作者：尼尔•弗格森（Niall Ferguson） 2011年3月6日 The Telegraph .jpg)
There was a time when we believed in Western civilisation. By “we”, I mean Europeans and their cousins in the colonies of European settlement, above all the United States.
You can chart the rise of that self-belief if you go to Google’s latest gizmo, Google labs, which allows you to search the huge number of books Google has scanned to date to see how frequently a word occurs in them.
In English, “civilisation” (from the French) was a term scarcely used until the later 18th century. Thereafter – not coincidentally, as European empires spread to rule more than half the world – the C word’s popularity with authors grew steadily, reaching a peak in the middle of the 20th century.
Interestingly, that peak came in the period of maximum conflict within Western civilisation, between 1914 and 1945, when writers in the English-speaking world insisted that their countries were defending civilisation against German “barbarism”.
During the Cold War, “Western civilisation” was a phrase that still resonated. In high schools and colleges all over the US, there were mandatory courses with titles like “From Plato to Nato”.
In Britain, public school boys and Oxbridge men (and it was mostly men) were expected not only to have read the classics of the ancient world (Western civilisation’s first incarnation) but also to have a good grasp of the West’s revival after the Dark Ages and subsequent rise to global dominance.
Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, French and American Revolutions, Industrial Revolution, Electoral Reform – the big “Rs” of the West’s ascent – were noted, memorised and then “discussed” in innumerable essays.
When Kenneth Clark defined civilisation in his acclaimed 1969 television series of that name, he left viewers in no doubt that he meant the civilisation of the West – and primarily the art and architecture of Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th century.
Clark’s hugely successful series defined civilisation for a generation in the English-speaking world. Civilisation was the chateaux of the Loire, the palazzi of Florence, the Sistine Chapel, Versailles.
And then something changed. After around 1960, the word “civilisation” slumped in popularity. Universities – beginning with Stanford in 1963 – ceased to offer the classic “Western Civ” history course. To the generation that came of age protesting against the Vietnam War, Mahatma Gandhi had been right when he implied that “Western civilisation” was a contradiction in terms. It was nothing more than a euphemism for a blood-steeped, bomb-dropping imperialism.
In British schools, too, the grand narrative of Western ascent fell out of fashion. Thanks to an educationalists’ fad that elevated “historical skills” above knowledge in the name of “New History” – combined with the unintended consequences of the curriculum-reform process – most British teenagers now leave secondary school knowing only unconnected fragments of Western history.
A survey of first-year history undergraduates at one leading British university revealed that only 34 per cent knew who was the English monarch at the time of the Armada, 31 per cent knew the location of the Boer War and 16 per cent knew who commanded the British forces at Waterloo. In a similar poll of English children aged between 11 and 18, 17 per cent thought Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings.
Throughout the English-speaking world, moreover, the argument has gained ground that it is other cultures we should study, not our own. The musical sampler sent into outer space with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 featured 27 tracks, only 10 of them from Western composers, including not only Bach, Mozart and Beethoven but also Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. A history of the world “in 100 objects”, published last year by the Director of the British Museum, included no more than 30 products of Western civilisation.
Yet any history of the world’s civilisations that underplays the degree of their gradual subordination to the West after 1500 is missing the essential point – the thing most in need of explanation. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve.
In my new book and series, I argue that what distinguished the West from the Rest – the mainsprings of global power – were six identifiably novel complexes of institutions and associated ideas and behaviours. For the sake of simplicity, I summarise them under six headings: 1. Competition 2. Science 3. Property rights 4. Medicine 5. The consumer society 6. The work ethic.
To use the language of today’s computerised, synchronised world, these were the six killer applications – the killer apps – that allowed a minority of mankind originating on the western edge of Eurasia to dominate the world for the better part of 500 years.
This is of more than purely historical interest. For it is only by identifying the causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our fall.
My conclusion is that we are already living through the twilight of Western predominance. But that is not just because most of the Rest have now downloaded all or nearly all of our killer apps. It is also because we ourselves have lost faith in our own civilisation.
