I have long been searching for a book that adequately explains Europe’s rise to dominance in world affairs. For obvious reasons, I found genetic explanations distasteful and geographic reasons incomplete. Yet the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, colonial appropriation, and global hegemony must not have occurred purely by happenstance. Contingency had its role, but Mokyr’s book argues a unique cultural milieu that gained prominence around the sixteenth century led not only to the West’s propulsion, but, more importantly, its ability to stay on top the global stage.
Mokyr’s book is a combination of the disciplines of economics and cultural evolution. He seeks to explain why between 1500-1700 AD Europe’s material wealth grew exponentially while the rest of the world remained at just about a subsistence level economy. He suggests it was a unique culture that developed across Europe. Mokyr accepts Boyd and Richerson’s definition of culture as “a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.” Mokyr continues, “the advantage of models of cultural evolution is that they are contingent and concern ex ante probabilities rather than deterministic causal models. In other words, they force us to recognize that things could have turned out differently than they did with fairly minor changes in initial conditions or accidents along the way.” He begins his argument by claiming that knowledge is a public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable. As such, “economists suspect knowledge tends to be chronically underproduced.”
Mokyr suggests that the largest factor in Europe’s success was its encouragement of invention over tradition. “If the culture is heavily infused with respect of ancient wisdom so that any intellectual innovation is considered deviant and blasphemous, technological creativity will be similarly constrained.” It was individualism that promoted heterodox ideas that challenged boundaries and created outside the box solutions to old problems. There was a sense that the ancients did not know everything and that the classical period was not a golden age to be cherished and preserved, but a starting point of knowledge to be built upon. These were radical ideas in Europe at the time, when recently heretics were burned at the stake and non-Aristotelean and non-Ptolemaic teachings were grounds for dismissal from Oxford’s colleges.
For cultural evolution to succeed one must have variation. For good ideas to win out there must be many ideas to choose from. These ideas must be inheritable. There must be a mechanism to have them passed on and diffused, both vertically (generationally) and horizontally (geographically). There also must be a repository of shared knowledge, since no individual brain could hope to master and remember all the group learning of human society. In all societies, there is a small leadership of cultural entrepreneurs who synergize and transform latent and prevailing thoughts. They do not make up ideas ex novo, but take the zeitgeist of the day, reshape it, and transform the cultural milieu. Europe succeeded, in large part, because it was culturally homogenous while politically diffuse. “This unity derived from both Europe’s classical heritage and widespread use of Latin as the lingua franca of intellectuals, and the Christian Church.” However, the small nation states that warred for political and religious reasons created small arenas where ideas could be tested against one another. Successful ideas were copied regardless of the religious affiliation of the inventor, because rulers could not afford to get behind in the technological arms race. Heretics could easily escape across borders, where they were often welcomed as the enemy of one’s enemy and given patronage and protection. There they could smuggle back innovations through the newly ubiquitous printing press.
Europe created a competition for ideas, but also an atmosphere where both propositional and practical knowledge flourished and were combined and reinterpreted. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers interacted with engineers, explorers, cartographers, and farmers to create inventions that helped the lives of everyday man, while also reconceptualizing the metaphysical reality of humanity. The distinctions between intellectuals and artisans blurred. That combination was powerful. Christianity encouraged a homocentric worldview where nature was expected to bend to the will of man. Science, in the puritanical view, became the study of God’s creation and inventions, discoveries, and technical improvements were not seen as heretical, but the blessings of God. “The ideal life was one that efficiently deployed one’s ability for personal advantage and public service and glorified God by maximizing one’s material resources.” It was Weber’s Protestant ethic at work. “The systematic and meticulous study of God’s creation was the closest a Calvinist could get to an inscrutable deity that could not be grasped by the cultivated intellect.”
The two men who contributed most to this sea change were Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. Bacon felt “knowledge ought to bear fruit in production, science ought to be applicable to industry, and it was people’s sacred duty to improve and transform the material conditions of life.” His method was a bottom-up empirical induction, rather than the deductive philosophizing favored by Aristotle and Descartes. Bacon wanted facts, datum, and proof: a proto-positivist. Newton expanded on this thirst for quantification and measurement. He was not interested in a grand encompassing system, but more modest truths.
The Republic of Letters codified a system to share knowledge across national boundaries and religious sects. Through prestige and censure, the system also rewarded individuals for generating useful knowledge and new concepts. It finally paid reputationally and financially (through patronage), to be original. The Republic of Letters was a clearinghouse for new ideas that rewarded “property rights” through crediting the inventor. The main rules “were freedom of entry, contestability, that is, the right to challenge any form of knowledge, transnationality, and a commitment to placing new knowledge in the public domain.” Furthermore, qualitatively, it prized different kinds of knowledge. “The most important of these were the ever-growing use of mathematics where it was applicable (astronomy and mechanics), the validity of experimental data in those fields where experiments were possible, and the collection and careful taxonomy of empirical observations where neither of these approaches worked (e.g., in botany and entomology).” The Republic of Letters created a merit based system which encapsulated a single European group mind, where people could build on the knowledge of others through shared notes, papers, and books.
The last section of Mokyr’s book contrasts China of the same period. Mokyr reveals that in the Song Dynasty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries imperial China was actually leaps and bounds ahead of all of Europe. Measured by increased use in fossil fuels, iron, textiles, transport, agricultural productivity, and internal trade, the Song were on the verge of industrialization. But by 1500-1700 AD things had stagnated and even retrograded into decay. The culture did not sustain innovation and growth. Education was a state run monopoly that consisted entirely of Confucian classics and traditional writings. Examinations stressed rote memorization. The best students went exclusively into the civil service after studying only ancient philosophy. Medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture were held in low esteem. Confucianism denigrated all manual labor. There was a strict divide between scholars and artisans. Books and encyclopedic knowledge were kept in the hands of the Mandarin elite. The large geographical landmass, ruled centrally, instilled a homogeneity of thought. “Stability and domestic peace were increasingly regarded as an overriding value, and this included intellectual stability.” Heretical views were suppressed and rarely spread. Li Zhi, Wang Yangming, and Xu Guangqi all individually rose high in the bureaucracy, and had enlightened ideas regarding experimentation, practical applications of inventions, and even quasi-Epicurean philosophy, but their ideas did not survive beyond them. Neo-Confucians viewed world history as steadily in decline and antiquity was upheld as an ideal.
Mokyr concludes by suggesting that European growth was sustained through two complimentary ideas: “the concept that knowledge and the understanding of nature can and should be used to advance the material conditions of humanity, and the belief that power and government are there not to serve the rich and powerful but society at large.”
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