Shannon Love on Western Exceptionalism

Over at Chicago Boyz, Shannon Love makes an excellent point with regard to human history that is often overlooked in discussions of development.

She writes:

Whether one looked at ancient Rome, China, Japan, the Caliphate, medieval Europe, meso-America, etc., one would see societies where the vast majority of the population lived in dire material poverty and where political power rested in the hands of a narrow and usually hereditary elite. Staggering human rights abuses like slavery and execution by torture were common practices everywhere. Justice was largely dependent on patronage and class. Mass education did not exist. Work was physically demanding, tedious and continous. Wars, plagues and famine were common, and every generation could expect to experience at least one of the three if not all three in concert. Uncivilized peoples faired even worse.

Medieval Europe was every bit as poor and cruel as the worst areas of the present day world. It was no better than, and in some ways worse, than the civilizations of its contemporaries. However, starting with the Renaissance something in Europe changed. Europe began to diverge from the "normal" human experience. Political power began to devolve to the masses. Commerce grew and with it rising material standards of living. Knowledge of the material world exploded. In the span of three-hundred years (a time span of one Chinese dynasty or a third of a Pharaohic one) European civilization became something never seen
before.

It is easy to see that poverty and oppression in the nations of the developing world occur in direct proportion to the degree in which those nations' social, political and economic systems diverge from the Western model. The Japanese succeeded by the widespread adoption of Western ideas. Their greatest disaster befell them when they tried to resurrect pre-industrial Japanese ideals in the modern context. The degree to which former colonies of the West maintained the political and legal institutions left by colonizers largely predicts their current level of prosperity and freedom. Places that were never colonized and which have no legacy of western institutions at all are even worse off.

Had the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution never occurred in Europe, the non-western world be even worse off than it is today. They would have all the material poverty and political oppression they have always had without any of the amelioration (such as vaccines and other medicines) offered by the existence of the West. People who think otherwise are engaged in childish romanticism.

Unfortunately, childish romanticism seems to be the default position in the historical profession these days. It is fashionable to minimize or denounce the western achievement, to assert the long term superiority of other traditions, to blame the existence of widespread poverty on colonialism, capitalist exploitation, or western imperialism. These fantasies are dangerous as we have seen in the spread of Islamist radicalism that seeks to restore the imagined glories of the Caliphate. There is nothing childish about al Qaeda.

Read Shannon's piece here and follow her links to other commentary on the subject.