How is the “great convergence” – the topic of last week’s column – going to shape the world in the 21st century? Happily, in tackling this huge question, I have a guide: Ian Morris of Stanford, who has written a brilliant analysis of where we are, how we got here and where we might be going in a book that covers 16,000 years of human history.*
According to Professor Morris, social development is driven by “greedy, lazy, frightened people” who “seek their own preferred balance among being comfortable, working as little as possible, and being safe”. Since human beings are clever and highly social, they invent technologies and create institutions to achieve these aims. Yet what any group of human beings is able to achieve is determined by geography. The impact of a given geography also changes: 1,000 years ago, the oceans were a barrier; 500 years ago, they were a highway.
Prof Morris also provides a fascinating account of the progress of two poles of civilisation. These are the “west”, the civilisations that descended from the agricultural revolution in the so-called “fertile crescent” in today’s Middle East, and the “east”, the civilisations that descended from an independent revolution in a part of what is now China. His conclusion is that the west was somewhat more advanced than the east until the fall of the western Roman empire, behind it from then until the 18th century, and then ahead. Eastern exploitation of the “advantages of backwardness”, a recurring theme, suggests another reversal in the 21st century.