The World

A Beginner's Guide

Göran Therborn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745643441, 9780745643434
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

What is the world of the 21st century like now that the centrality of the West is no longer given? How were the societies and cultures of today's world together with their interconnections forged, and what is driving human society in our times? In short, what is the state of the world today as we enter the second decade of the 21st century?

This is the first book which deals with planetary human society as whole. It is a beginner's guide to the world after the West and after globalization, compact, portable, and jargon-free. It is aimed at everybody who, even with experience, has kept a beginner's curiosity of the world, to everybody who does not know everything they want to know about it, about the good, the evil, and the salvation of the world.

• It lays bare the socio-cultural geology of the world, its major civilizations, its historical waves of globalization, its family-sex-gender systems, and its pathways to modernity.
• It outlines the dynamics of the world, its basic drives, the contours of its most important global and sub-global processes.
• It presents the big team players on the world stage, populous as well as rich countries, missions and movements as well corporations and cities.
• It traces the life-courses of men and women on all the continents, from their birth and childhood to their old age, and their funeral.

1

WHY WE ARE WHO WE ARE: A SOCIOCULTURAL GEOLOGY OF TODAY’S WORLD

Coming together as members of humankind, we need, in order to relate and interact properly, to understand our differences – and not just the obvious ones, i.e., that we do not look alike, and talk in different tongues. Our basic values and tastes differ and our conceptions of the world and our expectations of life are different, as are our sense of body, sex and family. While no social scientist or psychologist will ever be able to grasp the infinite variety of human individuality, our differences tend to be historically and geographically patterned, and are thereby comprehensible.

As humans, we descend from different historical cultures and experiences. Our first task in grasping the world of humankind is to get a handle on this historical descent and experience. The most promising, if so far hardly used, approach, then, is to look at contemporary human societies and configurations from a perspective of social geology. The sociocultural mould, in which we have been formed, is not just of yesterday. It had better be understood as layered by different social processes of different age.

Sketching the contours of a contemporary global social geology depends on world history, of which the 1,300 or so pages of a ‘brief’ world history by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2008) are a wonderful start. But this book is neither dabbling in it nor competing with it. It is looking at the sedimentations of history from the special vantage point of the present. Our focus is not the historical record, but the historical DNA which we are carrying in our social and cultural make-up.

In this vein, I have found three extensive layers of human social formation, around the myriad of local strata, particularly pertinent. The most ancient we may, in accordance with much everyday language, call ‘civilizations’, in plural, spatially grounded cultural configurations of enduring importance, with ‘classical’ languages, texts and/or oral traditions, views of life and after-life, sense of beauty, notions of family, sex and gender.

Secondly, world patterns of society and culture history have been lastingly shaped by transcultural, transpolity, transcontinental processes, which we may term ‘waves of globalization’, even if, prior to 1492, they were not literally global. Thriving from long-distance travel, communication and exchange, these waves have by no means all been primarily economic in dynamics and significance. Religion and politics have also been at the forefront. These waves have further given rise to two important hybrid family-sex-gender systems, in Southeast Asia and in the Americas.

The third layer is ‘modernity’, the modern world. In the same way that art museums nowadays distinguish contemporary from modern art, so we should distinguish the contemporary from the modern world. The latter is a crucial historical layer of our formation, for two reasons. One is that modernity fought its way into cultural domination along different routes and across different constellations of proponents and opponents. These pathways have left their imprint on how much weight we give today to religion, to ideology, to class, to language. Secondly, the birth of the modern world was also the establishment of the current divide into what is now euphemistically referred to as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, aka ‘underdeveloped’, countries. For almost all of us, being born in one or the other makes an enormous difference. Why that rift opened up and has divided the world for, by now, two centuries remains subject to seemingly interminable controversy. How it happened is somewhat less controversial. In the geological perspective of this book, the divide was established through the confluence of the roads to modernity and the fourth wave of historical globalization.

In other words, we are who we are because of the civilization and the family-sex-gender system in which we were brought up, because of our home’s location in the recurrent historical waves of globalization, piled upon each other, and, finally, because of our society’s experience of the struggles for and against modernity. Individualists are not wrong in adding that these are moulds that can be broken and rejected, but they are naive if they assume that their impact can be wished away.

The Rock of Civilizations

The global geological perspective adopted here focuses, and narrows, our look at civilizations, which may be approached in several different ways (see Braudel 1963/87; Fernández-Armesto 2000, Huntington 1996; International Sociology 2001). The comparative study of (Eurasian) civilizations had already become a ‘fine art’ in ninth-century Baghdad (Chaudhuri 1990: 67). What we are concerned with are large, enduring cultural configurations, pertinent to our contemporary world. Historically, they have been shaped by geospatial forces – Braudel’s first rule of the grammar of civilizations was ‘civilizations are spaces’ – which now may elude the non-specialist. In such configurations we expect to find a cosmological and moral worldview, a pattern of symbolic imaginations, and, in literate civilizations, one or more classical languages and a classical canon, of cosmology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. Eventual clashes or dialogues between civilizations are out of focus here. To what extent they bear upon the dynamics of today’s world will be considered below.

For this purpose we may identify five ancient major civilizations of enduring importance. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; my only claim is that there is no other of as much or greater importance in terms of numbers of people encultured by it. It should be remembered that here we are not aiming at a brief historical summary of civilizations, or of any other layer of the world’s sociocultural geology, but at grasping key features of their current significance.

The Sinic

Sinic civilization is the largest of all. Developed and centred in China, it spread far outside Han culture, to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The adjective ‘Sinic’ is used in civilizational analysis precisely to convey this larger configuration. A recent scholar (Fogel 2009) has called it the ‘Sinosphere’. Its Chinese core, developed around and between the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers, is the oldest of all major civilizations today. It is the only continuously surviving of the great ancient fluvial civilizations, including those of the Euphrates and Tigris, of the Nile and of the Indus. A civilization of dense population, fed by wet-rice and millet, governed by a large centre of political organization, only by exception divided among different rulers. A sedentary civilization, which more than 2,000 years ago as a defence against nomadic ‘barbarians’, built the largest construction in human history, the Great Wall.

The most distinctive feature of the Sinic worldview is a non-transcendental moral and social philosophy, usually summarized as ‘Confucianism’, without God or gods. The currently world-spreading Chinese cultural centres bear the name of Confucius (who died in 479 before Christ). Sinic civilization is distinctively this-worldly, without sacred texts of godly narratives and revelations. Human life runs along bloodlines, which it is a moral duty to keep and to venerate. House altars are devoted not to gods, but to one’s ancestors. ‘Filial piety’, a son’s love and respect of his father, is the prime social norm.

True, the tradition has recognized something extra-worldly and sublime: the emperor was the Son of Heaven ruling with a mandate from Heaven. But this heaven was nebulous, harbouring no commanding patriarch like the Jewish-Christian-Muslim God, no godly dramas and impersonations as in the Hindu world, nor the spiritual animation of extra-worldly Africa. The imperial mandate could be lost, but not because some divine law had been violated. ‘Heaven sees as people see; Heaven hears as people hear’, Mencius, the paradigmatic disciple of Confucius, explicated (Tu 1990: 119). The Master himself had established a this-worldly focus: ‘When still unable to do your duty to men, how can you do your duty to the spirits?’ ‘Not yet understanding life, how can you understand death?’ (Bodde 1981: 321). This moral philosophy has left ample room for different religious faiths – Buddhism and Taoism together with Confucianism constituting the ‘three teachings’ in China – as well as for all kinds of magical beliefs and practices. But always off-centre, as if in Europe and West Asia, Christianity and Islam had remained a popular under-vegetation to a reigning Aristotelian philosophy.

To the contemporary world, Confucianism has left a legacy of secular politics, of meritocratic educational credentialism and patriarchal familism. While understandable pride in ancient power and glory sustained conservatism, political modernizers in the Sinosphere have never had to confront a powerful religious reaction – not the late nineteenth-century Westernizers of Japan, nor the Chinese, the North Korean or the North Vietnamese (the South was different) communists, nor the birth-controlling military men of post-Second World War capitalism in South Korea and Taiwan. The extraordinary Mandarin examination system, formally recruiting officials on a meritocratic basis of classical education, which was not fully institutionalized in Japan but which covered China, Korea and Vietnam, put a high value on education, and on education that was, in principle, accessible to everybody. Mass education emerged as a trump card of East Asian development in the twentieth century. To the family system, inherited and reproduced, we shall return below.

To the heirs of the Sinic civilization, a key feature of it is the language – that is, the written language, the ideographic Chinese script. This script is the classical language of this civilization. It was the common language of educated communication throughout the region at least until the Second World War, in spite of the fact that the spoken languages are mutually unintelligible, and that separate scripts had been developed in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Communication in this classical Chinese script was known as ‘brush talking’ (Howland 1996: 44ff). The ideograms could be understood by educated people across national boundaries throughout the civilization, like numerals and mathematical symbols between, say, English and Russian. The Japanese and the Koreans developed their own, simpler syllable scripts, which in the twentieth century became dominant, and late nineteenth-century colonial French missionaries succeeded in converting the Vietnamese – who had also produced an indigenous lower-culture script of their own – to the Latin alphabet, supplemented with a set of diacritical marks.

Chinese characters, kanji, are still part of Japanese writing, and part of East Asian classical education. Upon the insistence of its main corporate donors, a major private university of Seoul, Korea University, where I taught in 2007, demands a knowledge of 2,000 Chinese characters for student admission. The script has also given rise to a special art form: calligraphy. While not unique, it is cultivated also in the Islamic civilization and it maintains an unrivalled position in Sinic civilization. The main monument of the Beijing Tiananmen, in front of the big Mao mausoleum, was a column to the ‘Heroes of the People’. Its original inscription was in Mao’s calligraphy, and the text alongside in that of Premier Zhou Enlai.

A classical education in Sinic civilization is nowadays usually as fragmented, intellectually as well as socially, as a classical education in Europe, but my Chinese students at Cambridge have studied Confucius. A proper classical Sinic education included, above all, the Analects of Confucius, and the Five Classics, the Book of Documents (on just government), the Book of Poetry, the Book of Songs (on emotions), the Book of Rites (on social relations), the Spring and Autumn Annals a state chronicle) (Tu 1990: 123ff). There were also the canonical Book of Changes and the Book of Music (Poceski 2009: 37).

Classical forms of architecture were consolidated during the Tang Dynasty (seventh to tenth century CE), but classical principles of urban layout are much older. They still govern central Beijing, the Forbidden City and its surroundings, the layout of Kyoto and of central Seoul, and characterize the Van Mieu Confucian complex in Hanoi, nowadays often referred to as the Temple of Literature (Logan 2000: 26ff). Contemporary East Asian skyscrapers in their basically international style often add a roof reference to the East Asian canon – an upside-down reverence as classical Sinic architecture which was low-rise horizontal – and they regularly take feng shui principles of geomancy into consideration. Regional and national variants have developed across East Asia, but a ‘neo-classical’ building there remains recognizably different from, say, South Asian or European, neoclassicism.

The East Asia of Sinic civilization is a densely populated area, still largely governed by its ancient norms of obligation and harmony. Crime and family disruption are more marginal than in the rest of the world. Politics may be authoritarian and repressive of dissent, but social harmony and consensual decision-making remain important norms. Ancient historical traditions are kept alive, as in the imperial rituals of Japan, the recent museums of Seoul, the new monumentality of Hanoi, and in the recent Confucian robing of the Chinese state. In Pyongyang – in the early twentieth century known as the ‘Jerusalem of the East’ because of the successful proselytization by Scottish Presbyterians – there may be more rupture with the past, but in China Mao was proud of, and used, his classical education of history, poetry and calligraphy. He had read the 24 dynastic chronicles, covering all the emperors of China from 221 BC to 1644 CE several times, eagerly discussing them with his physician and private conversation partner. Before his numerous sexual encounters, he often gave the girls a classical Daoist sex manual, with ancient, rare characters, to read (Li 1994: 122ff, 358).

The identities produced by this civilization are not me-centred, but sociocentric or contextual. The languages of the area have several different words corresponding to the English ‘I’, used according to social context. In Vietnamese, when talking to one’s parents and referring to oneself, the first pronoun should be avoided altogether, and, instead, expressions like ‘your son/daughter’ should be used (I owe this piece of knowledge to my Vietnamese former star student, Pham Van Bich; on Chinese, Japanese and Korean, see Nisbett 2003: 51ff, 178).

From ancient Greece to contemporary Euro-America, there is a focus on, a concern with, the acting individual, with agency and its constraints – recycled as agency and structure in 1980s sociological debates. Their East Asian counterpoint is a concern with interrelations, totality and the ‘harmony’ of the whole, in which all individuals and groups have their proper place, like a successful blend of herbs and spices in a good dish. And ‘harmony’ is a current explicit policy goal of the Chinese government. To Euro-American confrontation of right against wrong is counterposed East Asian avoidance of division, and adjustment. That is the civilizational heritage underlying, for instance, Japanese government policymaking and corporate board management, as well as ASEAN decision-making. The opaqueness of contemporary Chinese top-level decision-making had better not be abused for ungrounded exemplifications. However, there is another aspect of the latter which is visible. That is the long-term view, radical and patient at the same time, which characterized the modernist political planning of nineteenth-century Meiji Japan and which is characterizing the Chinese post-Mao era of socioeconomic reform.

In an impressive work – using a range of hard evidence running from ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy to contemporary comparative child development, psychology and managerial studies, via cross-cultural student experiments – the American psychologist Richard Nisbett has demonstrated how Sinic and European civilizations have generated distinctive ways of seeing and knowing the world. The differences were there among the great philosophers 2,500 years ago, and they are here among parents, toddlers, students and managers of the 2000s. Of course, the differences are probabilistic, and are not inscribed in every single Chinese, Japanese, European or American of European descent.

Europeans tend to see the world in analytical categories, East Asians in a web of relationships. A simple example, used by Nisbett in his experiments, which also caught this writer off-guard as Eurocentric, is to ask people which two phenomena belong together from a triplet – in one version, panda, monkey, banana. Europeans tend to group the panda and the monkey as belonging to the same category, of animals. East Asians, on the other hand, mostly opt for monkey and banana as related, monkeys eating bananas. Euro-Americans tend to see the world in either – or categories, whereas East Asians more often see it in contradictory dialectical terms, of x as well as non-x. Mao Zedong may not have been the great thinker his adulators once claimed, but his contribution to Marxism was precisely his Chinese sense of dialectics.

The Sinic civilization today holds an immense cultural pride in a rich, ancient, continuous civilization, which, after its decline and intellectual rejection in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is still there in modern, prosperous or rapidly growing countries. This pride is most general in China (cf. Jacques 2009: chs. 7–8), the centre of the civilization, whereas in Japan, Korea and Vietnam it is grafted onto national cultural traditions. Its main historical weakness has been its self-centredness, which finally led to self-isolation from the rest of the world, in turn causing a stagnation of science, technology and economy that, by mid-nineteenth century, had become nearly fatal. Its most important strengths are probably its tradition of large-scale collective work organization, of civic discipline, its high evaluation of education and learning and its secular framework, which provides little room and basis for religious conservatism and inter-religious strife.

The Indic

India and Indic as well as Hindu all derive from the river Indus, in today’s Pakistan, but none of them has any known direct connection with the Indus valley civilization, which disappeared about 4,000 years ago. Indic civilization began emerging 500–1,000 years later, developed by peoples coming from the northwest of Iran and Central Asia, ‘Aryans’ – from whom the current name of Iran stems – through today’s Afghan passes and by the five-rivers country, Punjab. From its northwestern beginnings it fanned out eastwards, along the plain of Ganges – which has become a holy river of Hinduism, on which lies also what is perhaps the main religious centre of this polycentric faith, Varanasi (or Benares) – reaching southern India much later.

Indic has a similar relationship to India as Sinic has to China, extending conventional India south- and eastwards, to current Sri Lanka, to Bali and Java, and to what is now Myanmar/Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and into southern Vietnam. It also grew north, into and across the Himalayas, into Nepal and Tibet, whose Lamanism is an offshoot of Indian Buddhism. The European expression ‘Indochina’ captures the meeting-ground of Sinic and Indic civilizations. It is the southwestern end of Chinese characters, architecture and chopsticks, and the mainland eastern end of Sanskrit inscriptions and sculptural Indic temples, which reached into the Cambodia of the Angkor Wat temples, Laos and southern Vietnam under the Champa of the first half of the second Christian millennium, and of reading the Mahabbarata and the Ramayana, still part of the royal rites of Thailand (Coedès 1966, 1968).

Cognitive psychologists have discovered some similarities of causal attribution, emphasizing context more than actor’s disposition, between East and South Asian cultures, in contrast to Euro-American ones (Nisbett 2003: 114ff), and there may be others, e.g., a holistic worldview in which individuals are embedded in larger contexts (Singh 2002: 32ff). In different ways, both civilizations have been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Tables and Maps
• PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING THERE IS . . .
• INTRODUCTION: HUMANKIND AND ITS WORLD
• 1 WHY WE ARE WHO WE ARE: A SOCIOCULTURAL GEOLOGY OF TODAY’S WORLD
• 2 WORLD DYNAMICS: HUMAN EVOLUTION AND ITS DRIVERS
• 3 THE CURRENT WORLD STAGE
• 4 OUR TIME ON EARTH: COURSES OF LIFE
• CONCLUSION: HOW WE GOT HERE, AND WHERE WE ARE GOING
• REFERENCES
• Index