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)

The Purpose of a Nation State - II

Why are we still grouped together under nation states? What is the role of such an entity in our lives? A question like this goes into the heart of the current political arrangements and debates about the future of the world. There is no doubt that over time, nation states have developed a powerful emotional connection in the minds and hearts of the people living within them. There is also no doubt that nation states conferred a powerful advantage to those who developed them in the international sphere.

Questioning the raison d'etre of nation states can be tricky since this is typically a highly emotional topic. History has shown and continues to show that people are willing to undergo severe restrictions on their personal freedoms if they can be convinced that the nation is under threat. Witness the steady erosion of cherished civil liberties in the US since 9/11. The UK has one of the largest number of security cameras in the world; about 1 camera for every 14 people. This is a country that slowly and painfully developed parliamentary democracy and established modern concepts of personal and civil liberties and then extended these concepts around the world via the British Empire. The US in turn developed its own political and civil system because the founding fathers were strongly influenced by enlightenment concepts originating from the UK. In this regard, the US ows a strong debt to the UK.

Still the question now needs to be asked: what is the purpose of a nation state in the 21st century? There is one very important role that most nation states have fulfilled to some degree in the past and continue to do so: provide a safe environment for its citizens in which they can grow economically, socially and personally. They do this primarily by providing continuity of policy. Nation states do not often experience wild changes of policy and law. They also often have competing interest groups operating within them. This typically helps to counter arbitrariness. To what extent is this role still valid in an age of globalization where international trade treaties and protocols increasingly act as limitations on nation states?

Related articles

• Theories of Political Science (socyberty.com)

The 2012 Meme

The 2012 meme is getting increasing play as the end date of the Mayan calendar comes ever closer. Speculation abounds as to what will happen on or near the due date. Ideas range from a transcendental ascension to death and destruction on a massive scale and everything in between. These ideas have been around for a long time now but only fairly recently have they started seeping into mass consciousness. You know an idea has entered the cultural mainstream when school kids can have a knowledgeable discussion about it.

Most people tend to fall into two mutually exclusive and largely antagonistic camps regarding these alternative ideas. The skeptics camp peremptorily dismisses these ideas and memes as being fantasy. According to this camp, adherents of such ideas or even people who keep an open mind about them are running away from reality and retreating into a fantasy world. It helps that a lot of such ideas smack of conspiracy theories which helps the skeptics to dismiss them as fables. It also helps that there are a number of people who espouse genuinely strange ideas that cast a shadow over the whole genre; the most recent example of this being Mr. Harold Camping who famously proclaimed the rapture and the beginning of the end of the world on May 21, 2011. The skeptics are helped along with the "official" media which is also firmly on their side and largely tends to dismiss the 2012 meme and related ideas as being essentially absurd.

The other camp can be labelled as the true believers. Their attitudes are frequently conditioned by the fierce rejection of their ideas by the skeptics. These people have over the last decade or so been able to disseminate their ideas to a wide audience thanks to the worldwide spread and adoption (specially in the urban areas) of increasingly high speed internet access. The Net along with ever more powerful computers have enabled almost anyone to upload high quality video and audio on any subject they choose. A quick search on Youtube on 2012 or any subject for that matter  will quickly illustrate this point. The interesting thing about these ideas is that they are usually extremely well presented - frequently much better than the skeptics who have a tendency to fall into polemic.

Read both sides and one will think as if both are living in parallel universes. They frequently talk past each other and seem unwilling to listen to the other side's arguments. This is unfortunate because it is only through an open debate that wrong ideas get exposed and expelled from the mass consciousness.

Devaluing Education - III

It is impossible to predict in advance what type of education will be most useful later in life. That however has not prevented people from doing exactly this. The result as I have discussed before has been a narrowly focused educational system that excels at producing technocrats. What is the problem with that? This after all is the current requirement. All the market incentives are geared towards pushing people into a technically oriented education. Anything else is devalued with the consequence that potential students do not opt for such courses. The result is that increasingly higher educational institutions are closing down entire departments due to a lack of demand and increasing costs in providing the education to a shrinking pool of students.

This has several consequences. One consequence (that I highlighted earlier) is a gradual loss of innovation. This is perhaps a surprising conclusion. On the one hand, innovations build on previous ones. As knowledge progresses across many fields, ideas germinating in one area can fertilize another (sometimes completely different) area. As the body of innovation increases over time, such cross fertilizations become increasingly common. The result is an exponential increase in innovation which is exactly what we have seen in the last 10 years. However, for this process to work, ideas have to germinate across many fields. If there are barren patches amongst the productive ones, the potential for cross fertilization decreases. Furthermore, this tends to be a self-reinforcing cycle. Over time the barren patches become more so and effectively increase in size whilst the opposite happens to the productive patches. The result is that these latter become more and more isolated from each other. The scope for cross fertilization which is a necessary ingredient for innovation to occur deteriorates and the rate of innovation can actually slow down.

Another consequence of note is that technical innovation tends to run amok if there is no restraining influence. This influence is exerted by people trained in the humanities and arts that are currently being denigrated. Consider an example. The 19th century saw a series of amazing inventions. I would like to mention just two: the birth of the chemical industry and the invention of the machine gun. The former gave rise to amazing new products while the latter conferred an overwhelming military advantage to the Europeans over the rest of the world. Needless to say, there was quick and widespread adoption of both amongst the developed nations of the time. Nobody pondered over the full ramifications of both. These were highlighted by the horrors of chemical warfare and the mindless slaughter of millions on the battlefields of World War 1. Once a technology is invented or an innovation unveiled, it will be used. Sooner or later, it will be used for baleful purposes. If people end up being mere technocrats, they will be surprised when it is used for such purposes.

I read a lovely short story (called Profession) by Isaac Asimov that explores similar themes. The story posits a world whereby knowledge relevant to a person's career is literally downloaded into the brain. No need to tediously study for 18+ years. This was instant knowledge at the push of a button! Yet the question remained: where will the new innovations and inventions come from in such a scenario? Treating knowledge only as a means of acquiring material things or earning a salary results in such a scenario. We thus end up with an impoverishment of the soul that ultimately reflects back on our economy and material things. Small minds can conceive of small things not soaring projects.