The East and the West: Reflections on China and Europe

Sir Jack Goody, F.B.A.

Some people have influenced me through the force of their ideas, some through the force of their personality. The distinguished Cambridge anthropologist, Professor Sir Jack Goody has combined these. He has undoubtedly been the strongest influence on my career as an anthropologist and to a certain extent an historian.

I first came across Jack’s work during my M.Phil at the L.S.E. in 1967. Jack was appointed my M.Phil. examiner, which was when I first met him. I must next have met Jack in Cambridge (where he became William Wyse Professor in 1973), just after I arrived in Cambridge. I remember that he was friendly and encouraging in various ways. Most importantly, when I applied for my first teaching job in 1974 in the Department of Social Anthropology, to the post until lately held by his wife Esther, he not only encouraged me to apply, but clearly backed me strongly for the post. I was appointed a Lecturer.

In fact, for the rest of his tenure as Professor (to 1983) he was always a wonderful patron and support. He encouraged me in every possible way and it is difficult to measure his influence.

Intellectually his work and conversations with him had an enormously enlivening effect. Part of his breadth of vision arose from the fact that he was interested in and encouraging of inter-disciplinary work with many disciplines. He had read English as an undergraduate, but fortunately for me a particular interest he had was in history and its relationship to anthropology. So we discussed themes and overlaps, in particular in relation to the history of European kinship and marriage, about which were both writing in those years. Much of his work was set in a long historical time frame, often covering thousands of years. He was practising an early form of global history and maintaining the honourable tradition in anthropology of Kroeber and others in looking at long sweeps of civilizations.

Another stimulation was Jack’s interest in technology and material life. Not only was he interested in the practicalities of computers and machines, but he again maintained an earlier (and somewhat unfashionable) anthropological tradition in being interested in material technologies. Thus he wrote books and articles exploring technologies of production, destruction and communication and their effects. This was all the more suggestive because it was broadly comparative, always coming back to the basic contrast which informed his work, that is the difference between the post-Neolithic civilizations of Eur-Asia, and the pre-Neolithic technologies of sub-Saharan Africa. It is on this theme, where he has published half a dozen or more books, that I would like to devote my lecture, in tribute to a great historical anthropologist.

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The first divergence: from Mythical to Axial

For ninety-five percent of human history it was only possible to communicate by sound and gesture, through human speech, song, facial and bodily expressions. This set severe limitations on the power and flexibility of knowledge. The discovery of writing systems thus constituted the first great transformation.

Writing is, in many ways, much more powerful than speaking. As Jack Goody has argued in his The Logic of Writing (1986), writing eliminates the need for both the speaker and listener to be in the same place at the same time. A person can now read at his or her own convenience in time and space, and can take up or put down the text, re-read and compare and make amendments. The power of writing made world religions possible. Religious truths could be written down so that we have what are known as the ‘religions of the book’, that is Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and also religions based on written texts such as Hinduism and Buddhism. There is now a written and definitive version of the standard truths. There is a universal and uniform message from God or the gods. There is a literate priesthood to interpret these truths. There are increasingly firm boundaries between Good and Evil. Religion, with a capital R, is a bi-product of writing. Likewise the Economy is based on writing. Accounting, money, credit, taxation, rents, private property, exchange, all of these are virtually impossible to develop without some way of storing and transmitting information outside the individual human mind. The huge trading networks and complex bureaucracies of the early civilizations could not have developed without writing. Likewise the presence of writing inaugurated the State. Leaders could now control space and time in a new way and turn tribesmen into subjects. State officials and state organization all require writing. The development of Law as a separate sphere was made possible by writing. There were now legal codes and written precedents, judges and lawyers emerged to interpret and adjudicate. People could leave property through written wills, contracts could be made and witnessed, written evidence presented in court. Indeed there arose a new concept of an external ‘truth’, existing outside the biased opinions of individuals and universally applicable in all situations. Pictographic writing had been discovered in most of Eurasia very early on, but its effects were increased when the Greeks perfected alphabetic writing about three thousand years ago. No longer did writing take the form of little pictures of reality (pictographs), but became an incredibly powerful symbolic tool. With writing, humans could pursue truth and transmit their emotions in an efficient and cumulative way.

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This takes the story of philosophical systems across Eur-Asia up to about 800 B.C. In the following half millenium, partly through the influence of writing, a second great transformation occurred. This is what, following the work of Karl Jaspers, is known as the onset of the Axial Age. Previously the natural and supernatural worlds were entangled with each other, not seen as in contradiction or opposition. In most tribal religions, the world of spirit was largely a reflection of this world and inter-mingled with it. Humans and animals, this life and the after-life, were blended. This is often a world of shamanism and witchcraft, of animism (material things having spirit in them) and of attempts to put pressure upon spirits through sacrifice and magical spells. The divine world is not a separate ideal order against which we measure this life, but a continuation of the sensory world in an invisible form. Even in the great literate civilizations of Eurasia thought was embedded and there was no strong distinction between this world and an ideal and separate one. For reasons as yet largely unexplained, in much of Europe and Asia over a period of six hundred years a number of great religious and philosophical figures changed this. They created a dynamic tension between this world of matter and another world of spirit. They set up ideals against which our behaviour should be judged. New philosophical systems provided a re-organized relation between a God, or ideal system, and this corrupted world. In China this happened in the work of Lao-tse and Confucius; in India in the Upanishads and the teachings of the Buddha; in Iran, with Zoroaster; in the middle East in the books of the great Old Testament prophets, including Elijah, Jeremiah and Isaiah; in Greece, in the fount of western thought, in Homer, Heraclitus, Plato and others. So China found its Confucian template by which it has lived for nearly two and a half thousand years, much of India and central Asia its Hindu and Buddhist salvation, and the western end of the continent the firm foundations for the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which were to dominate that world, combined with Greek philosophy.

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The value of what these thinkers established is enormous and still influences us today, though we have rejected much of the larger framework. Many of our basic categories in logic, political thought, ideal types of knowledge were laid down in this period and in many senses we in the West are the heirs of Greek, Arabic and Medieval western thought and the great philosophers and religious figures in India and China.

It is thus ‘axial’ in another sense also, in that the philosophical systems developed in this period are still the centre, or axis, of our present systems of thought. Like spokes from a central hub or axis,

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all later thought systems in the world have radiated outwards from that great transformative revolution.

It was a world-view which did not immediately vanish at the Renaissance, for many of the thinkers of the period, as the very word Renaissance implies, thought of a return to an earlier period of superior knowledge. Yet there was also something different, a sense of advance and change which is well captured, for example, in the work of the English philosopher Francis Bacon in his various works on how experimental science could change our world, and how we now know new things, and have technologies which separate us from the ancients. The change would separate the two ends of Eurasia for the next three hundred years and be the basis for imperial conquest and a massive change in the fate of humans on this planet.

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The second divergence: from pre-scientific to scientific

It is widely agreed that the progress of the Scientific and Technological age is an exclusively European phenomenon for several hundred years. That this is so has been suggested by many historians who have studied the traditions of Europe, the Middle East, China and Japan.

The realization that something unusual had occurred in the West, but not in the East, is forcefully demonstrated in the first systematic book on Chinese civilization written by a western scholar. P.J.B. Du Halde (1674-1743) in his Description of the Empire of China of 1735, translated into English and published in London in 1741, based on a study of the reports of the early Jesuit mission in China since the later sixteenth century. It already shows an awareness that something special, a scientific break-through, had occurred in Europe which was absent in China.

When we cast our Eyes on the great Number of Libraries in China, magnificently built, suitably adorn’d, and enrich’d with prodigious Collections of Books: When we consider the surprising Multitude of their Doctors, and of the Colleges established in all the Cities of the Empire; their Observations, and with what Attention they inspect the Heavens: …That for above 4000 Years, according to the Laws of the Empire, the Literati only have been Governors of Cities and Provinces, and have possessed all the Offices of the Tribunals and about the Court, one would be apt to believe, that of all Nations in the World the Chinese must be the most ingenious and learned.

However a small Acquaintance with them will quickly undeceive one. ‘Tis true, we must acknowledge, that the Chinese have a great deal of Wit: But then is it an inventive, searching, profound Wit? They have made Discoveries in all the Sciences, but have not brought to Perfection any of those we call speculative, and which require Subtilty and Penetration. Nevertheless, I will not pretend to find Fault with their Capacity, much less will I affirm they want Talents, and that Sagacity proper for going to the bottom of things; since it is very plain that they succeed in other things, which require as much Genius and Penetration as the speculative Sciences.

Du Halde examined the various branches of knowledge. He described how logic, rhetoric and geometry hardly developed, and it was only in astronomy, to which he devotes ten pages, was there real progress.

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Joseph Needham studied the topic of science and technology in east and west in enormous depth in the second half of the twentieth century, summarized in the title of his multi-volume work with his colleagues, Science and Civilization in China. Needham did this work partly to solve what he considered to be one of the great enigmas of history, now widely known as the ‘Needham Question’.

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He frequently notes the divergence. ‘But then after the scientific renaissance had begun in the West with the Galilean revolution, with what one might almost call the discovery of the basic technique of scientific discovery itself, then the curve of science and technology in Europe begins to rise in a violent, almost exponential, manner overtaking the levels of the Asian societies...’

In the introduction to a book summarizing many of his thoughts, The Grand Titration (1969) he wrote: ‘Why, then, did modern science, as opposed to ancient and medieval science (with all that modern science implied in terms of political dominance), develop only in the Western world?’ In the 1985 introduction to The Genius of China (1991), by Robert Temple, which was a popular summary of much of his work, Needham wrote: ‘If the Chinese were so advanced in antiquity and the Middle Ages, how was it that the Scientific Revolution, the coming of modern science into the world, happened only in Europe? … It may be remembered that it was precisely this problem which presented itself to me so forcefully when I first met the Chinese scientists who came to Cambridge in 1937.’

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What happened as a result of the inauguration of the Age of Science and Technology was a profound shift whose implications we are only now fully experiencing. Basically it is the faster and faster cycling round the triangle of discovery, invention and multiplication of artefacts. So we not only have more knowledge, growing through the experimental method at an exponential rate, but that knowledge is then embedded in new technologies, which then increase the knowledge.

Whereas technologies and reliable knowledge had grown in various parts of the world, the rate had tended to be linear, that is a straight line (1,2,3,4), slowly changing as the result of a sort of Darwinian selection – random variation and selective retention of what was best. What the changes in methodology and spirit described by Jaspers did in parts of Europe was to lead to a systematic speeding up of the process so that it proceeded at an ever increasing rate. The process became exponential (1,2,4,8,16) rather than linear. The difference of linear and exponential growth is shown in the next diagram.

The general framework of increased knowledge were given by Needham, who illustrated the difference between the linear growth in China over two thousand years, and the exponential growth starting in Europe. In Figure 99 in The Grand Titration he compares Chinese and Western sciences. Here is a simplification of his diagram.

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If this is roughly accurate, then the exponential rate of change in most of the western sciences starts between 1450 and 1750 – in mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, medicine and chemistry in that order.

There is first an increase in theoretical knowledge, understanding of the basic laws of nature. This has increased at an exponential rate. The new theoretical knowledge was then embedded in better tools, many of them aiding precision of thought and new tools for exploring the world. A well-known case is in clockwork. We can see from an adapted diagram from Needham how Chinese clocks advanced in a linear way and were for long superior. Then the western exponential trajectory started in around 1300 and by the middle of the seventeenth century crossed the Chinese line and continued on an upward trend – which is far sharper than it seems on this diagram for again the scale is logarithmic.

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The outcome of this can be seen in two final graphs. One is an attempt to reconstruct the long-term economic growth of the west and China provided by Angus Madison in 2001.

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We can see that European economies were starting to grow from about a thousand years ago with improvements in agricultural and craft technologies. They grew at a linear rate and overtook China, Madison suggested, in about the fourteenth century. The growth remained linear, as the classical economists experienced it until the nineteenth century brought the fruits of the industrial and agricultural revolutions into many lives. Since then the growth has been exponential.

Meanwhile China went through an S curve, which flattened out and then dipped in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, with the famine of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ very marked. Only in the last thirty years has growth suddenly become exponential – is even faster than that in Europe and America.

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Basically, until the institutionalization of the method of invention, when evolution of ideas and their embedding in artefacts has started to get faster and faster, history grew in a linear way –

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1,2,3,4. Since about the seventeenth century, ideas and inventions have started to grow exponentially in the west 1,2,4,8,16. The full consequences started to be felt from the seventeenth century, but became ever more noticeable after the application of new knowledge to the harnessing of coal through steam, and the application of chemistry to agriculture from the middle of the eighteenth century.

There were numerous consequences. One is that for several centuries only western Europe had the advantages of rapidly improving technologies of various kinds. It is this which allowed the expansion of Europe, and particularly Britain, and it allowed the West to overtake the Rest in power and influence for at least a couple of centuries.

Secondly, it meant that people could begin to see within their own lifetimes that things were ‘improving’. There were times when war or other dislocations shattered this feeling but the idea of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ and later of ‘evolution’, come from this increasing rate of scientific knowledge and technological power.

Another obvious effect was on population. Adam Smith thought that the world could only feed the roughly half a billion people living when he wrote, and his successor Malthus was also pessimistic. But what Malthus did not realize was that, certainly for a time, his second law – that production can only rise at a linear rate – was wrong. It has risen at an exponential rate, so that we now have roughly sixteen times the number of people on the planet in Smith and Malthus’ day and, though at least one quarter live in considerable hardship, something like four times the 1750 level live with a degree of comfort unimaginable at that date. The following graph shows what has happened.

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The scientific revolution has created what could be thought of as a machine that is going faster and faster, forcing change at an ever increasing rate. One of the many effects of this was that thought systems began go change more swiftly, lasting a century or two, or less, as knowledge expanded exponentially.

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Accelerating change today

Here I want to establish two things. One is that the speed and dimensions of change are ever greater, exponential, changes. The second is that one of the countries where this is happening most dramatically is China.

Economic growth

Of course much of this huge change is intimately bound up with the extraordinary rate of economic growth, both in the total wealth of China and in individual incomes, that has been occurring in the last thirty years.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Chinese Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.) per head increased four-fold between 1978 and 2001. In the next ten years it increased a further six-fold. Although we have to allow for inflation, it is pretty impressive, with real growth of the economy in each year averaging normally between eight and twelve per cent.

We can see what has recently happened in a more detailed way as follows, and the trend has continued.

The implications for the future are staggering. If current projections are right, China and the U.S. will be roughly level in total G.D.P. by 2016. By 2035, Chinese G.D.P. will be twice that of America.

One of the effects, echoing earlier discussions of the effects of changes in the relations of power between the West and the Rest, is in the shifting of the balance of economic and political power eastwards. Until the 1980’s, power was firmly located in the West,

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despite the rise of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. Since the later 1980’s, and particularly in the last fifteen years, this has shifted. It is well shown in a simple diagram.

The end of the last unified western paradigms coincides with the end of a period (between 1940 to 1990) when the centre of world economic power was located in the Atlantic. It is now moving rapidly across Russia towards the borders of northern China.

Population growth

One way to appreciate the immensity of the change that has happened in China over the last hundred years is to look at the following graph, which indicates the enormous population growth, which has continued despite the one child policy introduced in 1979.

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This table only takes the figure to 1990. Since then, over two hundred million more Chinese have been added to the total. Even between 1960, with a population of some 650 million and the present 1.35 billion, there has been a doubling of the size of the population. This in itself is staggering and puts huge pressure on resources and human relations.

Communications technology

Another major cause of the change is technology. This can be in the speed and cost of travel, by car, rail, plane, which means that huge numbers of people are now on the move. Another is in the acceleration of the quality and reach of television, with satellite services reaching the most remote areas. A third is in the revolution in telephones, with the satellite or mobile phone putting everyone in touch.

All of the changes are connected to the digital or electronic revolution, which obviously affects the cost and availability of computers, shrinking from large mainframes to laptops and now tablets and connected through the Internet.

One law behind many of the ever-faster changes in the field of general technology and especially communications technology, is known as Moore’s law. It is a particular application of the more general law of the triangular and cumulative effect of the interplay of science and technology. Science discovers new ideas, these are

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made concrete in a piece of technology, this is multiplied by the market and often feeds back into more powerful and accurate knowledge-seeking. This is particularly the case with the first automatic thinking machine invented by humans, the computer.

Basically this law, devised by Gerald E. Moore in 1965, and amended later, states that the power of computers will double every eighteen months. This law also applies to many other digital devices, for example mobile phones and digital cameras. I remember my amazement when I went into the Apple shop in central Beijing in 2009 and saw devices there which I had not seen a few months before in Cambridge, and witnessed the crowds of young people thronging round them. My own experience of growing up through this revolution has shown me how much has changed so rapidly – and the rate of change is becoming ever faster.

At the heart of this is the power of computers. This can be seen from the following diagram. As it suggests, we now have computers that have the power of one mouse brain. By about 2025 they are predicted to have the power of a human brain – the most complex phenomenon on the planet. By about 2050 one computer is predicted to have the power of all the human brains on earth.

If we place this beside the roll out of mobile phones, broadband, new search and social networking software, what is happening is incredible. Some significant features can be seen from the next diagram.

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It is extraordinary to see that all this only started twenty years ago. If you are twenty in 2014, then even by the age of ten, broadband was only just being introduced. It is such a rapid change that no-one really knows what effects it is having. Yet anyone who travels round China will see that almost everyone is walking around with a mobile phone and that much of Chinese life is now lived on Weibo and other social networking sites.

This communications revolution, tied to a thinking machine, is unprecedented in human history. It is difficult to concentrate for long, difficult to turn off the ever present device without feeling cut off from the world. This means that the potentials for long, uninterrupted, periods of reflection and creativity are eroded. Everything becomes instant. And of course there are many other threats – cyber bullying, blackmail, on-line pornography and violence. Normal human relations can seem boring and routine compared to the excitements of the net.

And new technologies arising from digital media are not confined to the Internet. The proliferation of films and TV, the use of computers in manufacture and distribution, there are so many other ways in which machines great and small are entering our lives.

What we can be fairly sure of is that if current trends continue, computers will hold a vast corpus of information, foreshadowed now by Wikipedia and Google. Anyone will have the information available to them in a quantity and quality never before known in the world.

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This will allow explorations in all of the human sciences and humanities. There is an ever-growing knowledge explosion.

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Our present condition

Much of the theme of this talk is summarized in a diagram which

Karl Jaspers included in his book. As early as the late 1940’s, he foresaw that the divergence would come to an end and the Age of Science and Technology would spread all over the earth to create the ‘one world of mankind on the earth’ or what is now commonly known as the global community.

[From Jaspers, Goal, p.27]

The Axial Age which occurred some two and a half thousand years ago meant that Eurasia was united in its basic philosophies. By about the eighth century, China was ahead of all other civilizations

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in technology and knowledge. To a large extent it remained so until about the fifteenth century.

There were signs of some kind of break-through with the Su Song (escapement) clock, astronomy, gunpowder, printing, the magnet, some early glass, water-powered cotton looms, with huge cities and trading networks across the world. But from about the fifteenth century the great divergence in world-views began.

In the West there was the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, and in China these did not occur. There was a growing divergence in economy, society and polity to go alongside the knowledge divergence. Thus by the middle of the nineteenth century western power was greater, based on industrial technology and science.

Of course there were small imports of new technologies and ideas into China, both during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but by the end of the nineteenth century the East and West were far apart. One small indication of this was in the centres of learning. Europe had flourishing universities from the thirteenth century, but though it had early academies, the first modern style universities in China were only founded from the 1890’s.

Visitors from China to Japan and the West saw the need to try to catch up, so there was a period between about 1890 and the 1930’s when some serious attempts to graft on western learning were made by great thinkers and writers like Liang Chi Chao, Wang Gouwei and Xu Zhimou. But it was a huge task in such a vast Empire, and early attempts had hardly started when China descended into the chaos of the warlord period of the 1930’s, exacerbated by the Japanese occupation of the north of the country and a growing civil war. The turbulence of the Second World War heightened the difficulties.

By the birth of what is called ‘New China’ in 1949, China was still, basically an Axial Age civilization. It had hardly started on the Scientific Revolution and had missed out on the subsequent paradigms after the sixteenth century. Nor had it gone through an industrial revolution.

At this crucial point, it again shut itself off from the West (and from Japan for obvious reasons) and reverted to a ‘Closed’ world-view. Marxism is a paradigm or world-view which, while it has an interest in changes in history, fixes the present into an unchanging structure of thought once the supposed end point, the communist society, has been reached, as was thought to be the case in China after 1949.

So in terms of Karl Popper’s distinction between the Open and the Closed society, China was a closed system of thought for the next thirty years. Indeed with the attack on almost all ideas coming in from outside, the distrust of intellectuals and universities, an onslaught on the Axial philosophies of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, all alternatives to Marxism were to be eliminated. A homogenous, materialist and closed mental landscape was created

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in this period. This was possible through a self-fulfilling Marxist prophecy; the intellectual superstructure (world-view) is in Marxism a reflection of relations of production and technology, which is the ‘real’ determining infrastructure. The Communist party aimed to re-organize the determining infrastructure (class and property) and thereby created an ideological superstructure of a new kind.

Thus, over a fifth of mankind in 1979 had not gone through the second revolution identified by Jaspers – the age of Science and Technology. What China then faced was reconstructing its shattered economy – which it has done so successfully – and coping with huge population and urban growth, and the re-shaping of its educational and family systems, its law and government. It was also entering a new age of thought.

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