Harvard historian Niall Ferguson uses notably contemporary lingo to describe the reasons he’s identified for the West’s cultural dominance over the past five centuries. In the book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Ferguson ascribes Western predominance to a set of a six “killer apps“: competition, the Scientific Revolution, rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic.
Ferguson harbors no illusions that the West’s advantages are permanent, and he ends his book with a warning note:
[T]his Western package still seems to offer human societies the best available set of economic, social and political institutions — the ones most likely to unleash the individual human creativity capable of solving the problems the twenty-first century world faces. Over the past half-millennium no civilization 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 or not we are still able to recognize the superiority of that package. What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at its centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation. The civilization of China was once built on the teachings of Confucius. The civilization of Islam — of the cult of submission — is still built on the Koran. But what are the foundational texts of Western civilization, that can bolster our belief in the almost boundless power of the free individual human being? And how good are we at teaching them, given our educational theorists’ aversion to formal knowledge and rote-learning? Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islan or CO2 emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.
