Global Power - On Top of the World, Oct 7th 2010 P99 N2P38 東西文明拮抗 の歴史
(前略)
Mr Morris begins his story more than 50,000 years ago, but it only really gets going with the beginning of agriculture and the birth of large-scale oragnised societies after the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago. He shows how successive civilisations radiated outward from two geographically distinct cores - the ゛hilly flanks゛ of western Eurasia and the area between the Yangzi and Yellow rivers in modern China - because of their relative abundance of domesticated plants and animals. Development started in the West about 2,000 years before similar advances got going in the East. Its lead shrunk from about 1,000 BC on, after which East and West were roughly level until the slow collapse of the Roman empire, which represented a peak of Western social development not matched until the start of the early modern era in the 17th century.
What Mr Morris shows is that over a period of 10.000 years one civilisation after another hit a ゛hard ceiling゛ of social development before falling apart, unable to control the forces its success had unleashed. For every two or three steps forward, there was at least one step back. During those period of advance the West tended to pull ahead of the East, and during the steps back the gap narrowed again. On this went in a series of waves, each, Mr Morris says, cresting higher than the last, but with the West's lead apparently locked in. That process continued until the middle of the sixth century AD when the East suddenly, and for the first time, spurted ahead as Europe entered the so-called Dark Ages and the Sui dynasty united China, laying the foundation for the East to hold the lead for the next 1,000 years.
Although the West eventually caught up, thanks in part because it began making ships that could sail to America (the Atlantic is much smaller than the Pacific) and because its constant wars helped develop military technology, even by the mid-18th century there was not much difference between East and West. As Mr Morris observes：゛...although the hard ceiling had been pushed up a little, it remained as hard as ever゛. The West may have caught up, but according to a new breed of political economists, such as Thomas Malthus, iron laws governing humanity, in particular the one that held that people always converted the extra wealth earned from rising productivity into more babies to consume it, would prevent either the West's or the East's social development score rising farther. Malthus, however, had not reached on the transformative power of steam to smash through the West's hard ceiling.
Towards the end of his book, Mr Morris attempts to answer the question posed in the title. The West may still rule, but for how much longer? His conclusion is that althotgh power, influence and commercial dynamism are shifting eastward at a relentless pace, the question itself may be wrong. If Eastern and Western social development scores continue rising at their current rates, Western ゛rule゛ will end early in the next century. But the rise in the index over the next 100 years, propelled by quantum leaps in computing power and bioscience, is so exponential that humankind itself will be profoundly changed, making distinction between East and West seem weirdly anachronistic.
