The New Republic | November 7, 2010
Biography . History
Michelle Goldberg
Superwoman
Cleopatra: A Life | By Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra: A Biography | By Duane W. Roller
Given America’s recent and somewhat uneasy fascination with women in politics, it makes sense that we are seeing a revival of interest in Cleopatra, the subject of millennia of anxious caricatures about female power. As Stacy Schiff writes in her epic new book about the Egyptian queen, “All the issues that disrupt the dinner table, that go to our heads like snake venom, combine in her person…Female ambition, accomplishment, authority, trouble us as they did the Romans, for whom Cleopatra was more a monster than a marvel, but undeniably a little of both.” She was a brilliant politician and strategist who became, second only to Eve, an icon of sinuous feminine danger and manipulation. She has long been the archetypical femme fatale. And now she is becoming a different sort of archetype: the grossly underestimated female leader, mocked and demonized for her sexuality.
Schiff’s book is not the only new Cleopatra biography to come out this year. In April, Oxford published one by Duane Roller, a professor of Greek and Latin and the author of a book about King Herod, one of Cleopatra’s hostile contemporaries. (A Hollywood version is also in the works—Angelina Jolie, our own contradictory icon of homewrecking glamour and world-bestriding political activism, is set, fittingly, to star.) While Roller undoubtedly has the greater expertise as a scholar, Schiff, who has written lives of Saint-Exupéry, Vera Nabokov, and Benjamin Franklin, is unparalleled as a popular biographer. She excels at bringing distant settings to life, at spinning comprehensive research into juicy human drama.
Still, the two volumes have a broadly similar thrust. Both seek to rescue Cleopatra from what Roller calls “male-dominated historiography.” That is the kind of phrase that makes some people cringe, but these volumes demonstrate why feminist history is necessary, even if the line between correction and revisionism can be blurry. Cleopatra, Roller points out, “was a skilled naval commander, a published medical authority, and an expert royal administrator who was met with adulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean.” She probably had sex with no more than two men in her life—Caesar and Mark Antony—and yet she is remembered, above all, as a high-level slut.
Roman historians started it. Propertius called her “the whore queen.” Dio described her as “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice.” In the ensuing centuries, the view stuck. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the “lustful queen” occupies the second circle of hell, where “carnal sinners are condemn’d.” Shakespeare has Antony’s friend Philo lamenting his transformation into a “strumpet’s fool.” Cecil B. DeMille reportedly described her as “the wickedest woman in history.”
Such slurs are often hurled at powerful women. One of the most fascinating things about Schiff’s book is her depiction of the way the ancient world’s gender politics shaped epochal events. Cleopatra’s Egypt was reviled by Rome in part because Egyptian women had so much autonomy. As Schiff writes, they made their own marriages, inherited equally, and controlled property. Alexandria, which Schiff depicts as a kind of pagan Paris, had female mathematicians, doctors, and poets. “As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands,” she reports.
Rome, meanwhile, was profoundly patriarchal. “Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die,” Schiff observes. “A Roman was obligated to raise only his first born daughter.” Roman women were without political and legal rights. They cast their eyes down in public. To Romans, Cleopatra’s power was horrifying, depraved. And when tensions between Rome and Egypt mounted, the rhetoric was saturated with misogyny. As Schiff notes, when Octavian declared war on Cleopatra he rallied his men with their obligation “to allow no woman to make herself equal to a man.” It was in Octavian’s Rome that Cleopatra’s history was written. The result, Schiff writes, “is a nineteenth-century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth-century history of America were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.”
Her attempt to correct the record suggests an audacity worthy of her subject. She is a generalist wading into a field full of experts steeped in the history and languages of the era. The original Roman sources are unreliable as well as hostile. There is little archaeological evidence: “No papyri from Alexandria survive,” writes Schiff. “Almost nothing of the ancient city survives aboveground. We have, perhaps and at most, one written word of Cleopatra’s.” Many of the most elementary details of Cleopatra’s life—who her mother was, whether she married Mark Antony, how she died—are unknowable. Others are a source of scholarly controversy. Given so many lacunae, what’s left for Schiff to do is to try to reconstruct the context in which Cleopatra lived and to deconstruct the carapace of myth that surrounds her memory.
She does not deny that Cleopatra was wildly decadent and, when need be, ruthless. Cleopatra had her rivalrous siblings murdered, though, as Schiff points out, this wasn’t at all unusual in the famously bloody and incestuous Ptolomaic dynasty. She used sex to secure power, first through her liaison with Caesar, then with Antony. But Schiff, like Roller, makes the case that Cleopatra’s intelligence and courage were what made her remarkable. She inherited the Empire when she was eighteen, and she steered it through droughts, currency crises, and complex diplomacy. She united her people and ran a vast, intricate bureaucracy with skill. “Her reign is notable,” Schiff remarks, “for the absence of revolts in Upper Egypt, suddenly quiet as it had not been for a century and a half.”
Schiff’s Cleopatra is a voluptuary as well as an administrator. The biography contains delicious scenes of Anthony and Cleopatra “at the height of their power, reveling amid heady perfume to sweet music, under kaleidoscopic lights, on steamy summer nights, before groaning tables of the finest food and wine in Asia.” Such cinematic flair makes Schiff’s Cleopatra far livelier and more readable than the more academic version by Roller, but it also may make it a little less reliable. According to Roller, some of the most dramatic episodes that Schiff recounts may not have happened, including the wonderful scene in which Cleopatra is smuggled across enemy lines and into Caesar’s quarters in a sack. It is hard, reading Schiff, not to suspect that her Cleopatra is a little too contemporary, a bit too much the fulfillment of our own ideas about female power. She is, among other things, spectacularly savvy about her image, using identity in a way that is almost postmodern.
When Cleopatra assumes the guise of a goddess, Schiff sees it as a deft deployment of religious symbolism rather than an actual religious identification. Traveling to meet Antony in Tarsus, Cleopatra “seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry.” The anachronism is bold and playful, but it is anachronism nonetheless. Schiff describes the queen floating up a bright, crystalline river “with gilded stern and soaring purple sails,” dressed as Venus, surrounded by boys made up like cupids and maidens disguised as sea nymphs and graces, with an orchestra playing on deck. “Had Cleopatra not already cemented her genius for stage management she did so now,” writes Schiff. But we do not know that Cleopatra was performing, or that she was engaged in some knowing exercise in image making. Isn’t it at least as likely that she believed herself divine?
Then again, maybe all biography is necessarily anachronistic. Perhaps, in order to understand historical legends as human beings, there has to be some sort of translation into the categories of our own experience. Schiff’s version of Cleopatra’s life has clearly corrected earlier biases and distortions, but it has probably added new ones. The Egyptian queen has proved even more protean in death than she was in life.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
Pathological Conservatism
David Frum Goes Bulworth
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor
The New Republic
It's pretty remarkable to remind yourself that not long ago David Frum was writing speeches for George W. Bush, and now he is writing things like this:
Well before the crash of 2008, the U.S. economy was sending ominous warning signals. Median incomes were stagnating. Home prices rose beyond their rental values. Consumer indebtedness was soaring. Instead, conservatives preferred to focus on positive signals — job numbers, for example — to describe the Bush economy as “the greatest story never told.”
Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.
Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.
The whole piece is a dead-on attack on the central thrust of conservative thought over the last two years. I think it's desperately necessary that sane people reform the conservative movement into a non-pathological, reality-based force in American politics. But I fear Frum is slaying so many sacred cows that nobody in the movement will listen to him.
Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor
The New Republic
It's pretty remarkable to remind yourself that not long ago David Frum was writing speeches for George W. Bush, and now he is writing things like this:
Well before the crash of 2008, the U.S. economy was sending ominous warning signals. Median incomes were stagnating. Home prices rose beyond their rental values. Consumer indebtedness was soaring. Instead, conservatives preferred to focus on positive signals — job numbers, for example — to describe the Bush economy as “the greatest story never told.”
Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.
Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.
The whole piece is a dead-on attack on the central thrust of conservative thought over the last two years. I think it's desperately necessary that sane people reform the conservative movement into a non-pathological, reality-based force in American politics. But I fear Frum is slaying so many sacred cows that nobody in the movement will listen to him.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Staying Human Online
Staying Fully Human Online
13 Nov 2010 03:47 pm
Ross Douthat feels the push and pull of the web:
With rare exceptions, our miraculous communications technologies always seem to tug me toward superficiality and inattention, and away from deep intellectual engagement and true personal intimacy alike. (And I don’t even really use Facebook …) What’s more, the assumption that “humans will always find new ways to stay human” strikes me as too blithely pollyannish: All societies are human, but some are more human than others, and I’m not at all convinced that internet culture is nearly as conductive to the fullest sort of human flourishing, whether personal or cultural or political, as its boosters constantly insist.
On the other hand, the internet isn’t exactly going away, retreating from the world that Mark Zuckerberg helped build isn’t an option for most people — and so Madrigal’s exhortation to mastery is perhaps a more plausible prescription than Smith’s wistful suggestion that we should resist and/or withdraw from social media’s flattening embrace. All of which is to say that you should read both pieces in full, because they both have something important to say about the challenge of staying fully human in the brave new online world.
13 Nov 2010 03:47 pm
Ross Douthat feels the push and pull of the web:
With rare exceptions, our miraculous communications technologies always seem to tug me toward superficiality and inattention, and away from deep intellectual engagement and true personal intimacy alike. (And I don’t even really use Facebook …) What’s more, the assumption that “humans will always find new ways to stay human” strikes me as too blithely pollyannish: All societies are human, but some are more human than others, and I’m not at all convinced that internet culture is nearly as conductive to the fullest sort of human flourishing, whether personal or cultural or political, as its boosters constantly insist.
On the other hand, the internet isn’t exactly going away, retreating from the world that Mark Zuckerberg helped build isn’t an option for most people — and so Madrigal’s exhortation to mastery is perhaps a more plausible prescription than Smith’s wistful suggestion that we should resist and/or withdraw from social media’s flattening embrace. All of which is to say that you should read both pieces in full, because they both have something important to say about the challenge of staying fully human in the brave new online world.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Ideology Run Amok
Since Ronald Reagan, the ideology of tax cuts/tax breaks for the wealthy with the middle class paying for it has driven politics in this country. The proposals of the so-called deficit commission continues the saga.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hijacked Commission
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 11, 2010
Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.
My misgivings increased as we got a better feel for the views of the commission’s co-chairmen. It soon became clear that Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman, had a very Republican-sounding small-government agenda. Meanwhile, Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman, revealed the kind of honest broker he is by sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League in which he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.
Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?
Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.
So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?
Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.
It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?
Let’s turn next to Social Security. There were rumors beforehand that the commission would recommend a rise in the retirement age, and sure enough, that’s what Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson do. They want the age at which Social Security becomes available to rise along with average life expectancy. Is that reasonable?
The answer is no, for a number of reasons — including the point that working until you’re 69, which may sound doable for people with desk jobs, is a lot harder for the many Americans who still do physical labor.
But beyond that, the proposal seemingly ignores a crucial point: while average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age.
Still, can’t we say that for all its flaws, the Bowles-Simpson proposal is a serious effort to tackle the nation’s long-run fiscal problem? No, we can’t.
It’s true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what’s going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea.
It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.
Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hijacked Commission
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 11, 2010
Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.
My misgivings increased as we got a better feel for the views of the commission’s co-chairmen. It soon became clear that Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman, had a very Republican-sounding small-government agenda. Meanwhile, Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman, revealed the kind of honest broker he is by sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League in which he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.
Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?
Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.
So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list?
Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.
It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?
Let’s turn next to Social Security. There were rumors beforehand that the commission would recommend a rise in the retirement age, and sure enough, that’s what Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson do. They want the age at which Social Security becomes available to rise along with average life expectancy. Is that reasonable?
The answer is no, for a number of reasons — including the point that working until you’re 69, which may sound doable for people with desk jobs, is a lot harder for the many Americans who still do physical labor.
But beyond that, the proposal seemingly ignores a crucial point: while average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age.
Still, can’t we say that for all its flaws, the Bowles-Simpson proposal is a serious effort to tackle the nation’s long-run fiscal problem? No, we can’t.
It’s true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what’s going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea.
It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.
Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
A Tale of Two Planets
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul PiersonAuthors, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Posted: November 11, 2010 05:11 PM
The distance between Planet Washington and Planet Earth, or at least the American corner of it, has never been greater.
Today, on Planet Washington, two big news stories capture the cognoscenti. The first is that President Obama appears willing to cave on Republicans' insistence that all the Bush tax cuts, including the extraordinarily expensive cuts focused on the country's wealthiest, be extended in lockstep. Somehow, on Planet Washington, extending tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans while saving $700 billion for more pressing economic needs than further enrichment of the richest isn't a winning position.
The second story is the blueprint for fiscal reform floated by the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. These folks are serious. The day of reckoning has arrived. It's time for middle America to tighten its belt big-time: huge cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with virtually every other significant government program.
For those at the top, however, the belts aren't so tight. The proposal includes a cap in federal revenues, which would essentially insure that all the fallout takes place on the spending side, hitting programs like Social Security and Medicare and an already-straitened discretionary budget. And even as the Simpson and Bowles bravely announce that we must take tough steps, their plan would sharply reduce -- again! -- the top income tax rate. Executives at Morgan Stanley, where Bowles is a very well-compensated member of the Board of Directors, must be smiling.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, things don't look so happy. The job market is horrible and is projected to stay horrible for years -- even if no other shoes drop. Compared with previous recessions, the loss of jobs is far worse, and signs of recovery far more difficult to detect. Even the staggering unemployment rate fails to capture the pain. Not since the Depression have so many Americans been unemployed for so long. Millions don't show up in the statistics since they are either squeezed into part-time jobs or have given up looking for work in despair.
Apparently you can't really see any of this through the telescopes on Planet Washington. Yet it is wrenching and cumulative, measurable in thwarted careers, broken families, shortened life-spans, and roiling frustration.
To be sure, that frustration is useful as a prop for campaigns, not to mention a powerful weapon for targeting scapegoats, like poor immigrants or the nation's teachers and first responders -- whose pensions and health benefits are now supposed to be the great source of our problems. But serious action to create jobs? On Planet Washington, that's so 2009.
On Planet Washington, the new alpha species is Republicans, along with those cooperative Democrats whom we -- in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics -- call "Republicans for a Day." They're pushing the same all-purpose tonic they peddled when the unemployment rate was low: cuts in social programs for the middle class and poor, tax cuts for the wealthiest, removal of any restrictions on the activities of big business. Already, they're searching for ways to undercut the moderate financial reforms passed earlier this year. On Planet Washington, the Wall Street casino that got us into this mess should be open for business while Main Street is shuttered.
It's a tale of two planets. And it won't end until we can bring our democracy back to earth.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Posted: November 11, 2010 05:11 PM
The distance between Planet Washington and Planet Earth, or at least the American corner of it, has never been greater.
Today, on Planet Washington, two big news stories capture the cognoscenti. The first is that President Obama appears willing to cave on Republicans' insistence that all the Bush tax cuts, including the extraordinarily expensive cuts focused on the country's wealthiest, be extended in lockstep. Somehow, on Planet Washington, extending tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans while saving $700 billion for more pressing economic needs than further enrichment of the richest isn't a winning position.
The second story is the blueprint for fiscal reform floated by the co-chairs of the president's deficit commission, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. These folks are serious. The day of reckoning has arrived. It's time for middle America to tighten its belt big-time: huge cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with virtually every other significant government program.
For those at the top, however, the belts aren't so tight. The proposal includes a cap in federal revenues, which would essentially insure that all the fallout takes place on the spending side, hitting programs like Social Security and Medicare and an already-straitened discretionary budget. And even as the Simpson and Bowles bravely announce that we must take tough steps, their plan would sharply reduce -- again! -- the top income tax rate. Executives at Morgan Stanley, where Bowles is a very well-compensated member of the Board of Directors, must be smiling.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, things don't look so happy. The job market is horrible and is projected to stay horrible for years -- even if no other shoes drop. Compared with previous recessions, the loss of jobs is far worse, and signs of recovery far more difficult to detect. Even the staggering unemployment rate fails to capture the pain. Not since the Depression have so many Americans been unemployed for so long. Millions don't show up in the statistics since they are either squeezed into part-time jobs or have given up looking for work in despair.
Apparently you can't really see any of this through the telescopes on Planet Washington. Yet it is wrenching and cumulative, measurable in thwarted careers, broken families, shortened life-spans, and roiling frustration.
To be sure, that frustration is useful as a prop for campaigns, not to mention a powerful weapon for targeting scapegoats, like poor immigrants or the nation's teachers and first responders -- whose pensions and health benefits are now supposed to be the great source of our problems. But serious action to create jobs? On Planet Washington, that's so 2009.
On Planet Washington, the new alpha species is Republicans, along with those cooperative Democrats whom we -- in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics -- call "Republicans for a Day." They're pushing the same all-purpose tonic they peddled when the unemployment rate was low: cuts in social programs for the middle class and poor, tax cuts for the wealthiest, removal of any restrictions on the activities of big business. Already, they're searching for ways to undercut the moderate financial reforms passed earlier this year. On Planet Washington, the Wall Street casino that got us into this mess should be open for business while Main Street is shuttered.
It's a tale of two planets. And it won't end until we can bring our democracy back to earth.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Why the West Rules - For Now
Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History
Ian Morris, 20 October 2010
History TodayVolume: 60 Issue: 11
Many reasons have been given for the West’s dominance over the last 500 years. But, Ian Morris argues, its rise to global hegemony was largely due to geographical good fortune.
I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films and today is whatever date it is because you say so.
This is what Shad Faruki, a Malaysian lawyer, told the British journalist Martin Jacques in a 1994 interview. And he was right: for 200 years, a few nations clustered around the shores of the North Atlantic – ‘the West’, as we normally call them – have dominated the world in ways without parallel in history.
Most people, at some point or another, have wondered why the West rules. There are theories beyond number. Perhaps, say some, westerners are just biologically superior to everyone else. Or maybe western culture is uniquely dynamic; or possibly the West has had better leaders; or the West’s democratic politics and its Christianity might give it an edge. Some think western domination has been locked in since time immemorial: others that it is merely a recent accident. And, with many westerners now looking to China’s double-digit economic growth to pull the world out of recession, some historians even suggest that western rule has been an aberration, a brief interruption of an older, Sinocentric, world order.
When experts disagree so deeply, it usually means that we need fresh perspectives on a problem. Most of those who pronounce on Western rule – economists, political pundits, sociologists – tend to focus on recent times and then make sweeping claims about the past. Asking why the West rules, though, really requires us to work the other way round, posing questions about history, then seeing where they lead. As the masthead of this magazine puts it: ‘What happened then matters now.’
The shape of history
Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. When we do this the first thing we see is the biological unity of humanity, which flatly disproves racist theories of western rule.
Our kind, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 70,000 years ago and has spread across the world in the last 60,000 years. By around 30,000 years ago, older versions of humanity, such as the Neanderthals, were extinct and by 10,000 years ago a single kind of human – us – had colonised virtually every niche on the planet. This dispersal allowed humanity’s genes to diverge again, but most of the consequences (such as the colour of skin, eyes, or hair) are, literally, only skin deep and those mutations that do go deeper (such as head shape or lactose tolerance) have little obvious connection to why the West rules. A proper answer to this question must start from the fact that wherever we go – East, West, North, or South – people are all much the same.
So why have their histories turned out so differently? Many historians suggest that there is something unique about western culture. Just look, they say, at the philosophy of Socrates, the wisdom of the Bible, or the glories of Leonardo da Vinci; since antiquity, the West has simply outshone the rest. Such cultural comparisons, however, are notoriously subjective. Socrates, for instance, was certainly a great thinker; but the years in which he was active, during the fifth century bc, were also the age of the Hebrew prophets in Israel, of the Buddha and the founders of Jainism in India, of Confucius and the first Daoists in China. All these sages wrestled with much the same questions as Socrates (Can I know reality? What is the good life? How do we perfect society?) and the thoughts of each became ‘the classics’, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meanings of life for millions of people ever since.
So strong are the similarities between the Greco-Roman, Jewish, Indian and Chinese classics, in fact, that scholars often call the first millennium bc the ‘Axial Age’, in the sense of it being an axis around which the whole history of Eurasian thought turned. From the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, larger, more complex societies were facing similar challenges in the first millennium bc and finding similar answers. Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path.
From a global perspective, Christianity, too, makes more sense as a local version of a broader trend than as something setting the West apart from the rest. As the Roman Empire disintegrated in the middle of the first millennium ad and new questions (Is there something beyond this life? How can I be saved?) gained urgency, the new faith won perhaps 40 million converts; but in those same years, in the wake of the Han dynasty’s collapse in China, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism offered their own answers to the same questions and won their own 40 million devotees. Soon enough Islam repeated the feat in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Even such astonishing Renaissance men as Leonardo and Michelangelo, who refined the wisdom of the ancient West to revolutionise everything from aeronautics to art, are best seen as Europe’s versions of a new kind of intellectual which societies needed as they emerged from the Middle Ages. China had produced its own Renaissance men some 400 years earlier, who also refined ancient wisdom (in their case, of course, the East’s) to revolutionise everything. Shen Kua (1031-95 ad), for instance, published groundbreaking work on agriculture, archaeology, cartography, climate change, the classics, ethnography, geology, maths, medicine, metallurgy, meteorology, music, painting and zoology. Even Leonardo would have been impressed.
Over and over again, the triumphs of western culture turn out to have been local versions of broader trends, not lonely beacons in a general darkness and, if we think about culture in a broader, more anthropological sense, the West’s history again seems to be one example of a larger pattern rather than a unique story. For most of their existence, humans lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. After the Ice Age some hunter-gatherers settled down in villages, where they domesticated plants and animals; some villages grew into cities, with ruling elites; some cities became states and then empires and, finally, industrialised nations. No society has ever leaped from hunting and gathering to high technology (except under the influence of outsiders). Humans are all much the same, wherever we find them; and, because of this, human societies have all followed much the same sequence of cultural development. There is nothing special about the West.
Location, location, location
You may have noticed that all the historical examples I have mentioned – Italy, Greece, Israel, India, China – lie in a narrow band of latitudes, roughly 20-35° north, stretching across the Old World. This is no accident: in fact, it is a crucial clue as to why the West rules. Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world.
When temperatures rose at the end of the last Ice Age, nearly 12,000 years ago, global warming had massive consequences everywhere, but, as in our own times, it impacted on some places more than on others. In the latitudes between 20° and 35° north in the Old World and a similar band between 15° south and 20° north in the Americas, large-grained wild grasses like wheat, rice and teosinte (the ancestor of maize) and large, relatively tame mammals like wild goats, pigs and llamas went forth and multiplied in the warmer weather. This was a boon for humans, who ate them, but in the process of managing these other species – cultivating and tending the plants, herding and culling the animals – humans unintentionally domesticated them. We unwittingly altered their genomes so much that they became new species, providing us with far more food. Genetically modified organisms had been born. Potentially domesticable plants and animals existed outside the lucky latitudes, but they were less common. Indeed many places, such as large parts of Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia, had no domesticable native species at all. The consequence, given that humans were all much the same, was predictable: the domestication of plants and animals – farming – began in the lucky latitudes long before it began outside them. This was not because people in the lucky latitudes were cleverer or harder-working; nature had just given them more to work with than people in other places and so the task advanced more quickly.
Nor was nature even-handed within the lucky latitudes. Some places, above all the so-called ‘Hilly Flanks’, which curve from what is now Israel through Syria, southern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran, were extraordinarily well endowed; China between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers and the Indus Valley in Pakistan were somewhat less so; Oaxaca in Mexico and the Andes in Peru somewhat less still. Consequently, the Hilly Flanks were the first to see farming firmly established (by 7500 bc); then came China and Pakistan (around 5500 bc); then Oaxaca and Peru (by 5000 bc); and then, over the next 7,000 years, most of the rest of humanity.
Farming spread from its original cores because it could support more people than hunting and gathering. The lives farmers led were often harder and their diets poorer than hunters’, but that was beside the point. The farmers’ weight of numbers, nastier germs (bred by crowding and proximity to domestic animals), more efficient organisation (required to keep order in larger villages) and superior weapons (necessary to settle constant quarrels) steadily dispossessed the hunters, who either took up farming in their own right or ran away.
The agricultural cores developed increasingly complex institutions as they expanded. Within 3-4,000 years of the start of farming (that is, by 3500 bc in Southwest Asia, 2500 bc in the Indus Valley, 1900 bc in China, 1500 bc in Mesoamerica and 1000 bc in the Andes) the first cities and states were taking shape. Within another few centuries, most had bureaucrats keeping written records and by 2,000 years ago a continuous band of empires, with populations in the tens of millions, stretched from the Mediterranean to China. By then imperialists and traders had exported agriculture, cities and writing beyond the lucky latitudes as far afield as cold, rainy Britain in the northwest and hot, humid Cambodia in the southeast. These great empires – the Han in the East, the Mauryan in India, the Parthian in Iran and Iraq and the Roman further west – had many similarities; but the biggest, richest and grandest by far was Rome, the descendant of Eurasia’s original, westernmost agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks.
Geography explains why farming first appeared towards the western end of the Old World’s lucky latitudes; and, if the West had simply held on to the early lead that nature’s unfairness had given it, geography would be the obvious explanation for why the West now dominates the world.
But that is not what actually happened. The West has not always been the richest, most powerful and most sophisticated part of the world during the last ten millennia. For more than 1,000 years, from at least 600 to 1700 ad, these superlatives applied to China, not the West.
After the fall of the Roman and Han empires in the early-to-mid first millennium ad, China was reunited into a single empire while the West remained divided between smaller states and invading Arabs. By 700, China’s capital at Chang’an had probably a million residents and Chinese literature was enjoying a golden age. Woodblock printing presses churned out millions of books, paid for with the world’s first paper money (invented in the 10th century). By 1000 an economic revolution had joined the cultural explosion: 11th-century China produced almost as much iron each year as the whole of Europe would be doing in 1700, on the eve of its Industrial Revolution. Chinese ironmasters produced so much, in fact, that they clear-cut entire forests to feed their forges, and – six centuries ahead of the West – learned to smelt their ores with coke.
For centuries, Chinese wealth and power dwarfed the West’s. Between 1405 and 1433, while little Portuguese caravels tentatively nosed down Africa’s west coast, Chinese emperors dispatched gigantic fleets across the Indian Ocean under the leadership of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (who, according to legend, was nearly three metres tall and 230 cm around the belly). Zheng’s flagship was on the same scale as its skipper. At 80 metres long, it was the largest wooden ship ever built. When Columbus set sail in 1492, his own flagship was shorter than Zheng’s mainmast and barely twice as long as the big man’s rudder. Columbus led three ships and 90 sailors; Zheng led 300 ships and 27,870 sailors. His fleet extracted tribute from the cities of India, visited Mecca and even reached Kenya, where today Chinese archaeologists are diving to locate wrecks of Zheng’s ships.
The power of place
The glories of medieval China seem, on the face of it, to disprove any geographical explanation for why the West now rules. After all, geography has not changed very much in the last 500 years.
Or maybe it has. Geography shapes history, but not in straightforward ways. Geography does determine why societies in some parts of the world develop so much faster than others; but, at the same time, the level to which societies have developed determines what geography means.
Take, once again, the example of Britain, sticking out from Eurasia into the cold Atlantic Ocean. Four thousand years ago, Britain was far from the centres of action in the Nile, Indus and Yellow River valleys, where farming had been established for millennia, great cities had grown up and labourers by the thousand broke their backs to immortalise divine kings with pyramids and palaces. Distant Britain had few of these things, which spread only slowly from the Mediterranean core to the Atlantic periphery. Geography made Britain backward.
But, if we fast-forward to 400 years ago, the same geography that had once made Britain backward now gave the island nation wealth and power. Britain had been drawn into a vastly expanded and more developed core, which now had ships that could reliably cross oceans and guns that could shoot the people on the other side. Sticking out into the Atlantic, such a huge disadvantage 4,000 years ago, became a huge plus from the 17th century.
The first sailors to the Americas were Italians (Christopher Columbus was from Genoa; the famous ‘British’ explorer John Cabot, who reached Newfoundland in 1497, actually grew up as Giovanni Caboto, in Florence). They were soon shoved aside by the Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch – not because the Atlantic littoral produced bolder or smarter adventurers than the Mediterranean, but simply because Western Europe was closer to America.
Given time, the 15th century’s greatest sailors – the Chinese – would surely have discovered and colonised America too (in 2009 the Princess Taiping, a replica of a 15th-century junk, came within 20 miles of completing a Taiwan–San Francisco round trip, only to collide with a freight ship within sight of home). But in much the same way that geography had made it easier for people in the Hilly Flanks to domesticate plants and animals than for people in other parts of the world, it now again stacked the odds in the West’s favour. The trip from England to New England was only half as far as that from China to California. For thousands of years this geographical fact had been unimportant, since there were no ocean-going ships. But by 1600 it had become the decisive fact. The meaning of geography had changed.
This was just the beginning of the changes. In the 17th century a new kind of economy took shape, centred around the North Atlantic, generating massive profits and driving up wages in north-west Europe by exploiting the geographical differences round its shores. In the process, it enormously increased the rewards for anyone who could explain how the winds and tides worked, or measure and count in better ways, or make sense of the secrets of physics, chemistry and biology. Not surprisingly, Europeans began thinking about the world in new ways, setting off a scientific revolution; they then applied its insights to the societies they lived in, in what we now call the Enlightenment. Newton and Descartes were geniuses, but so too were Chinese scholars like Gu Yanwu (1613-82) and Dai Zhen (1724-77), who also spent lifetimes studying nature. It was just that geography thrust new questions on Newton and Descartes.
Westerners answered their new questions, only to find that the answers led to still newer questions. By 1800 the combination of science and the Atlantic economy created incentives and opportunities for entrepreneurs to mechanise production and tap into the power of fossil fuels. This began in Britain, where geography conspired to make these things easier than anywhere else; and the energy windfall provided by fossil fuel quickly translated into a population explosion, rising living standards and massive military power. All barriers crumbled. British warships forced China to open to western trade in 1842; Americans did the same in Japan 11 years later. The age of western rule had arrived.
The lessons of history
So what do we learn from all this history? Two main things, I think. First, since people are all much the same, it is our shared biology which explains humanity’s great upward leaps in wealth, productivity and power across the last 10,000 years; and, second, that it is geography which explains why one part of world – the nations we conventionally call ‘the West’ – now dominates the rest.
Geography determined that when the world warmed up at the end of the Ice Age a band of lucky latitudes stretching across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China developed agriculture earlier than other parts of the world and then went on to be the first to invent cities, states and empires. But as social development increased, it changed what geography meant and the centres of power and wealth shifted around within these lucky latitudes. Until about ad 500 the Western end of Eurasia hung on to its early lead, but after the fall of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty the centre of gravity moved eastward to China, where it stayed for more than a millennium. Only around 1700 did it shift westward again, largely due to inventions – guns, compasses, ocean-going ships – which were originally pioneered in the East but which, thanks to geography, proved more useful in the West. Westerners then created an Atlantic economy which raised profound new questions about how the world worked, pushing westerners into a Scientific Revolution, an Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, the West dominated the globe.
But history did not end there. The same laws of geography continued operating. By 1900 the British-dominated global economy had drawn in the vast resources of North America, converting the USA from a rather backward periphery into a new global core. The process continued in the 20th century, as the American-dominated global economy drew in the resources of Asia, turning first Japan, then the ‘Asian Tigers’ and eventually China and India into major players.
Extrapolating from these historical patterns, we can make some predictions. If the processes of change continue across the 21st century at the same rate as in the 20th century, the economies of the East will overtake those of the West by 2100. But if the rate of change keeps accelerating – as it has done constantly since the 15th century – we can expect eastern global dominance as soon as 2050.
An age of rapid change
It all seems very clear – except for one niggling detail. The past shows that, while geography shapes the development of societies, development also shapes what geography means; and all the signs are that in the 21st century the meanings of geography are changing faster than ever. Geography is, we might even say, losing meaning. The world is shrinking and the greatest challenges we face – nuclear weapons, climate change, mass migration, epidemics, food and water supply – are all global problems. Perhaps the real lesson of history is that by the time the East overtakes the West, the question of why the West rules may have ceased to matter very much.
Ian Morris is Willard Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and the Archaeology Center at Stanford University and author of Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future (Profile, 2010).
Ian Morris, 20 October 2010
History TodayVolume: 60 Issue: 11
Many reasons have been given for the West’s dominance over the last 500 years. But, Ian Morris argues, its rise to global hegemony was largely due to geographical good fortune.
I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films and today is whatever date it is because you say so.
This is what Shad Faruki, a Malaysian lawyer, told the British journalist Martin Jacques in a 1994 interview. And he was right: for 200 years, a few nations clustered around the shores of the North Atlantic – ‘the West’, as we normally call them – have dominated the world in ways without parallel in history.
Most people, at some point or another, have wondered why the West rules. There are theories beyond number. Perhaps, say some, westerners are just biologically superior to everyone else. Or maybe western culture is uniquely dynamic; or possibly the West has had better leaders; or the West’s democratic politics and its Christianity might give it an edge. Some think western domination has been locked in since time immemorial: others that it is merely a recent accident. And, with many westerners now looking to China’s double-digit economic growth to pull the world out of recession, some historians even suggest that western rule has been an aberration, a brief interruption of an older, Sinocentric, world order.
When experts disagree so deeply, it usually means that we need fresh perspectives on a problem. Most of those who pronounce on Western rule – economists, political pundits, sociologists – tend to focus on recent times and then make sweeping claims about the past. Asking why the West rules, though, really requires us to work the other way round, posing questions about history, then seeing where they lead. As the masthead of this magazine puts it: ‘What happened then matters now.’
The shape of history
Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. When we do this the first thing we see is the biological unity of humanity, which flatly disproves racist theories of western rule.
Our kind, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 70,000 years ago and has spread across the world in the last 60,000 years. By around 30,000 years ago, older versions of humanity, such as the Neanderthals, were extinct and by 10,000 years ago a single kind of human – us – had colonised virtually every niche on the planet. This dispersal allowed humanity’s genes to diverge again, but most of the consequences (such as the colour of skin, eyes, or hair) are, literally, only skin deep and those mutations that do go deeper (such as head shape or lactose tolerance) have little obvious connection to why the West rules. A proper answer to this question must start from the fact that wherever we go – East, West, North, or South – people are all much the same.
So why have their histories turned out so differently? Many historians suggest that there is something unique about western culture. Just look, they say, at the philosophy of Socrates, the wisdom of the Bible, or the glories of Leonardo da Vinci; since antiquity, the West has simply outshone the rest. Such cultural comparisons, however, are notoriously subjective. Socrates, for instance, was certainly a great thinker; but the years in which he was active, during the fifth century bc, were also the age of the Hebrew prophets in Israel, of the Buddha and the founders of Jainism in India, of Confucius and the first Daoists in China. All these sages wrestled with much the same questions as Socrates (Can I know reality? What is the good life? How do we perfect society?) and the thoughts of each became ‘the classics’, timeless masterpieces that have defined the meanings of life for millions of people ever since.
So strong are the similarities between the Greco-Roman, Jewish, Indian and Chinese classics, in fact, that scholars often call the first millennium bc the ‘Axial Age’, in the sense of it being an axis around which the whole history of Eurasian thought turned. From the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, larger, more complex societies were facing similar challenges in the first millennium bc and finding similar answers. Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path.
From a global perspective, Christianity, too, makes more sense as a local version of a broader trend than as something setting the West apart from the rest. As the Roman Empire disintegrated in the middle of the first millennium ad and new questions (Is there something beyond this life? How can I be saved?) gained urgency, the new faith won perhaps 40 million converts; but in those same years, in the wake of the Han dynasty’s collapse in China, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism offered their own answers to the same questions and won their own 40 million devotees. Soon enough Islam repeated the feat in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Even such astonishing Renaissance men as Leonardo and Michelangelo, who refined the wisdom of the ancient West to revolutionise everything from aeronautics to art, are best seen as Europe’s versions of a new kind of intellectual which societies needed as they emerged from the Middle Ages. China had produced its own Renaissance men some 400 years earlier, who also refined ancient wisdom (in their case, of course, the East’s) to revolutionise everything. Shen Kua (1031-95 ad), for instance, published groundbreaking work on agriculture, archaeology, cartography, climate change, the classics, ethnography, geology, maths, medicine, metallurgy, meteorology, music, painting and zoology. Even Leonardo would have been impressed.
Over and over again, the triumphs of western culture turn out to have been local versions of broader trends, not lonely beacons in a general darkness and, if we think about culture in a broader, more anthropological sense, the West’s history again seems to be one example of a larger pattern rather than a unique story. For most of their existence, humans lived in small, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. After the Ice Age some hunter-gatherers settled down in villages, where they domesticated plants and animals; some villages grew into cities, with ruling elites; some cities became states and then empires and, finally, industrialised nations. No society has ever leaped from hunting and gathering to high technology (except under the influence of outsiders). Humans are all much the same, wherever we find them; and, because of this, human societies have all followed much the same sequence of cultural development. There is nothing special about the West.
Location, location, location
You may have noticed that all the historical examples I have mentioned – Italy, Greece, Israel, India, China – lie in a narrow band of latitudes, roughly 20-35° north, stretching across the Old World. This is no accident: in fact, it is a crucial clue as to why the West rules. Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world.
When temperatures rose at the end of the last Ice Age, nearly 12,000 years ago, global warming had massive consequences everywhere, but, as in our own times, it impacted on some places more than on others. In the latitudes between 20° and 35° north in the Old World and a similar band between 15° south and 20° north in the Americas, large-grained wild grasses like wheat, rice and teosinte (the ancestor of maize) and large, relatively tame mammals like wild goats, pigs and llamas went forth and multiplied in the warmer weather. This was a boon for humans, who ate them, but in the process of managing these other species – cultivating and tending the plants, herding and culling the animals – humans unintentionally domesticated them. We unwittingly altered their genomes so much that they became new species, providing us with far more food. Genetically modified organisms had been born. Potentially domesticable plants and animals existed outside the lucky latitudes, but they were less common. Indeed many places, such as large parts of Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia, had no domesticable native species at all. The consequence, given that humans were all much the same, was predictable: the domestication of plants and animals – farming – began in the lucky latitudes long before it began outside them. This was not because people in the lucky latitudes were cleverer or harder-working; nature had just given them more to work with than people in other places and so the task advanced more quickly.
Nor was nature even-handed within the lucky latitudes. Some places, above all the so-called ‘Hilly Flanks’, which curve from what is now Israel through Syria, southern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran, were extraordinarily well endowed; China between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers and the Indus Valley in Pakistan were somewhat less so; Oaxaca in Mexico and the Andes in Peru somewhat less still. Consequently, the Hilly Flanks were the first to see farming firmly established (by 7500 bc); then came China and Pakistan (around 5500 bc); then Oaxaca and Peru (by 5000 bc); and then, over the next 7,000 years, most of the rest of humanity.
Farming spread from its original cores because it could support more people than hunting and gathering. The lives farmers led were often harder and their diets poorer than hunters’, but that was beside the point. The farmers’ weight of numbers, nastier germs (bred by crowding and proximity to domestic animals), more efficient organisation (required to keep order in larger villages) and superior weapons (necessary to settle constant quarrels) steadily dispossessed the hunters, who either took up farming in their own right or ran away.
The agricultural cores developed increasingly complex institutions as they expanded. Within 3-4,000 years of the start of farming (that is, by 3500 bc in Southwest Asia, 2500 bc in the Indus Valley, 1900 bc in China, 1500 bc in Mesoamerica and 1000 bc in the Andes) the first cities and states were taking shape. Within another few centuries, most had bureaucrats keeping written records and by 2,000 years ago a continuous band of empires, with populations in the tens of millions, stretched from the Mediterranean to China. By then imperialists and traders had exported agriculture, cities and writing beyond the lucky latitudes as far afield as cold, rainy Britain in the northwest and hot, humid Cambodia in the southeast. These great empires – the Han in the East, the Mauryan in India, the Parthian in Iran and Iraq and the Roman further west – had many similarities; but the biggest, richest and grandest by far was Rome, the descendant of Eurasia’s original, westernmost agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks.
Geography explains why farming first appeared towards the western end of the Old World’s lucky latitudes; and, if the West had simply held on to the early lead that nature’s unfairness had given it, geography would be the obvious explanation for why the West now dominates the world.
But that is not what actually happened. The West has not always been the richest, most powerful and most sophisticated part of the world during the last ten millennia. For more than 1,000 years, from at least 600 to 1700 ad, these superlatives applied to China, not the West.
After the fall of the Roman and Han empires in the early-to-mid first millennium ad, China was reunited into a single empire while the West remained divided between smaller states and invading Arabs. By 700, China’s capital at Chang’an had probably a million residents and Chinese literature was enjoying a golden age. Woodblock printing presses churned out millions of books, paid for with the world’s first paper money (invented in the 10th century). By 1000 an economic revolution had joined the cultural explosion: 11th-century China produced almost as much iron each year as the whole of Europe would be doing in 1700, on the eve of its Industrial Revolution. Chinese ironmasters produced so much, in fact, that they clear-cut entire forests to feed their forges, and – six centuries ahead of the West – learned to smelt their ores with coke.
For centuries, Chinese wealth and power dwarfed the West’s. Between 1405 and 1433, while little Portuguese caravels tentatively nosed down Africa’s west coast, Chinese emperors dispatched gigantic fleets across the Indian Ocean under the leadership of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (who, according to legend, was nearly three metres tall and 230 cm around the belly). Zheng’s flagship was on the same scale as its skipper. At 80 metres long, it was the largest wooden ship ever built. When Columbus set sail in 1492, his own flagship was shorter than Zheng’s mainmast and barely twice as long as the big man’s rudder. Columbus led three ships and 90 sailors; Zheng led 300 ships and 27,870 sailors. His fleet extracted tribute from the cities of India, visited Mecca and even reached Kenya, where today Chinese archaeologists are diving to locate wrecks of Zheng’s ships.
The power of place
The glories of medieval China seem, on the face of it, to disprove any geographical explanation for why the West now rules. After all, geography has not changed very much in the last 500 years.
Or maybe it has. Geography shapes history, but not in straightforward ways. Geography does determine why societies in some parts of the world develop so much faster than others; but, at the same time, the level to which societies have developed determines what geography means.
Take, once again, the example of Britain, sticking out from Eurasia into the cold Atlantic Ocean. Four thousand years ago, Britain was far from the centres of action in the Nile, Indus and Yellow River valleys, where farming had been established for millennia, great cities had grown up and labourers by the thousand broke their backs to immortalise divine kings with pyramids and palaces. Distant Britain had few of these things, which spread only slowly from the Mediterranean core to the Atlantic periphery. Geography made Britain backward.
But, if we fast-forward to 400 years ago, the same geography that had once made Britain backward now gave the island nation wealth and power. Britain had been drawn into a vastly expanded and more developed core, which now had ships that could reliably cross oceans and guns that could shoot the people on the other side. Sticking out into the Atlantic, such a huge disadvantage 4,000 years ago, became a huge plus from the 17th century.
The first sailors to the Americas were Italians (Christopher Columbus was from Genoa; the famous ‘British’ explorer John Cabot, who reached Newfoundland in 1497, actually grew up as Giovanni Caboto, in Florence). They were soon shoved aside by the Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch – not because the Atlantic littoral produced bolder or smarter adventurers than the Mediterranean, but simply because Western Europe was closer to America.
Given time, the 15th century’s greatest sailors – the Chinese – would surely have discovered and colonised America too (in 2009 the Princess Taiping, a replica of a 15th-century junk, came within 20 miles of completing a Taiwan–San Francisco round trip, only to collide with a freight ship within sight of home). But in much the same way that geography had made it easier for people in the Hilly Flanks to domesticate plants and animals than for people in other parts of the world, it now again stacked the odds in the West’s favour. The trip from England to New England was only half as far as that from China to California. For thousands of years this geographical fact had been unimportant, since there were no ocean-going ships. But by 1600 it had become the decisive fact. The meaning of geography had changed.
This was just the beginning of the changes. In the 17th century a new kind of economy took shape, centred around the North Atlantic, generating massive profits and driving up wages in north-west Europe by exploiting the geographical differences round its shores. In the process, it enormously increased the rewards for anyone who could explain how the winds and tides worked, or measure and count in better ways, or make sense of the secrets of physics, chemistry and biology. Not surprisingly, Europeans began thinking about the world in new ways, setting off a scientific revolution; they then applied its insights to the societies they lived in, in what we now call the Enlightenment. Newton and Descartes were geniuses, but so too were Chinese scholars like Gu Yanwu (1613-82) and Dai Zhen (1724-77), who also spent lifetimes studying nature. It was just that geography thrust new questions on Newton and Descartes.
Westerners answered their new questions, only to find that the answers led to still newer questions. By 1800 the combination of science and the Atlantic economy created incentives and opportunities for entrepreneurs to mechanise production and tap into the power of fossil fuels. This began in Britain, where geography conspired to make these things easier than anywhere else; and the energy windfall provided by fossil fuel quickly translated into a population explosion, rising living standards and massive military power. All barriers crumbled. British warships forced China to open to western trade in 1842; Americans did the same in Japan 11 years later. The age of western rule had arrived.
The lessons of history
So what do we learn from all this history? Two main things, I think. First, since people are all much the same, it is our shared biology which explains humanity’s great upward leaps in wealth, productivity and power across the last 10,000 years; and, second, that it is geography which explains why one part of world – the nations we conventionally call ‘the West’ – now dominates the rest.
Geography determined that when the world warmed up at the end of the Ice Age a band of lucky latitudes stretching across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China developed agriculture earlier than other parts of the world and then went on to be the first to invent cities, states and empires. But as social development increased, it changed what geography meant and the centres of power and wealth shifted around within these lucky latitudes. Until about ad 500 the Western end of Eurasia hung on to its early lead, but after the fall of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty the centre of gravity moved eastward to China, where it stayed for more than a millennium. Only around 1700 did it shift westward again, largely due to inventions – guns, compasses, ocean-going ships – which were originally pioneered in the East but which, thanks to geography, proved more useful in the West. Westerners then created an Atlantic economy which raised profound new questions about how the world worked, pushing westerners into a Scientific Revolution, an Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, the West dominated the globe.
But history did not end there. The same laws of geography continued operating. By 1900 the British-dominated global economy had drawn in the vast resources of North America, converting the USA from a rather backward periphery into a new global core. The process continued in the 20th century, as the American-dominated global economy drew in the resources of Asia, turning first Japan, then the ‘Asian Tigers’ and eventually China and India into major players.
Extrapolating from these historical patterns, we can make some predictions. If the processes of change continue across the 21st century at the same rate as in the 20th century, the economies of the East will overtake those of the West by 2100. But if the rate of change keeps accelerating – as it has done constantly since the 15th century – we can expect eastern global dominance as soon as 2050.
An age of rapid change
It all seems very clear – except for one niggling detail. The past shows that, while geography shapes the development of societies, development also shapes what geography means; and all the signs are that in the 21st century the meanings of geography are changing faster than ever. Geography is, we might even say, losing meaning. The world is shrinking and the greatest challenges we face – nuclear weapons, climate change, mass migration, epidemics, food and water supply – are all global problems. Perhaps the real lesson of history is that by the time the East overtakes the West, the question of why the West rules may have ceased to matter very much.
Ian Morris is Willard Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and the Archaeology Center at Stanford University and author of Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future (Profile, 2010).
A Biography of Cleopatra
Sounds interesting.
'Cleopatra: A Life’
By STACY SCHIFF
Reviewed by KATHRYN HARRISON
Papyri crumble away. What remains of her home is 20 feet underwater. She died before Jesus was born. Her first biographers never met her, and she deliberately hid her real self behind vulgar display. A cautious writer would never consider her as a subject. Stacy Schiff, however, has risen to the bait, with deserved confidence. “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” and “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” demonstrated her mastery of the form. “The Great Improvisation,” Schiff’s analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris, revealed a different genius: the intellectual stamina required to untangle the endlessly tricky snarls created by the intersection of human personalities and international relations.
“Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails. Although it’s not Schiff’s purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to “restore” Cleopatra — to see her at all — one must strip away an “encrusted myth” created by those for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Lucan, Appian, Josephus, Dio, Suetonius, Plutarch — the poets, historians and biographers who initially depicted Cleopatra were mostly Roman and all male, writing, for the most part, a century or more after her death with the intent to portray her reign as little more than a sustained striptease.
And although Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the known world and Egypt an ancient pioneer of gender equality, the country had “no fine historian” to counter the agendas of those for whom “impugning independent-minded women was a subspecialty.” As Schiff observes, Cleopatra may boast “one of the busiest afterlives in history,” including incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor,” but the single piece of documentary evidence that might be traced to her own hand is “perhaps and at most, one written word” (translated as “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). The woman left no primary sources.
Born in 69 B.C., Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at 18. As childhood was not a subject of great interest to the ancients, Schiff explains, “players tended to emerge fully formed” into the public consciousness, their recorded lives beginning when they first influenced history. To distract the present-day reader from the absence of her subject’s early years, Schiff neatly draws our attention to a different, albeit geographic, femme fatale — Alexandria. Balanced on the sparkling Mediterranean coast, with a parade-ready colonnade running the length of the city and mechanical marvels like hydraulic lifts, coin-operated machines and statues with flickering eyes, Egypt’s capital made Rome look like the “provincial backwater” it was. Schiff’s rendering of the city is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library.
When Cleopatra came to power it was, in accordance with her father’s will, as co-ruler with her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy, to whom she was wed. Probably her parents were also full siblings. The Egyptian practice of incest among royals was adopted by her Macedonian forebears, who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. But Cleopatra had no more intention of consummating a pro forma marriage than she did of sharing power with a little boy. Educated rigorously with an eye to her future rule, she’d paid careful attention to her father’s missteps as well as his triumphs. To keep her crown required Rome’s allegiance, which she captured in 48 B.C., swiftly and with the flair and ingenuity for which she would be remembered.
Goaded into exile as a result of a failed attempt to oust Ptolemy and his advisers, Cleopatra, 21, had herself stuffed into a sturdy sack, smuggled back into her own palace, and presented thus to Julius Caesar, who, taking advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval, had installed himself in the capital. While even her detractors agree, grudgingly, that Cleopatra was blessed with megawatt charisma as well as a formidable intelligence — she spoke nine languages — there is no record of how she persuaded Caesar to support her hegemony rather than making Egypt a province of Rome, and “no convincing political explanation” for his remaining with her in Alexandria for months while his own empire languished. We do know that when he left, Cleopatra was pregnant. Clearly a seduction had been accomplished, and she had far the most to gain from it.
To discover what truths remain after two millenniums, Schiff must consider her limited and inconsistent sources through the lenses of anthropology, archaeology and psychology, revealing a ruler who, centuries before those disciplines had been invented, used a similar set of tools to consolidate and maximize the power she inherited. What Schiff describes as Cleopatra’s ability “to slide effortlessly from one idiom to another” depended on what was in fact an astute and arduous campaign to secure the allegiance of a people whose religion and culture she borrowed to suit her own ends. Detractors misrepresented her use of jaw-droppingly over-the-top spectacle as proof of decadence rather than the art of a political visionary. From the beginning of her reign, the young queen had manipulated her largely illiterate populace by staging elaborate productions that underscored and cemented the idea of her divinity and her therefore incontestable rule.
Gliding up the Nile, having styled herself as Isis, Cleopatra presented Caesar to “cheering crowds” agog at the gigantic royal barge embedded with gold and ivory and bearing colonnades and 18-foot gilded statues. For as long as nine weeks Cleopatra displayed herself and her alpha mate as “the earthly visitation of two living gods.” And her auspiciously timed pregnancy allowed her to advertise the fertility of their union. When her child was born, she named him Caesarion and, in a further reworking of the myth she inherited, installed “little Caesar” as her co-ruler after his father’s assassination in 44 B.C. Caesar fit neatly into the role of Isis’s partner, Osiris. The supreme male divinity was murdered by enemies who spared his “young male heir and a devoted quick-thinking consort.” As Schiff dryly observes, “the Ides of March handily buttressed the tale.”
Egypt had the wealth to underwrite Roman wars; Cleopatra needed Roman clout to keep her throne; it had long been Rome’s intent to annex Egypt. In 41 B.C., Mark Antony, intending to learn where Cleopatra’s post-Caesar loyalties lay, summoned her to Tarsus. Fluent in pantheons other than Egypt’s, Cleopatra there descended as Venus, with an entourage befitting the goddess of love. Her silver-oared barge had purple sails and an orchestra of lyres, flutes and pipes, everything perfumed by “countless incense offerings.” Fair maidens dressed as nymphs and graces worked the ropes while beautiful cupids fanned the queen under her golden canopy. The “blinding explosion of color, sound and smell” captivated another gaping multitude, and the equally astonished Mark Antony followed Cleopatra back to Alexandria. Again using biology to shape destiny, she promptly bore him a son and a daughter, and then another son; she and her lover remained together for the better part of a decade. Death didn’t part so much as bind them together indefinitely, with tandem suicides concluding their biographies on a note of high drama and guaranteeing the staying power of a romance that had held their contemporaries in thrall.
Cleopatra mythologized herself before anyone else had the chance. Roman contemporaries misread the pageants she acted out; early biographers were biased, xenophobic, politically motivated and sometimes sensationalistic, writing for an audience that expected to be dazzled by intrigues reflecting its assumptions. It’s dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff’s writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.
'Cleopatra: A Life’
By STACY SCHIFF
Reviewed by KATHRYN HARRISON
Papyri crumble away. What remains of her home is 20 feet underwater. She died before Jesus was born. Her first biographers never met her, and she deliberately hid her real self behind vulgar display. A cautious writer would never consider her as a subject. Stacy Schiff, however, has risen to the bait, with deserved confidence. “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” and “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)” demonstrated her mastery of the form. “The Great Improvisation,” Schiff’s analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s years in Paris, revealed a different genius: the intellectual stamina required to untangle the endlessly tricky snarls created by the intersection of human personalities and international relations.
“Mostly,” Schiff says of “Cleopatra: A Life,” “I have restored context.” The claim stops sounding humble when we understand what it entails. Although it’s not Schiff’s purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to “restore” Cleopatra — to see her at all — one must strip away an “encrusted myth” created by those for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Lucan, Appian, Josephus, Dio, Suetonius, Plutarch — the poets, historians and biographers who initially depicted Cleopatra were mostly Roman and all male, writing, for the most part, a century or more after her death with the intent to portray her reign as little more than a sustained striptease.
And although Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the known world and Egypt an ancient pioneer of gender equality, the country had “no fine historian” to counter the agendas of those for whom “impugning independent-minded women was a subspecialty.” As Schiff observes, Cleopatra may boast “one of the busiest afterlives in history,” including incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor,” but the single piece of documentary evidence that might be traced to her own hand is “perhaps and at most, one written word” (translated as “Let it be done,” with which she or her scribe signed off on a decree). The woman left no primary sources.
Born in 69 B.C., Cleopatra ascended the throne of Egypt at 18. As childhood was not a subject of great interest to the ancients, Schiff explains, “players tended to emerge fully formed” into the public consciousness, their recorded lives beginning when they first influenced history. To distract the present-day reader from the absence of her subject’s early years, Schiff neatly draws our attention to a different, albeit geographic, femme fatale — Alexandria. Balanced on the sparkling Mediterranean coast, with a parade-ready colonnade running the length of the city and mechanical marvels like hydraulic lifts, coin-operated machines and statues with flickering eyes, Egypt’s capital made Rome look like the “provincial backwater” it was. Schiff’s rendering of the city is so juicy and cinematic it leaves one with the sense of having visited a hopped-up ancient Las Vegas, with a busy harbor and a really good library.
When Cleopatra came to power it was, in accordance with her father’s will, as co-ruler with her 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy, to whom she was wed. Probably her parents were also full siblings. The Egyptian practice of incest among royals was adopted by her Macedonian forebears, who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. But Cleopatra had no more intention of consummating a pro forma marriage than she did of sharing power with a little boy. Educated rigorously with an eye to her future rule, she’d paid careful attention to her father’s missteps as well as his triumphs. To keep her crown required Rome’s allegiance, which she captured in 48 B.C., swiftly and with the flair and ingenuity for which she would be remembered.
Goaded into exile as a result of a failed attempt to oust Ptolemy and his advisers, Cleopatra, 21, had herself stuffed into a sturdy sack, smuggled back into her own palace, and presented thus to Julius Caesar, who, taking advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval, had installed himself in the capital. While even her detractors agree, grudgingly, that Cleopatra was blessed with megawatt charisma as well as a formidable intelligence — she spoke nine languages — there is no record of how she persuaded Caesar to support her hegemony rather than making Egypt a province of Rome, and “no convincing political explanation” for his remaining with her in Alexandria for months while his own empire languished. We do know that when he left, Cleopatra was pregnant. Clearly a seduction had been accomplished, and she had far the most to gain from it.
To discover what truths remain after two millenniums, Schiff must consider her limited and inconsistent sources through the lenses of anthropology, archaeology and psychology, revealing a ruler who, centuries before those disciplines had been invented, used a similar set of tools to consolidate and maximize the power she inherited. What Schiff describes as Cleopatra’s ability “to slide effortlessly from one idiom to another” depended on what was in fact an astute and arduous campaign to secure the allegiance of a people whose religion and culture she borrowed to suit her own ends. Detractors misrepresented her use of jaw-droppingly over-the-top spectacle as proof of decadence rather than the art of a political visionary. From the beginning of her reign, the young queen had manipulated her largely illiterate populace by staging elaborate productions that underscored and cemented the idea of her divinity and her therefore incontestable rule.
Gliding up the Nile, having styled herself as Isis, Cleopatra presented Caesar to “cheering crowds” agog at the gigantic royal barge embedded with gold and ivory and bearing colonnades and 18-foot gilded statues. For as long as nine weeks Cleopatra displayed herself and her alpha mate as “the earthly visitation of two living gods.” And her auspiciously timed pregnancy allowed her to advertise the fertility of their union. When her child was born, she named him Caesarion and, in a further reworking of the myth she inherited, installed “little Caesar” as her co-ruler after his father’s assassination in 44 B.C. Caesar fit neatly into the role of Isis’s partner, Osiris. The supreme male divinity was murdered by enemies who spared his “young male heir and a devoted quick-thinking consort.” As Schiff dryly observes, “the Ides of March handily buttressed the tale.”
Egypt had the wealth to underwrite Roman wars; Cleopatra needed Roman clout to keep her throne; it had long been Rome’s intent to annex Egypt. In 41 B.C., Mark Antony, intending to learn where Cleopatra’s post-Caesar loyalties lay, summoned her to Tarsus. Fluent in pantheons other than Egypt’s, Cleopatra there descended as Venus, with an entourage befitting the goddess of love. Her silver-oared barge had purple sails and an orchestra of lyres, flutes and pipes, everything perfumed by “countless incense offerings.” Fair maidens dressed as nymphs and graces worked the ropes while beautiful cupids fanned the queen under her golden canopy. The “blinding explosion of color, sound and smell” captivated another gaping multitude, and the equally astonished Mark Antony followed Cleopatra back to Alexandria. Again using biology to shape destiny, she promptly bore him a son and a daughter, and then another son; she and her lover remained together for the better part of a decade. Death didn’t part so much as bind them together indefinitely, with tandem suicides concluding their biographies on a note of high drama and guaranteeing the staying power of a romance that had held their contemporaries in thrall.
Cleopatra mythologized herself before anyone else had the chance. Roman contemporaries misread the pageants she acted out; early biographers were biased, xenophobic, politically motivated and sometimes sensationalistic, writing for an audience that expected to be dazzled by intrigues reflecting its assumptions. It’s dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff’s writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.
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