Book Reviews: ‘Why the West Rules – for Now’, ‘What Every Environmentalist Needs…’, ‘Born to Run’
End of geography
Why the West Rules – for Now. By Ian Morris. Profile Books.
The basic question addressed by Morris is why in recent times the Western part of the globe has been dominant over the Eastern part. Britain’s rulers, for instance, sent armies and gunboats to humiliate the Emperor of China in the nineteenth century and extract trading concessions, rather than vice versa. It is important to realise that the West (more precisely, the rulers in the West) has not always been top dog: from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries the East was more developed. Morris summarised his views in an article in History Today in October 2010, which can be read for free at www.historytoday.com/ian-morris/latitudes-not-attitudes-how-geography-explains-history.
Morris defines the ‘West’ as societies descended from the original core region of southwest Asia, so encompassing Europe and the Americas. The ‘East’ is those societies descended from the early civilisations between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers. Social development is quantified by looking at four criteria: energy capture (the capacity for extracting energy from the natural environment and for using it), urbanism (the size of a society’s largest city, as a proxy for the ability to organize complex situations), information processing (the power to communicate information) and the capacity to make war. The higher the score, the more powerful and developed a society is, and the more able it is to impose itself on others. The West was more advanced till around the middle of the sixth century CE and again from around 1800, when development leapt upwards, first in the West (the Industrial Revolution) and then in the East. The West is still ahead (especially in war-waging ability) but, as the title of the book suggests, this may not last for long.
Biological explanations (to the effect that people from the West are more intelligent) do not hold up, since human beings are basically the same everywhere. Rather, the factors behind the differences are claimed to be essentially geographical. A period of global warming around twenty thousand years ago led to the growth of agriculture in the ‘Hilly Flanks’ (covering the valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates and Jordan rivers) and so to a distinctive ‘Western’ core. At the end of the last Ice Age, agriculture began between 20 and 35 degrees north, a region with plenty of domesticable plants and animals (unlike, say, sub-Saharan Africa). Millennia later, by around 700 CE, China was a unified empire, with an enormous capital city and woodblock printing, while the West remained divided and much less developed, in the period known as the Dark Ages. But it was Europeans who encountered and exploited the Americas, because it was easier for them to cross the Atlantic than for Chinese explorers to cross the Pacific. Chinese fleets sailed through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century, but distances and prevailing winds meant that sailing eastwards into an empty ocean was unlikely to be attempted.
Western Europe (especially Britain) was well-placed to start off industrialisation because it could build on the gradually-accumulating technologies of previous centuries, but also because it possessed plenty of natural resources, colonies and warships, much more so than China at the time. We might add that it benefited from the profits of the slave trade, too. The various graphs that Morris presents suggest that the East will overtake the West in development early next century; compare predictions that China will become the biggest economy within just two decades, though Morris is not simply dealing with China. He argues, however, that geography will soon cease to mean anything anyway, as globalisation undermines real differences and produces a true worldwide system.
Morris’s work is probably most reminiscent of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which emphasised the importance of environmental factors, such as the relative shortage of domesticable animals in Africa and the Americas, in determining the course of historical development in different areas. In The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey accuses Diamond of a geographical or environmental determinism: on Diamond’s view, he says, ‘Africa is poor for environmental reasons, not … because of centuries of imperialist plundering, beginning with the slave trade’. This objection misses the point, though, since there needs to be an account of why it was Westerners who enslaved Africans, rather than vice versa. A geographical explanation is perfectly compatible with the view that the slave trade contributed to the impoverishment of Africa. In connection with the determinism objection, Morris is right to quote Marx to the effect that people make their own history but under circumstances they have not chosen themselves; their geographical situation being part of those circumstances.
Astonishingly, the word ‘capitalism’ is absent from the book’s index, though there is much discussion of industrialisation and industrialists (i.e. capitalists). It is all very well to say that ‘Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things’, but there needs to be explicit recognition that this often involves people getting others to work for them, and so exploiting them. Life for the earliest workers in capitalist factories was in no way easy or safe, and the profits went to the owners, not to those who toiled in the factories. The owners were not so much lazy and frightened as hungry for wealth and power.
Marx attributed the growth of the industrial working class to deliberate acts by the capitalists, fencing off the countryside and so driving people into towns to labour as propertyless wage workers. Rather, says Morris, it was due to increases in life expectancy and hence in population (Britain’s more or less doubled between 1780 and 1830). But he does not seem to deny that the rural dispossession took place, and it clearly contributed to the availability of urban workers as a labour force to be exploited by the new lords of capital.
One thing the book does show is that societal arrangements are never permanent. We could turn its theme around and say that the capitalists rule – but only for now.
PB
Need to end capitalism
What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism. By Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster. Monthly Review Press. 2011.
Overall the book contains a very good analysis of the causes of the world’s environmental problems which it is claimed are largely attributable to the global economic system of capitalism. Bearing in mind the book is aimed at environmental activists and those concerned with the problems associated with global warming, climate change and the general degradation of the state of the planet, the authors are spot on with this early statement: ‘It’s essential to break with a system based on a single motive – the perpetual accumulation of capital and hence economic growth without end.’
The chapters unfold neatly revealing the depths of inequality between rich and poor, individually and collectively, including the relative size of their ecological footprints. A clear case is presented as to the illogicality of an expectation that capitalism can be organised a different way to be made ‘green.’ The growth imperative of capitalism is explained and linked to its antagonism to the health of our environment in that what’s good for economic growth is bad for the environment and vice versa. The wide spread of capitalism’s ever expanding reach and resultant damage is comprehensively covered, including the imperialism of land grab, resource wars, water as an urgent resource problem, the exploitation of aquifers adding to annual sea level rise, damage as a result of careless but deliberate exploitation and externalities in their many guises. How appropriately the authors suggest amending the well known phrase, ‘the tragedy of the commons’ to ‘the tragedy of the private exploitation of the commons.’
When it comes to how we should deal with the causes and what is promoted to achieve the break with the system based on the perpetual accumulation of capital and economic growth without end, however, things take a turn for the worse. The final chapter is a disappointing list of rules, regulations, what could, should and must be done to put people and the environment before profit. It’s disappointing because these demands are all reformist based. Having read this far it must now be plain for readers to see that without first dismantling the very economic system that the authors have so successfully discredited right up to the final chapter there is no way that anything will change for the better, neither for people nor for the environment. Capitalism has been reformed many times and in many different ways and still it continues to progressively worsen the environment. If socialism is to be achieved it has to mean much more than transitional reforms to a democratically planned economy.
JS
Marketing crap
Born to Run. By Christopher McDougall. Profile Books.
Hundreds of scientists recently convened in London to untangle half a century of sports and leisure propaganda that more supportive shoes are better. Running is one of the most natural things human beings can do; it is as good for you as long periods of sitting are bad for you. It is as vital to our sustainability as a species as is breathing, eating and reproduction. Christopher McDougall was puzzled, then, to learn from podiatrists that recreational running is blighted by injury. His research led him to write this best-seller which spawned the movement that is challenging the supportive shoe orthodoxy. The journalist for Men’s Health tells the tale of his time with the Tarahumara tribe from Mexico.
“In Tarahumara land, there was no crime, war or theft … Fifty-year-olds could outrun teenagers, and eighty-year-old great-granddads could hike marathon distances up mountainsides. Their cancer rates were barely detectable.” They did no stretching or warming up, partied all night and got drunk on beer the night before a race. The races could last two days. Some runners could do 300 miles or 12 full marathons back to back. When the Tarahumara were introduced to Leadville 100 mile Ultramarathon in Colorado in 1993, they revolutionised ultra-running and broke records, a 52 year-old Tarahumara runner finished first, a 46 year-old Tarahumara runner finished second.
The barefoot movement that the book has spawned simply contends that supportive shoes encourage unhealthy habits. These include heel strikes rather than toe strikes, and pronation which causes knee injury. The book stops short of asking why the lucrative trainer industry has ignored or suppressed this evidence and sells bad running shoes. The answer is that some scientific studies and research is in the interests of capital to sponsor, and other studies are not. As cultural theorists such as the Frankfurt School have observed, the culture industry does not just fail to meet needs, it actually creates false needs and artificial desires too.
Since the co-founder of Nike (and champion sports coach) Bill Bowerman liked to claim responsibility for the popularity of recreational running with the publication of Jogging in 1962 then the industry ought to be responsible even on its own terms. Eventually even Bowerman concluded Nike were “distributing a lot of crap” in order to “make money”.
Although the scientific consensus now is inconclusive, trainer companies have already started selling shoes with minimal support to simulate the effect of going barefoot. So in the trainer industry, just as in capitalism generally, no crises are permanent, just unnecessarily wasteful and extremely destructive.
DJW