Ian Morris -- Why the West rules, for now: the patterns of history, and what they reveal about the future =========================================================================================================== This book attempts to answer questions such as: (1) What advantages did the West have that enable it to dominate other regions at certain times in history. (2) *When* did the West dominate? And, (3) having attempted to learn something about social development and the advancement of society, what can we say about our future, both in the West and in the East. I'm hoping we'll get answers to the questions such as: (1) What were those (historical) strengths? (2) Are those same strengths and characteristics still advantageous, given our current problems? (3) Who has and is gaining those strengths? Who is losing them? And, of course, (4) what can be done? Is there anything effective that can be done, both to advance our society and to protect us from some of the environmental, climate, and resource problems that lie in our future? For me, since I'm a techie and a computer programmer, chapter 10, "The western age" is an especially interesting one, because it picks apart the story of how power (mostly steam power, I suppose), innovation, technology, and mechanization helped break through what Morris calls a "hard ceiling". That's interesting because this story might give us hints about how to break through the next hard ceiling or, if we are in the process of some sort of break through, how that process might proceed. I believe that each of these major moves in technology is started by some significant new enabling technology, e.g. the printing press (although Morris denies that the printing press really changed communication, not level of social development), the steam engine, accurate watches for navigation, telegraph, ..., and the Internet. If Morris is correct in the last few chapters of this book that we are approaching some sort of cataclysmic change, it is extremely important that we understand the nature of the change we are currently going through and also how this transformation might be influenced. Migration and immigration -- Morris has interesting things to say about migration, in particular migration over the long term. He claims that one of the enablers of a modern Europe was what he calls the closing of the Steppe Highway. The effect of that blockage was to protect Europe from disruptive invasions from the east, enabling it (Europe) to advance to levels of social development that occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries. Labor costs are a worthwhile point of view for thinking through the changes that Morris describes in Europe's industrial revolution. A central theme or basis for explanation is that people are naturally lazy, greedy, and frightened (or chose euphemisms if you prefer), and that this motivates them to invent and work towards what is easier, more rewarding, and safe. Apply that to labor availability and use; then you will soon arrive at explanations for mechanization, labor efficiency studies, etc. What kinds of incentives does this apply to, e.g. the drive to mechanize? What other incentives push mechanization? Reliability of labor and the labor force? Other, non-wage costs, e.g. the demand for education, medical care, etc? Worries about dependable labor availability. (I know that my relatives in California worry about whether there will be a sufficient labor force available right when fruit is on the trees and must be harvested immediately. Perhaps we ask questions about the quality of the metrics that Morris uses to measure social development. By that I mean, is one kind of energy use just as good as another? Isn't a more efficient use of energy, even when the total energy consumed is lower, a sign of a more highly developed society? And, is all manufacturing the same? Perhaps building houses is not as good in some sense as manufacturing farm implements or some other machinery that helps to produce food. Perhaps burning lots of coal, especially if done in an uncontrolled and "dirty" way, produces a poorer quality of life than a lower use of energy might. A higher-level question should also be asked about Morris's comparisons of East and West: Is this a zero-sum game? If one nation, region, or alliance wins, must others lose? Isn't it possible that in the future, all, or at least most, of us could become richer? Even while the East, in particular China and some of the nations once called the "Asian tigers" close the lead, isn't it possible that the West will still remain ahead, and that it will have even more wealth at its disposal, while societies in the East advance, too? If, after reading this book, you need help sleeping at night, then you might try to convince yourself that what Morris calls climate weirding will force the industrial nations to organize and cooperate in response. Although much of this book discusses the relative position between societies, it also spends a good deal of effort on the problem of whether all or any of the advanced societies in the world today can proceed. Can we continue on our present trajectory without hitting some unbreakable ceiling, or even without descending into some apocalyptic state of dis-organization or resource depletion or destruction? So, we have to ask whether it is reasonable to expect that the four measures of social development used by Morris can continue on an upward trend. In the long-term, don't these measures have to go down as well as up? Isn't there something self-limiting about the use of accelerating amount of energy, for example? Yes, learning how to use energy enables us to use more of it, but won't there be exogenous limiting pressures? To give him credit, Morris is well aware of this worry; in fact, he discusses it and tries to factor it into his theory and calculations. I'm going to introduce an alternative thing to worry about. This book encourages us to think about when and why the East will catch up with the West, even as they both advance. I'm worried that both the East and the West will devolve or even implode, possibly while the East does so more slowly relative to the West, as nations in both the East and West consume more of the easily accessible natural resources that have been enabling recent progress. Morris assumes that more social development, more use of resources, more energy use, and, even, more ability to wage war are all signs of progress. Morris worries about this, too, although his suspicions about what will go wrong are different from mine and are quite a bit more cataclysmic. My worries are that as the world population soars in response to our improved abilities to feed and care for people, we may see limits that can't be finessed by improved technology. There is the possibility that we, both in the West and in the East, will need to learn to do more with less and to even to make do with less. It'd be nice to be able to believe that those hockey stick, elbow- shaped graphs that Morris shows can go up forever. But, I doubt that. Even if we do not have the cataclysms that Morris worries about, I believe that the green revolution can *not* go on producing increasingly larger supplies of food, nor can fish farming in the ocean can produce increasing supplies of fresh fish, etc. There are going to be some limits and some costs. All societies face that sooner or later. It might even be that the higher levels of social organization, information processing, and ability to use energy will bring us up against those limits all the faster. Perhaps we need a higher order, wider scale of social organization. But, given that the most powerful country and the one most needed to drive an effort to create that organization has in the last ten years outlawed serving French Fries because they had a foreign name, I don't have much in the way of hope about that. I have these criticisms for the assumption that continuing growth is the only conceivable goal: (1) It can't continue; those elbow-shaped graphs in Morris's book that go steeply upward cannot continue for long. There are some limits (some hard and some merely uncomfortable) that will be imposed on increasing city size, increased use of natural resources, accelerating use of energy, etc. (2) It does not produce the results we want. Too many are left out, while a few acquire extreme amounts of wealth. So that some can benefit from these advances, so many must live in poverty. Yes, overall standards of living have improved, but we simply must do a better job of enabling more of the world-wide population improve their lives in a sustainable way. One of the most interesting aspects of Morris's book is his awareness of this paradox. And he attempts to analyze the future, several possible futures in fact, in the light of that paradox and his theory of social development. If I were to stretch for one complaint about this book, it would be that several concepts that I tried to look up in the index were not there, even though they seemed central to Morris's thinking. I notice that Amazon has a Kindle version (I read paper), so I suspect that if you read that, you'd just be able to search for what you want. For those of you who want a somewhat more approachable, or at least shorter, book on why societies fall behind and collapse, take a look at "The Collapse of Complex Societies", by Joseph A. Tainter. Tainter's view seems to be that a society is a resource consuming organism; that as a society depletes resources, it becomes more complex in an attempt to acquire those resources; and that eventually that attempt fails. Comparing that line of thinking with Morris's ideas on our society's future leads to interesting, but gloomy, conclusions. 04/30/2011 .. vim:ft=rst:fo+=a: