The melancholic West

Illustration: Igor Saktor

IT is worth remembering that Western civilisation has declined and fallen once before. The first version of the West, Western Civilisation 1.0, arose in the so-called Fertile Crescent stretching from the Nile Valley to the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and reached its twin peaks with Athenian democracy and the Roman Empire.

But that version of Western civilisation declined and then fell with dramatic speed in the 5th century AD, undone by barbarian invasions and internal divisions.

In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted.

Is decline and fall the looming fate of Western Civilisation 2.0? In demographic terms, the population of Western societies has long represented a minority of the world's inhabitants, but today it is clearly a dwindling one.

Once so dominant, the economies of the US and Europe face the prospect of being overtaken by China within 20 or even 10 years, with Brazil and India not so far behind.

Western hard power seems to be struggling in the greater Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, just as the Washington Consensus on free-market economic policy disintegrates. The financial crisis that began in 2007 also seems to indicate a fundamental flaw at the heart of the consumer society, with its emphasis on debt-propelled retail therapy.

The Protestant ethic of thrift that once seemed so central to the Western project has all but vanished. Meanwhile, Western elites are beset by almost millenarian fears of a coming environmental apocalypse. What is more, Western civilisation appears to have lost confidence in itself. Beginning with Stanford in 1963, a succession of leading universities have ceased to offer the classic Western Civ history course to their undergraduates. In schools, too, the grand narrative of Western ascent has fallen out of fashion.

Thanks to an educationalists' fad that elevated historical skills above knowledge in the name of new history, combined with the unintended consequences of the curriculum-reform process, too many British schoolchildren leave secondary school knowing only unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King Jr.

A survey of first-year history undergraduates at one leading British university revealed only 34 per cent knew who was the English monarch at the time of the Armada, 31 per cent knew the location of the Boer War, 16 per cent knew who commanded the British forces at Waterloo and only 11 per cent could name a single 19th-century British prime minister.

In a similar poll of English children aged between 11 and 18, 17 per cent thought Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings and 25 per cent put World War I in the wrong century.

Throughout the English-speaking world, moreover, the argument has gained ground that it is other cultures we should study, not our own. The musical sampler sent into outer space with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 featured 27 tracks, only 10 of them from Western composers, including not only Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. A history of the world "in 100 objects", published last year by the director of the British Museum, included no more than 30 products of Western civilisation.

Yet any history of the world's civilisations that underplays the degree of their gradual subordination to the West after 1500 is missing the essential point: the thing most in need of explanation. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the heart of modern history.

It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.

The first time Western civilisation crashed, as Edward Gibbon tells the story, it was a very slow burn. But what if political strife, barbarian migration and imperial rivalry were all just integral features of late antiquity: signs of normality rather than harbingers of distant doom? Through this lens, Rome's fall was in fact quite sudden and dramatic.

What is most striking about this more modern reading of history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome fell by three-quarters. Archeological evidence from the late 5th century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What one historian has called "the end of civilisation" came within the span of a single generation. Could our version of Western civilisation collapse with equal suddenness?

A large majority of scientists subscribe to the view that, especially as China and other big Asian as well as South American countries narrow the economic gap between the West and the rest, humanity is running the risk of catastrophic climate change.

Without question there has been an unprecedented increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. And there is some evidence that this has caused an increase in average temperatures. What is less clear is how a continuation of these trends will affect the earth's weather.

However, it does not seem entirely fanciful to imagine further melting of the polar icecaps leading to changes in the direction of ocean currents or flooding of low-lying coastal regions; or the further desertification of areas hitherto capable of sustaining agriculture.

Quite apart from climate change, some environmentalists also fear that, as Asia's more populous nations follow the Western route out of poverty, the strain on supplies of energy, food and fresh water will become unbearable.

Sceptics about the risks of climate change should spend some time in China, where the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history is causing measurable, indeed unmissable, environmental damage.

Most people who discuss these issues -- myself among them -- are not scientifically qualified to weigh the evidence. What attracts us to the idea of an environmental disaster is not so much the data as the familiarity of the prediction. Since the earliest recorded myths and legends, mankind has been fascinated by the idea of a spectacular end of the world, from the "twilight of the gods" in the Nibelung saga to the key text of Christian eschatology, the Book of Revelation, written by evangelist John of Patmos.

This idea that we are doomed -- that decline and fall are inevitable, that things can only get worse -- is deeply connected with our sense of mortality. Because as individuals we are bound to degenerate, so, we instinctively feel, must the civilisations in which we live. All flesh is grass. In the same way, all vainglorious monuments end up as ruins. The wind blows through the melancholy relics of our former achievements.

But what we struggle to decide is how exactly this process of decline and fall unfolds in the realm of complex social and political structures. Do civilisations collapse with a bang, on the battlefield of Armageddon, or with a long, lingering whimper? The only way to answer that question is to return to the first principles of historical explanation.

What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic: sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration? What if historical time is less like the slow and predictable changing of the seasons and more like the elastic time of our dreams? Above all, what if collapse is not centuries in the making but strikes a civilisation suddenly, like a thief in the night?

Western civilisation in its first incarnation -- the Roman Empire -- did not decline and fall sedately. It collapsed within a generation, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders in the early 5th century.

In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from their lofty Andean cities. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. The Ming dynasty's rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid-17th century. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time, but it served to push French finances into a critical state. The summoning of the Estates General in May 1789 unleashed a political chain reaction and a collapse of royal legitimacy so swift that within four years the king had been decapitated by guillotine, a device invented only in 1791. At the time of the Young Turk movement, which came to power in 1908, the Ottoman Empire still seemed capable of being reformed. By 1922, when the last Ottoman sultan departed Istanbul aboard a British warship, it was gone. Japan's empire reached its maximum territorial extent in 1942, after Pearl Harbor. By 1945 it too was no more.

The sun set on the British Empire with comparable suddenness. In February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill bestrode the world stage as one of the Big Three, deciding the fates of nations with US president Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. No sooner had the war ended than he was swept from office. The Suez crisis in 1956 proved Britain could not act in defiance of the US in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. According to one recent account, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon". But this was not apparent at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA (wrongly) estimated the Soviet economy to be about 60 per cent the size of the US economy. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the US stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favour for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in Central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed in 1991 by the Soviet Union. If ever an empire fell off a cliff rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.

If civilisations are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the implications for Western civilisation today? Can anything be done to save Western civilisation from such a calamity?

First, we should not be too fatalistic. True, the things that once set the West apart from the Rest are no longer monopolised by us. The Chinese have got capitalism. The Iranians have got science. The Russians have got democracy. The Africans are (slowly) getting modern medicine. And the Turks have got the consumer society.

What this means, however, is that Western modes of operation are not in decline but are flourishing nearly everywhere, with only a few remaining pockets of resistance. A growing number of Resterners are sleeping, showering, dressing, working, playing, eating and travelling like Westerners.

Moreover, Western civilisation is more than just one thing; it is a package. It is about political pluralism as well as capitalism; it is about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method; it is about the rule of law and property rights as well as democracy.

Even today, the West has more of these institutional advantages than the Rest. The Chinese do not have political competition. The Iranians do not have freedom of conscience. They get to vote in Russia, but the rule of law there is a sham. In none of these countries is there a free press.

These differences may explain why, for example, all three countries lag behind Western countries in qualitative indices that measure national innovative development and national innovation capacity.

Of course Western civilisation is far from flawless. It has perpetrated its share of historical misdeeds, from the brutalities of imperialism to the banality of the consumer society. Its intense materialism has had all kinds of dubious consequences, not least the discontents Sigmund Freud encouraged us to indulge in. And it has certainly lost that thrifty asceticism that Max Weber found so admirable in the Protestant ethic.

Yet this Western package still seems to offer human societies the best available set of economic, social and political institutions: the ones likeliest to unleash the individual human creativity capable of solving the problems the 21st-century world faces. During the past half millennium, no civilisation has done a better job of finding and educating the geniuses that lurk in the far right-hand tail of the distribution of talent in any human society.

The big question is whether we are still able to recognise the superiority of that package. What makes a civilisation real to its inhabitants is not just the splendid edifices at its centre, or the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilisation is the texts taught in its schools and recollected in times of tribulation. The civilisation of China was once built on the teachings of Confucius. The civilisation of Islam -- of the cult of submission -- is still built on the Koran. But what are the foundational texts of Western civilisation that can bolster our belief in the almost boundless power of the free human being? And how good are we at teaching them, given our educationists' aversion to formal knowledge and rote-learning?

Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions but by our loss of faith in the civilisation we inherited from our ancestors. The biggest threat to Western civilisation is posed not by other civilisations but by our pusillanimity -- and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

Edited extract from Civilisation: The West and the Rest, by Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane, $49.95). British historian Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard, a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.