The Success of the West

An enduring question for the last 500 years has been the historic and ongoing success of the West. Why has a tiny slice of the world been able to so comprehensively dominate global discourse? Many reasons have been postulated and a large number of books published on the topic. I particularly liked Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future on this topic. The way events happened have complex reasons. It is difficult if not impossible to cite one cause or one set of causes as being responsible for a particular event. To ask why the West came to dominate the world to the extent that it has is perhaps asking an impossible question. Nevertheless, it is an important question as the multitude of books and research on the topic attest.

History is both personal and social. At the latter level, history is a dance of societies adjusting to their environment and to each other. Different societies have risen and fallen over the centuries in this continuous dance. Despite this, in nearly all parts of the world, there was an essential continuity as new societies arose from and in place of old ones; this continuity was reflected in the mores and customs of the new societies which borrowed elements from their predecessors. Until fairly recently, this was a natural process and a consequence of the dance of societies.

The great disruption to this process was the rise of the West and the concomitant offshoot colonialism. Western dominance has multiple causes all of which worked in an interlocking fashion. There is no single element to which this dominance can be ascribed. Recognizing this, historians have made an effort to identify the set of elements that worked together to cause Western domination over the last 500 years. Indeed, this effort is not a recent one at all. As societies around the world came under the rule of Western powers, there were increasingly urgent attempts to understand the causes of this seemingly unstoppable process.

So what kind of elements are we talking about here? One example is the historian Niall Ferguson who in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest identifies 6 killer apps (taking a metaphor from the computing world) that together were responsible for Western domination:

• Competition
• Science
• The Rule of Law
• Medicine
• Consumerism
• The Work Ethic

Why is it important to try and look at the roots of Western dominance? What possible relevance can a topic like this have today? As I have mentioned before, history and its study is exceedingly important. Today's world did not arise in a vacuum. It is the result of the interactions of the dance of societies in the past. While Western dominance was a great disruption to the natural evolution of different societies, the dance of societies did not end; it started occurring to a different tune. The cadences of the new tune were imposed by the West. For this reason alone, this is an important area to look at. Western domination also had important consequences when the process is viewed from a global level. These are consequences that are not often appreciated. Finally, tomorrow's world will be established in a framework defined by Western societies. That in turn has important consequences for the future and again for this reason it is important to study the elements that led to Western domination. All of these - the rise of the West and its causes, the consequences of that rise and the future effects - have an important bearing on us all.

Related articles

• Niall's Ferguson six killer applications (nickfatsios30.wordpress.com)
• Civilization: The West and the Rest (thewesternexperience.com)
• Can we avoid the fate of the Mayans? (amanwithaphd.wordpress.com)
• Death of the west (whitelocust.wordpress.com)