Civilization: Is the West History? (2011) s01e06 Episode Script

1
For the last 500 years, Western
civilization has dominated the world.
The West taught the rest
its way of doing business,
its scientific method
its law and politics
and its way of dressing.
In this series,
I'm Iooking at the six unique factors,
I'm caIIing them the kiIIer appIications,
that ensured that the West
ruIed over the rest.
And I'm asking, if we Iose
our monopoIy on those kiIIer apps,
couId the rest catch up with the West?
lt wouldn't be the first time in history
the ascendancy of Western civilization
has been threatened.
ln his
DecIine And FaII Of The Roman Empire,
the historian Edward Gibbon
gave a vivid account
of the last time the West
collapsed - 1,600 years ago.
Today, many of us fear we're Iiving
through a kind of nightmare sequeI,
Decline And Fall Revisited.
FinanciaIIy and cIimaticaIIy,
signs of impending disaster
seem to be aII around us.
Is this the end of Western civiIization
aII over again?
So far, l've explored
five of the killer apps
that gave the West
its advantage over the rest
for the better part
of the past half millennium.
But l've saved a key killer app
until last.
Edward Gibbon's most radicaI
and contentious argument
was that Christianity was a fataI soIvent
of the first version
of Western civiIization.
What a rich irony, then,
that a variant of Christianity
provided the sixth kiIIer appIication
for Western civiIization mark II.
It was a variant that arose
in 16th-century Europe -
Protestantism and the work ethic,
to which it famousIy gave its name.
The Protestant work ethic was critical
to the success of Western civilization.
But the big question today is,
have we lost it
just at the time
when others have found it?
(BIRDSONG)
(CHURCH BELLS)
lt was one of the great mysteries
of Western civilization.
Why was it, if you were a wealthy European
industrialist in the 1 9th century,
you would also
most likely be a Protestant?
ln the 1 6th century, the Reformation
had led many north European states
to break away
from the Roman Catholic Church.
At the same time, there had been
a shift of economic power
from Catholic countries
like ltaly and Spain
towards Protestant countries
like England and Germany.
It seemed as if there was
some kind of connection
between the content of your faith,
the form of your worship
and your economic fortunes.
The question was,
what was it about Protestantism
that made peopIe not onIy work harder,
but save and accumuIate capitaI?
Just why was Protestantism
such an integraI part
of Western civiIization's success story?
WeII, the man who came up
with the best answer to that question
was a depressive German professor,
and in the process he gave socioIogy
perhaps its most enduring catch phrase,
the Protestant work ethic.
Max Weber was a precocious youth.
He grew up here in Erfurt,
one of the great strongholds
of the German Reformation.
By the age of 1 4,
Weber was writing letters
studded with references to classical
authors like Homer, Virgil and Cicero.
But the older he got, the more
it was religion that interested him.
What it was about the Reformation,
Weber wondered,
that had made the north of Europe
more capitalism-friendly than the south?
(BELLS RING OUT)
It took a trip way out West
to give Weber the reaI key
to the West's unique workahoIic ethic.
ln 1 904, Weber travelled here
to St Louis, Missouri,
to attend the Congress of Arts
and Sciences at the World's Fair.
This is the Iast surviving paviIion
of the WorId's Fair.
And you can see why Weber
was bIown away when he came here.
There were IiteraIIy dozens
of these huge buiIdings
scattered aII over a 200-acre site,
and each one was jam-packed with the
Iatest products of the Age of Industry.
It was a cornucopia
of American capitaIism.
Weber was dazzled by the shining lights
of the Palace of Electricity.
The alternating-current king,
Thomas Edison himself, was on hand,
the personification
of American entrepreneurship.
St Louis was brimming
with marvels of modern technology,
from telephones to titanic steel plates
to motion pictures.
The amazing thing about the 1904 St Louis
WorId's Fair wasn't just its size,
it was the fact that inside every singIe
one of these huge purpose-buiIt paviIions
there was something the pubIic
was actuaIIy wiIIing to pay to see.
This thing made a profit.
What couId possibIy expIain
the dynamism of this society,
which made even industriaI Germany
seem stoIid and staid by comparison?
Almost manically restless,
Weber rushed around the United States
in search of an answer.
Travelling by train
from St Louis to Oklahoma,
through small Missouri towns
like Bourbon and Cuba
Weber finally got it.
(BELL RINGS)
This is the IittIe town
of St James, Missouri,
about 100 miIes west of St Louis,
and one of thousands of settIements
that sprang up aIong the raiIroads
that spearheaded
the great American thrust westwards.
Now, when Max Weber came here
about a century ago,
he couIdn't heIp being struck
by the extraordinary number
of churches there were
of every conceivabIe denomination.
Wherever Weber Iooked,
there seemed to be a kind of hoIy aIIiance
between economic growth
and the Protestant faith.
When Weber returned
to his study in Heidelberg,
he wrote the second part
of his seminal two-part essay
The Protestant Ethic
And The Spirit of CapitaIism.
ln it, he identified
the key component of Protestantism
that fostered economic success.
Whereas other reIigions associated
hoIiness with a renunciation of the worId,
monks in cIoisters and hermits in caves,
the Protestant sects were different.
For them,
thrift and industry couId be expressions
of a new kind of hard-working hoIiness.
(ORGAN MUSIC)
''For most of history, men had worked to
live, but the Protestants lived to work. ''
And this work ethic, Weber argued,
was the key to the spirit of capitalism.
His core argument was
that Protestants worked hard
out of a kind of godIy caIIing.
They were working, accumuIating capitaI
and deferring consumption,
in order to prove their own godIiness.
ln earlier programmes, we saw
how Confucianism has been blamed
for lmperial China's failure
to have an industrial revolution.
We saw how the power of the clergy
snuffed out any chance of a scientific
revolution in the lslamic world.
And we saw how Protestant North America
pulled ahead of Catholic South America.
But the biggest contribution of religion
to the history of Western civilization
was this.
Protestantism made the West work.
The question is,
has part of the West today
lost both religion
and the work ethic that went with it?
The Protestant ethic
seemed to Max Weber to be the key
to the spirit of Western capitalism,
one of the things that set the West apart
from the other-worldly
and often indolent Orient.
For a long time,
the theory seemed to hold good.
Through a mixture of hard work and thrift,
the Protestant societies
of the North and West Atlantic
achieved the most rapid
economic growth in history.
But today there's a schism
at the heart of Christendom.
Europeans these days work a whole lot less
than their American counterparts.
And they don't only work less,
they pray less.
ln England, for example,
fewer than 2% of the population
now attends a Church of England service
on a typical Sunday.
lt's a real anomaly in a world
where, everywhere else, religious faith
is not just strong but growing.
So, just who killed
Christianity in Europe?
Was it, as Weber himself predicted,
that materialism corrupted
the original austerity of the Protestants?
Was it the legacy of Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution,
which successfully supplanted
the Biblical story of divine creation?
Or could it be that European Christianity
was killed by selfishness itself,
the chronic egotism of modern culture?
Was the murderer of Europe's Protestant
work ethic none other than this man,
the Viennese psychotherapist
Sigmund Freud?
(SIGHS) I don't know what it is
but I'm I'm reaIIy depressed.
I I'm haunted by a fear of my own death.
And by guiIt. TerribIe guiIt.
GuiIt aboutabout my parents,
about my wife, about my kids.
I don't know what I'm gonna do.
(SIGHS) My anaIyst thinks
it couId be my mother.
I mean she's not Jewish but
but she couId be.
But I think it's more IikeIy my father,
this insane Protestant work ethic.
AII I ever got aII my Iife
was, ''Work, more work.''
Every probIem, the same soIution.
''Do some more work.''
But that's enough about me.
TeII me, Dr Freud,
what do you think my probIem is?
ln The Future Of An IIIusion,
the founding father of psychoanalysis
came up with a different story
from Max Weber's.
For Freud,
religion wasn't the driving force
behind the achievements
of Western civilization.
lnstead, it was essentially an illusion
a universal neurosis
devised by civilization to prevent people
from giving way to their basic instincts.
ln particular, their sexual desires
and violent, destructive impulses.
Freud's point was this - if you took away
the prohibitions of reIigion,
then men wouId feeI free to sIeep with any
woman they wanted whenever they wanted.
They'd feeI free to kiII their rivaIs
and grab their property.
The whoIe point about reIigion
was that it prohibited
sexuaI promiscuity and vioIence.
Was Freud saying that religion was
a necessary prop for a civilized society?
Or was he siding with those who felt their
innermost urges were being thwarted,
repressed by superstitious mumbo jumbo?
Perhaps it was Freud's theories,
with their negative view of repression
and their explicit sympathy
with the erotic impulse,
that persuaded Europeans to exit
the churches and enter the sex shops.
(SIRENS)
For many people, this is what Western
civilization has now been reduced to -
a spiritually vacuous celebration
of the pleasures of the flesh.
Maybe, in short,
it was porn that killed God in Europe.
The trouble with all these theories
about the death of Protestantism
is that they explain everything
about Europe's de-Christianization
but nothing whatsoever
about America's continued Christian faith.
You see,
Americans have experienced just the same
social and cultural changes as Europeans.
They've become richer.
Their knowledge of science has increased.
And they're even more into psychoanalysis
and pornography than Europeans.
But whiIe Christianity in Europe
is moribund,
here in the United States it's thriving.
Indeed by some measures,
Jesus and Christianity
are bigger in America today
than they were 50 years ago,
and here's the evidence.
Thousands of worshippers piIing
into church on a Sunday morning,
the way the EngIish these days
piIe into shopping maIIs.
And, no, this is a church
not a shopping maII.
So, how can we explain the fact
that Western civilization
appears to have split in two?
MAN: And good morning!
To the East a godless Europe.
To the West a God-fearing America.
The best answer can be found here
in Springfield, Missouri,
birthplace of the legendary highway
linking Chicago and California, Route 66.
Max Weber passed through here
on his road trip back in 1 904.
lf he was impressed by the diversity
of Protestant sects 1 00 years ago,
he'd be astonished today.
Now it's not your kicks you get
on Route 66, it's your crucifix.
Springfield has roughly one church
for every 1,000 citizens.
There are 1 22 Baptist churches
36 Methodist chapels,
25 Churches of Christ
and 1 5 Churches of God.
ln all, some 400
Christian places of worship.
And as Weber pointed out, these
churches are involved in a competition
that today is just as hot as that
between car lots or fast-food joints.
And this is it, the winner
in the SpringfieId battIe of the churches.
It's the James River AssembIy,
and it's not onIy the biggest church
in SpringfieId,
it's one of the biggest
in the whoIe of the United States.
- (BAND PLAYS)
- You are awesome and you are great.
So, can we just worship the Lord?
WouId you Iift your hands and just begin
to praise him in your own words?
About how good and how great he is?
On a Sunday, they pack around
7,000 believers into James River Assembly.
lts pastor John Lindell certainly believes
in the potent mix of work and religion.
You might think you're aII aIone,
but if you Iove God, he's right there
with you, and he's your stronghoId.
So, Max Weber came to these parts
aImost exactIy 100 years ago
and was struck by the reIationship between
these very diverse, vibrant churches
competing with one another,
and economic Iife, which seemed to be
equaIIy more vibrant than inin Europe.
Do you see there as being a Iink between
the spirituaI and the economic in America?
AbsoIuteIy, I mean,
and I think it's as simpIe as this.
That when awhen a person
has had their Iife touched by God,
immediateIy there's gonna be an optimism,
because the BibIe says,
if God be for us, who couId be against us.
There's aIso gonna be a sense of purpose,
of something beyond myseIf,
and work itseIf becomes
a means of gIorifying God,
because the BibIe says
you're not working for youryour master,
you're working for the Lord.
So, there's no question
when somebody is serving God,
their quaIity of Iife
and their focus in Iife reaIIy changes.
And I think
that contributes to prosperity.
So, the Protestant ethic is aIive and weII
and Iiving in SpringfieId, Missouri?
I think it is.
Lord, we praise you! You're awesome!
Ask yourseIf
what is the singIe biggest difference
between reIigion in America
and reIigion in Europe.
I think the answer is that the Reformation
in Europe ended up being nationaIised,
and the resuIt was the creation
of state monopoIy churches
Iike the Church of EngIand.
But here in the United States
they maintained
the separation of Church and state,
and the resuIt was competition
between muItipIe churches.
And that may be the real reason for
the strange death of religion in Europe.
ln religion as in business,
state monopolies are inefficient.
There's only one problem with turning
religion into a form of consumption.
Americans have drifted
a very long way away
from Max Weber's version
of the Protestant ethic,
in which deferred gratification went
hand in hand with capital accumulation.
We've just lived through an experiment,
capitalism without saving.
And it didn't turn out too well, did it?
In the United States during the housing
bubbIe, the savings rate feII to zero
and totaI debt exceeded
three-and-a-haIf times nationaI income.
The Protestant ethic without thrift turned
out to be a recipe for financiaI meItdown.
But that isn't true everywhere.
In parts of the worId that seek to emuIate
the American economic miracIe,
retaiI reIigion and feeI-good faith
have retained the Protestant ethic.
Yup, I'm taIking about Asia.
According to a recent survey,
there are now around 40 million
Protestant Christians in China,
compared with barely
half a million in 1 949.
Some estimates put the maximum
even higher, at 7 5 or 1 1 0 million.
This is the Nanjing Amity
Printing Company,
the biggest manufacturer of bibIes
in the entire worId.
Since 1986, they've produced
70 miIIion of the things,
50 miIIion of them in Mandarin
and other Chinese diaIects.
(AMERICAN ACCENT) In the beginning was
the word. In the end there was this pIace.
Today there may actually be
more practising Christians in China
than in Europe.
(# CONGREGATION: Amazing Grace)
That's an amazing fact,
considering how much resistance
there's been throughout Chinese history
to the spread of Christianity.
ln programme one of this series,
l argued that after the 1 4th century,
China's wealth and power
were fatally undermined
because the Chinese failed to grasp
the killer app of competition.
But that wasn't the onIy app
they Iacked for haIf a miIIennium.
The other was the Protestant work ethic.
The historical failure of Protestantism
to take root in China
is actually something of a puzzle.
lt wasn't as if Westerners didn't try
to give the Chinese the good news.
In the 19th century,
as you can see from this amazing map,
Western missionary societies
took China by storm,
sending IiteraIIy hundreds
of young men and women
to try to convert
the worId's most popuIous nation.
Many of them ended up here in Wenzhou,
a city just to the south of Shanghai,
as trailblazers
for the China lnland Mission.
The problem was that,
for all their hard work,
the missionaries' time in China
turned out to be not a breakthrough
but nearly a breakdown of Christianity.
And that was due to one convert
who went very badly off-message.
His name was Hong Xiuquan.
Indeed, it was Hong Xiuquan
who was responsibIe
for the biggest and bIoodiest rebeIIion
in aII Chinese history
a confIict that cIaimed the Iives
of twice as many peopIe
as died on aII sides
in the whoIe of the First Word War.
ln 1 836, it seemed that Hong was just one
of many new missionary society converts.
But while recovering from a nervous
breakdown, he had a mystical vision
in which he was revealed to be
the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
God had instructed him
to rid China of Confucianism
that inward-looking philosophy
which saw competition and trade
as pernicious foreign imports.
To achieve this,
Hong created a quasi-Christian
society of God Worshippers
that attracted the support
of tens of millions of Chinese.
Hong procIaimed himseIf the monarch
of the HeavenIy Kingdom of Great Peace,
and this was the goIden throne
on which he sat,
respIendent in yeIIow siIk,
surrounded by his princes.
In Chinese he was known
as Taiping Tianguo,
hence the name of the uprising,
the Taiping RebeIIion.
From Guangxi,
the rebels swept to Nanjing
which Hong, the self-styled
Heavenly King, made his capital.
By 1 853, his followers controlled
the vast Yangtze valley.
Between 1850 and 1864,
some 20 miIIion peopIe Iost their Iives
in centraI and southern China,
as the Taiping RebeIIion raged,
unIeashing pIague and famine in its wake.
But the rebels couldn't take
the imperial capital Beijing,
and slowly the tide turned against them.
By the time Nanjing fell
to the imperial army,
Hong was already dead of food poisoning.
Just to make sure, his cremated remains
were firedout of a cannon.
China's experiment with Christianity
had been a catastrophe.
By the end of the 19th century,
many Chinese had concIuded
that Western missionaries
were just another maIign foreign infIuence
on their country.
Time and again, in the next 50 years,
Protestantism lost out in China.
Finally, just after the 1 949
Communist Revolution,
the committed atheist Mao Tse-tung ordered
the expulsion of Christian missionaries,
all 1 0,000 of them.
Churches were closed down.
Some were turned into factories.
lt looked like the end of the line
for Protestantism in China
and, as Communism swept all before it,
for the Protestant work ethic too.
To Max Weber
and other 20-century experts, then,
the probabiIity
of a Protestantization of China
and, therefore, its industriaIization
and modernization seemed negIigibIy Iow.
As Iow in fact as the probabiIity
of a de-Christianization of Europe.
And yet that is preciseIy
what we've witnessed in our time.
lt's a development that's having profound
economic implications all over the world.
It's a funny thing -
aIthough I was brought up an atheist,
I suffer from an extreme form
of the Protestant work ethic.
No matter what my probIem is,
the soIution is aIways the same - work.
Now, for many years I feIt as if I was
part of a dying minority in Europe.
But today I find myseIf
in extremeIy good company.
The Protestant work ethic, for so Iong
one of the West's kiIIer appIications,
has come to China.
Whereas the average European or American
works less than 2,000 hours a year
the top Asian economies
average 2,300 hours.
Moreover, unlike us, the Chinese
save up to a fifth of their income.
Max Weber's idea of living to work
rather than working to live
is now an Oriental phenomenon.
And that's not all.
The fascinating thing is
that it's not just hard work and thrift
they're importing from the West.
Now they're importing Christianity too.
And not just any oId Christianity.
The seeds the British missionaries
planted 1 50 years ago
have grown
in the most extraordinary fashion.
Wenzhou has become
the Springfield, Missouri, of China.
Where before the Cultural Revolution
there were 480 churches in Wenzhou,
today there are 1,340.
And those are only the ones
officially approved by the government.
All over Wenzhou,
and increasingly all over China,
Christians also meet secretly
in their homes.
The Victorian missionaries
would be impressed.
It's Sunday, and the church is packed.
Founded in 1877 by the InIand Mission,
cIosed down during the CuIturaI RevoIution
and onIy re-opened in 1982,
this church now boasts
a congregation of more than 1 ,200.
The work ethic and Protestantism
are thriving in China.
So, it won't surprise you
that here in Wenzhou,
the most ardent Christians
tend also to be businessmen.
lt's home to a new breed of entrepreneur,
the so-called ''Boss Christians''.
Men like Hanping Zhang,
chairman of the Aihao pen company.
Once a farmer,
he opened his first factory in 1 987.
Today he employs 5,000 workers
and sells 500 million pens a year.
He's also a devout Christian.
(TRANSLATION)
Does that mean
that in Wenzhou there's an advantage,
that businessmen here are more trusted
than businessmen in other pIaces?
Marx's old jibe that religion
was the opium of the people
no longer carries much conviction here.
The richer China gets, it seems,
the more people like Zhang there are.
It's possibIe
that within the next three decades
between 20 and 30% of the entire
Chinese popuIation couId be Christians.
Now, that's a pretty amazing prospect.
Just when you thought
the worId was turning Chinese,
the Chinese turn around
and Westernise themseIves.
lt's certainly not a result
Max Weber would have anticipated.
Yet the Chinese Communist Party
recently stated
there were three requirements
for sustainable economic growth -
property rights as a foundation,
law as a safeguard,
and morality as a support.
If that sounds famiIiar, then it shouId,
because those used to be the foundations
of Western civiIization itseIf.
And I say ''used to be'' quite deIiberateIy,
because I think we've Iost faith
in those very foundations.
It's not just that the churches are empty.
We seem to doubt the vaIue
of everything that's been achieved
in the West since the Reformation.
We've Iost faith
in those kiIIer appIications
which, as we've seen in this series,
decisiveIy set the West apart
from the rest.
Capitalism has been disgraced
by the recent financial crisis
and the rampant greed of the bankers.
Science is studied by too few
of our children at school and university.
Private property rights
are continually violated by governments
with an insatiable appetite for taxing
our incomes and wasting our money.
Empire has become a dirty word,
despite the real benefits conferred on the
rest of the world by the European empires.
AII we risk being Ieft with
is a vacuous consumer society
and a reIativistic cuIture
that regards any theory,
no matter how outIandish,
as just as vaIid as whatever it was
we used to beIieve in.
The troubIe is,
as GK Chesterton famousIy said,
when men Iose their faith
they don't beIieve in nothing,
they beIieve in anything.
Today the West faces
unprecedented challenges.
The rise of China
as a new economic superpower.
(CALL TO PRAYER)
The revival of lslam not just as a faith
but as a violent political ideology.
Not to mention the environmental crisis
caused by rising population,
carbon dioxide emissions and sea levels.
How are we to contend with these threats
if we can't even believe in ourselves,
let alone in God?
For 500 years the West dominated the rest.
And it did so by depIoying
six kiIIer appIications,
six unique seIIing points
that the rest didn't have.
CapitaIism, science,
democracy, medicine,
consumerism and the work ethic.
But when I Iook at the worId today,
it's the resembIances between the West
and the rest that strike me
more than the differences.
The things that used to set the West
apart from the rest
are, quite simpIy,
no Ionger monopoIized by us.
The Chinese have got capitalism.
The lranians have got science.
The Peruvians have got democracy.
The Africans are slowly
getting modern medicine.
The Turks have got the consumer society.
The reality is that Western modes
of operation are not in decline
but are flourishing nearly everywhere.
The ''resterners'', as we might call them,
are nearly all dressing, working,
eating, travelling
and playinglike Westerners.
All the West's killer apps
have become universal.
But this carries its own dangers.
Some wouId say these apps
are now so widespread
that we risk kiIIing the pIanet itseIf.
You can certainIy beIieve that, here
in the smog-infested heartIand of China.
Environmentalists fear that
as Asia's more populous nations
embrace the Western route out of poverty,
the strain on global supplies
of energy, food and fresh water
will become unbearable.
Many peopIe Iive in dread
of the environmentaI consequences
of Westernizing the entire worId.
lf emissions of greenhouse gases
continue at their current levels,
the result could be catastrophic changes
in the Earth's climate and ocean levels.
Sceptics about climate change
should spend some time in China,
where the biggest and fastest
industrial revolution in history
is causing measurable
environmental damage.
But does global warming
really mean the end of the world?
This is the hill at Megiddo in lsrael,
the scene in the New Testament of the
final showdown between good and evil
the battle of Armageddon.
I'm not a scientist,
and it may weII be
that the Earth is going to boiI
and the sea IeveIs are going to rise,
but I can't heIp noticing that this vision
of an environmentaI apocaIypse
has a Iot in common with earIier versions
of the doomsday story.
And if you don't beIieve me,
weII, take a Iook at chapter 16
of the Book Of Revelations.
''And he gathered them together
into a Hebrew place,
''in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. ''
Get yourseIf together, puII yourseIf
together, bind yourseIf together.
''And there were voices,
and thunders and lightnings,
''and there was a great earthquake,
''such as was not seen
since men were upon the Earth. ''
The idea is this, the Lord is coming soon
and when he comes, your triaI wiII be won.
Among the visitors to Megiddo,
there's no shortage of believers in the
literal truth of that biblical prophecy.
WOMAN: When you see what aII's going on
in the worId, tsunamis and earthquake,
it's just got to be a sign
of what's coming.
- Are you scared?
- No, because I know where I'm going.
- ReaIIy?
- Uh-huh.
Some say the first trumpet
has already sounded.
Once we've heard the second,
third and fourth trumpets,
evangelical Christians believe
the United States will collapse.
When the fifth trumpet sounds,
World War lll will break out.
After that comes a demonic army
to massacre mankind
and with the seventh and final trumpet,
we'll feel the full might of God's wrath.
The idea that we're aII doomed,
that decIine is inevitabIe,
that things can onIy get worse,
is deepIy bound up
with our own sense of mortaIity.
Because we're bound to decIine and faII,
we naturaIIy feeI that the civiIizations
we Iive in shouId do so too.
People used to believe
that all great civilizations
went through a long, slow cycle
of rise, zenith, decline and fall.
That was certainly how Gibbon
thought about ancient Rome.
But in fact that isn't always the case.
This amazing pIace is a grim reminder
that no civiIization is indestructibIe,
no matter how mighty
it may appear in its own eyes.
It's aIso a reminder
that coIIapse, when it comes,
isn't necessariIy graduaI and cycIicaI.
It came suddenIy, very suddenIy,
to the Incas who buiIt Machu Picchu.
One minute, they were the masters
of aII they surveyed
from their great Andean cities.
The next, foreign invaders with gunpowder,
horses and IethaI microbes
had smashed their great empire
to smithereens.
How are the mighty faIIen.
And how fast they sometimes faII.
ls the West today heading
for a similar calamity?
l fear as much.
But it doesn't need to be.
When you hear that phrase
''Western civiIization'',
what does it make you think of?
Today it seems more important than ever
that we understand the lessons
of Western civilization's success.
That it isn't just one thing
it's a bundle.
So, the first one is competition.
lt's about political pluralism
as well as capitalism.
lt's about the freedom of thought
as well as the scientific method.
lt's about the rule of law
and property rights, as well as democracy.
Even today, the West still has more
of these killer apps than the rest.
The Chinese don't have
political competition.
The lranians don't have
freedom of conscience.
They get to vote in Venezuela
but the rule of law there is a sham.
Of course Western civilization
isn't flawless.
lt's certainly perpetrated
its share of historical misdeeds
imperialism's bouts of brutality
the banality of the consumer society
shopping till it drops.
And yet as I stand here in Shanghai,
in the smog,
I can't heIp feeIing that
Western civiIization stiII has the edge.
And the reason I think that is because
I'm free to think it and free to say it.
And it's that freedom that's most IikeIy
to unIock the human creativity
we need to soIve the worId's probIems
in the 21st century.
So, perhaps the biggest threat we face
isn't our CO2 emissions,
it's our Ioss of faith in the civiIization
we inherited from our ancestors
and we gave to the rest of the worId.