Twitter steered me to a fascinating (and not unsympathetic) Guardian interview with Niall Ferguson who is cranking out another TV series, this time on Civilisation: The West and the Rest.

Thus:

"The book is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it," says Ferguson… "I have a sense that my son and daughter’s generation is not well served by the way they are taught history. They don’t have the big picture. They get given these chunks, usually about Adolf Hitler, so I wanted to write a book that would be really accessible to them."

Civilization sets out to answer a question that Ferguson identifies as the "most interesting" facing historians of the modern era: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?"

In other words, the book attempts to explain the roots of something – western power – that has long fascinated its author.

Read the whole thing. Very interesting.

One of Ferguson’s clever ideas for making these ideas more accessible is to describe some ‘Killer Apps’ which gave (and still give) Western civilisational astounding advantages. These include Competition, Science, Property and so on:

Science: The 16th and 17th centuries were the age of science, with an extraordinary number of breakthroughs occurring. This revolution was, Ferguson writes, "by any scientific measure, wholly European".

In the Muslim world, clericism curtailed the spread of knowledge, while in Europe, aided by the printing press, the scope of scholarship dramatically widened. Ultimately, breakthroughs in science led to improvements in weaponry, further cementing the west’s advantage.

As we see even today in Libya and Bahrain, with the gruesone irony that the crumbling Arab elites are using old weapons developed by Western civilisation (machine-guns, sniper rifles) to cope with massed protesters armed with new technologies developed by Western civilisation (social networks, transparency, a sense of accountability).

All these civilisational Killer Apps themselves turn on one profound idea, an über-Killer App which emerged some four hundred years ago in Europe, namely that the individual has a place in the world independent of the masses and of massed ideas (be they centrally-controlled socialist collectivism or top-down religious collectivism or top-down assertions of mystical royal authority).

The Muslim world does not appear to articulate that idea in any systematic way, relying instead on a philosophy of strict top-down Teaching, not a more fluid decentralised idea of personal Exploration and Learning. A philosophy of Obedience and above all Submission. 

Which is why the Arab world is literally impoverished in terms of knowing things and so defaults to passion, not reason.

Four or five hundred years of that accumulated Arab/Muslim cultural disaster won’t be put right quickly, if at all.

Here’s a fine example from American Scientist of that western civilisational Killer App Science at work. The Memristor:

Will the memristor turn out to be a transformative technology, the key to putting hundreds of trillions of devices in the palm of your hand? Or will we be asking, a few years from now, “Whatever happened to the memristor?”

… Considering only the realm of switched-resistance memory elements, there are several other candidates, including devices based on phase changes, on magnetic fields and on electron spin …

To evaluate the long-term prospects of such technologies, one would have to go beyond basic principles of operation to questions of reliability, longevity, uniformity, cost of manufacturing and dozens of other details…

Think about all the civilisational processes going on here. Inquiring minds, free from state or ideological control, exploring in a disciplined way amazing new technologies capable of benefiting the whole human race and the practical processes needed to bring the best ideas into production.

What I especially liked was the very last paragraph:

In a telephone conversation I asked Williams why he believes the memristor will be the technology that prevails. He offered several substantive arguments, but he also added, candidly: “It’s the one I’m working on. I have to believe in it.” In a sense this is the strongest endorsement anyone can give.

As a bystander, I have the luxury of waiting on the sidelines to see how the contest comes out. But someone has to make choices, take risks and commit resources, or nothing new will ever be created.

Think too about that last sentence.

But someone has to make choices, take risks and commit resources, or nothing new will ever be created. 

What a superb and optimistic description of the free human spirit. And of the perhaps all-too-fragile civilisation we have created, which not only makes it possible but makes it central.

Well done Niall Ferguson for laying it all out so boldly.