E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten
Norberg Peak Human
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-730-8
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages
E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-730-8
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Johan Norberg is a historian, lecturer and commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington DC and his books have been translated into forty languages. His books include The Capitalist Manifesto, the international bestseller Progress and Open, which was an Economist book of the year. Norberg regularly writes for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Reason and HuffPost.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
INTRODUCTION
JOEL MOKYR1
THE QURAN, 7:34
The feeling will be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic Assembly, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. And it left me with a sense of profound sadness. Here were the scenes of some of the most extraordinary moments in human history, and all that was left was rubble, garbage and dog waste. Instead of bustling creativity, there was silence, interrupted only by the odd intoxicated passer-by.
To be sure, I also experienced spectacular beauty in Athens, like the grand monuments on the Acropolis. But even that was a museum to bygone glory. This used to be the place around which the world revolved, and now it’s a collection of patched-together columns, stone blocks and shards with plaques telling us that it used to be impressive.
This must be what Shelley – a great admirer of ancient Greece – reflected upon when he wrote about the crumbled monument to Ozymandias, king of kings, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. … / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
This encounter with the transience of great civilizations set my mind racing. What made it possible for them to rise so spectacularly, and how could they decline so thoroughly that they left little trace? It forced me to consider whether travellers will one day visit our proud landmarks and plazas and think about how our civilization lost its way and became so sluggish and stationary.
This is a precarious time to write about history’s golden ages. Ours is an era of authoritarian and populist revival, with savage dictators trying to extinguish neighbouring democracies, when the fear of inevitable decline seems more prevalent than belief in progress. This may invite speculation that my motive resembles that of the American legal scholar Harold Berman when he wrote his great history of the rise of Western law: it is said that a drowning man may see his whole life flash before him, perhaps in an unconscious effort to find something within his own experiences to escape his impending doom.2
I wouldn’t go that far. We are not yet drowning. But drawing on historical human experience can be a useful way to avoid ending up in a bad situation: it might even help us to keep our vessels seaworthy. It is said that we should study history to avoid repeating its mistakes, and that is all very well. But our ancestors were not just capable of mistakes.
Human history is a long list of depravations and horrors, but it is also the source of the knowledge, institutions and technologies that have set most of humanity free from such horrors for the first time. The historical record shows what mankind is capable of, in terms of exploration, imagination and innovation. This in itself is an important reason to study it, to broaden our mental horizon of what is possible.
This book is about seven of the world’s great civilizations: ancient Athens, the Roman Republic and early empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere. Why did I pick those? Because each of them exemplifies, in my understanding, what I think of as a golden age: a period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields and sectors in a short period of time. A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which encourages people to explore new knowledge, experiment with new methods and technologies, and exchange the results with others. Its characteristics are cultural creativity, scientific discoveries, technological achievements and economic growth that stand out compared with what came before and after it, and compared with other contemporary cultures. Its result is a high average standard of living, which is usually the envy of others, often also of their heirs.
This could have been a much longer book, exploring many other cultures, because golden ages are not dependent on geography, ethnicity or religion, but on what we make of these circumstances. And these cultures just happen to excel in the era in which they, for some reason or another, begin to interpret or emphasize a particular part of their beliefs and traditions to make it more open to surprises – unconventional ideas and methods imported by merchants and migrants, dreamed up by eccentrics at home or stumbled upon by someone fortunate.
There are certain important preconditions for this progress, and you will find them making cameos in every ensuing chapter. The basic raw materials are a wide variety of ideas and methods to learn from and to combine in new ways. Therefore it takes a certain population density to create progress, and urban conglomerations are often particularly creative. Being open to the contributions of other civilizations is the quickest way of making use of more brains, which is the reason why these golden ages often appear at the crossroads of other cultures, and in every instance benefited greatly from the inspiration brought about by international trade, travel and migration. They were often maritime cultures, always on the lookout for new discoveries. Distance is the ‘number one enemy of civilization’, as the French historian Fernand Braudel understood so well.
To make use of these raw materials, it takes a relatively inclusive society. Citizens have to be free to experiment and innovate, without being subjected to the whims of feudal lords, centralized governments or ravaging armies. This takes peace, rule of law and secure property rights.
And, most importantly, there has to be an absence of orthodoxies imposed from the top about what to believe, think and say, how to live and what to do. If we limit the realm of the acceptable to what we already know and are comfortable with, we will be stuck with it, and deserve the inevitable stagnation. If we want more knowledge, wealth and technological capacity, we have to cut misfits and troublemakers some slack.
This book will look at how institutions that were built for discovery, innovation and adaptation had profound effects on science, culture, economy and warfare.
It is not easy to sustain such institutions for a long time. The most depressing aspect of studying golden ages is that they don’t last. You don’t have to wait 2,300 years to go back to Athens. There are many stories about people visiting centres of progress just decades later and finding that it’s all over. It’s the same place, the same traditions and the same people, but that irreplaceable spark has gone.
The California historian Jack Goldstone calls these episodes of temporary growth ‘efflorescences’.3 It is really another word for an anti-crisis: just as a crisis is a sudden and unexpected downturn in indicators of human wellbeing, an efflorescence is a sharp, unexpected upturn.
Goldstone argues that most societies have experienced such efflorescences, and that these usually set new patterns for thought, political organization and economic life for many generations. This is a corrective to the common notion that humankind has a long history of stagnation and then suddenly experiences progress. History is full of growth and progress; it is just that they were always periodic and efflorescent rather than self-sustaining and accelerating. In other words: they don’t last. That is why the subsequent silver, bronze and iron ages so often think of themselves as golden ages.
It is as if history has a Great Status Quo Filter (similar to a hypothesis about the Fermi paradox on why we have not encountered alien life despite the likelihood that it exists). Civilizations in every era have tried to break away from the shackles of oppression and scarcity, but increasingly they faced opposite forces, and sooner or later these dragged them back to earth. Elites who have benefited enough from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them, groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy, and aggressive neighbours are attracted to the wealth of the achievers and try to kill the goose to steal its golden eggs.
Why would intellectual, economic and political elites accept a system that keeps delivering surprises and innovations? Yes, it might provide their society with more resources, but at the risk of upending a status quo that made them powerful to begin with. Often such institutions came about by accident or as a result of revolutionary upheaval, or they emerged unintentionally because they happened to provide important solutions in difficult situations or had to be accepted to provide necessary resources and technologies at a time of fierce competition against rivals.
But, sooner or later, most elites regain their composure, begin to reimpose orthodoxies and stamp out the potential for unpredictability. The great economic historian Joel Mokyr calls this Cardwell’s Law, after the technology historian D. S. L. Cardwell, who observed that most societies have remained technologically creative for only a short period.4
The perceived self-interest of incumbents who have much to lose from change goes a long way to explaining why episodes of creativity and growth are terminated. But such groups are always there, always eager to stop the future in its tracks. Why do their...
