Monday, May 26, 2014

How The West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity


    Left wing college professors aren’t going to like Rodney Stark’s book. His brilliant work promotes the idea of European superiority over that of the Muslim empires, then debunks the myths about the Dark Ages. He claims that the centuries after the Roman collapse were not a time of starvation and were the catalyst for independence and self-sufficiency. Skeletons from the era reveal that Europeans were eating more meat than ever before! This was hardly the age of horror.

    One of the more humorous pieces in How the West Won is the issue of education in the post-Roman days. He talks about the “accepted fact” that there was illiteracy in the Dark Ages, and nobody doubts that, there weren’t lots of free elementary schools in 750 A.D. But was that a radical change from before? Was literacy widespread in the Roman era? Somehow I doubt the average Roman plebian sent his son to school, and if he did, who at the time would read for leisure? This was the time before printing presses, and there weren’t any newspapers or bookstores. You wouldn’t have been able to go to a stall in the market and say “a scroll of Homer’s Iliad, if you please.” As for the library of Alexandria, I doubt the average Roman or Egyptian could just walk in there and help himself to a copy of Herodotus.

    If countering the ideal of the lawless Dark Ages won’t be enough to infuriate the professors at Columbia, you should see what he does to the Muslim Empires. He debunks the ideal of Ottoman superiority, calling Suleiman the Magnificent anything but that. For proof, he simply states the facts; Suleiman’s army and navy scored a few victories than got trounced by Europe. As for the fall of Constantinople (1453), he makes clear that it was not a great conquest. The Byzantine Empire was just a city state by that point, and the Sultan’s army had cannons. Now where did he get the cannons? A Hungarian engineer built them! Muslim engineers were nowhere near the geniuses they’ve been made out to be. Furthermore, the outnumbered Greeks in the city put up a serious fight, and the Sultan lost thousands of troops. Don’t forget, his elite fighters, the Janissaries, were actually slaves stolen from Christian families!

    One of the reasons for European advances, according to Stark, was that they were more open to accepting foreign things. Europe’s nobles are stereotyped as xenophobic, but even without reading this book, you can see that they weren’t. Delft ceramics, for instance, originated in China, and tomatoes, essential to Italian cuisine, came from the Americas. The British would never have had their famous 4pm tea if they hadn’t learned of it from the Chinese, same thing with “tea cups.” Oh, and don’t forget the famous German chocolate cakes, because chocolate originated in Mexico, not the Swiss Alps. The caravel ships used by Columbus were based on Arab dhows. But the bottom line here is that the Europeans advanced on what came from Asia and the Americas. Everything flowed from China to Europe, not the other way. It wasn’t the Arab sailors that risked their lives sailing across the Atlantic. Even the conquest of the American West is cited, though I wouldn’t need to read it to believe it. The reason Custer’s men were defeated at Little Big Horn was because the Indians bought repeating Winchesters; an example of adopting new technologies and winning the game.

    To sum up, Rodney Stark trashes political correctness by stating the facts. It was Europe that provided the great engineers, mapmakers, navigators, physicians, strategists, and farmers, and if you want proof, look at the results. Did the Turks manage to conquer Europe? How come their navies never defeated their Spanish rivals? As for rights and law, it’s true that France, Spain, and England expelled the Jews, but were Muslim rulers any better? Slavery was widely practiced in Muslim countries, and when you’re a slave there isn’t much incentive to invent things.

   Even today, you can see evidence of European superiority. China has great industry to produce metals and technology, but so does Germany. The difference is that Germany does it without polluting the land.

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