Abstract
These books, which can be independently appreciated, propose a numerical index of social development for comparing human communities (regions) either through space or over time. Social development, according to the anthropologist Ian Morris, includes the organizational, technological, and symbolic tools that allow a community not only to sustain, reproduce, and defend itself but also to extend its ideas and institutions at the expense of other communities. He measures social development by focusing on four underlying traits: energy capture, social organization, information technology, and war-making ability.
The intellectual foundations for this ambitious project are diverse. Controversial ideas on social evolution, particularly community differentiation, are taken from disparate contributors such as Hebert Spencer, V. Gordon Childe, and Talcott Parsons. Here Morris makes it clear that social evolution, while being strongly linked to material advancement, has little to say about happiness or moral improvement. The various works of Raoul Naroll, Robert Caneiro, and Earl Cook are targeted for pointing out that key “functional prerequisites” are needed before societies can advance from one level of complexity to the next. But the contributions of the anthropologist Leslie White appear to be the most influential of all. White, a materialist, believed that societies could move from primitive to civil to complex stages only by harnessing more energy per person and then applying that energy surplus through new technological means. Morris also makes a strong plea for devising a numerical methodology to study social evolution and community differentiation; in the second volume he contends with critics like Charles Tilley, who warn that quantification in social thought sometimes hides an agenda of legitimizing Western domination. Borrowing from Mark Granovetter (1985), he sensibly counters that research on social evolution has simply lost its balance in recent decades because academics have preferred “over socialization” to “under socialization,” with an attendant emphasis on detail, context, and meaning at the expense of data collection, measurement, and quantification.
He also draws inspiration from the popular Human Development Index (HDI), which has succeeded in shifting much international focus away from national income accounting toward human well-being. Crafted by economists like Mahbub ul Huq and Amartya Sen in the late 1980s, the HDI was adopted by the United Nations to provide a single score indicating how well individual nations are doing toward fulfilling their development potential. The HDI recognizes only three traits—life expectancy, knowledge (including literacy), and standard of living—and consequently has attracted some criticism for being so narrow. While Morris admits that the concepts of human and social development are similar, the two methodologies are very different. This is because Morris is only interested in one overarching issue: Why did the societies of Western Europe and their colonies come to dominate the world in the 19th and 20th centuries? In contrast to the HDI, which allows individual nations to trace their development trajectory from year to year, the Social Development Index compares, over a much longer time frame, only the leading performances of the core Eastern and Western communities. By focusing on communities of approximately the same physical extent, such as England and the Yangzi Delta, he avoids the Pomeranz Problem where areas of much different size have often been inappropriately compared by historians. As a result, the index proposed by Morris says little about the level of social development that has ever been attained in the peripheral communities of either the East or the West.
Following White (1959), energy capture is seen as the main driver of social development, and here Morris recognizes the wide and various uses that have been made of food, fuel, and raw materials. Taking issue with various dissenters, including Clark (2007), he argues that the West actually experienced a long period of slow growth in energy capture from the Ice Age to the rise of the state, next witnessed a period of faster capture that was only held up by an agrarian ceiling, and then broke out of this constraint with the industrial revolution. This upward trend was often interrupted, sometimes severely, but in each case the setback proved to be only temporary. The story in the East was similar but involved a lag because the path of cultivation and domestication occurred much later than in the West. His figures for human calorie consumption, presented in both books, are different from those of others because he predates the usual historical estimates of wages or gross domestic product per capita (e.g., Angus Maddison) with the best available archeological evidence regarding houses, public buildings, and infrastructure.
Social organization is seen as the second pillar of civilization. Here Morris adopts city size as a convenient measure for organizational complexity and points out that while city size and energy capture are certainly correlated, growth in city size started somewhat later and has exhibited more vacillation throughout history. However, by only focusing on the largest city in each core community, he is unfortunately neglecting the great variation in urbanization levels that has existed through time in both the East and the West. Moreover, current city growth in the developing world does not share the same logic as past city growth in the developed world. As a result, megacities like Mumbai and Sao Paulo are likely to replace today’s frontrunners like Tokyo and New York without enjoying comparable levels of efficiency and prosperity. Perhaps the level of urbanization—which is, however, a measure having an upper limit—would be a more appropriate choice for evaluating social organization in each core community.
Information technology involves assessing both literacy and numeracy. Like others, he advocates using a multiplier where the overall information technology score equals the product of the level of technology and the extent of its use. In the first stage, he examines knowledge and skills—while emphasizing persistent gender gaps—and admits his measurement standards are probably lower than those used by specialists in the field. In the second stage, he examines the speed and reach of communication technologies, including the differing abilities of societies to store information. Oral cultures are given a score of zero because symbolic recording was never undertaken. Moreover, the widening and deepening of electronic and digital technologies in the past century means that all of the pre-1900 advancements, while certainly critical in the sense of being prerequisites, are practically negligible in numerical comparison to current information technology levels.
Comparisons of war-making capacity involve measuring the destructive power available to core societies. Here again the most daunting problem is evaluating the changes made between the years 1900 and 2000. Not only has weaponry exhibited a qualitative leap but strategy has changed remarkably with the advent of logistics and war games. While spending a lot of time talking about earlier military innovations, Morris eventually opts for a ratio of 50:1 between Western war-making capacity at the end and the beginning of the 20th century. He states that the margin of error is perhaps greater here than with his estimates of change for the other three traits.
Morris calculates a time-specific subindex for each of the four traits in each of the two core areas. The maximum score in each category is 250, so the maximum possible score overall is 1,000. During the past century, the overall scores for the West grew from 170 to 906 while those for the East grew from 71 to 565. He uses both tables and log-linear graphs to show the slow and steady improvements made in each of the four traits since 14000 BC. While there are many nuances to his argument, the main finding is simply that the West leapt ahead of the East after 1800 only by making revolutionary improvements in the appropriation and application of fossil fuels.
Some of this detailed material is heady stuff so anticipating that readers might enjoy pursuing a variety of topics, the author has supplemented the two volumes with numerous notes and references: 100 extra pages in Why the West Rules and a further 115 pages in The Measure of Civilization. I clearly preferred the first book because it was full of anecdotes, more speculative, and was replete with informative maps; the second book, written for an academic press, was more data-intensive and figure-laden, and the tone was somewhat more confirmatory. Perhaps the main merit of these fairly redundant books is that they force “big history” historians to be explicit about what they are measuring and comparing. His findings are perhaps most controversial because they suggest that the widely held view of multilineal social evolution depends more on our chronological perspective than on anything else. Morris is not only a technological determinist, but also a somewhat naive optimist who uses his simplistic “model” to forecast that the East will catch up to the West sometime soon after the year 2100.
One major disappointment with the books is that the various traits underlying social evolution are all placed in separate silos. Consequently, the reader discovers little about how urban life, known for influencing much of the trade and exchange of the world, has itself promoted the need for better information technologies. Likewise, major advancements in information technology are not linked to the dramatic changes that have been seen in war-making capacity down through the years. Other books, like those by Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986), Landes (1998), and Christian (2004), must be consulted for gaining insights into how the synergies and spillovers from these key traits have affected social progress and economic development in core communities.
In the end Morris provides a sweeping techno-materialist interpretation of human history that is nearly devoid of both creative individuals and the human spirit. All human inquiry appears to be directed toward materialist ends no matter what might be the true inspiration or motivation. The Renaissance and the arts, rationalism, experimentation in science, and the rise of capitalism are hardly mentioned in the two volumes. Little concern is given to widening human freedom, improvements in governance, and the eventual rise of the democracies, as especially seen in the West. In fact, the author pays much more attention to the detritus of the distant past and the dynasties of older Eastern societies than to today’s Western communities. While technology is certainly a major force in contemporary life, it seems to me that Morris is missing a lot by being such an avid determinist.