Civilization, The West and the Rest

Citation

Richardson, J. (2013), "Civilization, The West and the Rest", Foresight, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 334-335. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs-08-2012-0062

This remarkable volume has been reviewed elsewhere, but it deserves a word of special appreciation for the benefit of foresight's readers. Futurists will find in its pages a thorough scanning of a half‐millennium of recent world history, all of it oriented towards how the future was made to develop in favor of what today we call The West. This is retrostrategy par excellence.

The formulating initiatives (or “killer applications downloaded” as Ferguson terms them) culminating in contemporary Western civilization number six. They constitute the world of today, a hypercomplex, fast‐changing and highly adaptive system. The six drives to achievement are:

1. 1.

   Competition. Economic as well as political, this has been the decentralization responsible for the emergence of nation‐states and capitalism.

2. 2.

   The sciences (other than medicine). The study, understanding and even changing substance of nature and what these have provided for humanity. The sciences have also supplied to the West military supremacy over the “Rest”.

3. 3.

   Property rights/rule of law. Protecting private ownership and resolving disputes among proprietors have made possible stable, representative government in most of the West.

4. 4.

   Medicine. Research and technology have allowed improved health‐ care and life expectancy in Western society and its (now former) colonies, with due regard for ethical considerations.

5. 5.

   Consumerism. The production and distribution of clothing and all other goods are today a central mode of economics. Without the advent of a consumer society, the industrial revolution would not have survived.

6. 6.

   Ethics of work. Emerging mainly from Protestant Christianity, this endeavor (with its division of labor) proved itself the dynamic to regulate a possibly unstable society generated by the five previously listed “ apps“.

1 What happened before

Until the 1400s of our era, the west was a“backwater”, learning much from the cultural progress of the Chinese and the (Islamic) Ottoman regions. These hegemonies – strong in mechanics, mathematics, navigation, astronomy and some medicine – ended with the last Asian voyage of exploration by Chinese admiral Zheng He and the first investigative travels of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama. Both took place in the fifteenth century, preliminary to the Renaissance and Reformation in the west.

This evolution lasted well into the twentieth century; the east stagnated while the west advanced on the scale of human development. The rivalries inherent in the bellicose west, impregnated during earlier centuries within its very social fabric, gave way to a search for better body coverings, tools and means of communicating and teaching, together with a yen for improved barter that formalized itself as commerce.

The Rest succumbed to a cultural stasis in which philosophy/religion played a guiding role. Progressively the Chinese wanted little or none of the west's innovative “things”, while the Muslim world was repelled by the west's aggressive expansion and missionary proselytizing. Gradually, from late in the eighteenth century, east began to emulate west by the adoption of the tenets and mechanisms of Ferguson's six killer applications or guiding themes.

The author's readers may not agree fully with this rich, six‐part scenario, yet futurists should find it fascinating to follow his reasoning and his almost encyclopedic justification of each of the half‐dozen highly functional motivations advanced by the British historian with detailed examples. The book is, indeed, the archetype of Ferguson's holistic reasoning.

2 What might come after

What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of western dominance. This time the eastern challenge is for real, both economically and geopolitically. It is too early for the Chinese to proclaim “We are the masters now”. But they are clearly no longer the apprentices (p. 322).

The author of Civilization ends his opus with a glance into the future via the changing empires of the twentieth‐twenty‐first centuries, but this is another kind of futurism – foresight whose projections and validity are best left to the judgment of individual readers. They merit the reading.