Yet there is another set of facts that progressives ignore. Every civilization that has appealed to our idealism has claimed it will lift the poor and the oppressed. But Western civilization has done this the best.
Islam’s second advantage is the eagerness of its militants to solve political disputes with violence. Violence is a potent force multiplier, especially in a world peppered with democratic societies.
Allah has given Islam’s warriors what the Qur’an calls “the fire whose fuel is men and stones” — the fire of nuclear weaponry.
There is only a handful of authors alive today whose ideas about geopolitics have won respect in both the world of Islam and in the West. Howard Bloom is one of them. The following is the second part of an interview with Bloom, published here last November.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In your 1995 book, The Lucifer Principle, you introduced a new concept in geopolitical science — “the pecking order of nations.” What new light does this shed on Islamic civilization and its relations with the rest of the world?
Howard Bloom: Research on pecking orders — known technically as “dominance hierarchies” — has gone on now for roughly 100 years. Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, the naturalist who observed it in a Norwegian farmyard, called it the key to despotism. Schjelderup-Ebbe had discovered that in the world of chickens there is a social hierarchy, a division into aristocrats and commoners — lower, middle and upper class. Pecking orders also exist among men, monkeys, lobsters and lizards. And the struggle for position in a pecking order is not restricted to individuals. It also hits social groups.
The pecking order of superorganisms helps explain why the danger of barbarians is real, and why “humanitarian” assumptions in foreign policy are sometimes suicidal. With our dream of eliminating competition, we try to wish the pecking order away. But the fact is that we will continue to live in pecking orders whether we like it or not. The brutal fact is that the more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be. That holds true in our lives as individuals. And it holds even truer in our life as a nation.
We all know that Rome was picked apart by peoples any respectable Roman could see were beneath his contempt. The barbarians did not shave. They wore dirty clothes. They were almost always drunk. Their living standard was one step above that of a mule. Their technology was laughable. They usually couldn’t read and write. And they certainly had no “culture.” What could these smelly primitives do? They could fight. The moral is simple: Never forget the pecking order’s surprises. Today’s superpower is tomorrow’s conquered state. Yesterday’s overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians.
Some readers will be outraged by my presumption. How dare I regard any group as barbaric? What appalling ethnocentrism! There are no barbarians; there are simply cultures we have not taken the time to understand. But there are barbarians — people whose cultures glorify the act of murder, and elevate violence to a holy deed. These cultures portray the extinction of other human beings as a validation of manliness, a heroic gesture in the name of truth, or simply a good way to get ahead in the world. And traditional Islamic societies tend to be high on this list.
Progressive critics are right when they point out the West’s bloody track record. Our two world wars in the 20th century killed a combined total of roughly 70 million human beings. Our two great social experiments — the Marxist-Leninist transformation of Russia and the Marxist Revolution of Mao Zedong in China, a revolution based on the philosophy of a German Westerner, Karl Marx, killed another 80 million. With our atomic bombs, we Westerners wiped out two Japanese cities in less time than it takes to read this page. We warred to control the lives of others in Korea, Vietnam and Algeria, where the French fought from 1954 to 1962 to quash a local war of independence that cost between 350,000 and 1.5 million lives. Even our conventional weapons in World War II produced fire storms that sucked the oxygen out of the lungs of innocent civilians, miles from the center of impact and roasted them alive as they suffocated and died.
Yet there is another set of facts that progressives ignore. Every civilization that has appealed to our idealism has claimed it will lift the poor and the oppressed. But Western civilization has done this the best.
If you had been born in 1850, your expected lifespan would have been 37.5 years. If you had been born in the West in 2000, your expected lifespan would have been 78.5 years. Chinese emperors were willing to spend almost all of their wealth to achieve an extra four years of life. But Western civilization has added another 40. Western civilization has more than doubled the human lifespan. No other civilization in the history of the world — not the Chinese, Egyptian, Muslim, Russian Marxist or Roman — has ever pulled this off.
If you had been the poorest-paid worker in London in 2012, a personal assistant, you would have earned what an entire tenement full of the poorest-paid workers in London were paid in 1850. You would have earned what seven Irish dockworkers made.
If you gave a bunch of average Western kids today a Stanford Binet IQ test from 1905, today’s kids would register as near geniuses. They’d register an average IQ of roughly 135. That’s an IQ jump of 35 points.
If you were in an indigenous culture, one of those tribes that “lives in peace and harmony with nature,” your odds of dying a violent death at the hands of a fellow human being would be 10 times what they are in the West today. Since 1650, Western Civilization has upped the level of peace by a factor of 10.
If you were born in 2000, your height would have been four inches higher than if you had been born in 1850.
If our great, great grandparents could give us an extra 40 years of life, we owe an extra 40 more to our great, great grandchildren. If our great, great grandparents could septuple the incomes of the poorest workers among us, surely we owe another septupling to our great, great grandkids. If our great, great grandparents could up the average IQ by 35 points, surely we owe another 35 to our great, great grandkids. And if our great, great grandparents could increase the peace in the world by a factor of 10, surely we owe our great, great grandkids 10 times more. The only way to achieve this is to defend Western civilization with all your heart and might.
