Stanford Magazine - March/April 2011

their own; some sort of world governance or “institutions that can find global solutions for global problems” will be required. Indeed, catastrophe—nuclear war, pestilence, global meltdown or some other form of what Morris calls “Nightfall”—is one of the author’s standing caveats as he plots human development trends forward, and he sees only more nuclear proliferation coming.

By the final chapter, Morris is rocketing into the future to explain how in just one century humankind will realize four times the change witnessed in its first 150 millennia advancing from cave painting to the Internet. An astute follower of futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Morris can envision humans evolving into carbon-silicon hybrids whose computerized intelligence is capable of instant recall and instant connectivity; war managed by machines because humans can’t analyze situations fast enough; or even Kurzweil’s “ Singularity,” where humans evolve into a single global consciousness. Morris says it is unreasonable to assume the world will change without humans changing, too— they already are, with life-altering medical electronics and pharmaceuticals.

M

orris found the
exercise of pulling
together his bibli-
ography reveal-
ing. Sources for
the beginning
chapters and the end of the book are domi-
nated by science writers, he notes, and the
middle chapters by historians. What do the
discontinuities mean? “I think we have
developed wildly di;erent approaches to
very early stu; and very recent stu; and all
the middle stu; is treated in a completely
di;erent way by historians.”
Natural scientists and evolutionists
tend to be put o; by 5,000 years or so of
documented history, Morris contends,
because on the whole historians work in
such di;erent ways than scientists. Yet
that period is where “a lot of theories
about social evolution could really be test-
ed.” On the other hand, historians feel
equally uncomfortable straying into pre-
history or “very modern stu;” where sup-
position has to stand in for hard evidence.

“So historians don’t root what they’re
doing in this very long time perspec-
tive, which I think would produce a dif-
ferent way of looking at things.”
Morris knows many historians are
troubled by prehistory’s maybes. “If
you’re a prehistorian, you have to be
happy with chainsaw art, just hacking
away, whereas if you happen to be
working on Bismarck’s foreign policy
from 1873 to 75, you can be pretty
damn precise.”
Techniques are di;erent, too. Pre-
historians don’t have to know how to
analyze sections of bone or pottery, Morris
allows, but they do need to know enough to
be conversant with the people who have
these skills. “You’re forced to develop at
least a nodding acquaintance with how
things are done in the natural sciences.”
Morris puts historians at the top of the
evidentiary food chain: If it’s documented
it’s real, and if it’s real they’ll consider
going deeper. “Prehistorians and social sci-
entists more generally tend to study some
big question they’re interested in,” Morris
says. Question first, evidence second; if the
evidence is really scant, they might look
for another topic that o;ers at least more.
Still, “More ‘sciency’ people will look for
evidence wherever it might be or, more
likely, say, ‘we don’t need any evidence.’ ”
Morris gives an example. “We have no
direct evidence for the domestication of
plants. We have seeds, but they don’t tell
you what happened—you cannot dig up
somebody watering a plant. But when you
look at these rye seeds, botanists tell us
that certain things have to have happened
in order to generate this rye seed. Unless
someone can come up with a more compel-
ling explanation for these rye seeds, the
most plausible explanation will stand.”
So far, reaction to the book seems large-
ly enthusiastic. Writing in the Financial
Times in December, Princeton historian
Harold James called it “the first history of
the world that really makes use of what
modern technology can o;er to the inter-
pretation of the historical process . . . a
path-breaking work that lays out what

Read Ian Morris on what’s next for Homo sapiens in an online-only excerpt.

DIGGING DEEP: Morris spent 10 years on Why the West Rules—For Now.

modern history should look like.”
Morris has won plaudits from review-
ers in the Wall Street Journal, the Econo-
mist and other publications, though the
author expects historians especially will
quarrel with his maps, not chaps thesis. He
got an early taste of that on a campus visit
in Michigan. “I made one of the local histo-
rians so angry he could barely speak. It
appeared to be something about [my] say-
ing people are all the same—obviously
there was more to it—but he was really,
really annoyed. It seems to be a general-
purpose sort of annoying-people book,” he
says, looking just a little like the kid who
left the thumbtack on teacher’s chair.

He’s taken other hits. In the January/ February issue of Foreign A;airs, Duke University economics and political science professor Timur Kuran criticized the book’s “curiously broad” definition of East and West. Among other complaints, Kuran said Morris overlooked advantages that could keep the West on top through this century and into the next.

But Morris doesn’t claim to have a crystal ball. “Maybe great men and women will come to America’s aid, preserving Western rule for a few generations more; maybe bungling idiots will interrupt China’s rise for a while,” he writes. “Maybe the East will be Westernized or maybe the West will be Easternized. Maybe we will all come together in a global village, or maybe we will dissolve into a clash of civilizations. Maybe everyone will end up richer, or maybe we will incinerate ourselves in a Third World War.” ■