One more review on Ferguson, from the NYT this time: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/books/niall-fergusons-empire-traces-wests-decline-review.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
*Gathering at the Wake for Western Dominance* In his 2003 book, “Empire,”<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/books/books-of-the-times-a-mighty-global-power-and-its-heir-apparent.html?scp=2&sq=niall+ferguson+empire+kakutani&st=nyt> which was published here in the immediate wake of the United States-led invasion of Iraq, the popular British historian Niall Ferguson argued that the United States was “an empire in denial” and was “capable of playing an imperial role” in the world today, much the way Britain once did, in the 19th century. Only eight years later Mr. Ferguson has written a tendentious new book, “Civilization,” which asserts, with similar certainty, that we are now living through “the end of 500 years of Western predominance,” that while China is on the rise, the question is not whether East and West will clash, but whether “the weaker” — that is, the United States and Europe — “will tip over from weakness to outright collapse.” The financial crisis “that began in the summer of 2007,” Mr. Ferguson argues, should “be understood as an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline,” coming on top of already serious debt problems. “From 2001, in the space of just 10 years,” he goes on, “the U.S. federal debt in public hands doubled as a share of G.D.P. from 32 percent to a projected 66 percent in 2011”; when “unfunded liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems,” growing state deficits and public employees’ pension funds are added on to projections, he contends, “the fiscal position of the United States in 2009 was worse than that of Greece,” which is now teetering on the edge of default and desperate for a bailout from the European Union. As usual, Mr. Ferguson, who teaches in Harvard’s history department and business school, uses his powerful narrative talents in these pages to give the reader a highly tactile sense of history. But his book as a whole has a hurried, haphazard feel to it that underscores its genesis as a companion volume to a British television series called “Civilization: Is the West History?”<http://www.channel4.com/programmes/civilization-is-the-west-history> Not only do the book’s more cogent arguments owe a decided debt to ones made by the New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman and the CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria, but its more original hypotheses also tend to devolve into questionable generalizations (“Europeans today are the idlers of the world”), contradictory assertions and silly Power Point schemas that strain painfully to be relevant and hip. Indeed, the central thesis of “Civilization” is that six “killer apps” (along with “the fortuitous weakness of the West’s rivals”) enabled the West “to dominate the world for the better part of 500 years.” Those “apps” were competition, science, property rights, medicine, “the consumer society” (“without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable”) and “the work ethic” (which Mr. Ferguson, drawing upon Max Weber, associates with Protestant Christianity). Much as Mr. Zakaria did in “The Post-American World” (2008), Mr. Ferguson notes that in recent decades much of the rest of the world has become increasingly adept at downloading such Western concepts. Japan, Mr. Ferguson writes, began “copying everything, from Western clothes and hairstyles to the European practice of colonizing foreign peoples,” and in the 1950s “a growing band of East Asian countries followed Japan in mimicking the West’s industrial model, beginning with textiles and steel and moving up the value chain from there.” China, of course, has not only become a vigorous market society, with the world’s largest population, but also an economic behemoth, holding more than $1 trillion in United States debt. “In demographic terms,” Mr. Ferguson says, “the population of Western societies has long represented a minority of the world’s inhabitants, but today it is clearly a dwindling one. Once so dominant, the economies of the United States and Europe are now facing the real prospect of being overtaken by China within 20 or even 10 years, with Brazil and India not so very far behind. Western ‘hard power’ seems to be struggling in the Greater Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, just as the ‘Washington Consensus’ on free-market economic policy disintegrates.” Mr. Ferguson’s decision to structure this volume around his six “killer apps” — a decision based, no doubt, on the six-part structure of the British Channel 4 series — results in a book that, oddly, is schematic and disorganized at the same time: An extended discussion of the French Revolution appears in the chapter titled “Medicine,” as does a discursive talk about imperialism that draws heavily on the author’s earlier writings. As in his previous books, Mr. Ferguson does little to mute his own strong ideological views: He denounces Marx as “an odious individual”; disdains what he calls “a lumpenproletariat with vices” like drinking gin and engaging in street fights; and emphasizes what he sees as the positive aspects of colonialism. What keeps the reader pushing on through “Civilization” is the author’s knack for making long-ago events as vivid and visceral as the evening news, for weaving anecdotes and small telling details together with a wide-angled retrospective vision. For instance, Mr. Ferguson provides a concise and fascinating analysis of why the colonial origins of the United States and Latin America led to such different outcomes. In summary, he argues, “North America was better off than South America purely and simply because the British model of widely distributed private property rights and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism.” In another chapter he discusses how the Singer sewing machine (which “completed the process of mechanizing clothes production”) helped promote the standardization of dress around the world, even as it helped increase American manufacturing productivity. More important, Mr. Ferguson artfully uses his knowledge of economic history — his book “The Ascent of Money,”<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/books/02kaku.html?scp=2&sq=ascent%20of%20money%20niall%20ferguson%20kakutani&st=cse> which went to press in May 2008, shrewdly anticipated many aspects of the 2008 fiscal meltdown — to analyze the bleak financial circumstances the West now finds itself in. “Even in the late 1990s the West was still clearly the dominant civilization of the world,” he writes. “The five leading Western powers — the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Canada — accounted for 44 percent of total global manufacturing between them.” The scientific world was dominated by Western universities; the Soviet Union had collapsed; a democratic wave was sweeping the world; and some scholars were declaring the triumph of liberal capitalism and dubbing the United States a “hegemon.” The financial disasters of 2008 and its continuing fallout; political partisanship and gridlock in the face of daunting problems; divisions within the United States and within the European Union; the overextension of American military forces in the wake of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the rise of China: Is the West headed toward a fall like ancient Rome’s? “Such fears appear not altogether fanciful,” Mr. Ferguson dourly observes, pointing out the role that fiscal crises, wars and political factionalism have played in the toppling of other dominant powers. Even more alarmingly, he suggests that the collapses of great civilizations tend to come quickly. Rome, he writes, imploded “within the span of a single generation”; “the dramatic transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy” in Ming-era China “took little more than a decade”; and the Soviet Union “fell off a cliff — rather than gently declining.” Civilizations, he concludes, “are highly complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, so that their construction more closely resembles a Namibian termite mound than an Egyptian pyramid.” “Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time,” he goes on, “apparently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they ‘go critical.’ A slight perturbation can set off a ‘phase transition’ from a benign equilibrium to a crisis — a single grain of sand causes an apparently stable sandcastle to fall in on itself.” MORE IN BOOKS (1 OF 45 ARTICLES) Books of The Times: Vonnegut in All His Complexity<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/books/charles-j-shieldss-and-so-it-goes-on-vonnegut-review.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbooks%2Findex.jsonp> Read More »<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/books/charles-j-shieldss-and-so-it-goes-on-vonnegut-review.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbooks%2Findex.jsonp> Close
