Why the West Rules - For Now | Ian Morris

good evening I'm Alexander Rose the executive director at the long now foundation and thank you for finding us in our new venue here at the Marines memorial tonight's long short and if for those of you who don't know a long short is a short film that exemplifies long term thinking we have consciously been avoiding doing more time lapses because they're the easy way out but this one this one was brought to my attention by Austin on our staff and it was too beautiful to pass up and it it shows the lighting effect in the atmosphere that I had hoped to see when I was in Svalbard but it was it's by an eight bolt and enjoy it please roll the long short [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm Stuart brand from the long now foundation historians have two major taboos he can't really be part of the discipline one is you must never ever have a theory of history the last time that was approached in a big way we had Marx and the Communist Manifesto and a lot of people killed and so theories of history that are wrong are lethal and many historians just decided it's way too complex it's way too dangerous and we don't do theories of history so I'll forget about it you grad students the other thing the historians are forbidden to do is talk about the future because history and the historians discipline is based on facts and the problem of the future is it doesn't have any facts yet therefore to hold forth about fifth Street the future is obviously just so much smoke our speaker tonight perhaps because he works as an archeologist and archaeologists are very gritty and what they do and they have a lot of fun and what they do and that grit and that fun and that long perspective is what Ian Morris brings we please welcome him well thank you very much it's great to be here this evening I'd like to thank Stewart for inviting me to come and speak to you and I'm Danielle for organizing me so they actually got here in time to give the talk and it's great to see so many of you here tonight the last time I did a big lecture thing in the US as a couple of months ago I flew to Chicago and I flew in the day after they'd had like the third biggest snowstorm on record they'd had like three feet of snow dumped on the city and they did by the time I landed there they plowed every street in the city the plane landed dead on time and there are no delays anywhere at all so when I woke up this morning and saw that it was raining outside I thought you know clearly there's nothing to worry about everything's going to be fine and people did did rain up here as well I left down the Santa Cruz Mountains it always rains down there um but so yes I'm glad everybody was able to come along here this this evening to hear the talk um my effect on the weather is actually the least are barely the beginning of my superpowers when it comes to giving talks um a year or so ago I had the wonderful invitation got to Athens and give a talk and while I was in Athens the government there confessed they've been cooking the books of the previous five years the country was broke and they were gonna need an enormous bailout from the European Union shortly before that I'd been in Dubai when Dubai World announced it couldn't pay any of its bills and so I've decided I'm actually gonna retire from the professor business and start just betting against the currencies of every country I go to and everything will be fine but so far this is not yet panned out I haven't become wealthy yet so I'm actually here this evening and I'm going to talk a little bit about what I do and I'm going to talk particularly about some ideas I developed while I was writing a book recently which came out um last autumn called why the West rules for now patterns of history and what they reveal about the future now um like Stuart was just saying by background I'm a historian the sort of people who normally write books like this tend to be political pundits of various kinds I'm not really one of those people I'm a I'm a historian or I'm at least I'm a part-time historian I'm the rest of my time I spend being an archaeologist and I'm a big fan of one of the sayings of another and somewhat more famous part-time historian Winston Churchill who as many of you all know wrote a wonderful life of mall Dru who had been one of his relatives many many historical books um that one of Churchill's favorite sayings was the farther backward you can look the farther forward you're likely to see and I've always thought this was absolutely right this is something historian should be doing now Winston Churchill as a part-time historian when he wasn't being historian his day job was saving civilization my day job when I'm not being a historian is being an archaeologist which is different from and I like to think superior to saving the world um what it allows you to do if you're an archaeologist it allows you to see a lot further back than most historians do and I think that's very important for grasping what the larger shape of history has been and where it's likely to go next so in this book that I wrote I asked the question can we identify the historical forces that have shaped Western domination of the world and if we can can we then project these enforces forward and see where things are likely to go next and I think the answer to both these questions is yes so okay having said that there are lots and lots of theories out there as I'm sure you're aware lots of theories about why the West rules why the West came to dominate the planet I think these theories can be basically broken down into two broad camps and what I like to call the long-term lock-in theories and the short term accident theories so just want to say a couple of words quickly about and what these theories look like there's lots and lots of different versions of each kind of theory but and within the first bundle the long term lock-in theories the most popular is a kind of classical theory and then what I mean by that is it's an idea that goes back to the 18th centuries when Europeans first start to dream up this idea and and it's a classical theory because it goes back to ancient Greece and the idea is that back in ancient Greece two-and-a-half thousand years ago the Greeks come up with a unique civilization there's nothing else like it anywhere else in the world the Greeks then passed the civilization on and it's it's picked up by the Romans and the Romans spread it around over a much larger area eventually this civilization gets passed down to the pinnacle of Western civilization and here you see the pinnacle of Western civilization this is the town I was born in I found this photo in a book it was the town I was born in taken in the month I was born and I'm pretty sure it's a little bit hard to figure out through the smog what exactly you're looking at here apart from urban blight obviously but and pretty sure and if it's my pointer yeah my point is working I was born perhaps as this picture was being taken just about half a mile or so off in this direction to the left pinnacle of civilization but of course I just here is the proper pinnacle of civilization so this theory that it runs ancient Greeks invent a unique civilization passed down unto the modern West this civilization makes the West different from and superior to all other civilizations in the world the UM the implication is Western domination of the world was locked in in the distant past hence the name long-term lock in theories and also I think there's a kind of an implication with this but because it's all locked in the distant past it might be a permanent state this was the way the world is fated to be now the second big clump of theories the short term accident theories these guys look at the long term luck in theories and they just say nonsense all of that is nonsense everything I just said is ridiculous if you look at ancient Greece and Rome they say ancient Greek and Roman civilizations really not that different from the ancient Maori an empire in India or Han Dynasty China or the mire and Mesoamerica all pre-modern agrarian civilizations are basically the same thing the short term accident theorists will say they say the West only really pulled ahead of the rest very recently hence short term theories and the reason they did so was largely accidental under the short term accident theorists disagree among themselves over what exactly the accident was but they all agree something kind of accidental happens set off the Industrial Revolution in the West my hometown once again my home town you will be pleased to learn the first town in the world to have a clean air act and you can probably see why so okay the short term accident theories then say Western domination is just dumb luck something happens quite recently tip the West into an industrial revolution and the rest is history well okay there are heated arguments between the proponents of these theories because both of them as I'm sure you can see very easily both of these are theories that can become very politicized very very quickly heated arguments have been going on for a long time now and the thing with these arguments and they remind me very much of the famous South Asian story about the five blind man and the elephants which I'm sure many of you know already the story is for that for reasons which are left obscure in this story there are five blind guys who encounter an elephant and they're trying to figure out what it is and one grabs the tusks can says oh this is a spear and somebody else grabs the tail and says it's a rope and somebody else grabs a leg and says it's a tree trunk and they all grab different bits of elephant anatomy and we probably should not pursue the story too far really but they all grab different bits of the anatomy and say it's something different and the moral of course is that you if you're gonna debate about what something is you must all be talking about the same thing otherwise the whole discussion will become pointless very quickly and this I think has been the case with these debates about explaining Western domination of the world people have been talking about different things using the same terminology to mean different things or different terminology to talk about the same thing different methods really very much talking past each other so when I started getting interested in this question it seemed to me that the first thing to do was to figure out what the arguments are really about when people are having these big disputes and it seemed to me the the core thing here in these debates was one in my book I came to call Social Development this is what the arguments about Social Development and by Social Development I basically means society's abilities to get things done now I'm one of my pet hates I have a lot of pet hates but one of them is people who read PowerPoint slides out but I am now about to do this you know basically because I can I got the projector and this fancy little microphone here so I'm gonna read the PowerPoint thing out to you because I obviously I need to say a little bit more than just society's ability to get things done of what I mean by social development so the way I define this is a bundle of technological subsistence organizational and cultural accomplishments through which people feed clothe house and reproduce themselves explain the world around them resolve disputes within their communities extend their power at the expense of other communities and defend themselves against others attempts to their power that's basically what I mean I'm really what it is is a groups ability to master its physical and intellectual environments and in principle at least I think this is something that we ought to be able to measure and then compare across time and space now I also think the long term lock-in theories it seems to me those are basically saying that West and Social Development has been ahead of development in the rest of the world for a very long time map since ancient Greek times short-term accidents say no it has it's just not like that at all and these I think are basically quantitative claims about how much Social Development two different parts of the world have at different points in time and that I think is a solution to the elephant problem if we can agree that this is what we're talking about then we ought to be able to measure it and argue about it a bit more precisely now I'm not trying to claim that numerical comparisons of Social development's are more objective than other ways of looking at this problem having spent a long time I'm working on this are you've acutely aware of all the assumptions and guesses and hunches are going to doing this so I don't think that measuring social development makes you more objective but it does make you more explicit it forces you to say I'm gonna look at this and this and this and not that enough of that and I'm gonna measure them in these ways and these are the numbers I come up with and this is why I came up with these numbers and if someone then disagrees with you they can attack you on the basis of what you've actually done rather than starting from totally different set of premises so this seemed to me like a good thing to do so I spent a long time calculating Social Development scores but different parts of the world across the 15 thousand years since the end of the last major Ice Age asking myself basically one question over and over again do long term luck in theories or short term accident theories correspond better to reality now I could bore you rigid with an account of my Social Development Index and I say this with confidence because I've done it several times now so audience is it really knock some just dead in there see but I won't do that because I'm up on the screen there is a URL where if you are the kind of obsessive person I am you can go there and download an entire book that is about nothing except my Social Development Index and I strongly recommend that no one I've met even my bitterest enemies have no one has yet admitted to reading the whole thing the whole way through so this is a good sign I think so but I just like one very quick thing about the index before moving on to I'll talk about results and when I was trying to figure out you know how do you do this this thing the ability of societies to master their physical intellectual environment how do you actually measure that and I ended up taking inspiration from something the United Nations did about 20 years ago and they dreamed up what they call the Human Development Index and the idea with that is they've got all these organizations are looking for ways to invest to to raise welfare in different parts of the world so some of the economists said what we need is a simple index it will help you with your investment decisions so they decided what we want is a way to measure human development by which they meant the ability of governments to create conditions to allow their citizens to realize their human potential and so they said we want some way to measure this and we could try to just mini measure everything is because everything is relevant here but we don't want to do that because it's stupid and pointless what we want is the smallest possible number of traits with roughly cover what we mean by human development and which can be measured and they came up with three traits and they looked if I can get them straight they they looked at life expectancy at Birth real wages and levels of education in different countries calculated this score now that seemed to me to be a really good way to do this um social development that I'm looking at it's a bit different so I use different traits to look at and what I did was come up with four traits which were per capita energy capture on levels of organization within the society by a wet wave for which I used a proxy measure and I just looked at the size of the largest settlement within a society um the forms of information technology and then last but sadly not least a more making capacity which now has to be part of the index this so that's what I did that was my idea for doing this index and okay yeah so while moving along I mean that is enough preamble about my index you might think that is it too much preamble now it's time to look at the results so big drumroll we now have a graph which shows you the shape of human history and there it is yet now I don't understand why do people always laugh at my graph this rules me but yes I mean I do actually sort of see the humor in my graph after all this time working on it this is what I come up with and it's sort of oh oh that's it so yeah the obvious thing here is you look at this graph and unless your eyesight is way better than mine which it may well be at this stage in my life it's sort of hard to see very much going on here so initially I was a bit disappointed with my graph but I think there are actually several interesting things going on here quite important things I would say first thing I should say about my graph I've just got two lines on the graph out of all the different regions in the world I looked at this graph just shows you a western region and an eastern region and what I mean by those and why there's only two of them I'll come back to that in just a second but um the first thing you see when you look at this graph first thing that struck me was how similar the lines are which I think if you're a long term lock-in theorist that's kind of bad news though the lines are so similar second thing you see the lines he's my pointer again the lines kind of putter along the bottom of the graph put up on a putter not much is going on about 2000 BC they sort of dragged themselves off the bottom it wobbles around a little bit but still you know really not a lot is going on here and then you get to about the Year 1800 they take a 90 degree turn to the left and shoot off the top of the page almost now this again this sounds like good news for the short term accident theory so say that basically nothing really happens then a couple hundred years ago everything happens so two observations about that graph the problem though I think is that the second of my observations largely explains the first and what I mean by that in order to get the score the where's the point again though the Western score for the year two thousand nine hundred and six points up here in order to get that score on this because I've got to have the graph go up to a thousand which means squishing down all of the earliest scores down into a very very small area now I should have said that here we got the dates from 14,000 BC up to the year 2000 they stopped in 2000 there's a nice round number here the Social development's score from 0 which is actually it's not possible to score 0 would mean we were capturing no energy from the environment which would mean we'd all be dead so 0 you can't actually do 0 but up to a thousand which is the biggest number of points you could theoretically score for the year 2000 in order to go up to a thousand on this graph you got to squish everything else down so the next picture I'm going to show you is this exactly the same data but leaving off the really high scores for the year 2000 so the next graph just goes up to the year 1900 now what we look at this graph clearly this is a rather different sort of graph there's a lot more going on than we could see in the first graph and the previous graph go back to the second again it looks like the eastern and western scores the red and the blue scores they're more or less the same until very recently in this graph we see that's actually not the case the western score has been higher than the East and for 90% of the time since the last ice age which you might say ah long term luck in theory this is now good news for the long term guys second thing I think we see on this graph that um previous graph it looks like the lines are basically flat almost all the time dragged up a little bit and then there's this huge change in in recent times this graph we see that's actually not the case the scores have been rising generally since the end of the Ice Age slowly and then accelerating certainly but the scores have been rising almost all the time next thing we see though scores don't rise consistently they rise as periods of fast rising there's periods of stagnation as periods of collapse and decline in the Social development's scores this is something we just couldn't see on the previous graph last thing I would say we see on this graph the western score the blue line is not ahead all of the times ahead 90% of the time but not all the time there's a twelve hundred year period roughly the 50 around here to their 1750 over here where the eastern score is higher than the Western that's very bad news for the long-term lock in theory because that really shouldn't happen if things were locked in a very long time ago now I think to explain all the the six observations I just made about the two graphs to explain all of those you you have to explain all of those I think if you're going to answer the question about why the West rules you can't get away with just explaining one or two of them and I think in fact this calls um thought like Stuart mentioned for some kind of general theory of history there can take all of the near the teeming details of the real history and reduce them to a few underlying principles so that's what I can try to develop in my book and I came to the conclusion that we need three intellectual tools to understand to explain why the West rules for now the first of these tools I think is biology biology ought to be fundamental to everything humans do because it when it's not and often it isn't and when it's not it means we don't understand what we are biology tells us what we are we are animals it tells us that people are all pretty much the same wherever you find them all over the world throughout their history humans have all been pretty much the same and the thing that we are the same thing that we all are all around the world is clever chimpanzees we do more or less what chimpanzees do but we do it better we have the 2.7 pounds of magic up in the top of our heads these brains that are so far beyond the brain suppose we know of any other living thing we can do what chimpanzees do but we do it better so chimpanzees are able to munch down on their bananas catch the odd monkey and smash its brain out and eat it whereas human beings um my students at Stanford just come back from Spring Break on spring break they can go to the Caribbean and drink beer on the beach until they pass out which I'm certain chimpanzees would do if they could but they can't so this is what we are the first thing we need to know is about biology which tells us what we are second thing we need to know is about sociology by which I that's it's a shorthand expression for the social sciences writ large um biology tells us about how individual human animals behave what they get up to the sociology tells us about how societies as large groups behave how societies deal with change what causes change in societies and what the changes caused in the societies I think you've got to have both of these things once you put the two together I think you've got a universalizing kind of bio social theory about humanity applies to all people in all times and places I think biology and sociology tell us why social development generally increases across time why it's sometimes stagnates and falls but these two things don't tell us about east/west differences why the Western score is higher than the Eastern why why it's been higher for so much of our history and I think to explain that we need the third tool and the third tool is geography its geography I suggest in my book that tells us why groups of people which people are all pretty much the same and why groups of these people are all the same which and these groups kind of develop along similar lines because the societies are basically all pretty much the same and yet the groups fare differently in different places and this I suggest is because the places are different the people are the same the society the social groups are the same but the place is a difference now this is a very simple claim to make but it has big consequences big implications it means that the Western domination of the world is not explained by great men or great women it's not explained by culture it's not explained by religion it's not explained by politics its geography that explains why the West rules and also geography that explains why Western rule is coming to an end so okay I could actually stop right there where you'll all be done and the problem of course is some obvious questions then arise if things are really so simple why is history so messy and I'm sure you all studied history in high school college you you know history is messy why is it so messy also if it's so simple why haven't people figured this out before if it's really that simple and actually people have figured this out before and how did the first person to suggest that geography is the big motor but it's certainly not the way most historians see things so why is history so messy why is this not a more popular theory the answer to both of these questions I think is the geography itself is messy that's why the results are messy too and I realized as I was writing my book that geography operates as a kind of a two-way streets on the one hand geography determines how societies develop but the way societies developed term ins what geography means and this is my my basic shtick in this book um now to convince you that I'm right in this obviously what we should do now is you should all leave and go outside and buy my book and take it home and read it very very carefully and then you will be absolutely convinced that I'm right about this but since I've got you here right now um I will try to convince you of the basic truth of these claims but to do that we now have to plunge into some actual history I mean it may have come to your attention I mean doing all this talking so far there's been precious little actual history in this so what I will now want to do is take us on a sort of whirlwind tour of the last fifteen thousand years of Eastern and Western history trying to demonstrate the validity of the claim I'm making and and what that might teach us if it's true so I want to go back fifteen thousand years a long time to start off with to the end of the last ice age and the reason I'm gonna stop at that point is that that is the point at which I think we first begin to see really distinctive ways of life appearing in different parts of the world what happens at the end of the Ice Age as the war world warms up there's half a dozen places around the world there's actually there's a little bit about the debate among archaeologists over precisely what the places are but these places come under a reasonable amount of green agreement there's half a dozen places where and we're very new kinds of society start to emerge at the end of the Ice Age what's new about these societies is it in these places not really anywhere in these places humans begin to domesticate plants and animals this supports much larger populations and the humans begin to develop much more complicated societies to live in now why these places why then well this is something that I think has become increasingly clear across the last 20 years and I'm Jared Diamond's book Guns Germs of steel I'm sure many of you will have encountered I think is far and away the clearest and best explanation of why these places and dimond explains really lucidly that geography is the reason domestication begins in these places you'll notice on this map there all along a roughly similar band of latitudes these are the only places in the world in the world where topography and climate conspire to allow the evolution of the kinds of large plants and heavy grains so heavy grain grants and large mammals that can be domesticated and bent to the human will to produce more food for the humans these are the places where it can happen and within these places the place in the world where it happens fastest and most easiest is here the area archaeologists like to call the hilly flax this is where geography conspires to produce the densest concentrations of domesticable plants and animals that's why it happens there first because it's easiest there are most of these things it starts there certainly by the year 9500 BCE across the next 2,000 years the other places you see on this map start to have their own domestication processes after that data other places join in the process as well now what this means is the part of the world that starts producing complex societies with rising social development first is this hilly flanks area here and in in my book what I did was what I think is a sort of common sense thing to do is to say that I'm going to refer to Western societies as the ones who trace their roots in complex societies back to the westernmost core area within Eurasia in the hilly flanks modern Western societies in one way or another we could say have all sort of developed out of this core area here and spread out from there through migration and diffusion across the intervening 11 thousand plus years I mean the other end of Eurasia we have another core area and I described the societies that the complex societies had developed out of that as the Eastern societies the ones that developed out of the young yellow Yangtze Valley's area I ended up in my book doing a comparison of really just these two these two traditions its Western and Eastern tradition um largely to keep the book within a manageable length I wanted originally to look at everything but that was gonna hang this book would be this fad I probably got very upset with me and so I trimmed it down to just these two places because the parts of the world that I have had the highest social development scores since the end of the Ice Age have always been societies that descended from one of these two cores so we could kind of simplify the problem by just doing this two-way comparison which I think gives us enough information to answer the questions so anyway whether that's true or not um everywhere you get domestication population grows it expands geographically through migration and through people emulating what's going on in the areas of domestication as it expands as the societies become more complex rising social development changes the meanings of geography geography drove where the process starts the process and takes over starts changing what geography means what I mean by that um if we look just to this Helly flanks area again farming spreads out relatively quickly across Europe within four thousand years it's gone all the way to the Atlantic it's gone off into Central Asia but it moves extremely slowly come back here moves extremely slowly the short distance down here into what we now call Iraq now the reason for that is geographical um if you live in Iraq in ancient times and you try to do what the farmers up in the hilly flanks to which is take a handful of wheat or barley planted in the ground and stand there with your arms out waiting for the rain to fall you will wait a very long time the rain is not going to fall um you can't farm that way in Iraq it just isn't gonna work our Iraq is a very marginal backward kind of place in the early farming system what changes that around is that as social development increases you get more more complex societies people figure out a new way to do farming instead of rating waiting for the rains to fall they wait for the great Euphrates and Tigris rivers to flood they figure out if we um combine the flooding of the rivers with this brilliant technological breakthrough the big ditch this is the technical word for it you see here the big ditch if you dig a big ditch you can catch as the rivers flood you can drain the water up into a big storage pit and then when you need to water your crops to to fertilize and get them growing you can take the water from the big pit another technical term and put it in your field everything will grow great now that sounds very simple it actually there's a lot of technicalities to it it takes thousands of years for people to really crack the system of irrigation farming once they do though it abruptly changes the meaning of geography ancient Iraq goes from being this backwater where farming is almost impossible to pull off to suddenly being a place where if you're doing this kind of stuff you now generate agricultural yields much much higher than the Helly flanks could do so very quickly after about 5,000 BC um ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt begin to overtake the hilly flanks as the core of the western area they're bad geography has become good geography as they do that other things happen the new meaning of geography pushes up social development further the villages get bigger and bigger the villages start to turn into actual cities as that happens the city dwellers discover oh there's this whole new advantage the rivers not only can we irrigate our crops we can also trade along the rivers which is much cheaper than moving goods by land we can move taxes and armies up and down the rivers the rivers become indispensable for the cities as the cities get bigger driven by this use of the rivers as the cities get bigger new changes start to set in as the cities turn into real empires people realize Oh rivers are great but entire seas those are even better the Mediterranean Sea goes from being a kind of backward fringe a boundary to the ancient world and to be a kind of super highway connecting the ancient world and particularly as the first millennium BCE goes on we get the emergence of new great empires like particularly the Roman Empire based over here at city of Rome Rome is able to unite the whole Mediterranean Basin this turns into this kind of super motor for social development geography changes meanings um as it does so social development is pushed up higher and higher still now by the end of the first millennium BCE you've got a series of Empires of arisen all across Eurasia from the Roman Empire out at the left of this map over to the Han Dynasty Chinese Empire the right string of other empires in between um the Roman Empire has the Mediterranean Sea is this in a highway it's always the biggest and richest of these empires but all of them have very powerful empires now as the empires get bigger you can probably guess at this point what I'm about to say as the empires get bigger they change the meanings of geography further as social development increases and in particular what these ancient empires do it's not changing the meaning of the geography around their borders in particular the geography of one on this map I call the steppe highway running from Hungary in the West all the way out to Manchuria in the Far East this band of very arid flat grasslands running across Eurasia that um once you've got domesticated horses and big domesticated horses really you can move very very quickly back and forth along this step highway once you have really big empires to the south of the steps there are people you can trade with and people you can raid as you move back and forth along the steppe highway so the rise of the big empires Kanna transforms what the steps mean you get the evolution of big nomadic empires on the steppes as this happens the nomadic empires interact more and more with the stable agrarian empires they start to undermine these agrarian empires in the early to mid first millennium CE II certainly by the by the Year 200 CE II they're starting to cause the empires to collapse so much movement is going on the migration to spy they out of control the empires are breaking down under pressure in particular they're the big thing that happens is people from the different ends of Eurasia start to merge their disease pools this is something I now feel very much an expert on a couple of weeks ago I went off to give a talk about the German translation of my book and I did five different german-speaking cities in five days personally merging their disease pools as I traveled by the fifth day I honestly thought I could barely stand up anyway I couldn't speak which was perhaps a mercy but I was so sick now in the first millennium CE II the first couple essentially see we see this on a spectacular scale in Eurasia horrific new diseases break out a huge part in undermining the ancient empires all across Eurasia the big empires collapse social development plunges for all kinds of reasons that I won't bore you with right now western end of Eurasia never again gets reunited into a single great Empire the eastern end does though in 589 China is reunited into a single great Empire and when that happens a same old story changes the meanings of geography once again reuniting China to single empire in the 6th century allows them to create a kind of new agricultural frontier in the south of China based on rice cultivation huge increase in productivity and and they're able to go even further than that lesser thing is one of the really interesting things in medieval Chinese history they create a kind of manmade version of the Mediterranean Sea by digging the Grand Canal that links the Fertile rice growing areas of the Yangtze base and points further south links it and all the way up to the great cities of the north the Chinese economy booms in the seventh eighth ninth centuries and this in many ways is the Golden Age of Chinese culture if you read classical Chinese poetry it will probably be poetry from the tongue dynasty of these years the tongue and the succeeding Song Dynasty this is the Golden Age of pre-modern Chinese science all kinds of inventions all kinds of technological breakthroughs are happening this is the period when East and Social Development rises higher than waist where and social developments as it does it once again begins to recreate reconnect the whole of Eurasia the overlapping zones of trade and warfare Mongol migrations black death all kinds of things happen that people haven't really been looking for but similar kind of recreation of these trade zones now all kinds of stuff is getting invented out in China in this period but I want to draw your attention to just two things that are popping up at a China in the 13th and 14th centuries which pushed social development upward um but also change the meaning of geography spectacularly and this is where the story really begins to sort of reach its its climaxes with these inventions in the 13th and 14th centuries and both of the inventions spread like wildfire once they get invented everybody loves them now the first of the inventions is practical ocean-going ships there have been ships before this that could cross the oceans like Viking longboats but they're not very reliable and they have to have very specific circumstances to do this by the 13th century the Chinese are building ships that can reliably sail across thousands and thousands of miles and in case anybody doubts the truth of this in 2009 a group of entrepreneurs on Taiwan built a replica of an early 15th century Chinese junk they sailed it all the way from Taiwan to San Francisco and I don't know if any of you went down and saw it while it stayed several months in the San Francisco Bay befitting so they refitted it in the San Francisco Bay they turned it around and the difficult part with pre-modern ships is actually not getting from China to California it's getting back again because of the winds and tides that's a tricky bit so they turn around they're gonna prove this can be done off they go they sail the whole way back to Taiwan they get within 20 miles of the coast of Taiwan and the middle of the night steel freighter slices the ship into and that's what you see on the top right now the good news is nobody died it was all fine and the bad news is is it's kind of disappointing that that's how it ended but you're obviously what the 15th century know steel freighters and the problem with doing this now of course is a replica junk no GPS no so no you don't see the steel freighters but yeah the 15th century didn't have steel freighters so this proves you know beyond any reasonable doubt that this this could be done and this these inventions the the inventions that make ocean-going ships possible they spread like wildfire within a century or the most - they spread all the way to the backward fringe of Western Eurasia Northwest Europeans have got these things now second invention the Chinese come up with it changes everything spreads even faster this in fact is the fastest spreading invention the world has ever seen up to this point and this invention is the gun everybody loves guns on the top left what you see is the oldest known true gun in the world if in the year 12 88 found in Manchuria in northeast China what you see in the bottom right is an illustration from a manuscript in Oxford I'm painting them here 1327 less than 40 years later showing a much improved version of a gun so in basically a human lifespan this thing has spread 4,000 miles overland from China to Western Europe everybody loves guns so these two inventions these set off the most spectacular transformation of geography the world had seen up till this point what I mean by that um let's have a map here we are Western Europe at this point to say around the Year 1400 Western Europe is very disadvantaged by geography it's a cold wet place it sticks out into the shores of the North Atlantic it's a long way from the real centres of action the centres of action in the Western world are down here in the Mediterranean Basin Italy Venice the Ottoman Empire that's where everything is going on northwest Europe miserable place I know this I grew up there miserable place geography has put it under the sword disadvantage now having said that interesting geographical fact Western Europe is about 3,000 miles in a straight line from America eastern Asia is about 6,000 miles the way you would have to say although catching the winds and tides about 6,000 miles from North America twice as far away now through all of human history up to about the Year 1400 this has been completely irrelevant to anything it's a fact it's true but it just doesn't matter because if you can't cross the oceans it doesn't matter which which of them you can sort cross least it really is irrelevant to anything once you can cross the oceans though this abruptly goes from being a trivial geographical fact to being the most important fact in the world it's a bit like what I'm saying when it's talking about the origins of Agriculture agriculture begins in Southwest Asia the hilly flanks not because Helle flankers are more energetic or cleverer than anybody else but because it's easier their geography has made it easier in the fifteenth century it's easier for Europeans to cross to the Americas than it is for East Asians because it's twice as close there's also other pressures on Europeans they know that the real wealth of the world is in East Asia they've got these great new ships these guns they can use to kill the people they meet when they get to the other end they want to get to East Asia some of them are so deluded about the size of the world Christopher Columbus for example Columbus is convinced it's only 4,000 miles from Portugal to China he is way off the mark everybody else knows it's three times as far they all tell him this he refuses to believe them he sets off sailing west to get to the east bumps into the Americas changes everything but even if Columbus had been a bit cleverer and hadn't discovered the Americas other people would have done so very very soon in 1500 another Italian Salem ganon Cabral is trying to sail to India and to get to India you have to swing out way out into the Atlantic Ocean to pick up the today the winds that will take you around the bottom of Africa he swings a little bit too far he bumps into Brazil once Europeans have gotten these ships it's inevitable they're going to discover the Americas it's easier for Europeans to do this and for East Asians Europeans go on to be the first people first and non Americans to find colonize and plunder the Americas and start drawing the Americas into an economic system based on their own countries they change the meaning of geography spectacular what are the precise thing I mean by that is these new ships they turn the Atlantic Ocean into a kind of Goldilocks ocean it's neither too big nor too small what that means it's big enough that in different Shores around the Atlantic while the different things are happening so up in Europe you've got those sort of early stages of as a manufacturing economy is being developed daran Africa you've got totally different sorts of societies where people can capture slaves Europeans and capture slaves over in the Americas you're growing completely different sorts of crops sugar and tobacco flourish cotton flourishes the Europeans turn the North Atlantic into this famous triangular economy that you've probably heard about in high school where you can sail around the economy from Europe down to Africa over to the Americas back again I'm picking up different Goods different points selling at each point along your trade making profits everywhere you go generating enormous revenues now that's only the beginning of what happens when the job if he changes meaning Europeans realize boy this is this is great we're getting so rich if we really understood how the winds and the tides work and how the stars move though we could get so much richer and Europeans start thinking about these problems much harder than before they start developing entirely new ways to look at nature in order to answer these questions about how the winds and the tides work how the stars move they've got to come up with entirely new kinds of mathematics they promptly do so Newton and Leibnitz at the end of the 17th century both of them invent calculus which you need to solve these problems both of them then spend the rest of their lives accusing the other of stealing the idea from them but a cascade of breakthroughs follows in mathematics physics chemistry biology Europe has a 17th century Scientific Revolution China doesn't India doesn't the Turkish Empire doesn't not because Europeans are smart on these other people but because they're asking different questions geography has changed its meaning forcing new questions upon the European as their natural scientific understanding of the world takes off in the 18th century they start applying these sorts of methods back onto their own society in what we normally call the Enlightenment asking how does society work can we have a political science which can explain our society by the end of the 18th century profits are being driven up so high by the Atlantic economy particularly in Britain which is coming gradually to dominate the Atlantic economy profits are being driven up so high then wages are being driven up as well and British entrepreneurs are finding that they're being priced out of their export markets in Europe they can't produce the goods as cheaply as other people because the wages are being driven up so high what they need they realize is some way to substitute machinery for labour so they start trying to mechanize production they go even further they start tapping into the energy of fossil fuels to drive their machines as they do this Britain has an industrial revolution and again not because the Brits are smarter or work harder than other people but because they're asking different questions different questions are thrust on them by geography coal and steam allow the British to project their power globally they conquer India they crush China by 1860 they bestride the world like a colossus now all of this has happened basically because of the way geography has changed its meanings since the Year 1400 and that's why I say it's geography that explains why the West rules so ok that's almost enough history for now when I was in high school back in the dark days of the 1970s when I was in high school that actually really was enough history for now it's something that didn't really strike me at the time but all of our modern history textbooks and British high schools ended in the year 1870 history came to a full stop as we said in Britain remarkable coincidence just a I'm sure there was no sinister motive of course but just at the point that Britain destroyed the world like a colossus history came to an end now the problem of course is you can end your textbook in 1870 but the British could not actually stop history in 1870 the same mechanisms kept on working after 1870 the mechanisms that can turn the Atlantic into a Goldilocks ocean carry on working in the late 19th century you get steam ships you get railroads drawing the economies of Central Europe for the Germans in particular and North America the u.s. in particular drawing these into this British dominated world economy as this happens same old story once again people in Germany in the u.s. they find they can't run an industrial capitalist economy in quite the same ways as the British because they don't live in Britain it's a different country they have to tinker with it to make it work as they tinker with it they discover oh we are making it work better than the British to the British like to laugh at the Germans in America say they can't do anything properly by 1900 they discover the Germans and Americans are doing it better than the British and this is a graphing a slightly bewildering mass of coloured lines here but it's showing you per capita levels of industrialization from 1750 to 1913 and the big thing that we see in this graph of course is first of all the British take off down here leaping ahead of the rest of the world and then accelerating for about 1860 onward the German and particularly the American catch up by the year 1900 the US has displaced Great Britain as the core of the Western economy that dominates the world now I did not study history in an American high school but I've been reliably assured my friends who did the us modern history textbooks all stopped around the Year 1970 remarkable coincidence the American problem once again is that geography still refused to stop working in 1970 when the US dominated the whatever strode the world like a colossus same processes keep working the sort of processes that made the Atlantic a Goldilocks ocean then basically shrunk it into a pond in the late 20th century these shrink the Pacific into a pond this of course is one of the reasons a San Francisco becomes a great global city but what it also does is draws East Asia into this global economy East Asians like uh North Americans are discovered in the late 19th century the late 20th century East Asians discover ways to to rejigger Western capitalism and industrialism to make them work back in East Asia East Asia starts bounding up after the Western core and catching up East Asian cities becomes remarkable as Western cities and this at the topic was the famous bird's nest in Beijing built for the Olympics and down at the bottom right is the architect I Weiwei who as I'm sure you know got arrested a week or two ago and Chinese have learned that you can build cities that are even more spectacular than Western cities but if you want to do that you must have architects and if you are going to have architects you have to learn to put up with them being annoying this is what architects and artists do there are annoying people I I for a while I was a Dean at Stanford responsible the humanities department I learned this firsthand artists very annoying people so if you're going to do this you you have to put up with annoying people I'm afraid but the bottom line here this is an inexorable process driven by geography something that people can't really control this process so okay that is why the West rules for now that is the title of my book to wrap up though I want to spend in the last few minutes turning to the subtitle of the book the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future now I suggest in my book that there's two real lessons so we can draw from history and learn from history for thinking about the future the first of these lessons is that we can identify the big trends the big forces that have driven global history second thing we can do is identify the the countervailing forces that might derail these trends because the trends don't just play out in a simple linear or even logarithmic kind of way they get derailed this side these I think are the two big things we can learn from history the forces that drive it and what derails it now taking the first of these lessons the forces that drive history if we take um the 20th century rates of increase in Social development's in the eastern and western cause and simply project them forward so you know take what I calculated from 1900 to 2000 project them forward for 2000 to 2100 we get a new graph this is the graph we get red line is the East again the blue line is the West what you see here is the red line the eastern line will catch up with the Western line in the year 21:03 so make a note of that put that in your diary that is the point at which Western rule will end now I've always been told it's a very good idea if you're going to predict things be as precise as possible so I've been very precise for you the other thing I've always been told to do is predict things which will not come true Awful's within your own lifetime very very important on Monday I mean we had a little debate down at Stanford our between though there's me and one of my colleagues from the political science department and Frank Fukuyama who's just published his new book about actually about Eastern Western history and professor Fukuyama is best known for this book he wrote a bunch in the early nineties the end of history predicting the width the fall of the Soviet Union history had basically reached its endpoints and the societies had developed as far as they were going to go now everybody was going to be liberal capitalists now his great mistake as I and his other critics like to point out is to make a prediction where you'll know within 15 years whether you were right or not mine who can tell so okay in Easton the the implication of the trends of history is that the east will catch up with the West acting not in the Year 2103 that's obvious is silly to try to be that precise but by the end of the 21st century we will see the East catching up that's one thing that this graph shows you here we are crossing over here which comes to more about this point here 2103 what the graph also shows us so the point where these lines cross going along now this way it's the vertical axis um the point is round about five and points on my social development scale now what does that mean well in the 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age um social development in the West has risen by about 900 points 900 points takes you from cave paintings at Alta Mira to the long now foundation the implication of a steady states change across the 21st century is that there will be four times as much change in the 21st century as we've seen in the entire time since the end of the Ice Age now that is a fairly mind-boggling sort of prognosis to make now all kinds of people speculated on on what a world at five thousand points might look like many many predictions have been made and most of them I'm sure when you look at predictions that were made in the past about what the future would be like they're always comically wrong and I'm sure the predictions have been made now many of them right here in the Bay Area will also turn out to be comically wrong but having said that um they do give us a sense I think of what the world might come to look like if we do see the great trends just continuing out into the future without a change and this graph here this is a graph drawn and by the futurist Ray Kurzweil who again I'm sure many of you know cause whales were probably a lot better than I do what this graph is showing us is the the power of supercomputers since the year 1990 um graphed on a logarithmic scale here so each unit you go up the vertical axis of you're actually going ten times as far in straightforward linear measurements as you would on a normal kind of scale and what Kurzweil was trying to show is just how strong and consistent this trend has been out here up to his book was published in the year 2005 so out as far as the range of them planned for supercomputers Kurzweil pointed out but if this trend were to continue by the year 2030 so very close to now we will have brain scanning so precise that we can generate neuron by neuron level scans of your brain your actual brain can be scanned into a computer with all of your individual memories everything will be in there because after all the year the way your brain works is electrical signals flash back and forth between the neurons in your brain so we'll scan an exact replica of your brain by the year 2030 by the year 2025 up here we'll have supercomputer so powerful that they can actually run this simulation of your brain Kurzweil suggests or what that means is that that program running on that computer will be another you now a lot of people say no it's not there's a lot of reasons why you maybe that's a silly thing to say but the implication of the trends are though by the year 2025 there'll be computers so powerful they can mimic the actions of an individual human by the year 2045 if the trends continue growing exponentially we will have computing power so great that all of the thought processes of all of the seven billion people living on earth can be uploaded to mainframes what Kurzweil predicts from this he says at that point we will have reached what he likes to call the singularity the point at which change becomes so fast it's basically instantaneous all of the intelligence of all of the beings on earth will be merged into one super intelligence one machine based life form that is greater trillions of times greater than the sum of all the biological intelligence on earth now if that happens I think Frank Fukuyama's end of history actually will be upon us the sort of forces I've been talking about biology sociology geography they will surely cease to mean anything at all in a world that looks even vaguely like that so that's one second lesson that we learn is that forces do derail these trends um if you look back through history there have been these great social collapses and the slightly alarming thing is if you look at the really big social collapses in the past the forces that drove them and tend to be rather similar to forces that many observers worried about in the world right now uncontrollable large-scale migration is one of these forces the breakdown of major states complete collapse of states another one in the force is linked of course very often to the migrations the spread of epidemic diseases in new forms again often linked to the migrations um massive famine as people start to outrun the food supply exacerbated by disease migration at state failure and then the fifth of the forces which is always in the mix somewhere is rapid climate change in a way that people can't control and obviously you don't need me to tell you that these are big worries in the 21st century world so one prediction we might make is that the 21st century might and should be heading toward the sort of collapse we saw with the end of the Roman Empire now I actually think that's highly unlikely for one very good reason and and the reason is this we now have the ability to annihilate ourselves completely this is the biggest nuclear explosion ever I'm a 58 Megaton bomb that the Soviets set up in 1961 if we now have a massive international global scale social collapse and I think it's highly unlikely to play out like the fall of the Roman Empire I think it's much more likely we're looking at humans and Nile ating themselves in nuclear war okay to wrap up now if you're anything like me when I travel around you go to airport bookstores because you always forget to take a book with you you go to airport bookstores and they're full of these books by political pundits telling us what the future will be like America in 2050 the world in 2100 things like this and I love these books I always buy them I never learn my lesson which is I get fifteen pages into them and get infuriated and can't read any further the problem I have with most of these books is that the the picture you get in them of the future is that the future is basically like now it's like now but it's faster it's like the Jetsons yeah it's faster it's shinier China will be a bit richer than the rest of us but it's basically like now now that's the one thing I think we can say is definitely not going to happen the future is not going to be like now the 21st century is going to be a great race between something like Kurzweil singularity and some kind of catastrophe that leaves all previous human catastrophes in the shade I don't see how we can possibly have a middle outcome here any one of these two things is on the cards and the slightly amusing thing I'm using for me at least when I was writing this book why the West rules slightly amusing thing is either way it turns out whether the east or the west dominates the planet is simply going to lose its meaning by the time the East catches up with the West that's just no longer going to be very important so okay the great question for our times and I would say is about not what I wrote my book about not whether the West will continue to rule it's a question I came to at the end of the book it's whether humanity as a whole is going to break through to an entirely new level of existence before disaster strikes us down permanently so on that cheery note I will stop and thank you very much for listening [Applause] you know oddly enough we've had half the people you quoted in this series of Frank Fukuyama gave one more shot at the end of history Ray Kurzweil showed his graphs all going toward the atmosphere stratosphere there's the thing in your book which was a geographical element that maybe this is a good time to fill in which is what happened to the impact of the steps and the pneumatic civil empires and so on when gunpowder became a big event you want to just run that one down yeah yeah I think that's a great question to raise through through most of human history the steps is a place where very few people live at all because you it's really hard to make a living there I mean if you're a hunter hunter gatherer I'm very difficult to make a living there's just not enough to eat very little wild human food available it's not really until people start to domesticated animals that you can make the steps work for you at all cuz things once you domesticate animals you can then move on to the steps and we as humans we can't eat the grass growing on the steps but cows can and the cows eat the grass we the cows so the steps begin to become productive and then when you start domesticating horses which probably happened on the steps around somewhere on 4000 BC when you do that you begin initially the horse is just like a fancy version of a cow and they eating the horse it's a quite a long time but eventually they get to the point they figure out how to hook the horse up to other things you begin to be able to move around the steps become much better than because you can move from Oasis to Oasis support much larger populations the Empire start to grow you can by that point you can ride the horses so you have lied down and raids on these empires the steps begin to be really a very wealthy part of the world and this carries on they they go quite suddenly between about a thousand and 500 BC they go for me in this backwater so being an incredibly important part of the world system and then even more gruffly um between die I would say you're really between the years 1500 and 1700 ad or C II they abruptly stopped being a major part of the story and the big reason for that is simply what you mentioned the gunpowder and what happens is um steppe nomads it seems pretty clear the steppe nomads have a big part in the initial creation of guns and using guns and a steppe nomads of course he could point a gun and fire it just as well as anybody else so which axis should say he or she I'm stepping on our societies among the few in world history where women have regularly been warriors so these step now my second points a gun as well as anybody else but what they can't is that they can't raise really large numbers of men the way a settled agrarian Empire camp and they can't pay for them to train your round the way the agrarian empires are beginning to be able to do and they can't train them to fire volleys in this sort of way they can anomer can ride up a shoot and then ride away again but the infantry from the big empires they can say draw up six ranks deep and the front rank can reload its muskets and set them up on the little stand and blast away and there's no matters they ride around and they can kneel down and start reloading so it takes an eternity to reload these early muskets second-ranked and blast away then they kneel down and reload the third-ranked and on you go and by the time the last rank is fired front monks ready to go again and up you stand and you shoot again and this is so important because like if if I had one of these 15 16th century our cabooses or muskets right now I mean I can hit one of you guys in the front row always a bad idea to sit I could hit one of you guys in the front row I could maybe hit somebody in the middle but if I was told to hit an individual in the back row there's no way I could possibly do that but if we got 500 oh it's all blast away at the same time we can hit your everything that's in front of us we'll get hit and so when you 50 in like in the year 1500 nomads normally win their battles against infantry musketeer armies by 1600 nomads sometimes win their battles by 1700 nomads basically almost never and as this happens the empires are able to move on to the steps and shut them down and once you stop nomads moving around once you make it so they've got to get your permission to move around you basically killed the whole Nomad thing and this changes the entire story they they can't spread the disease and the old so the way just everything changes by 1700 because of the steps as Europeans and East Asians open up the oceans they simultaneously close the steps this is what many changes you know a version of your sequence the difference between the Grand Canal being the waterway that that tied together China once they built it and the Mediterranean which was there all the time they didn't have to build it and the Mediterranean being a similar Wilder body of water than your average canal by mastering the Mediterranean it seems like the West was then the questions the skills the technology all that stuff to master Mediterranean they could master the Atlantic and then they could master the Pacific and in the Pacific War was sort of the fighting out of East versus West and who actually whose lake is it and that was determined in four years time this is pretty much of a maritime story yeah maybe the oceans are incredibly important in any any global historical narrative and yeah because my my whole shtick I kept saying is about how geography changes its meanings as as developments increases or or Falls and so the oceans yo through history the oceans have constantly been changing their meanings and for a very long time big bodies of water are obstacles more than anything else LAN tick in the Pacific are basically uncrossable and this is one of the things that makes global history so interesting is that after modern humans move into the America safe somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand BC somewhere in that ballpark um the Bering Strait land bridge disappears and after that the oceans are so big that it's only very occasionally from then on the people cross over from the old world to the new world and so this makes this great natural experiments you can look at how new world civilizations developed and how old world civilizations developed they got to basically independent tracks up to the points and the Spaniards go over there and start slaughtering everybody by breathing their bugs on them um and so yeah early on the oceans are big barriers then gradually seas get turned from barriers into highways so initially of course the little seas earlier like the Mediterranean Sea the North Sea at the Sea of Japan and then gradually bigger and bigger seas until we get to the point now where people people argue over this but some would say yeah we're now reaching the point where the oceans are basically starting to become irrelevant to the story I don't really think that's true I mean you you look at the volume of God's ship by container ships across the Pacific oceans are still very very much with us we still it's still possible for pilots to shut down world trade I think this is for historian this is just so cool I mean I think you if you get kidnapped by pirate this is not cool and people have been kidnapped by this would really be horrified that I can sit here and say such callous things for his stories it's really cool that pirates come back in because this is exactly what a historian what predicted the golden ages of piracy or when you get a great up spike in in a long-distance trade on the oceans combined with weak states control of the oceans and the problem we got now is we yeah we could easily shut down these pirates in the Malacca Straits or any staff Raqqah but who's gonna do it like who it has to be the u.s. really but the u.s. is not gonna just walk in and start shooting everybody again all over the world and this is you know Romans had the same problem the Chinese had the same problem once the great empires decide yeah we're gonna bite the bullet and crack down pirates go out of business but at the moment the Pirates are not going out of business so the next geographical scale and here's a question from Brad in the long view how do you see the geography of space travel changing history the next geographical scale is the planet as a whole which we seem to be engaging in two modes one is climate change at a global scale as a global problem and also the prospect of space travel yeah yes two things raised very I mean very different sorts of problems and challenges when I started writing my book I viewed science fiction fan and so I started writing the book I thought yeah this is gonna be great and the endless book talking about space travel it'll be really cool and then I started actually trying to learn something about space travel and you know we all know it's a long way to other stars we all grasp this basic points but I think it takes a bit of work to grasp just how big these differences are and again I'm sure there's lots of people in the room know a lot more about astrophysics and I do but the sort of the take-home message I brought away with me is that unless there's something about physics that we are currently not grasping there is not gonna be much in the way of really fruitful interplanetary travel going on but of course we're gonna be able to go to the other planets in our solar system and there may be all kinds of really great stuff out there then we're able to do they'll change the human story and I mean I fall in the camp as I tend to think any sensible person does it thinking that there are a lot of earth-like planets out there then you know prior to 1995 we didn't know for certain that any other planets existed outside our solar system and now we know if you know all these hundreds of them and all the astronomers are saying yes of course you're within the next few years we're going to identify earth-like planets there's probably hundreds of millions of them out in the universe so you're in theory yeah we could hop around to all these earth-like planets it's gonna be great um but they're a really long way away and so I suspect unless there's something we don't get about physics so this is simply never going to happen the climate change so I bad I think that simply is come down but it's more scary is I'm a train to a geographical issue and your spectrum of considerations ya know and I have been criticized by by thoughtless people don't care enough about my feelings criticized by people for being a little bit loose when I talk about biology sociology geography I am being fair these are very loose and sloppy concepts so you're where exactly climate change fits into this nexus there the Sun is room to argue about that I mean I would see it very much as a force but one that can to some extent be driven by what humans do as we're seeing at the moment and one that of course also it sort of ratchets up the pressure on humans forces you to start thinking about how you do things in new kinds of ways and so um I I guess you're my guess and where climate change is taking us is that I'm you're like it or not there's going to be some very substantial global warming and particularly I mean I like this phrase that I think is hunter Lovins came up with originally that we should talk about global weirding rather than global warming that we're really you know certainly we are looking at an upward trend in temperature but we're also looking at a huge increase in the wildness of the climate and the amount of rain you get in the big storms out here in Northern California or the scale of the droughts you'll get saying you're further inland out in the southwest and the the length of our fire seas and all of these things are getting wilder and weirder and I think you know this is gonna happen we've got to just take this one on the chin this is going to happen there's stuff we can do about it certainly but we don't seem to be scared enough to do this stuff another one of the the sayings I use throughout this book history is driven by by people that human beings are what as I said human beings are frightened lazy and stupid I think something along those lines and this is what drives history's these three things we've got to be frightened of things to react to them properly I think we started to get scared of climate change and then we forgot about it because very short term scary things happened with the economy and we focus on that instead I think you know whatever we do now we're going to see massive and melting of the polar ice cap so going to see significant rise in the sea level we're gonna see major change I like to think that we are capable of reacting to this climate change doesn't have to be disastrous for humans but it could be disastrous for humans if we don't kind of pull ourselves together reasonably quickly I think potentially and it's not the kind of thing that the world can heat up five or six or seven degrees that's not gonna kill us this is gonna change everything but it's not gonna kill us what will kill us I think is the way we react to climate change and particularly there's this huge band of the Society these are the most vulnerable to climate change and of arcing up through central southern Africa to Central Asia out of the East Asia where you've got most of the world's poorest people most of the most unstable governments in the world the fastest nuclear proliferation is going on in this region um the world's water supplies are under the most extreme pressure in this region I mean it's just so depressing and when you start thinking about then particularly if you factor in that for the short term at least the the most important energy resources for the developed economies the next 20 years are still going to be the oil of the Middle East this is terrifying um if things were to get out of control in the Middle East if there's a nuclear showdown between Iran and Israel I don't think it matters what administration is in charge in the u.s. there is no way the United States can stay out of a nuclear confrontation between Iran and Israel if the United States gets involved I find it really hard to see how Russia which is still the world's biggest nuclear power if their nuclear weapons actually work that's another question but if they do they're still the world's biggest nuclear power I find it a little hard to see how they stay out if the US gets involved in a nuclear confrontation between Iran and Israel so the how we react to climate change that's what really worries me in the short oh there's another geographical angle I know climate change you were describing the great vulnerabilities to climate being in the global south and as things get warmer people move to higher elevations and they move to higher latitudes they move toward the poles and the major difference geographically between the south and the north is that as you go toward the pole in the north there's more land you're avoiding this out and in North America why this out but in the south as you go toward the pole there's less land and so India and Latin America and Africa all narrow down in it to nothing and all you've got left is Antarctica so presumably if people are trying to leave the global south because of climate change they can't go south they'd have to go north that sounds like a problem yes yes this again with the the issues I was talking about right at the end of these Horsemen of the Apocalypse it always seem to be involved in the great social collapses you know a lot of people in Europe and the u.s. get very bent out of shape currently about immigration into Western Europe and the u.s. from point south I mean it seems to me that when you look back at European and US history across the last century or so on the whole immigration has been a really good thing for these economies and my feeling is that the kind of immigration we're dealing with at the moment it continues to be in that category the scary kind of immigration though is if we see um well there's a British report came out five years ago which predicted that we're going to see 200 million of what are called climate migrants out of this global South area by the year 2050 200 million that is a lot of people if you're getting tens of millions of people migrating around Central Asia South Asia it's getting very difficult to see how the governments in these regions are going to be able to cope with these sorts of movements if you're getting tens of millions of people moving into Russia you might say in a way that's that's good because Russian population is collapsing so while drinking themselves to death but um how is this actually going to play out on the ground I mean this is I think yeah this is the terrifying prospect do we have the level of institutions which are basically created in the 19th century do we have the institutions that can deal with these kinds of global challenges invention institutions can be a whole subject but here's a question from Dwayne O'Brien how do you think the rise of collaborative tools the last 20 years will affect all of us the Internet communications wiki smartphones so on is that of a major player and all this in terms of west-east and I suppose quartiles rate of this and that or is it just another bloody tool yeah I think it's an interesting question really interesting question if I mean yeah if you think about the the great forces have been transforming the world in the last 50 years um nearly all of our things that have been happening in the West and I mean obviously not all of them completely South Korea is a robotic center that can compete with almost anywhere in the world but still you're on the whole um these are things that are happening in the West and I mean if you look at the world today I think it's something 1/7 of the population of the world lives in North America or Europe but something like two thirds of the world's with search and Development money is spent in North America or Europe two-thirds of the world's advanced weapons and basically virtually all of its nuclear weapons are in Europe or North America I think all of its major aircraft carriers are based in Europe or North America and two-thirds of something else's or maybe it's two-thirds of the patents but overwhelmingly it's still the West is the engine driving things forward and I think you know the big question to put on the table is does this mean that's the Western domination particularly there the technological end of things I do tend to think is going to be the big motor and the relatively short term for what happens to us does the Western domination at the moment of the technology mean that in fact the West is going to be able to kind of hold off and fight off this great global shift or is this just a kind of the tail end of the older Western dominant said you're at the moment it's a Microsoft or wherever you might tend to who care to think about the great corporations doing things but 20 years from now it might be Lenovo or Tata or one of these corporations these are the big global corporations and this I think this is a very difficult question to answer because you know they're the newspapers and the weekly magazines are full of the doom and gloom prognosis about the end of American power and so on but um for historian the really amusing thing about these is how how closely they can be paralleled if you look back in history if you look back to the 1970s all these people are writing off American power you look back to the 1930s again all these people are writing up American power America plunged into the Great Depression in the 1930s in the 1940s it turns around defeats the Nazis overthrows Japan becomes the great global power in the 1970s were plunged into stagflation everybody's miserable Jimmy Carter goes on TV wearing a cardigan and everybody's appalled you know world and in the 1980s we overthrow the Soviet you um so I think it's certainly not beyond the belt the realm of possibility then and then in the 2010s the US will tap into another crisis you're probably a fiscal crisis and then the 2020s will bounce back to overcome all its rivals I think that's certainly very possible that um the Western powers will be able to manage this process of change what I think is much less likely is if we if things don't change so much of the whole question simply becomes irrelevant but if we look at the question again 50 60 70 years down the line it's not gonna be the West so I guess I tend to think there's certainly that it's possible to manage these processes it's not possible for great men or great political institutions though to stop them dead in their tracks well it comes to a question that Brad the earlier question raises if you were to try to disprove your theory or someone else were to try to disprove your theory how would ya take to take you down I think there's a lot of ways that I could be wrong your pains me to admit there are a lot of ways that I could be wrong and I think you won and what I'm doing here you know it revolves around this Social Development Index so the Social Development Index is one of the ways I could be wrong in fact I think this seems to me there's three major ways that I could be wrong about what I'm saying this index and one of them is you could look at this index all these numbers I'm banding around all the time and you could say you know this is just stupid that is the only word for what you're doing it's stupid you can't quantify human history in this way you're just wasting your time completely and then you could try to show any a lot of people to think that I mean I find their argument somewhat baffling personally but a lot of people do think this so you could try to make that point you can make this argument a second thing you could say okay I'm gonna share this the basic concept you're quantifying things comparing them that's maybe not a bad idea but the way you've got about the particular traits that you've picked on the mechanisms you use to score those are stupid and those are the wrong things you're looking at the wrong thing you're looking at in the wrong way and I will show you now what you should have looked at and then of course I mean these arguments because the only really matter if that then leads you to a very different set of conclusions at the end but that's another place you can attack it third way you can attack it it's to say yeah the basic idea yeah that's good you should measure things good idea um the things that you're measuring yeah you know the probably not ideal probably we can measure something else certainly we can measure it in different ways where you show your stupidity they would say to me is in what you actually do when you come to be a historian and actually look at the evidence this is where you mess it up and just go all over the place and go haywire and so um because they're the good thing about these forms of criticisms this is what I'm saying at the beginning about that they're the good thing about this approach is it forces you to be explicit they may be as wrong as is imaginable but even so I will still feel pretty good about what I did I mean not great not great but pretty good because even if I'm completely wrong and I would hope it's move the debate forward by by forcing people to be explicit and if they want to show that I'm wrong about things they then have to show why I and in the process hopefully come up with a better theory and you know it'll be hard for me to admit their theory is better but maybe I'll be able to do that and we'll be able to say at the end of the day yeah I was wrong but I move the debate forward so yeah a whole array of things and then of course the whole other set you can say well okay maybe you're right about all of that stuff but you still interpret it wrong that having generated all these scores um the the the story that you tell goes wrong and then I think I would be attacked in the conventional sort of ways that a historian would attack another historian by showing that your new narrative that you've constructed just doesn't connect them well enough with the evidence and so say they they might say like my story I tell about the Scientific Revolution how that is ultimately driven by the new meaning of geography that's just really stupid and I had lunch with a good friend on Monday who's a historian of science and he was very nice about it and he was kept saying oh yes of course you'll write brilliant you're brilliant you showed your if he's important that's brilliant but you are completely wrong about the Scientific Revolution that that is not by geography at all it that really is driven by the ancient Greek stuff that if the ancient Greeks had not had the particular theories that they did have about ellipses and the mathematics of ellipses then Newton and Leibnitz would not try to fill in the gaps between the Greek thinkers they would not have invented calculus and so um that I would say is the fourth level in which the theory can be attacked so you're probably keeping score books has been out for a year or so now and Neil Ferguson thinks it's wonderful and historian and Jared Diamond thinks it's wonderful to collapse guy who else thinks it's wonderful and who else thinks you're dead wrong well okay my relatives think it's wonderful yeah it's been it's been a very interesting experience the best reviews the book has got have been in financial thing so I got a great review in the economy it's got a great review in the Financial Times and to my surprise I've been invited by a number of financial industry based think tanks to come and think talk about the ideas um the place where I'm sort of guessing now predicting the future guessing my worst reviews I suspect are gonna come in the professional historian journals and the reason I'm guessing they're slow so they haven't come out exactly yeah the professional journals are bone achingly slow um like within the in the popular press if you review a book if you don't publish the review within a month or two of the book coming out there's no point publishing because he needs to coincide with the appearance of the new book because that's why in the book it is news briefly but in academia hey we're in no hurry we've all got tenure what do we care so um we published very very slowly and it generally takes one to two years for the scholarly articles to come out and I suspect that a lot of historians are not going to like the book for some of the reasons you talked about at the beginning that it's trying to do things that historians generally really really don't like there's a period back in the 60s and 70s when historians started to get quite excited about quantifying things we then had this huge backlash against it so quantifying things that really bad that is going to upset people I think but then you know launching off to say yes having done this stuff about the past we can now learn some lessons to project them forward that's really really bad and this is one of the amusing things about my profession that most of the academic profession why do you think it's been is something bad happen in the past that they're worried about yeah partly that yeah partly you look back to you guys like you mentioned Karl Marx there's an example in a slightly less of blood-soaked way I'm saying of Toynbee writing in the all these Browns theories of history yeah it's a writer grand theory of history you've got to do what historians um by training and I think I'm likely refused to do you you couldn't write a book like this if every single statement that you make is based on direct work in the primary sources in the archives and this is what historians do you you learn medieval Chinese or whatever it might be you learn the paleography you learn to read this handwriting you go to the archives you learn everything there is to know about a tiny subject and you come back me write a monograph about it and that of course that is good if people didn't do that we couldn't have any serious history we'd still be you know where we were back in the 16th century as far as history goes the problem I think is that historians have said that not only is that good that is so good that you shouldn't do anything else and the costing of some of the people who have done other things it has been slightly embarrassing what they've done but I think we really do have to do the other stuff and one of the question of why why do you have to do it well I think this is kind of what history's for almost everybody thinks this almost everybody believes this and I think history has our purpose meaning wow that is big news I think you partly of course we like history those of us who like history do like it at least in part because it's it's just interest and you switch on the History Channel and you know it's like 95% of the shows were about Adolf Hitler but that's because Hitler's interesting I mean who among this has not sat slack Gorge for an hour watching one of these ridiculous shows about Hitler's interest in the occult so whatever it might be it's just infants just cool and meat but then I also think that most of us do sort of thing that history but you can learn things from history and you can learn stuff that tells you about why the world is the way that it is at least a little bit about why the future will turn out in one way rather than another and you know all the historians would like to say you can't learn anything from the past you cannot predict the future from the past you're like when when George Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 those historians were not going around saying boy I wish the Bush administration knew less history because then they would have foreseen the future they didn't say that and this is I think is what makes history such a lovable discipline but if you go to the economics department say and talk to these guys they will tell you not only can we tell you all about economics we can tell you about everything else too and we wander over to your biology departments they will say yeah biology is the key to everything and physics well shaaka physics is also the key to everything historians as far as I know historians are the only academic profession whose point of pride is that their subject is the key to nothing and I find this peculiar I find this that's a shift we're gonna try to help move a blast question take us back to archaeology archaeology for you and archaeology in the world is the long now foundation we like looking at multiple millennia archaeology you delve into that give us a taste of what archaeology is meant to you well yeah archaeology is just really cool and I mean really is one field archaeology is one of the most fun things you can do if you like it if you don't like it it is the most tedious activity ever invented in the history of the world if you don't forget it if you don't get the buzz of it it consists of moving dirt from one place to another extremely slow and this is because that is what it is and of course you know if you do get it then of course it's a hole yes you are moving extremely slowly yes you have to admit that's true but there's a lot else going on as well and it's just and it's just really really neat feel sort of at the academic level you're doing two things at once and one of them it's kind of the most focused and detail-oriented of the human sciences because you can see you say oh my take I was running in Sicily for seven seasons um one one area we spent seven years excavating a single route across a period that spanned about 150 years in the past and I mean my god how nitpicky can you get seven years in one rule which 150 years are we talking about this was from about 650 BC to 500 BC so your very short period of time but on the other hand you're also comparing things across thousands of years and the entire planet is a one of the differences between archaeology and being the text-based historian is that um with text-based history the formation processes of the evidence are very culturally specific it's written in a particular language you've got to learn that languages all this very local stuff about it and there's so much of it to learn that it becomes very difficult to study China and then vault off to the Middle East and learn Arabic well enough to do the same thing whereas in archaeology you do get some very specific formation processes the climate and the geology make a huge difference but it's only kind of up to a point and so it's much easier say for an archaeologist it's very easy for an archaeologist to say what I study is the Agricultural Revolution and I study it wherever it happens and whenever it happens and so I know everything there is to know about the origins of agriculture in the Middle East but I also know most of what there is to know about the origins of agriculture in Pakistan and Mexico and China and it's you've got to be really really good to do that but there have been such people where as historians will tend to say I'm a historian of Ming Dynasty China rather than saying I'm a historian of civil wars and I am going to study all civil wars whenever they happen and I'm gonna pluck out the examples of the most useful for testing my theories historians very rarely do that and there's a I think good reason for that which is the nature of the evidence but also there it becomes this bad reason it stops you from doing it but that's one of the things that makes archaeology so cool is these vast enormous comparisons and then of course the digging part they're just the physical experience of moving this dirt that on the one hand it's just extremely bad paid manual labor really just painfully then on the other hand it's a super high-tech activity and you're uncovering the stuff I know you you laying bare say the abandonment deposit in the house it's burned down around 500 BC nobody has seen this in two and a half thousand years these are the last moments of that house and sometimes you'll catch um the the bodies of the actual people who were there when a building was destroyed caught in the destruction one is a graduate student they don't for quite a few years on a on a project in Greece on the Greek islands I'm directed by a Greek archeologist whose wife is actually here tonight and this is an amazing excavation I met my own wife there and we excavated all these bodies of the people caught in the destruction around 1200 BC and it's really hard not to like that stuff that is just really great thank you thank you all [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 2,006

Rating: 4.6666665 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, History, Conflict, Globalization, Government, Technology, Economics

Id: HZC-UJQ4sPM

Length: 101min 25sec (6085 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020