By Ian Jobling • 11/16/07
One of the great weaknesses in the work of race realist writers has been their failure to explain Western uniqueness. Why is it that whites and whites alone invented science, capitalism, democracy, and the idea of human rights? Treatments of this subject are rare or absent in the writings of race realists like Richard Lynn, J. P. Rushton, Steven Sailer, and Jared Taylor. Due to their focus on intelligence, these writers do a good job of describing and explaining the differences between whites and blacks, whose IQs differ substantially; however, race realists have little to say about the enormous cultural differences between whites and Asians, whose average IQ scores are approximately the same.
Michael Hart’s recent Understanding Human History, which attempts to explain history from a race realist perspective, is a case in point. Because of his focus on IQ, Hart has little to say about why modernity arose in the West and not China; consequently, he devotes only four pages of his book to the subject despite the fact that the source Western uniqueness is one of the great questions of history, perhaps even the central one. Furthermore, Hart’s remarks on the subject are implausible. Hart would have us believe that Western superiority is due to accidents of culture and geography, such as the fact that China’s alphabet is unsuitable for printing and that China has a smaller coastline in proportion to its area than Europe does.1
Hart ignores what surely must be one of the primary reasons for China’s failure to achieve modernity: throughout its history, China has been a despotism that crushed innovation and refused its inhabitants the most basic of rights. Western authorities have generally been much more friendly to innovation than the Chinese and had greater respect for the rights of their subjects; consequently, the individual initiative that is at the root of scientific inquiry and capitalism flourished in Europe.
The differences between Western and Chinese culture are too profound and persistent to be explained by historical accidents. Rather, there is plainly a difference in nature between the two peoples. I would like to suggest that the West’s unique characteristics are, in part at least, due to the white race’s capacity for humility. By humility I do not mean self-abasement, false modesty, or lack of self-respect. I simply mean the awareness of one’s own fallibility and the ability to recognize when one is wrong. The Chinese government always assumed that it had a monopoly on the truth and therefore insisted on the absolute subjection of its population. The Western authorities, by contrast, were much more accepting of their own fallibility and were thus more friendly to technological innovation and individual initiative.
Historian Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the nature and sources of Western uniqueness. Stark takes aim at the idea that the five centuries after the fall of Rome were a “Dark Ages” in Europe during which “barbarism, superstition, and ignorance covered the face of the world,” in the words of Voltaire.
In fact, Europeans in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages were highly innovative. The list of the inventions that arose between the fifth and fifteenth centuries is long and impressive: wind and water mills, horse shoes, the mechanization of cloth making, chimneys, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks, to mention only a few.2
Stark argues that the reason for this innovation was that Christianity encouraged it. The Christian authorities of the period had the humility to recognize that they did not have a monopoly on the truth; therefore, generally speaking, they responded to innovation with praise rather than censure.
For example, the fifth-century Roman theologian St. Augustine, whose ideas were influential in post-Roman Europe, viewed improvements as a gift from God:
What wonderful—one might say stupefying—advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation! … With what sagacity have the have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered!
These advances were due to the “unspeakable boon” of the “rational nature” that God had bestowed on man.3
The friendliness to innovation was part and parcel of the Christian faith in reason. Christians, Stark argues, believed that the holy scriptures were the beginning rather than the end of knowledge and that only the exercise of reason could complete man’s understanding of God and his creation.4 Again, here is St. Augustine:
Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.5
Gilbert de Tournai, a 13th-century Christian philosopher, wrote:
Those things that have been written before us are not laws, but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed.6
This forward-looking belief in progress was unique to Christianity. According to the religious and ethical codes of Islam and the Far East, the world was either in decline or passed through cycles with no enduring progress.7
The Chinese authorities were always more distrustful of innovation than Christians were. Granted, the years between the first and 11th centuries saw great innovation in China: the rudder, paper, gunpowder, stirrups, and the printing press are products of this period. However, after that time, when Western innovation was just beginning, Chinese technological expertise stagnated and even declined because of the culture’s reactionary traditionalism.
As an example of the reactionary spirit, consider this statement by a Chinese contemporary of Gilbert de Tournai:
If scholars are made to concentrate their attention solely on the classics and are prevented from slipping into the study of the vulgar practices of later generations, then the empire will be fortunate indeed!8
The totalitarian Chinese state regarded all innovation as a threat. As the historian Etienne Balazs says:
It is the state that kills technological progress in China. Not only in the sense that it nips in the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also by customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’Etat. The atmosphere of routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation suspect, any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, is unfavorable to the spirit of free inquiry.9
According to David S. Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, these different attitudes towards innovation explain why Europe appropriated Chinese inventions like paper and gunpowder, while China rejected European inventions and ideas. Landes captures the intense smugness of Chinese culture in the 16th century:
Those sixteenth-century Europeans who sailed the Indian Ocean and made their way to China met an unaccustomed shock of alien condescension. The Celestial Empire—the name tells everything—saw itself as the world’s premier political entity: first in size and population, first in age and experience, untouchable in its cultural achievement and sense of moral, spiritual, and intellectual superiority.10
The Chinese rejected the West because they could not tolerate the idea that there was any room for improvement in their country. As one Western observer wrote, “In this country they think that everything is excellent and that proposals for improvement would be superfluous if not blameworthy.” Another Western observer noted that this attitude smothered innovation by the Chinese themselves: “Any man of genius is paralyzed immediately by the thought that his efforts will win him punishment rather than rewards.”11
The pre-modern West also differed from other cultures in its respect for individual rights. One of the most basic of rights is the right to property, or the freedom from arbitrary government seizures of goods and money. Security of property is a fundamental prerequisite for capitalism and economic growth. If people are afraid that the government will seize their wealth, they have no motive to labor at all.
Stark demonstrates Christian theologians’ commitment to the right to property. As one theologian said in the 11th century, “It is by human right that we say ‘My estate, my house, my servant.” The greatest medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, wrote in the 14th century, “private ownership is both legitimate and necessary.”12
The respect for individual rights was virtually unknown outside the West, however. In the despotic regimes that have been the norm throughout human history, including in China, “the ruler, who was viewed as a god or partaking of the divine, thus different from and far above his subjects, could do as he pleased with their lives and things, which they held at his pleasure.”13
The respect for the right to property enabled Europeans to develop the beginnings of capitalism in the Middle Ages. Such developments were suppressed in China, however, by state confiscations of property.
For example, in the 10th and 11th century, an iron industry based on capitalist principles began to flourish in northern China. The positive effects of capitalism began to be seen; the industrialists began reaping profits and raising wages because of their urgent need for labor. Everything was going well until the Chinese government noticed. Stark summarizes their reaction, which was eerily similar to the collectivization practiced by the Mao regime:
Eventually, Mandarins at the imperial court had noticed some commoners were getting rich by manufacturing and were hiring peasant laborers at high wages. They deemed such activities to be threats to Confucian values and social tranquility. Commoners must know their place; only the elite should be wealthy. So, they declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything.
After the confiscation, the iron works were abandoned.14 The nineteenth-century historian Winwood Reade summed it up: “Property is insecure. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.”15
The difference between Western and Chinese attitudes towards innovation and rights is the difference between humility and arrogance. Because Western authorities could admit the possibility that they did not know the best way of doing things, they were open to new ideas and to individual initiative. However, far from believing the “truth was open to all,” Chinese authorities believed themselves completely omniscient and consequently squelched their subjects’ potential.
The lesson of Western success is that humility pays. As a result of the West’s friendliness to innovation, it grew richer and more technologically advanced as the centuries passed, while China stagnated. By the 19th century, European powers were able to defeat the Chinese in wars and force the government to adopt policies favorable to Western interests.
My hypothesis that whites have a greater capacity for humility than non-whites is sketchy and speculative, no doubt, but think of all the traits of Western culture that it explains. First of all, it accounts for one of the strangest practices of our people: ever since the Christian conversion, the high and mighty in the West have sat patiently every Sunday while a preacher told them that they were suspect in the eyes of a God who favored the meek and the poor. Why would the commanders of armies put up with such insults if we did not have an inborn taste for humility?
Furthermore, the humility hypothesis explains why whites have developed such a self-critical culture. Whites today are positively eager to flagellate themselves for Western sins real and imaginary, whether slavery, imperialism, or global warming. Such critical cultures have at best only a tenuous existence outside of the West. China is again a case in point. Chinese historians are still bitter over Western ascendancy and do their best to disguise their country’s failure. As Landes says, “The desire of sinologists to defend China from outrageous outsiders has spawned a small industry of defensive scholarship … designed to enhance Chinese performance and correct Western criticisms.”16
Whatever the merits of my humility theory, white activists sorely need some explanation of Western uniqueness. If we are to convince people that our cause has merit, we need to be able to explain to them what the distinctive traits of whites are and why they are worth defending. Important as IQ research is, the failures of the past indicate that we need to strike out in new directions.