Conversations with History - Ian Morris

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Ian Morris who is the gene and Rebecca Willard professor of classics and professor of history at Stanford University he is also director of Stanford's archaeological excavation at monta Palazzo Sicily he has published 10 books and more than 80 articles on archaeology and history his new book is why the West rules for now the patterns of history and what they would be reveal about the future Ian welcome to Berkeley well thank you thanks for having me here where were you born and raised I was born in stoke-on-trent which is right in the center of England and looking back how do you think your parents shape your thinking about the world um all kinds of ways when neither of them was an academic I never even finished high school but they were kind of interested in everything and I think they were both very keen to see the kids go on and you'll get a good education and pretty much do whatever we wanted so when I started announcing probably about 12 years old or so that I thought it would be great to be an archaeologist they were really very supportive about this although again your archaeology wasn't in either of their background so anything they say you'll go ahead and do it they helped me find out how you get a career or or not get a career in this line of work and it was all all uphill from there and what was what what was it about archaeology you think that attracted you even as a young person well this is something I remember very precisely what it was it is I was 10 years old and my parents took my sister who was 4 years older than me took my sister and me to go and see a new movie of the railway children they Edith Nesbit classic from the early 20th century and we went to see this movie and it was great I really liked it but before the movie showed they had a short feature based on Erich von Daniken's book Chariots of the Gods which had come out a couple of years before this went on to sell untold 68 million car but I'm sure you know the basic thrust of this book is that in ancient times astronauts kept coming to earth and visiting the earth and stuff like a lot of the Maya glyphs according to von Daniken showed my a lien spaceships coming to earth and the Nazca lines in Peru were alien landing strips for their spaceships and the Hebrew Bible describes the alien nuclear weapons being set off and so anyway they made this little movie about this and I thought this was great and um till that evening I'd been convinced they wanted to be an astronaut so I was not fazed by the fact that Britain didn't have a manned space program it seemed like a minor detail but after I saw this movie I realized that archaeology was the way to go and I plunged as this with enormous enthusiasm and and stuck with it interesting enough and we'll talk about this later in the interview it you're also looking to the future now in one of your biographies I read after working in bakery plastics plants and toilet factories plus a spell as a good to harvest and a heavy metal band in Morris went on to Cambridge so we'll talk about Cambridge Inman what did that experience and those different professions do for you well I think having to have jobs and make some money to keep body and soul together there's a very good thing for everybody and not everybody in the historical profession comes from the sort of background where they they have jobs like that and I think it does shape the way you view of the world a little bit I think it does inclined you to be more of a materialist when you're aware of the shortcomings of not having money to buy your food where there really focuses your mind and being a guitarist in a heavy metal band and that I told me to trust nobody I guess the main outcome of this that's right and then you went on to to Cambridge and you you you you followed your passion yeah I was an undergraduate at Birmingham University first of all and um I went there because in the British system this is in the late 1970s and the British system you would decide what you were going to major in before you went to college and you went there and you you just did that as I went to Birmingham in this very good program that had called ancient history and archaeology where you you focused initially on the whole world and then narrowed it down to a smaller area and the thing was by the time I went there when I was 18 I'd kind of lost interest in the archaeology by that point because I was in these heavy metal bands and I was much more interested in the kinds of things that most teenage boys are interested in and studying and stuff really wasn't part of the plan and then as I reached the ripe old age of 20 and studying with literature a little bit I then realized that this actually this ancient history stuff this was kind of cool this was a lot of fun I got some money from Birmingham to go and spend some time in Greece and Italy in the summer between my second and third year the third year was the final year in the British system and I went out and I just had such a great time and I thought this is its again this is really cool I could really like doing this and so my rock star career started to look like it wasn't panning out and I thought this this ancient history thing I think I'll stick with that and then because of you you get a little bit further along and start to discover some of the practicalities of going into an academic career and so I started a PhD at Birmingham but then transferred to Cambridge because that was where the guy who was at the world Authority in what I was interested in was at Cambridge so I moved on there and I think I was probably one of the only graduate students in the world who actually really likes graduate school I had a blast I mean nobody told me what to do I got paid enough to buy my food and my beer and that was pretty much all I was worrying about at the point so yeah graduate school was good and what did you do your dissertation on well like most dissertations it you know very narrowly defined topic it was a very quantitative study of burials from Athens between about 1100 and 500 BC and there was a lot of debates going on at that point about the origins of the Greek city-states and particularly where they peculiar egalitarianism of Greek society came from and you know why the Greeks developed something that we can meaningfully call democracy whereas most ancient societies don't go anywhere near something that and there just wasn't a lot of evidence this crucial period down to about 500 though the written sources start around 700 BC with homer and hesiod but before that there's you know there's really nothing except archaeology and this is a very poor period in Greek history and so most of what they built above-ground was very easily destroyed by other ancient buildings so it was basically burials on nothing at that point in the 1980s so I did all this quantitative stuff of graphs and diagrams and convinced myself I had solved all the problems of the origins of Greek egalitarianism and and what was your insight in the in the dissertation well um I sort of came to it from the way a lot of prehistoric archaeologists working in other parts of the world were currently looking at burials and they had gotten very interested in ideas about like of passive rituals and anthropologists have been working on very much in the early 20th century and so the basic idea they were playing around with was that when you bury a dead person the funeral is a ritual that accomplishes all kinds of things and a lot of the things that it accomplishes are very psychological very connected to grief but a lot of them are very sociological as well and in particular the thing that they tended to focus on was the way somebody dies and this changes the world for all the people connected to that dead person and you tend to get a ritual process that starts off by moving people out of the everyday state of life saying if something has now happens you have to do something so maybe you'll done special clothes for mourning or eat special foods or whatever it might be then there'll be this liminal period where you're kind of out of the normal state of things and then a closing ritual a funeral burying the dead person which brings you back into the normal state of things again and a lot of these rituals leave archaeological traces behind them and the idea was that by digging these up and understanding them properly we can get a sense of what ancient people thought the ideal world actually look like what the order of society should be so some people say get buried with spectacular grave guards and other people get nothing at all that probably tells you a lot about a sense of hierarchy and difference in the society if on the other hand everybody gets buried very similarly that tells you something very different about this is somebody the the funerals seem to conflict with what we find when we dig up their houses that tells you another set of things so basically I looked at the Greek material through this sort of lens and suggested that it was in the 8th century BC there we get this new idea emerging of a community of very equal male citizens and this is the roots of later Greek democracy now at Stanford now you are both a professor of archaeology and a professor of history is there a natural fit between these two disciplines and how do they complement each other yeah it seems to me that archaeology and history are basically the same thing you've got it you ought to have a discipline that is interested in understanding what people did in the past and archaeology and history of slightly different versions of it used different kinds of evidence but seems to me that's really all the difference that there should be and I'm always constantly amazed at the gap that they often is between archaeologists and historians they tend not to read each other's work tend not to communicate all that much each tends to find members of the other profession just the well doing people here why would somebody be interested in X rather than Y and so I think there's a huge amount to be gained from just sitting in the middle ground between these two disciplines now in somewhere in your book you talk about having served as a Dean and and in addition to all of the boring stuff that's my assertion okay necessarily your is that that you you really got a sense of all the breakthroughs that were occurring both in the science in the sciences and the social sciences and and the implications of that for your your own work yes yeah the set up we have at Stanford is we have a single big School of Humanities and Sciences it has a big Dean running the whole show and I wasn't the big deal it's a much more difficult job I was on the associate Dean's and in theory runs one part of the show but in those days all of the associate Dean's would all be involved in the appointments and the tenuring and in processes and so on and yeah I just found this very very eye-opening the this sort of standards being applied and the way people were thinking about things in the Natural Sciences in some parts of social sciences it was very very different from what's normally done in the humanities and I guess I mean I I felt I drew a number of conclusions from it and one was about the differences between the different ways of thinking about the human condition it seems to me humanities and Sciences we are all involved in a single Enterprise here you're making sense of the world basically but at the same time I also thought there were a lot of basic similarities between the humanities and natural and social sciences and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that natural scientists seem to be just as confused as humanists and sort of basically making it up just as much at the time it can similar sort of thing where you've got all these problems and you don't really have direct evidence it answers them so you make something up and see how it flies and this was very liberating to see how many of the natural scientists did seem to me to be working down the same same kind of path but I thought one of the big differences was that the Natural Sciences probably simply because of the nature of the material that you're working with they are much much better at being able to explain what would count as falsifying an idea and so it's not just a matter of telling another story and hoping it's a bit more there's some gut level a bit more convincing than the previous stories the way I think it often is in the humanities and people were much better at saying if we find X in our subsequent experiments I'll know I was wrong and if I'm wrong then either I'll have to fudge the data somehow or I will have to tweak my theory a little bit or just quit altogether and start over and that I think was your very very helpful to have an opportunity to see how people actually work through this in practice and and what what did you conclude and how has it affected you work in this regard namely breaking out of the silos because one of the problems of intellectual life at university is the fragmentation as you dig deeper and deeper you you're gone down so far that you don't know what's on the horizon coming from other disciplines yeah yeah because we like these archaeological metaphors of the digging deeper but yes and I think yeah I think everybody agrees on what the basic issues are of course it if you don't have the people who dig deeper and deeper deep you never really understand things properly but on the other hand if you don't have the people who sort of wonder and though is superficially up on the surface you don't see where anything fits together and I think everybody agrees that the ideal would be some combination of the two but I think there's a huge disagreement on just what that combination would look like and I get while we were talking a little bit before the show began about your personality types and different sorts of disciplines and my major discipline where my appointment is and I main appointment at Stanford is in classics which is a very dig deep kind of field we've been doing this in a you know clearly a modern form of classics for 250 years now working on Greek and Roman literature and people have dug about as deep as you can go like they had 150 years ago but already dug as deep as you can go in a lot of parts of the field and and I filled that field is very well designed for people who really really like to focus in on a solvable very definable problem I found early on that that's not really me I'm a much more superficial person with a very short attention span and a much happier kind of wandering around so this intersection of archaeology and history and classics and various other bits and pieces now I think that just suits my temperament a lot better and it may be that my particular solution to the best balance of these things is one which just horrifies a lot of my colleagues like I know it is but I think you know we need to have a lot of different kinds of people out there and and so how does this thinking affect your notions about how students should train in in both archaeology and history because we're talking about your book in a minute and it's it's very interdisciplinary in nature yeah I think that there are training of students thing is is a big issue and then we all wrestle with this and it comes up constantly for archaeologists because archaeology in the u.s. archaeology is not normally of course taught in so knackered department in university it's normally split up between your say things like Greek and Roman stuff will be in the classics department and near Easton might be in a biblical studies or Religious Studies department East Asian might be an art history American archaeology would generally be in the anthropology departments and a lot of other parts of the world as well so it's very fragmented and the idea is always that the archaeologist in this particular part of the world will fit into their host department so that class of the greco-roman archaeologists will be able to talk about Plato and Saint Augustine and you know make jokes in Latin and all this kind of thing and the people working in the new world should be able to sit down and have a perfectly sensible conversation with an ethnographer you know or maybe we're working on smoking in Milwaukee or something they're suppose we don't have a sensible conversation with that person but at the same time say an archaeologist working on the rise of the Maya city-states it's supposed to be able to have a conversation with an archaeologist working on the rise of Italian city-states say so you're always at this intersection between different sorts of communities and there's a lot of different ideas about how best to solve it and in what we've done at Stanford with our archaeology set up is our graduate students coming to particular departments like classics and anthropology and then they also belong to an archaeology Center which straddles these different departments and so they spend ideally about half their time in the departmental home and about half their time in their interview part mental center home and we found with archaeology this has been really quite successful and he's much more difficult to do with a really well established disciplined convention has its own quite big well-funded departments like history or classics a it's rather harder to pop people out of that context into a bigger and sometimes rather bewildering kind of context and often of course the rewards aren't really there early in your career before for going up and doing this something I say if you're a historian and you know as much about the ancient Chinese han dynasty as you do about the Roman Empire it may be that Roman historians and Chinese historians both say well this is just a weird guy this is not really one of so I think it's a great challenge I think again in principle everybody kind of agrees what ought to be happening but in practice there's so much room for falling out that it for the the new people getting their PhDs it's a very risky business so so let's talk about your book why and I'll show you and again why the West rules for now and well how long did it take you write the book and what was your overarching goal in doing that I assume that you were drawing on some of this intellectual background that we just talked about especially this combination of archeology and history yeah I mean I've been interested in questions of this kind of lis the big macro historical questions really ever since I started in the field but I've never really done very much about it I think a lot of a lot of people are like that you're a lot of historians are very interested in broad questions but your professional pressures are such that most of the rewards flow to people who define rather narrow questions and answer them very successfully so I'm not kind of never really done very much about this but then a number of some accidental things really I think in the in the middle part of the last decades have all came together round about 2005 or so and one of them was just a series of discussions that we've been having at Stanford in some big conferences been running with historical sociologists in particular about the larger directions of world history and this had and made me can reflect a lot more on the assumptions that go on in my own home field of classics because here's this field where you look at Greek and Roman culture this is basically our deal and the field got to be a very big deal at the beginning the end of the 18th be me the 19th century basically because because people in Europe started to say that Europeans are different from the rest of the world different from and better than the rest of the world and the major reason for this is that Europe has this background in Greece and Rome which were unique cultures of creativity and dynamism and science and reason and this has just made Europeans better than everybody else and in the 19th century this was a very powerful theory very very influential which is why classics departments came became so big as 20th century went on academics started to retreat from this theory for all kinds of very very obvious reasons and by the late 20th century it was almost impossible to find professional classicists who would say we study Greece in Rome because they're better than everybody else and they made us better too but the weird thing is if we don't believe that anymore we don't believe recently I was special in the whole history of the world then why do we have such huge classics departments at many many universities now almost every little College across the country has one or two classicists places like Berkeley we'll have 20 30 40 people specializing in Greece in Rome so it's a why do we do this and it seemed to me that the reason why we do this is this unstated implicit counterfactual assumption that there really was something special about Greece and Rome there's something nobody in the field was really talking about and so I thought for a long time here this is something we really need to investigate to take it seriously and as I was having these conversations with the historical sociologists increasingly came to feel that a lot of the debates about why Western Europe and North America came to such unprecedented global prominence in the last 200 years a lot of these debates were really argument about long-term history about whether there was something in the distant past that had locked in this outcome whether it's a recent accident and so I started to feel that somebody like me interested in a very long run history might have something to contribute here and then the final thing was a friend of mine had been very successful in writing trade books and she put me in touch with her literary agent who is a very very forceful dynamic character and one side mentioned this vague idea of a project to my agent the next thing I knew I was writing the book is I have no recollection of how I actually decided I would do this irresistible I did and I want to emphasize two points that that it's it's different in a way to talk about global has I mean there's more more of that being done but in this in in this earlier period that you were talking about it was really national histories or maybe regional histories and so on and then the other thing is I guess from your experiences as a Dean and and from your reading you you are really looking for patterns so you're you're also grappling with the notion well if we go back in time we're looking at global theory you know what what is a theory that we might play with to figure out if it's correct about how one part of the world comes to dominate another right yes yeah I mean it seems to me from my reading of the the theorizing has been done on this problem the core issue was that people are losing wildly different theories about Western domination and the likelihood that it will continue the core issue is that a lot of the time different groups of people would be looking at different kinds of evidence from different periods and places defining the terms in different ways having completely different assumptions about what constituted an adequate theory and what constitutes falsification and one of the things I say in my book is it reminded me very strongly this you know famous South Asian Indian story about the five blind men and the elephant you know one guy there are sweaty days and one guy grabs a tail if it is a rope and another guy grabs a Tuscan set of spear and they'll grab different bits and have very different ideas and it seemed to me that what we really need here is some way to force people to step back a little bit and say aha it's an elephant and then we can start arguing about why an elephant is the peculiar shape that it is but until we decide what the shape of the historical patterns is we're never likely to have any kind of agreement on what's causing them and people did disagree wildly over what that the long-run shape of the history was and and importantly when you when you take this long view you really go back in time so the the the the first part of the book really looks at one of your variables biology and asks well are people in different parts of the world really different and how did they evolve over time talk about that because you're you're pretty clear about what the answer is yes yes because uh back in the 19th early 20th centuries a lot of the most popular theories said well Westerners are simply racially superior to everybody else and end of story nothing more to talk about and because these theories are largely discredited in the academic world but not completely and certainly it's not too difficult to find people who in one way or another hang on to some version of these theories and in fact in in some parts of China and some parts of Chinese academia there's a very strongly held theory that human beings in China evolved separately from the humans in Africa and modern Chinese humans are genetically different from modern humans in other parts of the world so I think these are very very important ideas to talk about and I think the the definitional issues in fact are one of the critical things because I'll often when people are talking about Western dominance in the world and what is the West they will start by saying well the West is a set of values that I happen to like so it'll not be democracy on IV Christianity or all kinds of possibilities out there and our job is to start when we can I first identify this variable so say in ancient Greece with democracy or in a Roman Palestine of Christianity and trace the story forward showing how this drove the whole thing and it seemed to me that was just a kind of ludicrous way to do the whole procedure because a lot of other historians have pointed this out before so what I tried to do in the book was to start by um going backwards and tell the story from its beginning rather than starting in the present and looking back for the origin point of a particular value and so I look back into the past and find the point at which you can first identify really strong geographically distinct ways of life around the world and some historian some paleoanthropologists have suggested that we can actually see this emerging way way back in prehistory that is early as about 1.8 million years ago we can start to see divergence between cultural and even biological evolution in the east West there's numerous other points after this as well and so yeah the first chapter the book goes through this story in as much detail as I could squeeze into that many pages and it's a lot of fun writings I learned a huge amount and I also learned that it must be a lot of fun to be a paleoanthropologist it changes so fast I had a great crisis um after the book had gone off to be published have to clawback the proofs and make a big change because up till last spring I'm nearly everybody agree that modern humans have no Neanderthal DNA in their bodies then abruptly they all-tournament said no in fact we do have Neanderthal DNA in our bodies and in the end it turned out that didn't make a huge difference the argument I was making but it was something that really had to be in the book and so yeah it's an exciting field now now in what's interesting here is your your drawing on the insights you derive from actually being an administrator who saw all of the breakthroughs and so on and I guess in the end what what what I drew from this is that that all humans are alike and and there there is an adaptive quality that actually runs through the whole book you know man's ability to be presented with a man or woman with a situation and try to think their way out of it yeah I came to the conclusion as I was writing the book this games are clearer to me as the process went on but there were really three things we need to know about in order to answer this why the West rules question and one of them like I saying is biology that the the genetics and the archaeology seem to be pretty conclusive at this point that human beings are pretty much all the same that we are all fundamentally descended from people who evolved in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago people are much the same everywhere and obviously you can take any two human beings and find that they're wildly different from each other but people in large groups you take a million people from Europe and a million people from China you're going to have roughly the same set of characteristics within those two sets of a million peak the second thing that struck me very much I was a kind of sociological generalization that it seems to me that human societies have evolved or developed whatever word you want to use along very very similar paths we've never had hunter-gatherers leaping to the space age you always go through the same set of stages and if you want to put it that way and you put those two together and you get a kind of socio biological theory if you like that applies don't you're all human beings in all times and places and I realized that the thing that makes for the difference is you know why societies in some parts of the world have changed so much faster than those in other parts the world really was the geography there much as a biologist might say it's the ecological niche which makes the the major difference to why certain mutations flourish in one place not another it's the same with humans we're all animals we're clever chimpanzees were all pretty much the same our societies develop pretty much the same way it's the geography that makes a difference not great men not religion not culture not bungling idiots geography and so let's let's break this down and one very interesting point that you made that that is now becoming obvious but when we were growing up it wasn't so obvious and that is the notion that over and over again the triumphs of Western culture turn out to have been local versions of broader trends not lonely beacons and a general darkness if we think about culture and you you're really saying in a broader sense when you have breakthroughs like Christianity in the West then when you do global history and you relativize the the experience of the West you find similar things going on in different parts of the world talk a little about that because that's that's very important I mean we increasingly understand this as the world becomes multicultural but 25 30 years ago this wasn't something generally thought about yeah no I think as you say there is a general movement towards seeing things this way this is something that there's a lot more world to store now than they were 25 30 years ago this is the sword a point that on the whole world historians are very very keen on making and yeah when I started teaching my first propositions at the University of Chicago we had there this very famous undergraduate sequence a history of Western civilization which I taught in for several years I taught the whole sequence from ancient Greece through to the fall of communism and I loved doing it it was an absolute blast but it now seems like a really peculiar surreal kind of course we just looked at these what was supposed to be the great monuments of Western literature and thinking in a complete isolation from the rest of the world and as soon as you step back from the details and take a much longer-term perspective that much broader view it does become glaringly obvious how much of what was happening in Western Eurasia was part of these larger transitions going on all across Eurasia and I suggest in in my book that what you get is people are responding to the kind of questions that geography and social development are thrusting unto their societies and so like in the 1st millennium BC and the middle of that millennium you get a wave of new kinds of thought all the way from the Mediterranean to China you get characters like of Plato and Socrates in the Mediterranean or say the Hebrew Bible prophets in Israel and the Buddha and the early janus and India and Confucius and moat say out in China all of these guys or all of their ideas are quite different but they're all wrestling with the same basic problems about how an individual can transcend this world and come to a deeper understanding of the cosmos and a better place in the universe and they're all the different techniques for doing it but they're all wrestling with the same kind of problems and then about a thousand years later at the time of say the fall of the Roman Empire in the western end of Eurasia that collapsed the Han Dynasty in Eastern European taenia shift to another set of problems people start saying well all this stuff from a thousand years ago plates out on all these guys telling me how to comport myself and think and understand the workings of the cosmos I don't really care about that what I care about now in this world that seems to be falling to pieces what I care about now is individual salvation how will I go on from all this chaos and disaster how can I be sure that God or the gods love me and this is the world in which Christianity in Western Eurasia and Mahayana Buddhism in eastern Asia become these enormous successes winning tens of millions of converts and some people would look at Islam as being part of the same same general trend and again your tens of millions of converts and I think you can go through a lot of what in high school we were taught about is that turning points in Western Civ like the Renaissance and the Reformation and see how striking it is how similar the intellectual trends are over very large areas so yeah this is a really effort for me writing this book this is just an amazing discovery to get in to help us our audience understand the this importance of geography so so so what what we're this we've talked about biology we'll talk about in a minute about social development but with regard to geography where you wind up really matters as the climate changes it presents opportunities for people who are situated in a particular place yeah yeah I mean if you say like like I do that geography is driven social development geography explains why the West rules this it's a nice simple theory and you can say it into the one page or so and get the whole problem solved and then the problem of course is that historical reality is this extremely messy business as we all know we're constantly just stuff happening all the time it's not immediately obvious that it makes sense to say the geography explains everything and I guess again this is something that my thinking changed significantly while I was writing the book and things became a lot clearer to me and it dawned on me that geography is the driving force in this story but it's geography in a slightly complicated sense because it's like geography is kind of a two-way street on the one side you've got the fact that geography constrains societies geography forces problems unto groups people and in that sense geography drives social development but the other side of the street is that changing social development simultaneously changes what the geography means and this is one reason why the books quite a long book in order to demonstrate this claim what I have to do then is go through the story looking at all these episodes like the Renaissance and so on where people will point to some totally different factor like great geniuses say that's what changed history and show that no in fact it really wasn't like that the great men were were just a proximate cause of the outcome the ultimate cause was this back and forth interaction between underlying geography physical geography and the organization of societies which changes what geography means and so for example in in in initially when farming begins certain places have a natural advantage yes and and the men and women adapt to that but later we go forward hundreds of years and we discover that was what was a disadvantage for the British because they were an island close to North America suddenly becomes an advantage originally it was a disadvantage because they weren't near the farming areas yeah yeah I mean for most of human history growing up in Britain like I did was just a really bad idea stuck out into the North Atlantic Ocean it's wet it's cold it's kind of dismal and you're a very long way from the centres of action in western Eurasia down in the Mediterranean Basin what we now call Southwest Asia and this this remained true really up till about the last five hundred years and about five hundred years ago a series of technological developments it originally pioneered in East Asia spreads quickly across the whole Eurasian landmass all the way out to the backward fringe in northwest Europe and in particular I'm thinking of ocean-going ships and guns because the ocean-going ships of course as the name suggests allow you to cross over oceans guns allow you to shoot the people who live on the other side and these things everybody thinks these are swell inventions loves them but and when these get invented in East Asia they push Social Development in a way that abruptly changes the meanings of geography is Northwest year has been 3,000 miles from the Americas ever since the continents stopped moving and China has been about six or seven thousand miles as you would have to sail in a sailing ship to get to the Americas ever since the continent stopped moving and these have been facts of geography but they just haven't been very important if you can't cross the oceans America may as well be on the moon it just doesn't matter then the minute you start getting these ships that can cross the oceans all of a sudden this geography becomes the most important fact in the world and Northwest Europeans are sailed to the Americas before East Asians do simply because they're twice as close and I argue at some length in the book that other things being equal East Asians would have discovered the Americas sooner or later and East Asians would have shown up there East Asians had just as nasty germs as West Europeans dead they would have breathed these on the natives wiped out the vast bulk of the population they would have colonized a new world plundered its wealth and begun to develop much larger and come more complicated economic systems but other things are not equal geography meant that it was just much much easier for Europeans to do this and East Asians there are a lot more incentives for Europeans to do it as well driven by the geography and I suggest in my book that this is really what tips things toward the western end of Eurasia very very dramatically at that point and that it's really the new meanings of geography that pusher appears into a scientific revolution enlightenment ultimately an industrial revolution and then projecting power globally and you are grappling in the book with with what are the measures of social development that that help us understand why certain people's move ahead as they confront these new problems and opportunities of geography yeah yeah this is the the five blind men and the elephant problem again I was talking about earlier what we really need I think to answer question like this some way to make things explicit and not necessarily you don't need to claim that you're making everything more objective but you do need to be more explicit about things and you know perhaps because of the kinds of intellectual backgrounds that I've come from it has always seemed to me that the best way to do this is to quantify something and again your my my quantification of Social Development may be completely insane but because I've quantified it I've been forced to explain exactly how I'm thinking about things why I say the answer to this is 43 rather than 47 and somebody else and come along and say this makes no sense it really is 47 not 43 and just get everything out in the open so they're like oh the backbone running through my book in a way is this quantification of social development particularly eastern and western ends of Eurasia and I think that it really does make if I've done it correctly it really does make a lot of things clear like one of the big arguments has always been that the West has just always been more advanced more developed than the East another big argument has being that no East and West the similarities vastly outweigh the difference is up till say two hundred years ago when some weird accident happens and catapults the West into global domination and if either of those theories is true this should be visible in these graphs of Social Development and in fact it's not the picture is video a little bit more complicated than all kinds of interesting ways and so I think the great thing about quantifying Social Development over sixteen thousand year period like I do is that this this doesn't answer the question it doesn't explain why the West rules but it does show you what you need to be able to explain to have a proper answer so yeah the quantification thing is very important and and your variables that you're playing with our energy capture organization we're making information technology that's right yeah I took the my inspiration for actually doing this from the United Nations Human Development Index I call mine the Social Development Index just to make that clear and this I think the Human Development Index has come in for all kinds of criticism of all kinds of people but it is a very very useful thing and people do make a lot of very productive use out of it and what the UN decided to do is they said we want a simple measure which would allow us to compare how well governments around the world are doing at providing conditions so that their citizens can realize their innate human potential so they asked themselves what do we need to measure our and we want to come up with the smallest number of traits we can look at to avoid it just yet proliferating well they the smallest number of traits we can look at which actually covers the whole range of what we mean by human development so they came up with three traits which are what is life expectancy real wages and years of education and they said that small unless covers what we're interested in and so I tried to do the same thing for social development over this sixteen thousand year period since the last stage of the Ice Age and of course I I needed different variables to look at AI ended up with four traits rather than three I needed to cover the whole range of social development by which I basically mean the ability of societies to get things done in the world and impose their wills on their environments and also for my index what makes it a little bit trickier I think than the Human Development Index is I need to be able to do this over 16,000 year period so they have to be things that you really can within certain limits measure and so I spent quite a lot of time on this and last summer I ended up writing a whole new book which is available on my website as a free download just called Social Development at 75,000 word books I explain exactly how I do all of this and again I'm sure probably nobody in the entire world will agree with me completely on every claim that I make in this but I'm hoping it does at least push us toward being a bit more explicit about what we're doing now if we go back to your early years you saw this film and there were digs but there were there was also a concern with the spaceships land to him is this ancient time so so where you take all of this is to speculate about the future so so you you want to use history and archaeology to predict where we might be going so you you you've grappled with this why the West seemed to win for a time well you say that for now and then you're trying to anticipate where the world is going let's really talk about that and and where does that lead you in answering the question how will we deal with all these global problems who will be up who will be down so on yeah yeah I mean I guess I tend to feel that your history is kind of the worst guides to what's going to happen in the future except for all the other guides and so I mean I don't really come down with a single phone prediction I am this is what's gonna happen over the next century but I do think that in two ways looking back at the long run of history and can at least allow us to map out what the main issues are going to be in the 21st century and the two things I mean by this are what I think the long-run historian can do is you can identify the trends that unfolded across thousands of years you can see I mean I really do believe this you back up far enough you can see the forces that are driven human history but at the same time when you back up and look over the very long run you also see the Oh constantly these trends have tended to generate the very forces that go on to undermine them so as I there's a constant and push back or was a dialectical process if you want to dignify it with a fancy name going on throughout history and there is no reason to think that either the transit of driven history or the kinds of forces that they generate the then undermine them no reason to think that either of these are miraculously going to stop in the twenty ten and so in the last chapter the book I try to do two things at once one is look at where these trends might be taking us the other is to look at the forces they generated undermine them and I think one aspect of where they take these things pretty clear that if you just project forward across the next century the rates of change and social development we saw in the 20th century the Eastern score steadily gains on the west and so I come down with I got a marvelously precise prediction in my about with India via 2100 East and Social Development would catch up with Western which is because the absolutely insane prediction and therefore reasons I talked about a little bit in the book I I think it does though suggest that that's probably the other things being equal that is the latest point at which we can expect eastern and western social developed to converge we're probably talking at the second half of this century for the convergence for what we also see when we play around with these these lines drawn through history projecting forward into the future not only is it the convergence of these lines but also just how high are these scores those Social Development scores are going to rise if current trends continue and so I come from between the end of the Ice Age and the 2000 Social Development scores rose on my index by about 900 points in this 16,000 year period if twentieth-century trends continue they're going to rise by another 4,000 points by the times the lines cross and over simplifying rather dramatically but one way to think about that is to say that the amount of social change between the cave painters at Chauvet or Altamira and us is 1/4 of the amount of social change we should expect to see between now and the year 2110 which suggests that the year 2110 is going to be utterly unlike anything we can begin to imagine and I talked a bit in my book about some of the the most of spaceship oriented predictions have been made by different specialists in this area and about your what this scale unchanged on the scale might mean so that's kind of one side of it the other side is looking at the forces that undermine these trends and in the first you call singularity that's right yes a second night night for yeah I take the name the singularity from you know the very influential writings of Ray Kurzweil at Bay Area inventor and futurist and his big stick is that the big change we're gonna see in the 21st century is a merging of biological and machine based intelligence and I think there are enough very clear signs of this already being underway and the pace of it accelerating that we do have to take this very seriously I think this is one of the logical predictions you can make on the the trends of the fairly recent past who attached unto the longer term pictures the second day nightfall if we don't get I suggest in my book if we don't end up with some kind of singularity we're gonna end up in something that I call nightfall I take this name from Isaac Asimov the wonderful science fiction story writer and azimuth wrote the story called night for publishing it back in 1941 it's several times being voted the best science fiction story ever written and the idea here is this this planet called a gosh just multiple suns and so unlike Ash is always daylight except for once every almost ten thousand years all of the sun's line up right behind each other just the right moment for the one moon of lagash to pass in front of them and night falls total eclipse night falls the stars come out and everybody goes mad because they've never seen anything like this they burn their civilization down completely destroy it totally and have to start rebuilding it all from the ground back up again and throughout the book I look at examples of great disasters in history and constantly say you there's never been a nightfall now you never ever get to turn the clock back but in the 21st century we do have the option of turning the clock back and we have had in fact increasingly since 1945 and the big variable we got now which was never there in earlier times is nuclear weapons I know even if Congress does see its way to ratifying the most recent round of nuclear weapons reductions we're still going to have enough left to kill everybody multiple times over and so I in the last chapter of the book I look at the kinds of forces that Stretton moves toward a singularity and notes that on the whole that exactly the same sets of forces we've seen over and over again in history involving things like uncontrollable mass migration state failure large-scale famines epidemic diseases and climate change is always in the mix somewhere I will see a great social collapse and these of course are forces we can see very very clearly emerging in our own day so in some ways I suggest the 21st century will be much like periods like say the later Roman Empire or the for the Han Dynasty or era of that's the Black Death in Eurasia in other way so utterly different because now nightfall really is the table and and your your your suggesting the possibility for mankind and womenkind is is actually to transcend biology transcend geography but on the other hand in this this contradiction is that that we could also see a world that does it recognize and doesn't have the institutions to deal with all these problems which are really global problems yes I think this is again is a wonderful example of the way social development changes the meaning of geography over the last 150 200 years the the pace of integration of the world has accelerated just spectacularly and because the at one point the Atlantic Ocean was this huge impassable barrier in the 19th century the steam ships really shrank the Atlantic Ocean dramatically railroads shrank the huge spaces of North America in the 20th century we seen the same kind of thing happening to the Pacific Ocean and East Asia which is that they're one of the major reasons I think that we're seeing this rapid catch-up of Eastern social development in the later 20th century and these forces I think are just accelerating and if they continue with the sword of rate we've been seeing in the last hundred fifty years geography a hundred years from now is just gonna be an utterly different beast from what we used to and in fact it may well get to the point where geography physical space really cease to mean very much at all in the world and this again I think is very tightly linked to some of these arguments about the transformation of human biology you know if the way some people suggest we're moving toward conditions where humans and machines are increasingly merged then old biological conceptions of what space means are it almost certainly going to cease to be very relevant in this kind of world so I yeah I need the book I think there's kind of irony to this would you get only struck me as I was writing the book by the end of the writing process I had come to the feeling that once we have worked out why it is that the West like a wide West rules and have understood these long term historical patterns then we're in a position to project these forward and see why this is just for now but the problem is once we see that it's just for now and once we understand what's likely to happen the scale of change in the twenty-first century then the initial question of why the West rules begins to lose some of its significance so I think 100 years from now somebody writing a book like this one called why the West rules for now this would seem about as silly as if I'd written this book about anglo-german naval rivalry or something it'll just you know just seemed like a laughably out of dates kind of problem now if our improved machine based cells still nice history books this is across so so you're you're you've always had this commitment to the humanities and I'm just sort of curious what we're left with in with regard to your view of whether we will adapt to these problems and or whether these singular changes will make us less than human a guiding point in your book is from the science fiction writer Robert Hyland and you quote him as saying change is caused by lazy greedy frightened people who rarely know what they're doing looking for easier more profitable and safer way to do things so so in the end it's a it's a moderately cynical view but with hope that that essentially this principle that you propose in the book mainly adaptation will occur yeah I guess it's a very biological view of history and it does seem to me that history is really a subfield of biology and in fact all of the humanities are a subfield of biology they're about the doings of one particular animal species and if we're looking at bunny rabbits rather than humans we'd have no hesitation saying it the study of well in fact as we do with chimpanzees who have no has Asian saying the study of chimpanzee culture is a subfield of biology and I think the same is broadly true of human beings it's just that of course what humans do is so special and and fascinating so we tend to think of it as an entirely different way of looking at the world I really don't think it is I also think another consequence of thinking about human history is somewhat more biologically is you're before we get the evolution of fully modern humans there's nothing you can really call culture or cultural evolution going on with other species of somewhat human creatures or other kinds of animals when human beings as we're used to them are no longer around in this sort of form which i think is virtually inevitable virtually every species has already gone extinct so this is almost inevitable humans will change into something else when that happens the humanities will be a part of a kind of historical the historical biology evolutionary biology and they will remain important I think but I think they're going to become increasingly grounded in in biological approaches to human beings so what are the implications for policy of your study I mean we're always grappling with this notion of oh our policymakers should really know more history yeah I'm not surprisingly I agree completely witnessing history is a very very good thing to know about and yeah we we rarely go around saying but I wish that before invading such-and-such a country our leaders had known a bit less history I mean we rarely say that and so yeah the the implications that come out of my book the one that struck me most while I was writing it was one I hadn't thought about as much as I should have done before I started which is that the real issue I think still remains nuclear weapons said global warming is of course a massive issue that has to be confronted and dealt with in some way but by itself again if other things were equal which is an impossible thing to claim in human dealings if other things were equal and global warming is not gonna wipe humanity off the map what conceivably could wipe humanity off the map is the way that people react to global warming in particular because the impact of global warming varies around the globe and strategy people often like to talk about what they call an arc of instability stretching out from central Africa curving through the Middle East out into Central East Asia where we've got a lot of the world's poorest people living there and the world's most vulnerable water supplies are concentrated in this area a lot of the natural resources that the great powers still depend on are concentrated in this area a lot of the world's most shaky political regimes are here and nuclear proliferation seems to be working fastest in this area and I would say that the implication of looking at long-term history is that we should worry most about conflict in this area driven probably in large part by global warming as a root cause conflict in this area is spiraling out of control drawing in great powers that feel that their vital interests are at stake here and mushrooming into nuclear war of the kind that we had hoped had gone way after 1989 but it may turn out that we've been living in this little golden age and this I think is that the most terrifying thing one one final question our time is running out but but how do you think students should prepare for the future in light of the arguments you're making well I think that some education history is a very good thing some education economics and education in biology all these I think are very good things and in my experience with our undergraduates particular at Stanford is that students are thinking a lot about the future these days I think we come out of the period when there was a certain amount of complacency in a sense it yeah everything is great we won the Cold War we know how the world is going and students wouldn't normally say that we've seen the end of history but that I think was the kind of assumption that was being made now I don't think students are feeling that way at all so I think there are some reasons to be optimistic that the energy is then the commitment the recognition that the problems were facing are increasingly global scale problems whereas our institutions unfortunately are still mostly locked in the age I love nation-states so I think there's a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism among students well on that that note and I want to thank you for being here I'm going to show your book again and we you can't do one can't do justice to the book in an hour and I do want to emphasize that there are parts of this book that read like a novel so you're a great storyteller a social scientist and a futurologist who who really realize that dream that inspired you when you were a young person and what does that fill thank you for being on our program well thank you mommy on the show and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history Oh

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, Conversations, with, History, Harry, Kreisler, Ian, Morris, Why, the, West, Rules, For, Now, The, Patterns, of, and, What, They, Reveal, About, Future

Id: O5cSDfDrtik

Length: 60min 40sec (3640 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2010