The Triumph of Catching Up

A friend had asked me to read a book he’d recently finished by Niall Ferguson “Civilization:  The West and the Rest.”  I recognized the name though this may have been because a childhood friend shares the same moniker.  A different friend and I had stumbled on the idea of a book we might coauthor when I was in the Bay Area:  what happens when China is driving the arc of innovation?  I’ve wrestled with this theme before and with this in mind, I decided it was as good a time as any to dig into this work. 

It’s interesting to simply read the work without necessarily placing Mssr. Ferguson in any particular bucket.  It was an easy review-like read thought I appreciated his attempt to try to explain this this reliably fascinating question:  why did the West rise to global dominance?  Ferguson posits six, what he calls “killer apps” that he suggests explain things: competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and work.  Much of the narration of these themes is substantive, and entertaining, though often the conclusions are abrupt and lurching.  In the first example, 'competition', we consider a China that has been at the forefront of scientific innovation throughout most of recorded history that begins to be eclipsed by the west in the sixteenth century.  The explanation is lack of competition.  But this doesn't explain why dynastic China was able to lead innovation for the two millennium that preceded the West’s rise.  And, as the chapter ends, considering if China will once again somehow surpass the West, despite the fact that China is, not unlike it generally was, historically, a single continental edifice.  What then explains its ascendancy now?

Taking on a topic as broadly as he has, it isn’t properly fair for me to dwell too much on China.  This isn’t a China book.  I enjoyed the discourse on the French Empire as distinguished from the British, in the chapter on 'medicine.'  But it ends with the “threat” of China building a new empire in Africa which feels predictable and is left as a menacing meditation, without any substantive consideration.   Knowing the China narrative well, these broad strokes call out annoying and are hard to ignore.  The concluding chapter on 'work', again suggests that China, largely because of it's emphasis on savings, will overwhelm the West.  But the discourse into Christianity in China, suggesting that the faith itself explains the nation's burgeoning productivity, doesn't hold the weight he lays on it.  By his own admission, he's only talking about 1/13 of the population, at most.  There isn’t much consideration for what Chinese civilization itself, might be or evolve into, beyond simply the triumph of catching up and surpassing.  This is secondary to the main point that this will be an indignity for Westerners.  

Later I read a review or two online and what was posted on Wiki.  Come to learn he intended this partly as civilizing text for the youth of England.  Come to learn he is considered a neo liberal thinker who enjoys goading the left but that he has "evolved" from earlier positions with this work.  His ideological taxonomy didn’t matter much to me.  Though I could feel myself being repulsed when he intimated that Protestant faith continued to be a key link to the productivity of places he cherry picked from around the world.  As someone considering how to explain China’s innovative ascendency, I appreciated the ambitious breadth of what he’d done and noted how I enjoyed the bulk of each chapter’s historical narrative and yet how consistently I felt underwhelmed by his powers of conclusion at the end of each ‘killer app’ discourse.   The explanatory potential of the book kept being undermined in these periods of summation and connection.  The “apps” though, are a helpful half dozen to meditate on.