How to reclaim the Western history of freedom
The culture war is frustratingly obscuring a game-changing lesson from our past
It has become received wisdom that the epic of Western history is a chronicle of unparalleled evil. Grand narratives no longer cast its rise as the exhilarating march of enlightened liberalism, but instead detail a dark epic in which enslavement, oppression and controlism are the dominant elemental forces. The view that European prosperity is built on colonial plunder and the industrialised enslavement of millions of Africans has gained traction. So too that America, the ‘leader of the free world’, does not originate in a movement for equality and liberty, but the commercial exchange of human flesh.
The most audacious example of this bid to rewrite history is of course the New York Times 1619 Project. Perhaps one of the most astonishing claims of the latter was that it was “out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required” that “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” grew.
Such revisionism has dethroned an earlier romantic grand narrative. Standard world history tracks the rises and falls of imposingly resplendent but hopelessly authoritarian civilisations, as the West continuously advances.
As a child I vividly remember spending summer holidays inhaling history classics that traced the ghoulish magnificence and inevitable decay of Asian civilisations, as the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq blared on the news.
Through my adolescence I became fascinated with these stories — from the stridently progressive yet debilitatingly over-centralised Mesopotamia, to the sclerotic monumentalism of Egypt, as fanatically committed to rigid hierarchy as to precise measurement and mathematics. The spectacular disintegration of the decadent Persian empire in the face of the freedom-loving Greeks loomed large in this story. So did the baffling insularity of the Chinese dynasties and the Islamic efflorescence of the early Middle Ages, which fades under the militaristic Mamluks.
Implicit in these grand narratives was the sense that there is something intrinsically lacking in the non-West — namely some elusive and quasi-mystical impulse to freedom that has apparently stirred in the souls of Westerners as far back as Greek antiquity. The West is uniquely individualistic, rebellious, bold, outward looking, progressive, technologically dexterous, empirically minded, materialistic, egoistic, rapacious, selfish and acquisitive, so the story goes.
Slaying false narratives
Both ‘big reads’ on the West are, I think, wrong. It is not true that the West was essentially built on oppression, technocratic controlism, protectionism or any other top-down method of civilisation-building. If this were so then it would never have become the world hegemon; its evolution would likely have closely paralleled that other resource-rich, land-abundant former European slave colony of the Americas, Brazil. Similarly, had liberalism not taken hold on its shores, Britain would likely have remained an agrarian backwater and marginal trading enclave jostling hopelessly for protection and influence amid Eurasian clashes of empire.
Slavery may have played a role in the early consolidation and growth of America. But it was the technological development of interchangeable parts and the modern assembly line that made America an industrial superpower. The secret sauce to both of these breakthrough inventions was a culture of freedom —a social backdrop which enabled, tolerated and encouraged internal mobility, new ideas, unimpeded information exchange and experimentation.
The story of America’s rise to becoming the world’s factory across the 19th and 20th century is one of upstarts, failed dreams, mutual learning, quiet tinkering and adaptation, breakthroughs built on previous breakthroughs which seized on other breakthroughs ad infinitum in a country where people had freedom to move around, to think, to try, to fail.
The industrial revolution that helped take the much-maligned cotton textile sector to new heights would not have occurred, had it not been for the spread of Newtonian science and its application to production machinery by entrepreneurs — most notably with regards to the steam engine. This was only able to happen because of Britain’s pluralistic open culture. So too the Church of England’s singular keenness to champion disruptive scientific ideas which challenged the orthodoxies of the Catholic Church, as the latter clung to obsolete Aristotelian teachings.
The West’s fitful struggle for freedom
That is not to say that Western history is perfectly virtuous. It is frustrating that some on the Right are reluctant to engage at all with critical readings of Western history. This actually undermines their ability to grasp and challenge the perversions of modern liberalism. Slavery and colonialism helped lay the foundations for Britain’s heavily financialised, service-oriented rentier economy, which has in the end become entrenched at the expense of manufacturing. Multiculturalism, which unwittingly empowers conservative forces to amass power as the ‘representatives’ for minority ‘communities’ can be traced back to the British Empire’s tradition of indirect colonial rule, a system that granted status and power to local big men in a way that was largely unprecedented in much of Asia and most of Africa.
Rather than trying to preserve a heroic account of Western liberal history, we need to accept that the history of Western freedom is complicated. There are great leaps forward. These include the crafting of the Magna Carta, the disintegration of feudalism across the 12th-15th centuries, the Reformation, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution.
There are setbacks and periods of stagnation. An obvious one is the beckoning of the early Dark Ages amid the collapse Roman Empire. So are the backlashes in the Deep South that followed every milestone in the American Civil Rights movement.
Western history is littered with episodes which paradoxically expand and constrict freedom at the same time. Protestants struggled for freedom from the Pope in order to create new tightly controlled orthodox sects subject to even stricter Godly discipline than under the Catholic Church. In the French Revolution, the authority of the sun king was splintered into a million stars — only for the most brightly burnishing zealots in the new cosmos to force a re-fusion in the form of the ‘general will’.
The bringing into being of the American liberal democratic Eden was predicated on the providential sweeping away of heathen indigenous communities whom the Puritans denounced for idly refused to cultivate the beneficent fruits of sacred land. In Britain, the rise of the merchant class, and its attainment of political rights was at least in part catalysed by its accumulation of impressive capital from systems of slavery by the 19th century.
There is a temptation to look at all this and declare Western history uniquely confused, uniquely cruel and perhaps even uniquely evil. But Western civilisation — like all great civilisations — is constituted from a mixture of enlightened elements and dark matter. It is the outcome of incredible human ingenuity, creativity, personal striving, openness, but also a despicable ruthlessness and extraordinary human capacity for hypocrisy, which has included a willingness to profit from slaves. But there is nothing unique about this double aspect to the West.
To really make appreciate this, it is not enough to pick over and dissect controversial episodes in the West’s past. You have to interrogate the grand sweep of the entire history of the world. The Western story is an imperfect, incomplete struggle for human freedom, riddled with failures and hypocrisies. Westerners need to find a way to forgive themselves and strive to do better. But they can only do that if they cease to view their civilisation as one marked by a unique evil, and understand that the story of not just the West — but the entire world — is an imperfect, incomplete struggle for freedom, riddled with failures and hypocrisies.
World history as a universal struggle for freedom
The rub is that in order to let go of the fact that the West is peculiarly evil, it’s important to let go of the fact that the West is intrinsically peculiar. Despite assertions that the West is uniquely predisposed to individualism, liberality, progress, materialism and selfishness, there is nothing in the DNA or ‘traditional culture’ of Western people that renders them more pro-freedom.
On the contrary, pulsating through the whole of human history is the biological impulse of humanity to build societies that recognise the individual as a fundamental category of reality, distinct from collectives such as tribe and kin. Western individualism happens to be anchored in ideas of non-interference and freedom of the will.
In Early China, however, a different idea individualism, which boiled down to possessing the personal agency to shape one’s own life from within an intricate web of social relationships, flourished. The concept of an individuals sacredly endowed with inalienable natural rights is alien to West Africa. But this only because an alternative view of personhood, in which individual status is earned over time through the exercise of certain actions and cultivation of moral character, rather than attained by virtue of birth, has vied for supremacy in hierarchical societies marked by slavery.
Weber talked about a Protestant work ethic. But many communities across the world demonstrate a tireless attitude to labour, not all of which have been subject to Protestant influences. The Mozabites, a tribe that inhabits a series of oases in southern Algeria have been compared to Calvinists and the ‘Puritans of Islam’ owing to their zeal for maintaining palm groves of the desert, as well as their aptitude for trade and moneylending. My father’s tribe, the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, are notorious for their obsessive entrepreneurialism, which is rooted in the perspective that “the world is a marketplace and it is subject to bargain”.
It has become received wisdom that the natural attitude of man to time is cyclical, and it is only with the rise of the modern West that humanity is able to think in a linear fashion and contemplate the notion of progress. In fact, several non-Western societies do not view the world as static or cyclical but subject to constant change, such as the Igbo. The yearning the disposition of human beings to imagine and work towards a better, brighter day is clear across several millennia. There is copious evidence of progressively utopian populist ideologies through the ages from the Bahktis of India who formulated visions of casteless classless ‘city without sorrow’, taxes and toil as early as the 15th century, to the millenarian Taiping rebels who aimed to build a world free of oppression, hunger and suffering, drawing inspiration not just from Christian millenarianism but traditional Chinese classics like the Book of Changes and Laozi.
Cliches about African and Middle Eastern history being ‘tribal’ and ‘sectarian’ overlook just how steeped these regions are in struggles over freedom. What has been mistaken as endless cycles of primitive tribal warfare in Africa are more often bids to craft and contest ideologies that were developed to maximise productive and reproductive labour in hostile physical environments. The ‘ancient, sectarian’ Shia-Sunni religious conflict in the Muslim world is essentially a dynamic struggle over freedom. The theological split between Sunnis and Shias is after all rooted in the former’s rejection on the latter’s insistence that the Caliph should be headed by a hereditary elite descended from the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali. At the same time, the persecution of Shia minorities across the Muslim world has concretised their identity as an oppressed group.
The whole of human history has been a fitful struggle for freedom, which entails exhilarating breakthroughs, terrifying setbacks and frustrating periods of stagnation. World history is also streaked with the efflorescence of freedom movements that paradoxically incubate oppressive qualities.
The earliest momentous breakthroughs include the development of intensive agriculture from around 3300 BC, and the domestication of the Bactrian camel in central Asia followed by the refinement of the saddle in the 3rd and 2nd century BC, which brought about the dawn of long-distance trade in luxury goods. Other milestones include Hammurabi’s Code composed in Babylonia around 1750BC, possibly the first attempt to unify a society through rule of law exemplified by a set of common legal rules carved in stone, and the evolution of the first advanced system of common law based on widely documented jurisprudence in Sasanian Iran over the course of the 3rd to 7th century AD.
Game changing inventions include that of paper in China in the 2nd century AD and Ancient Maya in the 6th century AD, a scaffolder and concretiser of human thought that lent people the power to think and remember on an unprecedented scale. The invention of the numerical system by Indian mathematicians in the 1st to 4th centuries and systems of algebraic calculation by Arabic scholars in the 9th century laid the foundations from theories of chance and probability — systems that were fundamental in overturning fatalistic cosmologies, establishing choice as a basic human capability, and risk something to be taken as well as faced.
As with the West, there are setbacks in the global struggle to freedom. It is true that the West is implicated in some of those setbacks. In Africa, slavery was a colossally regressive phenomenon. It introduced rigid distinctions between the enslaved and the free that had never existed before. It also triggered a cataclysmic crisis of labour across swathes of the continent, plunging emerging states into a doom spiral of conflicts over control of scarce human labour. Although some have tried to argue that the British system of indirect rule was less repressive as it relied heavily on indigenous leadership, the system demanded rigid division of Africans and Asians into artificial tribal identities that are often mistaken as primordial in origin rather than modern inventions.
The West is not associated with all regressions, however. India’s caste system dates back to the arrival of the Aryans from present-day Russia and Kazakhstan around 1500 BC. And take the Islamic world. The seizure of the right to individual creative thought by the ulama in the late medieval period with the end of ijtihad (original thought) in the Islamic world marks the start of Islamic civilisation’s ceding of its global dominance, amid the rise of Western commerce and science. The Islamic world experienced another major setback with the rise of Wahabbism in the 18th century, a fundamentalist strain of Islamism that preached puritanical collectivism in rivalry to Sufism. What Westerners who caricturise Islam as a brain-numbing collectivist religion, fundamentally incompatible with Christian individualist societies, are apparently unaware of is that Sufism, with its emphasis on personal worship and communion with God through individual meditation, was actually the Islam of the masses for several centuries by the 12th century, before Wahabbism usurped it.
The history of global freedom is characterised too by baffling periods of stagnation. A trailblazer in social mobility, which developed the world’s first and largest scale meritocratic bureaucracy from the 3rd century AD, China proved unable to replicate the competitive spirit of its government administration in other areas, in particular in the realms of market exchange and production. In face of this stagnation, its world-beating bureaucratic system in the end proved a hindrance, absorbing the empire’s best talent, holding back capitalism.
Despite China’s staggering tradition of incremental invention and tinkering over several centuries, it did not experience an industrial revolution like the West in the 18th century. This is because it failed to discover the scientific method or the Newtonian mechanics that laid the foundations for the age of manufacturing.
Civilisational guilt is a global burden
It is widely accepted that the hegemonic West is afflicted with unique civilisational guilt, and must atone for its past atrocities. In fact, the whole of humanity must reckon with the paradoxical cruelties of progress and the often self-defeating dynamics of liberation movements.
The dawn of intensive agriculture was a crucial leap for human freedom but it also led to the liquidation of nomadic and pastoral agriculture. In the case of ancient Mesoamerica, the spread of large-scale, organised irrigated farming entailed brutal imperialistic expansion and violent rituals of subjugation, which sometimes included human sacrifice.
Many of the ideas we associate with freedom, such as pluralism, toleration and the unification of a disparate society of conflicting interests through a common commitment to a set of wise laws, emerged out of empire, as such powers struggled to find ways to hold together extensive territories. The first leaps in mathematics, science and writing that invited our ancestors across the world to contemplate that it is possible to understand and shape the world around us emerged from early complex societies that were typically highly stratified, heavily militarised, and economically dependent on slaves that enabled elite castes of priests or scholars to evade the toil of the fields in order to absorb themselves in the world of ideas.
To take a more recent example of the ‘freedom paradox’, the absurd irony is that Wahhabism has, over the last century or so, sought to establish egalitarian freedom by bringing into being a theocratic totalitarian state. Its emphasis on the purification of Islam has empowered religious elites to accumulate huge prestige and power as interpreters and enforcers of Sharia law and Quranic texts. There are quite striking parallels between the 17th-century British Puritans who called for freedom from the arbitrary will of Catholic rules only in order to submit to stricter godly control and Wahabbists like Sayed Qutb, who in his seminal book Milestones emphasised Islam’s aim to “bring anyone who wishes from servitude to men into the service of Allah alone.”
The most important lesson from history
The West’s complex — and at times troubled — struggle towards freedom over the centuries is not unique then. What is unique however is its comparably greater success at overcoming elite conservative vested interests.
Where the West’s story does genuinely diverge from that of the wider world is that it was the only place where the latest major phase in the universal struggle for freedom was not successfully blocked by conservative elite forces. In the Early Modern Age world leaders responded to destabilising trends of population growth, increased social mobility, intensifying elite competition as well as unsustainable pressures on the land by shoring up their position through authoritarian rule.
In China, Ming rulers dismantled checks on imperial power, erected a sprawling system of surveillance and espionage, as well as promoting a particularly constrictive form of Confucianism. Meanwhile the Ottoman viziers developed a totalitarian ideology drawing on the “traditional circle of equity”: security was granted to subjects in exchange for their submission, and a new politics of comprehensive control emerged, in which all forms of disobedience and insubordination were redressed through inzibat (discipline) and islah (reform).
But in Britain things were different. Supporters of absolute monarchy failed to create their own version of a modern authoritarian regime. Instead, there was a Civil War, and a generation later a tussle between Catholic and Protestant claimants to the throne in wake of the death of Charles II. Crucially, the triumph of the victor, William of Orange was not comprehensive, and he had no choice but to preside over a tolerant, permissive society. It was this singularly pluralistic, open atmosphere that entrepreneurship, innovation and a breakthrough heretical Newtonian worldview was able to flourish.
If there is one thing that stands out about Western history then, it is not its uniquely evil nature nor some peculiar cultural impulse to freedom, but its unmatched success at overcoming elite conservative vested interests at a crucial juncture in the Early Modern age.
It is a tragedy for the world that neoliberal actors have over the last generation done so much damage to the status of freedom as a universal human value, attempting to export a narrow idea of human liberty, based on Eurocentric ideas of natural rights and the cookie-cutter replication of liberal institutions. This neoliberal conception of freedom showed astounding ignorance of Western insights into liberty that really do have universal relevance — its equalitarianism, its emphasis on freedom of ideas, and its faith in the self-harmonising tendencies of individual endeavour.
In light of this, rather than merely fighting against the 'decolonisation’ of the curriculum, the centre-Right should surely be making the case for a course that covers the rise of the West in the Early Modern period, incorporating some kind of comparative exploration of the political dynamics of Europe and the Asian empires, to be added to the syllabus for GCSE or A-Level History. No child should leave school without having completed courses on the origins of the industrial revolution, as well as America’s rise to superpower status after the civil war.
The insight that the West’s divergence from the rest of the world is rooted in the inability of conservative elites to hold back progress is also terrifically relevant to us today. We will not able to understand and challenge the stickiness of stagnation and poverty as well as the rise of authoritarianism, both in the West and across the world, until we understand this single greatest lesson from humanity’s past.