NONZERO  THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY  By  ROBERT WRIGHT
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PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

THE INSCRUTABLE ORIENT

(Part II)

 

NEW, IMPROVED BARBARIANS

In this case the barbarians were the world-famous Mongols, as in Genghis Khan. As is often the case, the barbarian assault was a tribute to the victim. It was on the strength of Chinese memes that the barbarians encroached on China, conquering the whole nation in the late thirteenth century. The Mongols combined their expert horsemanship with Chinese iron technology and Chinese principles of administration and siege warfare.

The conquest, though disruptive, wasn't fatal. The Mongols, like so many barbarians, preferred inheriting an empire to destroying one. Indeed, once the initial chaos subsided, Mongol rule was in some ways a shot in the arm. The conquest brought political unity to China. In the now-expanded body of low-friction exchange-with a single currency, and a newly extended main artery, the Grand Canal-commerce flourished.

It even flourished beyond China's borders. The Mongols had pushed their western frontier all the way to the Caspian Sea by the time of Genghis Khan's death in 1227, and they later extended it into Turkey and eastern Europe. In the process they knocked off the Abbasid caliphate, the second of the great Islamic dynasties. The expansion was epically bloody. But, like the Muslims before them, the Mongols realized that, once the pillaging is over and you've got an empire to run, peace is a wonderful thing. They kept trade routes safe, and in return for thus lowering the communication and trust barriers, they exacted what has been compared to the modern value-added tax, at around 5 percent.

This was a bargain. Compared to the series of power brokers through which Jewish and Muslim caravans previously passed, the Mongol thoroughfare offered "less risk and lower protective rent," according to the social scientist Janet Abu-Lughod. By the end of the thirteenth century, with the Mongols having brought China into direct contact with Europe, there existed a "world system that ... had made prosperity pandemic."

The Mongol Empire's transcontinental highway, paired with seagoing trade routes to the south, thus carried Eurasia's invisible brain, and its invisible hand, to new evolutionary heights. They were still primitive organs by modern standards; goods and ideas traveled between east and west without east and west having a clear idea of each other. A global village it wasn't. Still, mutual awareness was now higher than in ancient times, when the Chinese thought cotton coming from the west was fleece from "water sheep," and Romans thought their imported silk grew on silk trees. In the mid-fourteenth century, a papal envoy to China even managed to convince some Europeans that Asia did not, in fact, contain whole nations of monsters (although, he conceded, "there may be an individual monster here and there").

Alas, at around this time, economic decline beset both China and Europe. By Abu-Lughod's reckoning, this is no coincidence, but rather a sign of interdependence. Mutual loss, after all, is the seamy underside of that bright promise of non-zero-sumness, mutual gain; stagnation, like prosperity, can become pandemic.

The fourteenth-century downturn was accentuated by what may have been a more literal Eurasian pandemic. William McNeill has suggested that the bubonic plague began in the interior of China and moved over Mongol trade routes to the Black Sea and then finally, via Mediterranean shipping, spread across Europe. Whether or not the black death did move transcontinentally, it certainly could have, and there lies its value as a metaphor that captures a basic trend of history. As economic and social integration grow in depth and scope, the welfare-the health-of ever more distant peoples becomes correlated. The web of non-zero-sumness expands.

To be sure, many scholars would question Abu-Lughod's claim that the economic fates of Europeans and Chinese had by the fourteenth century grown tightly interwoven. Still, with the web of non-zero-sumness growing larger and thicker, linkage this firm was bound to arrive sooner or later. Even if the eastern and western downturns of the 1300s weren't related, the eastern and western downturns during the great twentieth-century depression were.

This is one irony of globalization. The impetus behind it is strong largely because individual states see that their long-term interest lies in plugging into the system. But when the system hits a downturn, they would be better off if somehow they could magically become less plugged in--temporarily, at least. Modern China survived the early ravages of the 1997 Asian financial crisis in good shape partly because its currency was not easily converted into other currencies. Even so, China stuck to its plans for convertibility, because in the long run you’re better off plugged in.

China, of all nations, should know. Its epic mistake-the mistake that got it labeled an underachiever-was unplugging from the system beginning in the late fourteenth century. The consequences of this, a single political decision, have ever since been taken as final proof of some deep anti-modern streak in the Asian character.

CHINA CHICKENS OUT

The unplugging came during the Ming dynasty, which reigned from 1368 to 1644. When the Ming vanquished the Mongols, it was in theory a glorious moment for China: renewed native control after a century of barbarian rule. But since these particular barbarians had been a gateway to global commerce, the truth was more complicated. The Mongols still controlled trade routes in central Asia, but were now less enthusiastic about using them to channel commerce toward China. Besides, the Ming rulers weren't big on free trade. Ever fearful of incursion, they constricted overland commerce in iron, arms, even textiles, lest these things empower barbarian neighbors yet again. As if to provide future historians with a nice symbol for a siege mentality, Ming emperors built the Great Wall of China.

The lack of overland trade needn't, by itself, have been devastating. There was always the sea. But Ming rulers proved touchy about contact not just with barbarians, but with aliens of a manifestly refined variety. Foreign perfume, among other things, was banned at the end of the fourteenth century, and in various other ways, at various times, the Ming made seagoing trade tough.

The irony of this isolationism is that during the early Ming period the Chinese were king of the sea. In 1405 the emperor dispatched a fleet Of 317 vessels-nearly twice the size the Spanish Armada would reach-to explore trade routes along southern Eurasia. The voyage (manned, one historian notes, by "a can-do group of eunuchs") was the first of seven expeditions, which over the next three decades would reach India, Africa, and the Persian Gulf The odysseys were chronicled in books whose titles suggest that the Chinese were feeling their oats: Marvels Discovered by the Boat Bound for the Galaxy, for example, and Treatise on the Barbarian Kingdoms of the Western Oceans. Yet in 1433, the Ming retreated from big-time sailing, eventually banning the construction of large ships.

The reasons for China's withdrawal are much debated. An anti-eunuch faction of bureaucrats played a role, but most observers agree that something larger was at work, too. The historian John King Fairbank concluded simply that "anti-commercialism and xenophobia won, and China retired from the world scene." Others discern a more rational motive. The historian Peter Perdue sees China consciously shifting resources from one vast project-ocean voyages that had shown little profit-to another vast project: building the Great Wall to keep barbarians at bay. In this view, the move was neither mindlessly xenophobic (centuries of barbarian rampages were no figment of China's imagination) nor anti-modern (the Great Wall was high-tech back then).

Whatever the cause for China's withdrawal, the timing was bad. For centuries, China had been a big exporter of good ideas, and western Europe a big importer. Now, just as Europe's social brain was really humming, China opted out of the exchange.

The timing was bad in a second sense, too. Over the next half century, European nations would embrace sailing big-time, and find the New World. Some scholars believe this stroke of fortune explains why the industrial revolution happened where it did. Europe stumbled onto a trove of precious metals and vast farmlands and hacienda-ready farmers, all just waiting for exploitation. The ensuing enrichment helped finance a burst of technological progress that pushed Europe into the lead during a crucial phase of technological evolution. To believe otherwise-in particular, to think the industrial revolution reflected some intrinsic European brilliance that has only since penetrated the dimmer parts of the world-is to exhibit "a serious malady of the mind" also known as Eurocentricism, writes the geographer J. M. Blaut, a leading proponent of this theory. If Blaut is right, then the rise of the west to world dominance during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is essentially the result of a lucky break-geographic proximity to an untapped hemisphere.

To back up his claim, Blaut argues that, as of 1491, Europe was not ahead of the rest of the world in any obvious, across-the-board way. Indeed, the world was already awash in incipient capitalism, or "protocapitalism." Cities "strongly oriented to manufacturing and trade" stretched "around all of the coasts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia."

This is indeed evidence that, had Europe not led the world into industrialization, someone else would have--even supposedly solipsistic pre-modern China, given enough time. Still, that's a long way from saying that Europe's only leg up in the world was a few big ships and a straight shot to the West Indies. There is one other asset Europe had that neither China nor any other empire had: the absence of empire.

Large, unified polities are two-edged swords. On the one hand, they offer big, low-friction zones for trade--an especially valuable thing in ancient times, when marauders often lurked beyond state bounds. But this day-to-day benefit coexists with a long-run liability: imperial governments have often resisted changes that are key to continuing viability amid technological flux. We've already seen this logic at work in medieval Europe, where feudal fragmentation, for all its day-to-day downsides, had the upside of encouraging experimentation with economic and political algorithms.

At the end of the Middle Ages, as monolithic China turned inward, Europe was crystallizing into a land of nation-states, and so its contentious dynamism persisted. By their nature, Europeans were just as capable of formulating self-defeating policies as Ming emperors were. It's just that, in a more immediately competitive environment, someone else was bound to try a better policy, so bad policies came back to haunt you sooner. And once somebody did try a good idea, it could spread to competing polities fast by emulation.

Columbus himself illustrates the point. He sought Portuguese financing, but the king of Portugal turned him down--rather as the Chinese government had decided half a century earlier that long westward voyages weren't worthwhile. But there was one difference: Portugal, unlike China, had lots of neighbors that were a stone's throw away. Columbus went to Spain, got support, and came back from the New World triumphant. Within a few years Portugal was playing the discover-America game, too. The "sail westward" meme, having proved its value, proliferated.

As consequential as this meme was, the more important thing, for this book's purposes, is how memes in general exploited the political landscape of Europe. In this hothouse of interstate competition, technologies of energy, of materials, of information--including algorithms of capitalism and of political governance--were bound to keep sprouting and spreading. For example, patent rights, which helped make initiative worthwhile, were granted in Venice in 1474 and diffused to much of Europe by the middle of the next century.

In this light, Europe's eventual triumph is not just consistent with a directional theory of cultural evolution; the theory virtually predicts such a triumph. After all, the speed of any evolutionary process depends heavily on two factors: how fast potentially fruitful novelties arise, and how fast manifestly fruitful novelties spread. Europe in the fifteenth century, teeming with competitive but mutually communicative polities, scored higher in both categories than any other part of Eurasia. In such a setting the "sail westward" meme--and profitable memes in general--were (a) likely to take root in one polity or another; and (b) having proved their worth, likely to spread.

Can this simple, almost superficial contrast--China's centralized control versus Europe's fragmentation--really explain a difference in economic development that has often been attributed to a deep streak of mystical traditionalism in Asian culture? One way to find out is to look at a part of pre-modern Asia that shared much of China's cultural heritage but lacked its monolithic structure: Japan.

Like China (and via China), Japan was deeply influenced by Buddhism. But unlike Ming China, Japan saw a collapse of centralized rule in the late fifteenth century. The shogun's power seeped out to feudal lords, creating an amorphously competitive environment reminiscent of late medieval Europe. Sure enough, there ensued a familiar pattern: markets flourished, towns expanded (some started commodities exchanges), and the political power of merchants grew. Jesuits who came to Japan in the sixteenth century compared the city of Sakai to Europe's medieval "free cities." Edwin 0. Reischauer has described this period as one of "extraordinary cultural innovation, institutional development, and even economic growth" in spite of an atmosphere of "great political confusion and almost constant warfare." (Or, perhaps, because of the confusion and warfare?) By the late sixteenth century, "the Japanese, who only a few centuries earlier had been a backward people on the edge of the civilized world, had grown to the point where they were able to compete on terms of equality with the Chinese and also with the Europeans…"

All told, if the key to the "European Miracle" lies in geography, it is not so much Europe's and China's relative proximity to America as it is Europe's and China's political geographies. Europe comprised lots of independent laboratories for testing memes, while China possessed political unity--an asset, to be sure, in matters of everyday commerce, but a handicap in any long-run race for technological preeminence.

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD!

A number of scholars have acknowledged that Europe's broken political landscape played a role in its rapid advance. For some of them, such as David Landes, this is among the reasons to doubt that China, left to its own devices, would ever have reached the industrial age.

They are missing a key point. This European advantage--being a neighborhood of competitive laboratories--was an advantage of degree only. All nations have some relatively robust neighbors within some proximity. China had Japan, among others. That's why no government can countenance stagnation forever without facing the consequences. Even the much-maligned Ming dynasty periodically felt the need to flirt anew with international trade (which it had never quite stifled anyway, thanks to the enterprise of Chinese and Japanese smugglers). And, though technological advance slowed to a crawl during much of the Ming and Manchu periods, it didn't stop--and the economy continued to grow.

Not only do all states have some competitors within their neighborhoods; the number of those competitors grows inexorably. The reason is that, as the means of transport and communication advance, the size of a "neighborhood" grows. That is what China and Japan had begun to learn by the sixteenth century, but were taught with special force during the nineteenth century, when Westerners in gunships showed up and demanded access to Asian markets: Europe and Asia were now in the same neighborhood.

Such jarring encounters can incite a nativist reaction. At the turn of the twentieth century, China's Boxer Rebellion provided a fine metaphor for the illusions that nourish such reactions; it was inspired by a cult whose rituals were thought to render members impervious to western bullets. This thesis was abandoned in the face of painful evidence, as was the larger thesis of imperviousness to western influence. Witness China--and the rest of Asia--today.

Of course, in the view of Landes and other champions of Europe's greatness, to do what China is doing today—cloning western technologies and economic principles--is cheating. The question, as they want to pose it, is whether China would have industrialized on its own--no outside help allowed.

It would be tempting to answer yes if the question didn't hover so close to meaninglessness. Could France have industrialized "on its own"--without using steam engines made in Britain? Could Britain have developed the steam engines had not a Frenchman earlier shown that steam could move a piston? Could either France or Britain have reached the verge of steam power without first absorbing capitalist

algorithms from Italy, which in turn seems to have gotten some of them from Islamic civilization? The answer to these questions isn't no; it's yes, but--but it would have taken them longer to reach these milestones, because they would have been laboring under the handicap that afflicted China.

The point is Just that western economic historians have stacked the deck. They habitually compare progress in China to that in Europe, although China is just one polity and Europe is a synergistic cauldron of them. If China is going to be pitted against Europe in the game of hypothetical economic development, shouldn't it at least be allowed to team up with Japan?

Apparently not. Landes speculates that the Japanese, but not the Chinese, would "sooner or later have made their own" industrial revolution, even without European contact. Let's play out this thought experiment. If the Japanese had indeed done so, then China would have adopted Japan's industrial technology-either willingly or under Chinese coercion of one sort or another. Indeed, high-tech Japanese aggression was eventually a spur to Chinese modernization. But in Landes’s calculation, apparently, China doesn't get credit for such derivative development. Then how, in his calculation, does Japan get credit for being in a position to industrialize in the first place? It got there largely with technology from China, after all--beginning with writing.

For that matter, how does Europe get credit for being in a position to industrialize in the first place? In the early seventeenth century, amid the faint stirrings of the industrial revolution, Francis Bacon singled out three technologies that had "changed the appearance and state of the whole world": printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. We now know that all three were first invented in China, and it may be that all three diffused to Europe. (And paper became affordable in Europe thanks to waterwheel paper mills, which seem to have been an Islamic contribution, first appearing in Baghdad.)

Throughout history, cultural evolution has transcended political bounds. Ideas have swished back and forth across continents as the centers of innovation shifted. The question of what individual nations can do "on their own" is more or less pointless--and the fact that economic historians often ask it of Asian nations, but rarely of European ones, doesn't do much to shore up its utility.

Once you view China and Japan as part of a larger east Asian brain, some noted examples of China's forgetfulness during the listless Ming period lose their force. It's true, for example, that China's encyclopedic Exploitation of the Works of Nature, written in 1637, was destroyed (perhaps because of the author's political views). But by then there were Japanese editions, which survived. Once again, the world makes backup copies.

ZEN AND THE ART OF COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION

A Chinese magnum opus on how to "exploit" nature is rather at odds with the stereotype that past Asian cultures, unlike past western ones, abided in harmony with their habitats. According to this view, as summarized by one proponent, the western belief that nature exists "to be manipulated and enjoyed" insofar as technology permits is "exceptional in human history, and is mainly derived from the anthropocentric philosophies of Judeo-Christian religions." Tell that to the Chinese who during the T'ang dynasty of the early Middle Ages wiped out the forests of North China to create some lebensraum.

The idea that Westerners exploit nature while easterners commune with it is akin to a larger fallacy that has long haunted the study of economic history: religious determinism. In the standard version, western religion--whether the "Judeo-Christian ethic" or the narrower "Protestant work ethic"--explains why full-blown capitalism and industrialization first appeared in the west. While Christians are putting in a good day's work, Buddhists sit under trees.

It's true that Buddhist doctrine, as laid out by the Buddha, doesn't sound like fuel for material acquisition. Then again, the teachings of Jesus Christ aren't a capitalist manifesto, either. But religious doctrines evolve. China's first pawn shops were run by Buddhist monks. In seventeenth-century Japan, a Buddhist monk advised that "All occupations are Buddhist practice; through work we are able to attain Buddhahood"--an utterance that has rightly drawn comparison with the Protestant work ethic. Meanwhile, over in the cities of Mughal India, purportedly otherworldly Hindus were, as the historian Paul Kennedy has put it, "excellent examples of Weber's Protestant ethic."

Confucianism, unlike Buddhism, treated the profit motive with suspicion well into the Middle Ages. Then again, as Kennedy has noted, in that regard it is reminiscent of the pope's condemnations of usury during the Middle Ages. But this papal doctrine adapted to commercial exigencies, and so would Confucianism. In the thirteenth century, when Eurasia was spanned by a commercial web of unprecedented density, commerce was abetted by Confucians and for that matter by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians--a transcontinental patchwork of spiritual traditions, all with one thing in common: their adherents were human beings, and thus liked mutually profitable exchange. Economic ecumenicalism.

Religions don't always adjust to the dictates of economic growth. In the short run, their attitudes toward technology--including, sometimes, a professed abhorrence of it--can matter greatly. But in the long run--over centuries, not decades--religions either make their peace with encroaching economic and technological reality or fade into obscurity. The Old Order Amish are admirable in their principled refusal to adopt modern technology, but they are not the wave of the future.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN ISLAM ...

By the eve of the industrial revolution, prospects that the Islamic states of western and southern Asia might host it were dim. The Ottoman Empire had flourished for a time--not just on the strength of conquest, but also by restoring security to international trade routes and charging for the service. But the regime grew oppressive. The printing press was banned lest dissidence arise, and justice was warped by bribery. In short: the empire not only failed to lower the two great barriers to non-zero-sum interaction--the communications barrier and the trust barrier--but actually raised them. Some Ottoman rulers compounded matters by resisting cultural input from the west, and by the time this policy was clearly reversed, in the nineteenth century, it was too late.

Mughal India, born in the early sixteenth century, showed promise for a time, with robust commerce and an advanced banking system. And one of its earliest rulers, Akbar, faced with the prospect of governing lots of Hindus, announced that respect for all religions was now the will of Allah. But the later empire saw institutionalized discrimination, the razing of Hindu temples, and a self-indulgent ruling class. When a local prince yawned, according to one contemporary observer, "all present must snap their fingers to discourage flies."

Both of these Islamic states, having failed to nourish economic and technological growth, paid the price. The Mughal empire expired in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman in the twentieth. Why did they fail to thrive? Theories abound, but, obviously, we see some familiar culprits: parasitic governance and an oppression that left much non-zero-sumness untapped. India, with its caste system, is a famously vivid example.

Maybe, then, the world should be thankful that neither of these empires survived to become a much-emulated model. When regimes that ban printing presses and mandate bias are given the thumbs down, we can only compliment history on its Judgment.

At the same time, it's worth noting that these civilizations gave much to the world's river of memes. We've already noted a few of Islam's great gifts; and both Turkey and India, well before Islamic governance, made their own bequests. Around four millennia ago, Turkey--Anatolia, back then--seems to have given Eurasia the idea of smelting iron, the substance that would finally give form to the industrial revolution. And India has been the epicenter of great innovation in two ethereal realms: spiritual and mathematical thought.

In the spiritual realm, India gave us Buddhism, the first major religion to stress tolerance and nonviolence, the only major religion to spread far and wide without conquest, and arguably the major religion whose founding doctrines (unembellished by later additions) most readily survive the modifying force of modern science. In mathematics, India gave Europe, among other things, the concept of zero and the decimal number system, including the numerals that are misleadingly called "Arabic." (If you don't think they were a big advance, try doing some multiplication using Roman numerals.)

India in the late twentieth century began to reclaim its mathematical legacy, not just with deep contributions to theory, but in such practical matters as software design. This is a reminder--as are the "Japanese miracle" and later economic leaps in Asia--that leadership in cultural evolution is fleeting. All large expanses of Eurasia have had their days in the front of the pack, and their days closer to the rear. The story isn't over yet.

If we relax our focus--ask not which of the Eurasian cultures is leading the pack, but whether the front of the pack is advancing, whether the cutting edge of Eurasian culture, and thus of social complexity, is moving forward--the answer is that there have been few if any times since the initial closing of the "Eurasian ecumene" in the first century A.D. when the answer wasn't yes. The peoples and states come and go, rise and fall, but the memes keep flowing upward.

There are phases in cultural evolution that are by their nature big leaps; a technology, or a constellation of them, proves so explosive that its lucky hosts suddenly seem light-years ahead of other cultures. Those laggard cultures, indeed, look so pathetic that it is tempting to ask whether there isn't some qualitative difference at work, some special something that rendered the "leading" culture, and it alone, capable of crossing the technological threshold.

Surely such flattering interpretations accompanied encounters ten millennia ago between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies, or, five millennia ago, between literate, state-level societies and illiterate chiefdoms. In those cases we have hard evidence that the interpretation is wrong, the thesis of exceptionalism a self-indulgent illusion: we now know that both farming (and chiefdoms) and writing (and state-level societies) appeared independently, multiple times.

In the case of the industrial revolution, evidence of this sort is unattainable. A revolution at this technological level occurs in an age when a global brain is taking shape, and news can travel around the planet in months. So any subsequent episodes of industrialization--such as Japan's less than a century after Europe's--are necessarily derivative. Thus the thesis of European exceptionalism can never be conclusively disproved. Still, it is hard to take that thesis seriously if you are aware of the tens of millennia of cultural evolution that led to the industrial revolution; aware of the diffuse power evinced by that evolution at every turn; aware that what creates great technological change isn't so much great cultures as the greatness of culture itself.

One key to culture's greatness is its indifference to local politics. China during the Ming period fails to fulfill the promise of the Sung--but that's okay: there's always Japan; there's also England, France, Italy, India, Egypt, and so on. All these societies had their ups and downs--because of the vagaries of history, the luck of the geographic draw, the greatness or abjectness of political leaders. But through it all, probability overwhelmingly favored progress. If stagnation or regression beset one place, there were always other places.

Isaiah Berlin once wrote a book called Historical Inevitability that was devoted to debunking virtually all grand theories of history, certainly including directional theories. Among its errors was imputing to such theories a strict determinism--a belief that every detail of the future could in principle be predicted, that every detail of the present exists by necessity. To read his book, you would think that all who see pattern in history believe, as he put it, that "everything that we do and suffer is part of a fixed pattern."

The truth is more nearly the opposite. The key to the pattern of history isn't the fixedness of everything that people do. The key is the pattern's long-run imperviousness to the lack of fixedness. A Ming ruler, perhaps out of sheer caprice, rescinds China's oceanic voyages, and the most sophisticated nation on earth turns inward--yet the big picture remains unchanged: globalization and the information age, with all their political import, are in the cards.

An excerpt from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. Other excerpts are available at www.nonzero.org.