[chilefuturo] Re: [chilefuturo] Re: [chilefuturo] Fwd: Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall? - John Mauldin's Outside the Box E-Letter
- From: "PLandsberger" <pedro.landsberger@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <chilefuturo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:21:02 -0400
El atículo de Ferguson puede ser muy entretenido y provocador, y puede ayudar a
primera vista a manejar y entender procesos históricos complejos; pero
lamentablemente descansa sobre una larga lista de supuestos
histórico-ideológicos que de partida justifican el desarrollo que tuvo la
Historia hasta el día de hoy y por esa vía justifican también el statu-quo. Es
decir, justifican el sistema actual. Pues todas esas historias sobre las
virtudes y supremacías de la cultura europea/norteamericana en el fondo son
unos mitos cuidadosamente cultivados por los propios interesados y que nosotros
en gran medida reproducimos porque nacimos, crecimos y vivimos dentro de esa
cultura. Esto que afirmo lo he reflexionado después de largas lecturas de
autores que no aparecen en las listas de best-sellers ni en los comentarios de
libros de los días domingos. Y si ferguson basa su análisis en este tipo de
premisas, necesariamente los resultados a los que llegará y las tesis y
alternativas que visualizará serán erradas, y de poco nos servirán. Pienso que
una buena selección de autores que destruyen gran parte de las premisas del
artículo de Ferguson son los siguientes:
1) J.M. Blaut, geográfo/historiador de EEUU que estudió a fondo el problema
ideológico y cultural de Europa/USA en el desarrollo de la historiografía
mundial. Su principal obra: "The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical
Diffusionism and Eurocentric History" (adjunto Comentarios al respecto)
2) Mike Davis; varias obras, varias en castellano; la más atingente es Late
Victorian Holocausts, El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New
York: Verso, 2001). Hay edición en castellano.
3) Alfred Crosby; varias obras; la principal: "Imperialismo Ecológico - La
expansión biológica de Europa, 900-1900".
4) John Bellamy Foster; varias obras y artículos, muchos en castellano. (Estoy
adjuntando algunos)
5) Sidney W. Mintz: "Sweetness AND POWER". Estudia a fondo la fenomenal
importancia del azúcar tanto en los afanes coloniales de las potencias
europeas, como en la vital alimentación del ejército de obreros que permitió
que despegara la revolución industrial en Europa. (Adjunto algunas reseñas y
menciones. Además, el libro electrónico puede -al parecer- bajarse de varios
sitios web)
6) Domenico Losurdo; filósofo italiano con varios textos de interés, pero el
que viene a cuento ahora es "Contrahistoria del Liberalismo" (editorial El
Viejo Topo, 2005) donde este señor "indaga en las contradicciones y las zonas
de sombra que corrientemente eluden los estudiosos" poniendo de manifiesto la
dificultad de conciliar la defensa teórica que hacen ciertos reconocidos
personeros del pensamiento y el gobierno liberal moderno europeo/norteamericano
de la libertad del individuo con la realidad de las relaciones políticas y
sociales. (Adjunto reseña).
Saludos
P.
----- Original Message -----
From: Jaime Aravena
To: chilefuturo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2012 1:59 PM
Subject: [chilefuturo] Re: [chilefuturo] Fwd: Western Civilisation: Decline –
or Fall? - John Mauldin's Outside the Box E-Letter
hay 6 videos en internet que son notables (en ingles con subtitulos en ingles)
From: Carlos Contreras <clubcientifico@xxxxxxxxx>
To: chilefuturo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 9:49 AM
Subject: [chilefuturo] Fwd: Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall? - John
Mauldin's Outside the Box E-Letter
en inglés, lo bueno viene en el artículo de Fergusson. Ahora me ha
interesado la historia. No se sisirve para estimar el futuro pero es
entretenida a mi edad.saludos
---------- Forwarded message ----------From: John Mauldin and
InvestorsInsight <wave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>Date: 2012/3/6Subject: Western
Civilisation: Decline – or Fall? - John Mauldin's Outside the Box E-LetterTo:
clubcientifico@xxxxxxxxx
This message was sent to clubcientifico@xxxxxxxxxxxxx subscribed at
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Missed Last Week's Article?Read It Here
Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
John Mauldin | March 5, 2012
I had my nose in Niall Ferguson's newest book, Civilization: The West
and the Rest, at every possible moment during my recent trip to Hong Kong and
Singapore. It's powerful and very, very timely, and I strongly recommend it. To
help get the word out, I asked Niall for a short, somewhat personal piece on
the thinking behind the book – in other words, what moved him to write it?
What you're going to find in the piece below for this week's Outside
the Box, as well as in the book, is an author who is very concerned about our
civilization's prospects – and unafraid to say so. I mean, the last time I
looked, "saving the world" had gone distinctly out of fashion. And then, and
then, we all grow up and get pretty focused and incremental about things: if we
can just address the problem or three right in front of us, we're reasonably
content.
But leave it to a Harvard history professor to break out of the box
and go tilting at the big picture. And when you think of it, we're all pretty
concerned at this point, however we frame the issues. Everywhere we turn, it
seems, we find the forces of polarization and dissolution gnawing at our social
fabric, and Yeats' fateful line about the center not holding starts to feel
uncomfortably prophetic. Maybe it's about time we all thought bigger and worked
harder at getting along, while we still can.
Niall turns to a notion put forth by the social scientist Charles
Murray, who has called for a "civic great awakening" – a return to the original
values of the American republic. We could do worse.
I want to congratulate Niall and Ayaan on their new baby, Thomas
Hirsi Ferguson! May he grow up in a world that is flourishing.
Your holding out hope for our future analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
JohnMauldin@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
By Niall Ferguson
As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to
read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that
first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the
question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative
tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent
book, Civilization: The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.
The good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is
in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not
rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four
seasons or the seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve
after another. The bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially
steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.
To see what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the
Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights
of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses,
gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today
tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.
The notion that civilizations do not decline but collapse inspired
the anthropologist Jared Diamond's 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused,
fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As
a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the
history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most
of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.
The Roman Empire did not decline and fall over a millennium, as
Gibbon's monumental work seemed to suggest. It collapsed within a few decades
in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders
and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial
metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid
marketplaces deserted. The Ming dynasty's rule in China also fell apart with
extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and
external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little
more than a decade.
A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of
course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse
comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North
Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben
Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday,
gone today.
What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex
social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute
rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they did not. This
process is a familiar one to students of financial markets. Even as I write, it
is far from clear that the European Monetary Union can be salvaged from the
dramatic collapse of confidence in the fiscal policies of its peripheral member
states. In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you are
fine until you are not fine—and when you're not fine, you are suddenly in a
terrifying death spiral.
The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a
series of institutional innovations that (to entice younger readers) I call the
"killer applications":
1.Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple
monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing
corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.
2.The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs
in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western
Europe.
3.The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of
social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on
private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected
legislatures.
4.Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century
breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.
5.The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where
there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for
more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.
6.The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to
combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates,
permitting sustained capital accumulation.
For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized
by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia.
They are the best explanation for what economic historians call "the great
divergence": the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living
and those in the rest of the world. In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than
the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20
times richer than the Chinese.
Westerners not only grew richer than "Resterners." They grew taller,
healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th
century, just a dozen Western empires—including the United States—controlled 58
percent of the world's land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent
of the global economy.
Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another
has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western
operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have
witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in
China in 1978.
I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a
world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average
Chinese. I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty,
not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of
Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the "great
reconvergence," which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western
societies to delete their own killer apps.
Who's got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39
percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South
Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days in the U.S. And you do not have
to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really
drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans. The consumer society? 26 of
the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly
in Asia. Modern medicine? As a share of gross domestic product, the United
States spends twice what Japan spends on health care and more than three times
what China spends. Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in
the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73
in China.
The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest
World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16
different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States
fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only
one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is
shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on
business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of
politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of
auditing and financial reporting.
What about science? U.S.-based scientists continue to walk off with
plenty of Nobel Prizes each year. But Nobel winners are old men. The future
belongs not to them but to today's teenagers. Here is another striking
statistic. Every three years the Organization of Economic Cooperation and
Development's Program for International Student Assessment tests the
educational attainment of 15-year-olds around the world. The latest data on
"mathematical literacy" reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the
students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as
big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
The late, lamented Steve Jobs convinced Americans that the future
would be "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." Yet statistics
from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more
patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany
to take third place in 2005, and that China has just overtaken Germany too.
Finally, there's competition, the original killer app that sent the
fragmented West down a completely different path from monolithic imperial
China. The WEF has conducted a comprehensive Global Competitiveness survey
every year since 1979. Since the current methodology was adopted in 2004, the
United States' average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one
of the steepest declines among developed economies. China's score, meanwhile,
has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
Not only is the U.S. less competitive abroad. Perhaps more disturbing
is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the
postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You do not
have to be an Occupy Wall Street activist to believe that the American
super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has
become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the
underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
But if we are headed toward collapse, what will it look like? An
upsurge in civil unrest and crime, as happened in the 1970s? A loss of faith on
the part of investors and a sudden Greek-style leap in government borrowing
costs? How about a spike of violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to
Afghanistan, as insurgents capitalize on our troop withdrawals? Or a paralyzing
cyberattack from the rising Asian superpower we complacently underrate?
Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social
scientist Charles Murray calls for a "civic great awakening"—a return to the
original values of the American republic. He has a point. Far more than in
Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of
Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic.
They know the country has the right software. They just cannot understand why
it is running so damn slowly.
What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our
system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from
banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft
subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who
subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to
say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our
overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.
Then we need to download the updates that are running more
successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to
Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden. And finally we need to reboot our whole
system.
Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. If
what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame
may even be tighter than one election cycle.
Copyright 2012 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved.
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