G7-2: "Civilization: The West and The Rest"
January 29, 2018 | 1:00-3:00 pm
Description: If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople. By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe - Aragon, Castile, France, Portugal and Scotland - would have seemed little better. As for fifteenth-century North America, it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs and Incas. The idea that the West would come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half a millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? Historian and author, Niall Ferguson, argues that the West developed six “killer applications” that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so, Ferguson warns, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy. Over the course of 4 sessions, participants will discuss Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and The Rest and screen the BBC program based on the book. Through the television program and literature we will identify the true causes of Western ascendancy so as to estimate the possible imminence of our decline and fall.
Designed for: Anyone interested in discussing the influence of Western Civilization and the prospects for the future
Facilitators: Marianne Kure, Bill Krein
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