Why the West Rules--For Now (54 page)

The lines in
Figure 6.9
march up, while those for social development in
Figure 6.1
fall steadily down. The obvious question—is there a connection?—already recommended itself to Edward Gibbon back in 1781. “
We may hear
without surprise or scandal,” he observed, “that the introduction … of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire”—but the influence, Gibbon held, was not of the kind that Christians themselves liked to believe. Rather, he suggested, Christianity sapped the empire’s vigor:

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitude of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

Figure 6.9. Counting souls: the growth of Christianity and Chinese Buddhism, assuming constant rates of change. The vertical scale is logarithmic, as in
Figures 3.6
and
3.7
, so the constant average rates of growth (3.4 percent per annum for Christianity, 2.3 percent for Buddhism) produce straight lines.

Patience and pusillanimity were as much Buddhist virtues as Christian; so might we extend Gibbon’s argument and conclude that ideas—the triumph of priestcraft over politics, revelation over reason—ended the classical world, driving down social development century after century and also narrowing the gap between East and West?

The question cannot be shrugged off lightly, but I think the answer is no. Like first-wave Axial thought, the second-wave Axial religions were more the consequence than the cause of changes in social development. Judaism, Greek philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Jainism all emerged between 600 and 300
BCE
, when social development pushed past the level (roughly twenty-four points) at which the Western core had collapsed around 1200
BCE
. They were responses to high-end states’ reorganization and disenchantment of the world. Second-wave Axial religion was a mirror image of this: as the Old World Exchange destabilized high-end states, people found first-wave thought wanting and salvation religions filled the gap.

Unless the averaged-out growth rates in
Figure 6.9
are wildly off the mark, Christianity and Chinese Buddhism were marginal before the Old World Exchange. By 250, though, there were about a million Christians (roughly one Roman in forty), which was apparently some kind of tipping point. Christianity now started seriously annoying the emperors; not only was it competing for revenues in one of Rome’s darkest hours, but its jealous God also ruled out the god-when-I’m-dead compromise that had helped rulers justify their power for so long. The emperor Decius began major persecutions in 250, just before the Goths killed him. In 257 Valerian started another pogrom, only for the Persians to kill him, too.

Despite these discouraging examples and the obvious fact that using force to intimidate people whose highest goal was to die as horribly as Jesus was bound to be a losing proposition, emperors tried on and off for another fifty years to wipe Christianity out. But with congregations growing on average by 3.4 percent each year, the miracle of compound interest took church membership to around 10 million members, a quarter of the empire’s population, in the 310s. That was apparently a second tipping point: in 312, in the middle of a civil war, the emperor Constantine found God. Instead of trying to squelch Christianity, Constantine worked out a new compromise, just as his predecessors half a millennium earlier had worked out compromises with the equally subversive first-wave Axial thought. Constantine transferred massive wealth to the church, made it tax-exempt, and recognized its hierarchy. In return the church recognized Constantine.

Over the next eighty years the rest of the population turned Christian, aristocrats colonized the church’s leadership, and the church and state between them plundered the empire’s pagan temples—perhaps the biggest redistribution of wealth the world had yet seen. Christianity was an idea whose time had come. The king of Armenia turned Christian in the 310s, as did Ethiopia’s ruler in the 340s. Persia’s kings did not, but that was probably because Iranian Zoroastrianism was evolving along similar lines to Christianity anyway.

Chinese Buddhism seems to have passed through rather similar tipping points. In
Figure 6.9
it hits the million-member mark around 400, but because conditions were so very different in northern and southern China, the growth of the faith had different consequences in each region. In the unsettled north, Buddhists tended to cluster for
safety in the capital cities, which made them very vulnerable to royal pressure. By 400 Northern Wei, the strongest of the kingdoms, had set up a government department to supervise Buddhists, and in 446 it started persecuting them. In southern China, by contrast, instead of concentrating in the capital at Jiankang, Buddhist monks scattered down the Yangzi Valley, where they could get powerful aristocrats to protect them against the court and could force emperors to make concessions. In 402 an emperor even accepted that monks should not have to bow in his presence.

Figure 6.9
suggests that there may have been 10 million Buddhists in China by 500, and when the new faith reached this second tipping point, rulers (in northern China as well as southern) made the same decision as Constantine and lavished wealth, tax exemptions, and honors on the flock’s leaders. In the south the genuinely pious emperor Wudi supported vast Buddhist festivals, banned animal sacrifice (people had to consume pastry imitations instead), and sent envoys to India to gather sacred texts. In return, the Buddhist hierarchy recognized Wudi as a Bodhisattva, the redeemer and savior of his people. The kings of Northern Wei got an even better deal, asserting the right to pick their own chief monks and then having the monks pronounce that the kings were reincarnations of the Buddha. Constantine would have been jealous.

Patience and pusillanimity did not cause the decline and fall of East or West. The paradox of social development did that. To some extent the declines and falls followed the script written in the West around 1200
BCE
, when the expanding core set off chains of events that no one could control, but to some extent the sheer scale of social development by 160
CE
rewrote the script, transforming geography by linking East and West together across central Asia and creating an Old World Exchange of microbes and migrants.

By 160
CE
the empires of the classical world were much bigger and stronger than the kingdoms of the Western core had been in 1200
BCE
, but so, too, were the disruptions that their primitive version of globalization set off. The classical empires could not cope with the forces they unleashed. Century after century, social development slid. Writing, cities, taxes, and bureaucrats lost their value, and as the old certainties
stopped making sense, a hundred million people sought salvation from a world gone wrong by giving new twists to ancient wisdom. Like first-wave Axial thought, second-wave ideas were dangerous, challenging the authority of husbands over wives, rich over poor, and kings over subjects, but once again the mighty made their peace with the subversive, redistributing power and wealth in the process. By 500
CE
states were weaker and churches stronger, but life went on.

If I had been writing this book around the year 500
CE
I might well have been a long-term lock-in theorist. Every millennium or so, I would have observed, social development undermined itself, and for every two or three steps forward there would be one step back. Disruptions were getting bigger, now affecting the East as well as the West, but the pattern was clear. During steps forward, the West pulled away from the East; during steps back, the gap narrowed; and on it would go, in a series of waves, each cresting higher than the last one, with the West’s lead varying but locked in.

But if I had been writing a century later, things would have looked entirely different.

7

THE EASTERN AGE

THE EAST TAKES THE LEAD

According to
Figure 7.1
, 541 ought to be one of the most famous dates in history. In that year (or somewhere around the middle of the sixth century, anyway, allowing for a certain margin of error in the index) the East’s social development score overtook the West’s, ending a fourteen-thousand-year-old pattern and disproving at a stroke any simple long-term lock-in theory of why the West rules. By 700 the East’s score was one-third higher than the West’s, and by 1100 the gap—nearly 40 percent—was bigger than it had been for two and a half thousand years (when the advantage had lain with the West).

Why did the East pull ahead in the sixth century? And why did its social development score rise so high over the next half-millennium while the West’s steadily fell behind? These questions are crucial to explaining why the West now rules, and as we attempt to answer them in this chapter we will encounter quite a cast of heroes and villains, geniuses and bunglers. Behind all the drama, though, we will find the same simple fact that has driven East-West differences throughout the story: geography.

Figure 7.1. The great reversal: the East turns its decline around and for the first time in history pulls ahead of the West

WAR AND RICE

Eastern social development began falling before 100
CE
and continued until 400, and by the time it bottomed out it stood lower than it had been for five centuries. States had failed, cities had burned, and migrations—from Inner Asia to northern China, and from northern China to southern—had convulsed the whole core. It was out of these migrations, though, that the Eastern revival began.

In
Chapters 4
–6 we saw how rising social development transformed geography, uncovering advantages in backwardness and opening highways across the oceans and steppes. Since the third century, though, it had been shown that the relationship also worked in reverse:
falling
social development transformed geography too. As Roman and Chinese cities shrank, literacy declined, armies weakened, and living standards fell, the cores also contracted geographically, and the differences between these contractions largely explain why Eastern social development recovered so quickly while Western development kept falling into the eighth century.