Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
March 5, 2012
I
had my nose in Niall Ferguson's newest book,
Civilization: The West and the Rest, at every possible moment
during my recent trip to Hong Kong and Singapore. It's powerful and very, very
timely, and I strongly recommend it. To help get the word out, I asked Niall
for a short, somewhat personal piece on the thinking behind the book – in
other words, what moved him to write it?
What
you're going to find in the piece below for this week's Outside the Box, as
well as in the book, is an author who is very concerned about our
civilization's prospects – and unafraid to say so. I mean, the last time
I looked, "saving the world" had gone distinctly out of fashion. And then, and
then, we all grow up and get pretty focused and incremental about things: if we
can just address the problem or three right in front of us, we're reasonably
content.
But
leave it to a Harvard history professor to break out of the box and go tilting
at the big picture. And when you think of it, we're all pretty concerned at
this point, however we frame the issues. Everywhere we turn, it seems, we find
the forces of polarization and dissolution gnawing at our social fabric, and
Yeats' fateful line about the center not holding starts to feel uncomfortably
prophetic. Maybe it's about time we all thought bigger and worked harder at
getting along, while we still can.
Niall
turns to a notion put forth by the social scientist Charles Murray, who has
called for a "civic great awakening" – a return to the original values of
the American republic. We could do worse.
I
want to congratulate Niall and Ayaan on their new baby, Thomas Hirsi Ferguson!
May he grow up in a world that is flourishing.
Your
holding out hope for our future analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
By
Niall Ferguson
As
a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward
Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all
historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could
succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by
Gibbon. My most recent book,
Civilization:
The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.
The
good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is in some kind of
gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not rise, fall, and
then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the
seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve after another. The
bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that
quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.
To
see what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In
1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the
Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses,
gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today
tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.
The
notion that civilizations do not decline but collapse inspired the
anthropologist Jared Diamond's 2005 book,
Collapse. But Diamond focused,
fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse.
