Is Niall Ferguson History? Part Six: All Work and No Facts Makes Niall a Disgrace to Thucydides

In the final episode of Civilisation: Is The West History, Niall Ferguson finally loses the plot completely.

When discussing the last episode I lamented that Ferguson has neglected to cover the role religion played in fuelling the West’s domination of the rest of the world. I suggested that, since he is primarily a financial historian, he might not be interested in the ephemeral minutia of spiritual matters.

It turns out I was wrong, for in this last episode Ferguson finally gets round to describing how religion gave the Western world the self-confidence to impose itself on the rest of the world.

As usual, he makes a dog’s dinner of it.

1. Weber of Lies

Ferguson states that he was raised atheist, but he always felt a certain affinity for Weber’s “Protestant work ethic”, which encouraged Westerners to work hard in the hopes of spiritual rewards, unlike the lazy Papists and those drug-addled Mohammedans that populate his version of non-Western world (or “Resterners,” as he names them, which surely must be an illegal slur). That statement should immediately set off a few alarm bells, not least of how hypocritical it is for him to later condemn Europe as godless and shallow when he himself is not a believer. But it also raises the question why Ferguson is so focused on Protestantism as one of the West’s- *sighs deeply*- “killer apps.” One assumes he was also raised a Ranger’s fan.

Certainly it is consistent with the definition of “the West” that he has hitherto failed to elaborate on: the Protestant sphere happens to overlap with Northern Europe and the Anglosphere but also includes his beloved Prussia. It also includes Scandinavia and parts of Switzerland and the Low Countries, but he never mentions them even though it might help his case. Probably because they are a bit foreign.

Equating the West with Protestantism at least explains why he is so dismissive of South America, which is overwhelmingly Catholic. And it allows him to do what he does best: dismiss non-Western cultures by suggesting they lack the virtues that made the West awesome- in this case suggesting- and, in the case of the Middle East, outright stating that it is lazy as well as ignorant and overly bureaucratic.

Here’s the problem with the Protestant work ethic theory: it’s bollocks. Wikipedia has provided a convenient summary of the criticisms of Weber’s theory, but what is relevant here is that it totally downplays the role of Catholics and their church in establishing Western supremacy. Ferguson may have been raised atheist with Protestant leanings, but I am a humanist raised Catholic, and I can tell him that the Protestant work ethic has nothing on the power of the Catholic guilt complex. Of course, one might argue that the distinction between working in the knowledge one will be rewarded in the hereafter and working to in the fear that failure will leave one consigned to the Inferno is six of one, half a dozen of the over, but the point is that I don’t think Protestants work significantly harder than Catholics. They’re probably just happier about it.

What is relevant is that “Protestantism”- which, incidentally, is a term that covers a broad spectrum of beliefs, some of which differ but a little from Catholicism- has historically been the minority faith in the Western Europe, limited largely to Britain, North America, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and northern Germany, whereas the Catholic powers have included Spain (the conqueror of most of the Americas), Portugal (the nation that gave the West its dominance of sea trade), France (the most successful non-Anglophone colonial power), Austria (the dominant central European power for most of the modern period) and Italy (the birthplace of the Renaissance). One might also point out that one of the constituent countries of Great Britain at its height- Ireland- remained largely Catholic despite attempts at Protestant colonisation, and that many areas of Britain with significant Irish Catholic immigrant populations- like Liverpool, Jarrow and Ferguson’s own Glasgow- were amongst the centres of industry that fuelled Britain’s global dominance.

To the concert of Europe we may add Russia, which, is neither Protestant nor Catholic, and Turkey, which isn’t Christian but did rule over all denominations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere with remarkable tolerance and famously drew its soldiers from them. We might even add the Papacy itself, since it did at least organise a rather significant experiment in European domination of a non-European populace in the Middle Ages.

We might also add the major non-Western economies of the twentieth century, such as Japan and the Asian Tigers, where Christianity has had a negligible influence. It would be hard to describe the Japanese as lazy, after all.

Finally, in focusing on Protestantism Ferguson overlooks the Jewish contribution to Western civilisation: men like Einstein, Oppenheimer, Kissinger, Friedman (hell, here's the damn list!) who were hardworking, brilliant, and incontrovertibly not Protestant

2. One Nation, Under God

So Ferguson is off to a rocky start in claiming the Protestant work ethic was a “killer app” for the West, since most of the West didn’t have it. As evidence for his ridiculous claim he invents a schism between Europe and the United States, saying the former has lost its way and is now only interested in shopping and pornography, too busy fapping its way into oblivion to realise its end draws near. For this he blames Freud in a bizarre and oddly self-important rant about how psychiatry has made Westerners selfish and godless. A cruel observer might point out that Niall Ferguson is in no position to criticise anyone for being self-absorbed, narcissistic and obsessed with money, but I am of course above such spiteful jibes. Perhaps he is secretly a Scientologist as well as a Ranger’s fan. I shall however point out that his weird Widdecombe-esque critique of “European” society says more about how Ferguson views the British than it does about Europe as a whole, where religion remains an important factor of society. Even in Britain, religious feeling remains strong enough to fuel sectarianism, as we have recently been tragically reminded.

Anyway, Ferguson contrasts godless Europe with pious America (home of the largest pron industry of the world, by the way) by visiting a church in Missouri which has a Christian rock band that reminded me all too much of Metalocaplypse and speaking to a pastor who (of course) is eager to reiterate the idea that religion makes people work harder and become better people.

Now here I must accuse Ferguson of deliberately misleading the audience. He is trying to equate economic prosperity with religious faith, despite the fact that in terms of national GDP the most important areas are a generally on the east and west coasts, where attitudes are more secular and Christianity is less influential, whereas the areas where Christianity is strongest are in what politicians patronisingly call “the heartland,” and tend to be more agrarian and underdeveloped. It is not entirely the case that religiosity is inversely proportional to economic importance- Texas has the second largest economy, for example, though it is also the second largest state. But it is certainly not the case that religious faith has gone hand-in-hand with economic growth.

In fact Protestant faith- and, to be fair, Catholicism- has done much to retard progress in the United States, in the realms of science (by opposing stem-cell research), legal rights (by opposing a woman’s legal right to do what she wants with her body- and in fact by opposing the well-being of women in general), demographics (by opposing birth control), the environment (by denying the link between carbon emissions and climate change) and education (by encouraging creationism be taught in schools alongside or instead of evolution). It also encouraged long, unnecessary and ugly foreign wars that diminished America’s reputation and exposed its weakness. It also barely needs mentioning that it was a Protestant nutter who inflamed the passions of idiots in Afghanistan to kill United Nations personnel by threatening to burn a copy of the Qur'an.

3. FYI, It Was The Franciscans Who Brought Christianity to China

Protestantism might therefore be charitably described as a mixed blessing to America and the West. Where Ferguson really loses touch with reality is when he starts talking about Christianity in China.

Put simply, Ferguson believes the Protestant work ethic is alive and well in China, and he points to a few Chinese businessmen who are Protestant.

Now, the number of Christians in China is disputed, with estimates ranging from 40 million to 100 million. Most are Protestant, but the number of Catholics is likely to be higher than reported, since Catholicism (or at least communion with Rome) is officially banned. What is apparent is that the total number of all Christians in China make up less than 4% of the population, way behind Buddhism, traditional religions and atheism and probably comparable to the number of Muslims, most of whom are concentrated in the west and are ethnic minorities like the Uighurs, Hui and Kazakhs. Officially the state is atheist, and it is hard to imagine that Protestants represent a significant presence either among captains of industry, the Communist Party, or the government in general. Ferguson claims that it is possible up to 30% of the Chinese population will be Protestant in thirty years: as far as I know, he has pulled this statistic out of his arse, for there is no convincing evidence to suggest that this is the case.

More to the point, I don’t think you have to make China Protestant to explain its productivity. Ferguson claims that the average Chinese citizen works longer hours than the average Westerner. This is true, but it has nothing to do with religion: it is to do with different working conditions, readily available cheap labour, government-set targets and poor human rights legislation that has allowed dubious work practices like sweatshops and extended working weeks. One would hardly call Foxconn a model of Protestant virtue (or, for that matter, a haven of worker’s rights), but one cannot argue with its output.

Lest we forget, China is officially communist, and communism has always exalted the role of the working man by calling upon him to work longer and harder for the benefit of the people and the state. That might result in terrible working conditions and appalling human rights abuses, but it definitely gets results, as demonstrated by the Soviet Five Year Plans. I don’t want to overstate the case, both because of the failure of programs like the Great Leap Forward and because of the monstrous human suffering it involved, but China’s communist history- and present- surely provides a more immediate and logical explanation for its work ethic than any fictitious Christian influence.

In fact, Ferguson never mentions communism in relation to China. Not once. One assumes he doesn’t want to give Marxism even that much: the possibility that a successful, modern and dynamic economy could possibly owe anything to its communist heritage is clearly so anathema to him he has to invent some bullshit about the Chinese becoming Christian, in one of the most flagrant examples of historical fiction I have ever encountered.

4. "They wouldn't follow him to India..."

Sadly communism is not the only subject that goes unmentioned. The other potential non-Western world powers go curiously unmentioned in this episode- Turkey and Iran (Turan? Irkey?) are once again thrown together to represent the Middle East as if either was in anyway typical, but otherwise the superpowers-in-waiting like Brazil (about 98% Catholic) and India (whose Christian population makes up less than 3% of the population) are nowhere to be seen. In fact, it has only recently dawned on me that Ferguson doesn’t mention India throughout the entire series. I don’t remember him mentioning it in passing, even as part of the British Empire, despite the fact it is surely a model example of the adoption of Western values, the largest liberal democracy on Earth, one of the fastest growing economic and military powers and has nuclear weapons. It even plays cricket! One can only assume he chose to use China and a homogenised Middle East as his principle rival civilisations because Muslims and communists are so much more frightening to his audience of middle class mail-reading pseudo-intellectuals than democratic Hindus.

5. Turns Out The West Isn't History At All

There is more problem with this episode worth mentioning: the end is frankly bizarre- Ferguson starts channelling Savonarola by quoting Revelations and wailing how the West tends to see its destruction everywhere in environmental degradation and economic hardship (and I would like the record to show out that I mentioned millennialism was part of his appeal in the last blog post), where children are not being taught science (which is a bit hypocritical, coming from him) and our greatest weakness is our own loss of self-confidence (again, a bit hypocritical since he has spent six weeks trying to erode that confidence). He concludes by saying the West still has an edge, but he isn’t sure of its place in the future. He states that it has another advantage: the freedom, that he so enjoys, to say what you want, that encourages invention and development. One wonders why he didn’t mention this seventh “killer app before”- presumably Channel 4 were only willing to give him six episodes. It is, in other words, a typical reactionary call to arms, about how our civilisation is fragile but special, with enormous potential but facing enormous threats from lazy and superstitious foreign tyrants. It’s a narrative that has been repeated throughout Western history, from Cato the Elder and Herodotus to Enoch Powell and Frank Miller: the West is special, but we have to be constantly careful those damn foreigners don’t come over and ruin it. Even though they never do.

There are other criticisms to be made, but I think I’ve made my point: the Protestant work ethic is a myth, and Ferguson spends an hour trying to make it seem real. His argument is confused, speculative, grossly oversimplified and in direct contradiction with earlier episodes that extolled the virtues of the scientific rationalism and consumerist society he now condemns in favour of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

6. The Two Killer Apps

In making such a poor argument, Ferguson is at least consistent with the rest of his series. So the time has come to make a final judgement on his series. I think it’s clear that his central claim that the West is “history” is untenable: even he abandons it in the end, and the evidence he has provided for the forthcoming Gotterdammerung is sparse. That the West will face rising competition from the rest of the world is an economic and demographic certainty, but to read in that the downfall of our civilisation is scaremongering for ratings, pure and simple.

When it comes to the role of the “killer apps” themselves, his record is mixed: I agree wholeheartedly with assessment of only two of them- the first two, competition and science. I agree that capitalist competition between states and individuals drove Western domination of trade and industry, and I agree that liberalism and the Enlightenment paved the way for scientific progress that was turned into a profound military edge. Although I agree with his conclusion, I find his argument to be sloppy and full of contradictions.

I don’t agree that property laws were the reason behind Western expansion in Northern America: I believe it was driven by more complicated factors behind emigration from Europe and forced emigration from Africa. I don’t see how his discussion of medicine was relevant, and I don’t see how it is distinct from the conversation about science. I believe consumerism was a by-product and adjunct of the dominance of Western capitalism, not a cause of it. I think the idea of a Protestant work ethic is bullshit, and I find it insulting to the non-conformist contribution to Western civilisation. I believe the reasons for Western dominance are complicated and multifaceted, and not all of them are as glamorous as Ferguson intimates, as I have suggested in the past.

7. Why Niall Ferguson Is (Hopefully!) History

As for the man himself, he has done nothing to convince me he is not a lazy, ignorant and smugly self-satisfied arsehole obsessed with his own celebrity. Were he a financier, a banker or a political pundit I could perhaps live with him, as I have learned to live with so many Tory arseholes, by ignoring him. Unfortunately, he still maintains the pretence that he is a historian, despite the fact he never shows any evidence of knowledge of history before the fifteenth century, and even within his own sphere of knowledge his arguments are old-fashioned and fraught with errors.

Conveniently enough the man has provided an insight into his motivations in today’s Guardian in which, tellingly, he talks about his own status and reputation much more than he talks about history. He presents himself as the bogeyman of the left, the man they love to hate for his abhorrent political views and his arrogance, and justifies himself by stating that self-confidence is important to success: a fitting philosophy, since it accords so well with the conclusion of his series that the West has lost its self-confidence.

Niall Ferguson is an arrogant neo-imperialist Tory bastard, make no mistake. But I began commenting on his series to demonstrate that he is a bad historian, first and foremost, and I hope that I have mostly avoided simply dismissing him because I happen to disagree with him. There is a perfectly good argument that could be made in defence of Western imperialism, and an equally good argument that could be made that its place in the sun is coming to an end. Niall Ferguson makes neither argument convincingly. The fact that I disagree with him is a simple difference of opinion: it’s the fact that his argument is poorly made yet he remains so unrepentantly and arrogantly committed to it that makes him a bad historian.

His self-confidence is undeniable, but historians should not be self-confident: they must constantly question sources and interpretations for weakness and contradiction. They must even question themselves, or they risk becoming inflexible and parroting the same old tired arguments uncritically. They must not let their affection for a particular political system, culture or economic model get in the way of an objective conclusion- if they did, I would call for the immediate liberation of Constantinople from the Turk!

Ferguson dismisses the dangers of relativism for daring to teach that morality is not absolute as damaging to the fabric of Western civilisation. To question a system or an idea does not undermine it, but proves its strength if it resists scrutiny. The historian is obligated to approach her subject from a standpoint of moral relativism: there are no absolute truths, only different interpretations of the same evidence. The historian must be objective, open-minded, willing to accept that her interpretation may be faulty and willing to adjust it. She must accept that there is no single truth, that all opinions have validity so long as they are well made. She must be intellectually curious about other cultures, and prepared to revel in their differences from her own. Ferguson embodies none of these traits, instead choosing to be arrogantly certain of his believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and dismissive of the achievements of the rest of the world- including any part of the Western world he doesn't like. It’s as if he first learned history in the 19th century that the world needed to be ruled by the white man because it was better for all involved, and has remained stubbornly resilient to the passage of time and further research that has obligated more reasonable minds to accept a broader view of past events. Ferguson's conviction might make him a sound- if devious- politician; he might even be a great economist- I really have no way of knowing. What I do know is that he is a bad historian, and if we cannot stop him regurgitating half-baked theories then we should at least discourage his audience from mistaking his pseudo-intellectual posturing for actual history. His arguments are old-fashioned, and should be consigned to the dustbin of history, leaving him free to write columns for the Daily Mail.

A Big Thank You

Still, I suppose I should take this moment to thank Prof. Ferguson for giving me something to write about for the past six weeks. I estimate I may have written as much as twenty thousand words denouncing him, more than any of my dissertations, and in considerably less time. It has encouraged me to research, however briefly, aspects of history that I was previously ignorant. It’s provided some interesting conversations with other historians, some of whom agree with Prof. Ferguson, and others who do not, but all concerned about the state of history and its teaching in today’s Britain. It’s given me something to do on Mondays instead of pretending to find a job. It’s given me a chance to focus my rage on someone truly deserving and eminently dislikeable. Above all, it’s given me a chance to write something, it’s given me purpose to write this blog, and it has helped it take shape as a platform to escape the lies and deceits of bad historians around the media.

So let me make this as heartfelt as possible: Thank you, Professor Niall Ferguson BA (Glasgow). My second-greatest hope is that you continue to produce more tedious unhistorical lies for me to critique and expose.

My greatest hope is that you truly do become history, and I never have to see your conceited face on my telly again. Unless it's on Hole In The Wall.

Is Niall Ferguson History? Part Five: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Denim Trousers

I really don’t know what to say any more…

At this point anything I have to say about Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: Is The West History would be redundant: I would just be repeating myself. It would be much easier to just link to the four previous blog posts and ask the half-dozen or so people likely to read this to look there to see why Niall Ferguson is a complete hack of a historian who disgraces his profession every time he speaks.

However…

I seem to be a minority in wanting the man gone. In the past two weeks Ferguson has appeared in several media outlets on a number of subjects tangentially related to history, ranging from telling teachers they need to focus even more on the fucking Nazis instead of all this girly Roman crap to stating the obvious that Colonel Gadaffi is a bit of wrong ‘un. He was even on Question Time, though I only learned about it after the fact, and I dread to think what rubbish he was spouting about how “The Muslims” need to be taught the value of Coke and genocide to a live audience.

Why is the man so popular when he is so clearly a self-important buffoon? Do media outlets not realise the man doesn’t need them to feed into his delusions of importance by giving him airtime? The man must already have difficulty fitting his massive swollen head into the shower in the mornings!

So, even though I know I will be repeating myself, I am going to outline the reasons why Niall Ferguson is a bad historian and his programme is a waste of time, using examples taken from the fifth episode, which is about consumerism. In it he describes the triumph of Western popular culture of the world, just in economic terms, as befits a financial historian. I would have focused on the nature of the culture itself, but that’s the difference between him and me.

Well, that and I actually try to research my poorly thought-out rants...

If anyone who reads this cares about history, or knows anyone who admires Ferguson or buys into his simplistic and triumphalist view of history, please feel free to dispute his claims and share this post with them.

If nothing else it will give me traffic.

Let’s start with something every historian should know…

1. He doesn’t seem to understand cause and effect.

Western popular culture- its films, music, dress etc- are dominant throughout the world. It would be hard to deny that fact, though I feel Ferguson overstates the case for homogeneity (I also think he takes entirely too much pleasure in the erosion of diversity in this shrinking world, but that’s the difference of opinion between his neo-imperialist agenda and my lefty xenophilia). But I feel that he is incorrect to assert that Western consumerism supported Western dominance. In fact, I would argue the inverse was true: that it’s political and military dominance allowed the West to impose its culture upon the world.

By the time popular culture and consumerism emerged in the twentieth century, the West was already unassailably dominant, having imposed its political, religious and economic structures on a majority of the rest of the world, including the entirety of Europe, Africa, the Americas and South Asia. This provided an immense potential market, even after the end of European empires, for it remained receptive to Western goods and advertising.

Indeed, a worldwide Western culture had already been exported to much of the world in the form of Christianity, and it would be very interesting to examine why Christianity became the dominant world religion and not Islam or Buddhism, both of which are as inclusive and universal as Christianity. The reasons are far too numerous and complicated to outline here, but I would very much like to do so one day. But Ferguson is ill-equipped to deal with the role of religion- he doesn’t list it as one of his “killer apps” (*sigh*), nor does he really discuss religion in detail. It’s understandable: as I said before, his specialisation is finance, not culture.

The point is by the time Ferguson picks up his narrative in this episode, the West is already in a position to export consumer goods to the rest of the world, that was comparatively poor but aspired to a Western lifestyle and that had already been conditioned to accept Western cultural norms. The new consumer society simply reflected an existing dominance.

2. He dismisses the achievements of non-Western culture

Nowhere is Ferguson’s contempt for the non-Western world made obvious in this episode: his attempt at a comedy Russian accent is unbearably offensive; his casual dismissal of Chinese communist dress as “ugly pyjamas” is utterly infantile; his statement that Emperor Hirohito of Japan aped Western fashions is meant to demonstrate the way in which Western commodities became dominant throughout the rest of the world.

However, Ferguson has picked the worst possible example of a non-Western nation adopting Western manners, since it reveals that the process was not entirely one-way: although it is true that modern Japan has proved receptive to Western consumerism, it has also produced its own share of popular brand names and its own internationally popular culture that reflects both Western and indigenous influences. Many Japanese exports have in turn greatly influenced Western culture: the case of a famous sengoku drama that influenced a certain independent filmmaker to produce a certain series of space opera movies is simply the most celebrated example of a broader trend.

The case of Japan raises some interesting questions that should be addressed: what was the role of Western consumerism in creating a new popular culture? Why is it that Japan has proven more successful at exporting its culture than other non-Western cultures? Is it an exception to the rule of Western dominance? Or will the growing economic clout of China produce a similar phenomenon, since they already produce most of the West’s consumer goods? What about India, whose film industry is already the largest in the world? These are all interesting and relevant questions about the role of consumerism in a globalised world: Ferguson fails to answer any of them; because it would contradict his narrative that Western consumerism alone has conquered the world.

3. His definition of “Western civilisation” is faulty

I have already discussed the problem with a definition of Western civilisation that includes Spain but excludes Spanish America and that places German military prowess on a pedestal one moment but condemning its imperial excesses the next. The same could be argued for his Cold War narrative, that contrasts the capitalist west (synonymous with NATO) with the Soviet-dominated communist east. There is a case to be made that Eastern Europe is indeed a distinct civilisation from Western Europe in terms of ethnicity, religion, political structure and cultural affinity, but there is also much that unites them in those very same spheres. The distinction between capitalism and communism was an ideological and an economic disagreement, it was not a fundamental cultural distinction the way that, for example, Western civilisation is distinct from Islamic or Chinese civilisation. Rather than seeing the Cold War as a clashbetween civilisations, it could be seen as an ideological conflict within civilisation. I’m not suggesting such an argument is true, merely that it is feasible.

The point is that Ferguson only defines Western civilisation in terms of what it isn’t. Western civilisation is not a political or economic model, since Japan follows similar patterns and is militarily allied with the United States; it isn’t a shared cultural history or ethnic identity, because both Eastern Europe and Latin America are excluded; it certainly isn’t religious identity, since Ferguson is reluctant to discuss religion at all except to sneer at the irrational backwardness of Muslims.

In failing to outline what he means by “Western civilisation”, Ferguson reveals himself to be incoherent at best, and dishonest at worst: the truth is that “Western civilisation” is whatever he wants it to be, regardless of the facts of history.

4. He grossly oversimplifies the narrative of history

Niall Ferguson is a financial historian: he views the historical narratives in terms of economic movements. That approach isn’t wrong in itself, but it does mean that he tends to find one root economic cause for historical events that are in truth extremely complex. In this episode, he claims that the Western consumerist culture was so attractive that it encouraged dissent in the Soviet Bloc. He essentially states that the appeal of jeans was the reason the Soviet Union fell. I’m not even paraphrasing: he actual dismisses the role of Reagan and Gorbachev in dismantling the Cold War as unimportant compared to the role of Levis.

He doesn’t even present the role of consumerism as the primary reason communism failed: he actually seems to believe it was the only reason. So there’s no reason for any historian to suggest that the Soviet Union’s economic system, it’s political repression, its inability to match American spending or a costly war in Afghanistan was to blame. It’s useless to claim that communism failed “because of its inherent contradictions”, or because of the role of repressed nationalism, religion or civil society. It all ended because the Russian proletariat wanted to dress like James Dean.

Bullshit: everyone knows it was Rocky Balboa that defeated the Soviet Union.

5. He is a self-aggrandising egomaniac

There is a moment in this episode where Ferguson reminisces about his time living in Germany in the late 80s, when he predicted that communism was about to fall; but when he told people, they just laughed and ignored him. But, of course, events proved that he was right all along.

Now it should be pretty obvious that this is extremely fishy: we only have Ferguson’s word that he predicted the end of communism whist the rest of the world ignored him. For all we know he spent his days in Germany hidden in a concrete bunker stocked with six tons of semtex and a missile casing full of pornography in case Ivan ever came over the wall to rape Mrs. Thatcher and force our children into wearing ugly pyjamas. I wouldn’t put it past him. Even if he did predict the end of communism, so what? He’s a right-wing Little Englander: he probably predicted the fall of the Soviet Union ten times before breakfast every day, like a Tory Alice. Just because he was right once doesn’t stop him being wrong about hundreds of other things.

But what purpose does this bizarre incident serve, except to inflate Ferguson’s already massively over-swollen ego? Ferguson has moved on from acting as the West’s cheerleader and now wishes to present himself as its unhappy prophet, fated to always be correct yet doomed to be ignored by his peers, like a Glaswegian Jor-El raging against the blindness of Krypton’s doomed society. It’s as if he is desperately trying to convince us that some new catastrophe is about to befall the world.

Oh, wait….

6. He doesn’t actually prove that the West is history: instead, he downplays diversity in the non-Western world

His evidence for the downfall of Western civilisation is pathetic. Fresh from assuring us that Brazil is becoming slightly less poor and Iran might possibly one day get a weapon first invented in the 40s, his evidence for the end of Western consumerism is that women in Istanbul are rejecting Western fashion trends in favour of the veil.

Except he doesn’t provide any statistical evidence for this: he just states that he noticed more women wearing headscarves in Istanbul than he did fifteen years ago. Now, I am no scientist, but that sounds like something that one could prove empirically by citing statistics, or running a poll, or even interviewing some of these women to see what they thought about Western fashion. Ferguson does none of these things. We just have to take his word for it that there are fewer women in tank tops and boob tubes than there were in the 90s.

What we get instead of actual evidence is a very ugly, EDL/BNP friendly film that shows women buying veils and looking scared in dramatic freeze-frames whilst Ferguson drones on about “the thin end of the wedge of Sharia law,” as if every hijab came with compulsory genital mutilation. It’s intended to terrify, to act as a dog-whistle for the Daily Mail, to inform the audience “IT’S TIME TO PANIC! THE MUSLIMS AREN’T BUYING COKE ANYMORE, NEXT THEY’LL BE BLOWING UP PARLIAMENT.” It’s a cheap, dirty trick and Channel 4 should be ashamed for letting this sham of a historian get away with it.

But even if we accept Ferguson’s unsubstantiated report that the women of Istanbul are rejecting Western dress, that doesn’t prove anything. Istanbul is not Turkey: it is an extremely atypical European city whose historical legacy is profoundly influenced by European civilisation. It isn’t even Turkey’s capital city.

And Turkey isn’t “the Muslim world” (if such a term is even valid)- it’s profoundly atypical. Secular, non-Arabic, Western aligned, a proud member of NATO and an aspiring member of the European Union. True, it has a poor record on human and minority rights, but that hardly seems reason to exclude it from the halls of the West, especially given Western Europe’s own history in that regard. I don’t know what Ferguson has against the place, but this is the second time he’s sought to present it as backwards and barbarous without really doing his research.

And Turkey certainly isn’t the entire non-Western world. Even if we take Ferguson’s fallacy to its ridiculous conclusion and assume that all one billion Muslims in the world reject Western dress, what about the rest of the world? India, China, Japan, South America- all are still perfectly receptive to Western consumerism, and there is so far no evidence to suggest they will reject the Western model. They might in future, of course, if local nationalism comes to the fore, but this is pure speculation that has no basis in current trends. It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest the majority of the world is going to reject the West simply because one city might be, but that is the conclusion Ferguson wishes his audience to draw.

Conclusions

Given that Niall Ferguson is so obviously and so demonstrably a bad historian, one has to wonder why he is so popular. It is certainly the case that he is made for television; the man is certainly photogenic, and had I not been conditioned by his idiotic statements to retch every time he speaks I might describe his voice as oddly attractive. Even I must admit that he is a cuddlier prospect than David Starkey, not to mention better at hiding his prejudices.

He’s certainly colourful: everything he says is calculated to get woolly lefties like myself riled up and writing angry letters and blog posts in response (hang on…). Making controversial statements, however idiotic or ill thought out, certainly gains attention, both for the broadcaster and the arrogant, self-important historian. He is also able to cloak his witless statements in the guise of intellectualism, which I fear has convinced some poor souls that the man is genuinely witty and intelligent instead of a worthless hack recycling theories that were rejected by real historians decades ago.

He ticks a few diversity boxes: admittedly television has no shortage of straight middle-class white men, but it’s somewhat lacking in Scottish Tories, a sight even rarer than golden eagles in modern Britain than golden eagles. He can represent absurd right-wing views whilst claiming the objectivity of a historian, therefore allowing him to present a “balancing” opinion on well-meaning BBC political shows. Naturally real Tories love him for affirming their prejudices and providing intellectual credibility.

But I think the real reason why Ferguson has been so ubiquitous in the last week has to do with the tagline of his series: Is The West History? This is an age in which the self-confidence of the West’s elite has been profoundly shaken by an ongoing financial crisis, by the resultant civil unrest, by protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the growing economic muscle of China, by renewed instability in the Middle East and by a tragic natural disaster in Japan that has challenged the reliability of the only currently viable alternative to foreign oil. Niall Ferguson appeals to a Western mind that sees internal stagnation and external chaos and concludes that, once again, the barbarians are howling outside the gates of civilisation.

But this cultural zeitgeist is fleeting. The West isn’t doomed- Ferguson has yet to provide any compelling evidence to suggest that it is. The West may be overtaken in the next century, but there are healthier ways to cope with that fact than blind panic: one should never forget the many advantages (or-*sigh*- “killer apps”) the West still possesses and will continue to possess as the century progresses. Doomsayers like Niall Ferguson are simply exploiting the spirit of their age, fuelling the paranoia of the insecure in order to make a quick buck or draw attention to themselves and their ridiculous theories about the clash of civilisations.

Unless, of course, he actually believes it all. Now there’s a scary thought…

Is Niall Ferguson History? Part Four: Paging Doctor Feelgood, MA, PhD*

*Note that Niall Ferguson has neither an MA nor a PhD...

I was going to leave Niall Ferguson alone this week. I didn’t want to bore the handful of people who read this crap (many thanks to you all) by banging on about the same thing week in and week out. Ferguson clearly has no interest in becoming a better historian, and I’m not so self-absorbed as to believe I’m actually going to discourage Channel 4 from commissioning his little-Englander bullshit. Better to put the matter to bed early and move on to something else.

However…

The fourth episode is not only bad, but it is so awful, so insulting to the intelligence of the audience, so demeaning to the victims of Western imperialism, so dripping in racist undertones that it necessitates some sort of response. Ferguson himself seems to have given up on his central thesis that the West might soon be eclipsed; having apparently realised he was on flimsy ground claiming that Gehenna was nigh because Iran wanted a bomb and Brazil’s economy is growing, he now makes no effort whatsoever to suggest the non-Western world might take the lead in medicine (or genocide- it’s not quite clear what this episode is about), once again bringing into question why he subtitled his series “Is The West History”.

1. Stop doing the work for me!

This episode is dedicated to how medicine helped the West dominate Africa, but as usual he doesn’t do a very good job of explaining how or why Western medicine became more advanced, or how it helped Europeans in the Scramble for Africa. Instead, he spends much of the episode outlining how medical science was twisted by Europeans to justify racism. It’s grossly oversimplified, but it’s a valid point, and I applaud him for finally acknowledging that Western dominance was based in part on the willingness to be enormous pricks.

But… isn’t he supposed to be arguing about how the West came to dominate Africa? Eugenics programs and genocide are terrible, of course, but they are simply evidence of Western dominance, not proof of the cause. All he’s really doing is proving why the West deserves to be history, seeing how it used its global hegemony in such an atrocious manner, a point I made in response to the first episode. I’m glad he’s decided to make my argument for me, but it does leave me rather confused as to why his tone has suddenly changed. I’d like to imagine it was a genuine change of heart; more likely it was mandated by Channel 4, a condition for paying to send him to Africa. Ordinarily I’d expect him to whitewash the issue of Western abuses entirely, but here it is presented in all its terrible glory.

Why? Because it makes the Germans look bad…

2. The hierarchy of the West (again!)

One of the themes I’ve noticed in the series is that Ferguson often identifies the best of Western imperialism with the Anglosphere. Nowhere is this clearly than in this episode, in which racism, eugenics and genocide feature heavily and British imperialism is conspicuous by its absent. Instead, German imperialism takes centre stage (or “center” stage).

There’s some mention of the French use of Senegalese soldiers as cannon fodder in the Western Front, but Ferguson is charitable enough to outline the positives of French imperialism, such as access to healthcare and grants of French citizenship. Even here, there are shades of Kipling in his belief that Western civilisation was a genuine force for good, a “civilising influence” that is reinforced by the (hopefully unintentional) racist vibe of the episode that compares superstitious and tribal “Africa” (homogeneous and culturally monolithic, as ever) with the brave, upstanding white men who have come to make their lives better, whether they like it or not. But however misplaced his admiration for French involvement in Africa, one does get the impression it is at least genuine.

The Germans are not so lucky, for Ferguson speaks at considerable length about the many unquestionably awful things that German imperialism in Africa wrought. I don't want to downplay the fact that German imperialists did some pretty shitty things in Africa, but it is profoundly disingenuous for Ferguson to pick one European power for special criticism. I don’t know if Ferguson has seen Blackadder recently, but I will remind him that in 1914 “The British Empire [encompassed] a quarter of the globe, whilst the German Empire [consisted] of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika,” and that Germany was hardly the only- or even the worst- perpetrator of crimes against native peoples

I’d ask what Ferguson has against the Germans, but instead I have to remind him once again that the German state he condemns so viciously is not the same as the Nazi state, any more than it is the Prussia of Frederick the Great that he spent so much time praising in the second episode. He appears to be confused: praising the merits of German militarism when contrasted with Ottoman stagnation but condemning it becomes apparent that he must link it with the road to Auschwitz. He wants to have his cake and eat it: promote Germany as an exemplar of Western superiority when compared to the non-Western world but condemn it as barbaric when German atrocities risk making the whole of the West- especially the English-speaking world- look bad.

3. Some genocides are more equal than others

The other advantage of talking about Germany is that it allows him to link German atrocities in Africa with the Holocaust, the genocide that is likely best known to his audience but with which conveniently the British had no involvement. In Ferguson’s mind the mistreatment in Africa was a trial run for the Final Solution, where amoral German scientists practiced their craft of human experimentation and racial engineering. He even goes so far as to suggest the Germans invented genocide, that this was as “the first genocide, before the word was even invented,” a statement of such profound historical ignorance and of such crass insensitivity to the many, many, many, many, many, MANY examples of pre-twentieth century genocide in a just world it would cause any decent historian to be thrown out of the halls of academia post-haste.

It’s an extremely vile tactic that equates pre-war Germans with Nazis, reinforcing the old lie that there is something evil about the German national psyche, something dark and primeval that suggests that all Germans, everywhere, should and must take the blame for the actions of their government between 1933 and 1945. It’s not only xenophobic, it’s unhistorical and unsympathetic, for it ignores both broader historical trends and the specific circumstances of the 1930s and 40s that caused and triggered the Holocaust. As usual, Ferguson wants simple explanations for large events, and for him the explanation of the Holocaust is that the Germans were (and, perhaps, still are) simply evil. Once again, this is the same Germany he praised so fulsomely in the second episode.

But there is a more sinister racist undercurrent in viewing African genocides as practice for the European sequel: it downplays the importance of crimes against humanity. For Ferguson, what matters is that they contributed to genocide in Europe, not that they were terrible in their own right. It is a sad truism that history- like the media- simply doesn’t care about crimes committed against black people; it’s what allows vile carcinogenic parasites like Richard Littlejohn to state about the Rwandan genocide that “If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them”.

Ferguson’s problem is that he has to see history in parochial terms: for him, history is the story of the triumph of the West, and events are only important if the West is somehow involved. The terrible crime of African genocide is not that thousands of people died needlessly and pointlessly to satisfy a sick ideology, it’s that it allowed another, bigger genocide to be committed on European soil.

4. Equating racism with climate change (no, really!)

In a casual remark, Ferguson attests to the universality of theories of racial inequality in the 19th century by stating that people believed in it ‘as readily as people believe in man-made climate change today’.

The unspoken implication is that “people believed in one theory that turned out to be rubbish, just as they believe in a theory today that I don’t agree with that will be proved rubbish.“

I wish I was making this up.

I shouldn’t have to point out why this is stupid. Race theory is pseudoscience: it was a social construct that was supported by a false scientific methodology to lend it credence and which was conclusively disproved by rigorous scientific analysis. Climate change is an established scientific fact, denied only by fruitcakes: the overwhelming body of evidence claims that it is man-made, with the only major dissenting views coming from the energy lobby and God-botherers whose motivations are, at best, suspect.

I see what Ferguson is trying to do: he wants to present science as “fashionable”. He wants to say it was once fashionable to believe in a geocentric universe, that it was once fashionable to believe white men were better than black men, that it is currently fashionable to believe humankind is harming the planet. The implication is that, just as racism became unfashionable after World War II, so climate change will one day be dismissed as pseudoscience, and the whole world will look back and sigh that it ever believed anything so ridiculous. In doing so he has shown a profound ignorance of the process of scientific enquiry.

It’s ironic that he spent the entire second episode outlining how Western rationalism contributed to scientific progress, yet here he rails against the consensus of most of the world’s scientists by suggesting that one day they will fall out of favour and be proven wrong. For a man who believes that science is the basis of Western dominance he doesn’t seem to put a lot of faith in scientists themselves.

It might seem like a petty point to make, but its indicative of the problem with this episode, this series, and Niall Ferguson himself: he is utterly incapable of approaching history dispassionately. He is by inclination a right-wing conservative, an economic neo-liberal so enthralled with the idea of wealth he wrote a book about it (accompanied by a TV series here) that curiously only started in the fifteenth century. For him, he ideal world order is the current one: dominated by rich, white, middle-class men, like him. And for him history is the study of rich, white, middle-class men like him, and how they came to dominate the world. All of past events must be seen in terms of how they contributed to modernity, and history must be presented in a way that makes the current world order look like the best of all possible outcomes. If there is to be a world power, we are to be grateful that it’s us, and not those backwards Muslims, those authoritarian Chinese, or those superstitious Africans.

A true historian puts her prejudices aside: Ferguson uses his to paint he whole of history the way he wants it to be. And that bothers me, because I don't think any man so obviously incapable of understanding history has any business advising the government on how to teach it to the next generation.

Is Niall Ferguson History? Part Three: Whose West is it?

Niall Ferguson is a cunning son of a bitch, I’ll give him that.

I’ve already discussed how his argument that Western civilisation achieved global dominance due to its inherent magnificence is incomplete and simplistic, but I was hoping that with the third episode centering on the role “democracy” played, I was finally going to take the gloves off. Oh, I had such an argument prepared: the moment he started banging on about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy to other systems I was going to point out that even in the West it was the exception, not the rule until 1945, and it was not until 1991- within my own lifetime!- that it became a universal ideal that still has not become a universal reality. Ferguson wasn’t going to know what hit him: when I was through with him, he’d be a quivering wreck of a pseudo-historian, barely fit to teach a kindergarten the basics of the Norman Conquest!

Then the bastard cheated by talking about property laws and Latin America. He even mentions the slave trade, the crafty git!

I shouldn’t have been surprised, really: Ferguson is a historian of finance first and foremost, so it makes sense for him to speak of history in financial terms, and his latest series has shown a strange tendency to arbitrarily compare one Western power with one non-Western power as if they were comparable- though in this case at least, they were. But as a medievalist interested more in social history than economics, I was always going to be caught flat-footed by any discussion of indentured servitude or sub-prime mortgage borrowing or whatever.

I also know precious little about the history of the Americas, either North or South, except that they had one: playing Illusion of Time/Gaia on the SNES as the child engendered some fascination with the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Mesoamerica and the Andes, and I learned everything I know about the American Civil War from Iced Earth, but that’s about it.

So I confess that I am probably not the best person to challenge Ferguson’s assessment that English property laws were the reason the US became a world power, except that I’m sure, no matter what he suggests, that it wasn’t the only reason, because there is never any one reason for anything in history. Nor can I say with certainty whether Latin America was overshadowed to an indolent aristocracy that had to turn to British soldiers for its liberation, except even I know a continent with twelve countries and thousands of ethnicities cannot be discussed in the homogenous broad strokes that Ferguson uses. It also sounds a little bit racist to suggest that the greasy, lazy Dagos had all the luck ,dealing with a fabulously wealthy land already populated by compliant natives whilst the hardworking English settlers laboured and toiled in the barren wasteland of North Carolina whilst fighting of Injuns with absolutely no contribution from French, Russian Irish, Chinese, African and- yes- Hispanic immigrants whatsoever.

And that’s before we get into Ferguson’s schizophrenic handling of slavery.

I would recommend dedicated research into the history of the Americas rather than relying on me, but for what there worth, here are my thoughts on Ferguson’s third episode:

1. Defining “Democracy”



In the first episode Ferguson listed "democracy"as the third of the West's "killer apps"- and yes, I really wish he would stop using that phrase. But the third episode is entitled "property", and Ferguson tries rather pathetically to link the two by claiming property ownership granted voting rights in the British American colonies, encouraging indentured servants to work hard to get their own land and partake in the "democratic" process. I'll have to take his word for this being true, but I would appreciate it if someone could correct me if this is horseshit.

The problem is that this is not really talking about democracy, but about property; Ferguson draws a correlation between property rights and democracy that doesn't necessarily equate causation. I assume his thinking was that he could tie democracy to property, and since democracy is erroneously considered a universal good, it follows that property laws are a good thing. He wants to conflate democracy and prosperity, to link one to the other, in a manner that might make George W. Bush proud but is only considered superficially.

Ferguson's argument seems to be that freedom and democracy (which, incidentally, are not the same thing) were the cornerstones of American prosperity. An obvious counter is to point out that they weren't universal: that voting and property rights were limited or non-existent for women, Native Americans and slaves. I assumed he was glossing over this little inconvenience because it would take the shine off his rose-tinted view of imperialism.

I was more than a little surprised when he actually brought it up.

2. Slavery



I said Ferguson wouldn't have the balls to address the darker side of imperialism. It seems I was wrong. He dedicates ten minutes to the issue of slavery in the USA and its legacy of racial segregation, in a rare moment of clarity that reveals he is at least open to the idea that Western imperialism should not whitewash its crimes.

He still doesn't do a very good job of it, mind.

Ferguson knows he has to discuss slavery, and that he has to be seen to condemn it. The trouble is he says one moment that American property owners profited from slavery and then said they didn't have to. In essence, he says slavery was essential to provide manpower and then says it wasn't essential because... it's bad. Aside from being an inherent contradiction, it's a pretty weak argument to say that slavery wasn't "essential" to Western imperialism: it wasn't "essential" to sell opium to the China at the point of a gun. It wasn't "essential" to tear down the Templo Mayor and replace it with a cathedral. Ferguson's argument can be summarised as "yeah, we used slaves... but it's okay, really. We could have used humane manpower if we had wanted". Just because bad things didn't have to happen didn't change the fact that they did, or that the Western world profited immensely from the exploitation of the rest of the world, and continues to do so. I applaud the fact that Ferguson finally has addressed some of the shitty things the West has done, but he still seems to want to exonerate the West of its crimes rather than face them head on.

3. Defining “The West



This is something that's been bothering me for a while: what is Ferguson's definition of "the West?"

It's already been established that Ferguson likes history to be simple. He wants civilisations, not countries: to him, the Ottoman Empire might as well be the entirety of Islamic civilisation. Likewise, in this episode, "Latin America" is treated as a homogenous whole. Mexico and Cuba aren't mentioned at all, and Brazil- which is culturally and linguistically distinct from the rest of the continent- is presented as typical. I understand that Ferguson wishes to employ shorthand, but it's still a bit misleading to lump every culture on a continent together and label it "Latin America." It's even more misleading to imply that "Latin America" can represent the entire non-Western world. But Ferguson is not racist (at least in that regard): at least he generalises about The West too!

How does one define Western Civilisation? Is it based on religious origins? Cultural similarities? Political and socioeconomic systems? A shared history? The definition could be broad, and include not only Western Europe and North America, but also former European colonies, the former Soviet bloc (communism was, after all, devised by Germans living in London) and those non-Western nations that have adopted Western models to an extent and are Western aligned, like Japan and South Korea. It almost certainly has to include Israel. Or the definition could be much narrower, and refer to those nations that aligned with the US and NATO during the Cold War.

The point is that any discussion about the place of "the West" in the world has to define what "Western Civilisation" means. And Niall Ferguson has not only failed to provide a definition, but his conception of the West is profoundly muddled.

Put simply, it is open to debate whether or not South America is part of the West.

There is an argument to be made that South America is not part of the West: it is politically, economically and ethnically distinct from the United States and Western Europe, and has spent the majority of its history in the shadow of colonial powers; but is also religiously, culturally and linguistically part of the West, with obvious historic ties to Europe via Spain and Portugal and to the United States via the Monroe Doctrine, which considers the entirety of the Americas within a United States sphere of influence.

It is certainly more Western than the other civilisations discussed hitherto. China and the Muslim world evolved independently of Europe, and though the latter is a product of the same Graeco-Roman and Abrahamic traditions, it has emerged as its own distinct sociocultural bloc. Latin America- and the United States, for that matter- are a product of Western culture imposed upon a conquered native population. Right from their foundation they were indelibly stamped with the values and attitudes of European civilisation, and though they have experienced their own unique circumstances they remain recognisably the heirs of their colonial masters.

The problem is that Ferguson has hitherto taken a broad definition of Western civilisation, but is narrowing it. In the first episode, when talking about European competitiveness Spain and Portugal were mentioned as leading the way in the age of discovery. Two episodes later, and former Spanish and Portuguese colonies are no longer defined as Western. One might argue that Latin America was and is distinct from their former colonial overlords, since they contain a sizeable non-European populace and occupied a distinct economic position; but one can say the same thing about the United States, which (contrary to Ferguson's assertions) is not populated solely by white people. Both South America and the USA took a lot from their former colonial masters: Catholicism and football are as much part of Western civilisation as parliamentary representation and property laws.

The point is that the United States and South America are their own individual entities: but if the US and Britain are both to be considered part of the same civilisation, it follows that Latin America and Iberia must be be as well. Unless Ferguson has changed his mind and declared Spain is no longer part of Western civilisation- which would be a bizarre definition indeed- it follows that Latin America is also part of the West: unique, and certainly different, yet nonetheless demonstrably part of the same civilisation.

That being the case, the comparison between the United States and Latin America is not a comparison between a Western and non-Western culture, but between two distinct but related parts of the Western world, whose similarities arguably outweigh their differences. Indeed, much of the modern United States was formerly owned by Spain and experienced significant Hispanic immigration: a case could be made that the US is more a Latin American nation than a British construct

The problem is that it is is becoming clear that Ferguson tends to equate "The West" the the Protestant Anglosphere, yet is happy to use non-Engish-speaking nations to prove his point. He creates a hierarchy of "Western-ness" where all Europeans are Western, but some are more Western than others. It makes his gushing over Prussia in the second episode seem even more bizarre and out of place: surely undemocratic and militaristic Prussia is at least as alien to the English-speaking Founding Fathers as America as Brazil?

Ferguson has defined Spain, Portugal and Germany as part of the West: is it not a tad perverse to suggest their colonies are not part of the same civilisation as Britain and their colonies?

Besides, if only English-speaking countries are Western, democracy was not even invented by Western civilisation

4. Is the West history?



About two minutes from the end Ferguson remembers to play profit of doom and warn the view that the West may soon be eclipsed by the rest of the world. His evidence this time?

Brazil's economy is catching up to America's

That is literally all he has to say on the subject. There is no mention of the fact that Brazil has the world's eighth largest economy but is still 64th for per capita GDP. There is no mention as to why Brazil is now catching up to the US, or when it is poised to overtake it. There is no mention of the political ramifications the growth of Brazil may have on South America and the wider world. And, as ever, there is no mention of the emergence of democracy or new property laws in the wider world.

And, of course, Brazil is presented as completely typical for not only South America, but the entire non-Western world.

One sentence. Absolutely no context or explanation.

Is the West history? We've no way of knowing: Niall Ferguson apparently doesn't want to discuss it. Which is surprising really, given that the downfall of the West is implied from the title of the series!

Would it really have killed him to just name his series "Civilisation: Why The English Are Awesome and Foreign Women are Sexually Unsatisfied"?

Is Niall Ferguson History? Part Two: Your Argument Makes No Damn Sense!

Niall Ferguson is a bad historian.

It’s obvious why he’s a bad historian: he’s an attention whore whose argument is predicated on getting attention from tabloids, not in provoking thought or even intelligent debate in anyone interested in history; he lets his personal predilections affect his political judgment- since he thinks neo-liberal business economics are great, he retroactively applies them to past societies: he’s an unashamed little Englander, whose provincialism leads him to dismiss the achievements of any non-white culture as inherently inferior whilst downplaying the atrocities committed by Western imperialism; he is a political realist, who views history as a clash for power and wealth with no regard to sociological, cultural or religious trends; his focus is incredibly narrow- basically, if it didn’t happen to white people in the modern period, he isn’t interested. He is, in short, everything a historian should be: biased, provincial, ethnocentric, sensationalist and politically minded with a tendency to view history in narrative terms with the creation of the modern world as its ultimate goal without examining past societies on their own merits. He’d probably find a lot in common with structuralists like de Ste Croix…. apart from the Marxism thing.

The problem is that Ferguson is so bad that I’m having difficulty refuting him, simply because his argument is so bizarrely at odds with the argument I would make were I him. I’ve played matches of Soul Calibur in which I try to utilise the moves I’ve spent hours upon hours learning and rehearsing, only to fall to Brother Munro’s unceasing tirade of button-mashing: I know I’m better than him, but his approach is so idiotic, so brazenly primitive that I can grapple with it. Ferguson does the same: lashing out wildly with dramatic but factually inaccurate, irrelevant and often contradictory statements and comparisons to prove “The West” embraced modernity whilst the rest of the world regressed into despotic barbarism.

Perhaps part of the problem is that I don’t substantially disagree with his argument, at least as presented so far. I’m pretty sure I will disagree more strongly when he completely loses touch with reality and starts bleating about “democracy” and “the work ethic” in latter episodes (and I’ve already pointed out some of the factors that he hasn’t and will not mention), but it’s hard to argue with the thesis of the first episode that western adventure-capitalism encouraged exploration and colonialisation of the New World and domination of oceanic trade routes that meant the West controlled the lifeblood of the world’s that both encouraged and allowed the economic, military and political control of the rest of the world. Except Ferguson’s argument didn’t really mention any of the above: he just says the West was “competitive” and therefore somehow better without really explaining how or why it was competitive, or how this was an advantage, in any meaningful way. Basically I’ve put a better case in one sentence than he has in forty-five minutes (I’m also prettier than him, yet as such Channel 4 hasn’t picked up my proposed documentary series Byzantium: Why It’s the Best Civilisation Ever and the Rest of the World are Ungrateful Bastards).

Likewise, it’s hard to argue with the supposition with Episode 2's supposition that The West encouraged scientific rationalism that they turned into a distinctive military advantage. It’s hard to deny that guns tend to win out over spears, though it is worth pointing out that spears can occasionally win out when they outnumber guns by thousands to one. Niall Ferguson has apparently never seen Zulu.

In addition to its military applications, science also was (and is) a significant socioeconomic advantage that helped improve the lives of people in the West and helped spread Western culture across the world via mass media. Unfortunately Ferguson has no time for such post-structuralist woman’s talk! He likes war! Guns! Jets! The shameful massacre of thousands of brown people! That’s what SCIENCE is for! Sir Isaac Newton: the deadliest son of a bitch in space!



The fact that “The West’s” scientific advancement was translated into politico-military advantage is incredibly obvious: we see it every day when the US Air Force drops bombs on Taliban insurgents cowering in caves with Soviet-manufactured AK-47s. It is in fact so blindingly obvious that I hardly think it needs an hour-long documentary to explain it to us. Except…. that is precisely what Ferguson does: he lists examples of Western military supremacy, usually by comparing Prussian artillery with Turkish, um,… harems. Yes, that happens: Ferguson’s argument is essentially half an hour of him arguing that “we had guns: the Turks didn’t, BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO BUSY FUCKING!” That is an argument so basic and obvious it is basically immune from criticism: I can’t very well argue that the Turks actually had giant death-rays hidden in the minarets of the Blue Mosque that they conveniently never told anyone about.*

One would expect a professional historian to go a step further than stating the bleeding obvious: one would expect him to explain him to explain why the West was more fertile ground for the rise of science. He pays some lip service to the idea of religious tolerance and secularism, but not in any detail. Even if the religious status of Europe was the whole reason (which it isn't), this would have been an interesting opportunity to wonder why Catholic/Protestant Europe led the world whilst Muslim Turkey was left behind. He could point to the West's philosophical tradition, the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Erasmus. He could look to the foundation of universities as centres to teach canon law. He could look at the many schisms and heresies that have riven the Christian community and perhaps made it tolerant of deviance by necessity. He could point to the often rocky relationship between faith and science: how Leonardo, Newton and Einstein, all of them theologically heterodox yet brilliant scientists who achieved broad acceptance, were driven to discover by their conception of God, whilst scholars like Galileo and Darwin were persecuted for daring to challenge the traditional conception of the universe and whose ideas are still not universally accepted even in the West.

There are a thousand and one explanations for why scientific rationalism triumphed in the West, some crazy, some less so, but Ferguson could pick any one of them and revel in them for entire episodes at a time.

But he doesn't.

Because he's a bad historian.

So let's turn to some of the arguments he does make in Episode 2, all of which are very poorly made and incoherent.

1. How did we get here?



Ferguson begins his narrative in 1683, with the Ottoman siege of Vienna, the high-water mark of Turkish power in Europe. Had the Austrians lost, he says, all of Europe might have been Muslim (he is apparently unaware of the fact that of all the modern European states that were once under Ottoman dominion only three -Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina Albania- have a Muslim majority). But the Viennese proved victorious, due to their successful application of SCIENCE! in the city's defences that allowed a grand Christian coalition to relieve the city. I'm not an expert on the Ottoman wars, but a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that bad planning, poor tactics, unreliable allies and overstretched supply lines hampered the Turks as much as Vienna's modern defences. I'm also curious as to how the nations of Eastern Europe were able to unite against the Ottomans for more than five minutes, something they abjectly failed to so when the Turks took Constantinople, Belgrade and Rhodes (but managed somewhat when Rome itself was threatened)

1683 is a strange place to start: in the central narrative of a clash between the Ottoman Empire and the West, Ferguson could have picked the battles of Lepanto or Malta as evidence of early Western victories, and then picked up the narrative of how the West went on to eclipse the Turks in the following centuries by colonising the New World and establishing control of trade routes. But by 1683 the struggle is already won: the Ottoman Empire was already past its peak, reached under Suleiman the Magnificent, who died in 1600 and was followed by a series of feeble successors. By the time the Ottomans made their (second) bid for Vienna the Spanish and Portuguese dominated South America, European warfare had been transformed by the Italian Wars and the Thirty Years War, the Renaissance was complete, the religious divisions had been largely solved by the Peace of Westphalia. The West's star had already risen, and Europe was able to unite more effectively against the Turks now that old divisions had been overcome. Ferguson discusses none of this.

Instead, focusing on the reign of Frederick the Great, so he doesn't the seventeenth century and the wars of religion which would fatally undermine his argument that Europe was a secular, rational society with great tolerance for dissenting views. That way he can focus on all the lovely things Frederick did (and there were a lot).

No context, no explanation for why the West pulled ahead of the Ottomans. We are presumably to suppose Europeans are naturally smarter than those beastly Turks. One wonders if Ferguson thinks 300 is a documentary?

On the subject of Frederick...

2. Why the obsession with Prussian militarism



This point is a bit nitpicky, but why is Niall Ferguson so fascinated with Prussian militarism? He spends about fifteen minutes of this episode banging on about how fantastic Prussian militarism was, for no reason other than it appeals to him, which I find strange. It's also a bit creepy that he uses footage from an unnamed 1930s film about Frederick to illustrate his point. I think he wanted it to provide evidence of the way Europeans applied scientific discovery to warfare: but he seems to have overlooked the fact that the government of Germany at the time (dammit!) hijacked the reputation of Frederick for their own agenda. It seems strange for Ferguson to identify himself as an admirer of Prussian nationalism with material made by another of its famous fans.

But Prussia was hardly typical, and its militarism routinely found itself competing militarily with other ideologies like Russian autocracy and Napoleonism. Prussia did succeed in uniting Germany, but it was ultimately defeated by liberal democracies in the First World War. It could be argued (though I wouldn't) that Prussian militarism ultimately informed European Fascism (dammit!), which was defeated by an alliance of liberal democracies and communism. So if Prussian militarism was so great, how was it that it was ultimately defeated? We are never told

Frederick's Prussia accomplished a lot militarily and culturally, but Ferguson is mistaking his Prussian nostalgia with an argument for Western supremacy: he thinks because he likes something, then it is a success. He hasn't considered the ramifications that his chosen ideology didn't succeed in conquering Europe, let alone the rest of the world.

3. Is the West History? In a word: no.



By the end, Ferguson believes he has constructed a watertight argument outlining (if not explaining) “The West’s” scientific lead and its application to warfare. But then, almost as an afterthought, Ferguson remembers he is supposed to be arguing that ”The West” is doomed to be surpassed by “The Rest” and begins to argue that the Western scientific lead may soon be lost. His argument basically boils down to two points:

1. They teach science in Middle Eastern universities. They even let women learn (imagine!)
2. Iran wants an atomic bomb.

Quick! Someone! Tell the President! Iran wants the bomb, something they’ve been seeking for the past thirty years! Truly the end days are now upon us!

I shouldn’t have to point out how stupid these arguments are. Firstly, as ever, Ferguson seems incapable of focusing on more than one part of “The Rest” at a time: the focus is on scientific learning in the Middle East, with no mention of higher education in, say, China or India.

Secondly, though it is obviously true that science is being taught more readily in Middle Eastern universities, sciences are still dominated by the major universities of Europe and America: the Ivy League; Oxford; Cambridge; Hull. All names known throughout the world as centres of academic excellence that draw in thousands of foreign students (and will have to draw in thousands more now that they’ll be charging nine thousand pounds a year to English students for tuition- thanks for that, Nick) whilst the number of Western students attending students outside Europe and America remain much smaller and limited to linguists and students of Asian culture.

Thirdly, there are still parts of the world where scientific education is unavailable to women: Ferguson is neglecting to mention that although it may be legal for women to study in the Middle East, it remains difficult due to ongoing social attitudes about gender roles. The ratio of male to female students remains, for the time being, heavily unbalanced. Hopefully this imbalance will be corrected in time.

Finally, I fail to see how Iran’s quest for the bomb indicates the twilight of the West: the first nuclear bomb was developed in 1945, hardly cutting edge technology. Frankly, it’s a minor miracle that so few countries have nuclear weapons when the technology has been available for six decades. Even with the bomb, Iran would be unable to directly threaten the West without a delivery mechanism: it could perhaps intimidate the Western-allied states on its periphery, but any attack on Israel- another nuclear power- would be suicidal. I suppose we are to infer that Iran might provide terrorists with a bomb, but the argument goes unstated: Ferguson clearly wants us to be absolutely terrified of the very idea that “The Muslims” might be after weapons of mass destruction.

Except… there is already a nuclear-armed Muslim majority state with the bomb, and they are a western ally: the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ferguson would also do well the remember that despite the fact that nine states are known or suspected of having nuclear weapons, nuclear Armageddon has yet to befall us, even at the height of the cold war. Ferguson wants us to believe that non-Western powers having nukes signals the end of Western civilisation, despite the fact that non-Western nuclear states have, by and large, proved level-headed and cautious about their use, whereas the only two cases of the use of nuclear weapons in warfare was by a Western nation against a non-western power that had no nuclear capacity of its own. Perhaps if the West were “made history” the rest of the world might treat each other with greater civility.

4. The Clash of Civilisations

There is something else that bothers me about how Ferguson ends his documentary: throughout the last hour, he has been talking about Ottoman Turkey: it’s early modern peak, its decline, and its adoption of Western ideas under Ataturk. But when discussing the scientific progress of the Middle East, he switches to the education of women in Saudi Arabia and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as if it was a logical continuation of his narrative. In this way, he presents the Middle East as a monolith, dominated historically by the Ottomans but now divided into independent nations, all of whom apparently have the same agenda: because women can learn in Saudi Arabia, they can learn anywhere in the Middle East; because Iran wants a bomb, it follows every Middle Eastern state must. The entire region is mushed together into one amorphous blob labelled “The Middle East”, with no regard for the distinctions between nations. No discussion of the fact that neither Turkey or Iran are Arabic, and a mutually antagonistic: Turkey is a secular democracy, Iran a theocratic republic, more or less; no mention of the historical divisions between Ottoman Turkey and Salafid Persia (the latter are not mentioned at all when Ferguson dicusses Ottoman domination of “the Islamic World”); no mention of divisions along sectarian or ethnic grounds, or alignment of the West, or the fact that most of the Middle East is firmly against Iran and their nuclear goals. It is telling that Ferguson is happy to show the mosques of Istanbul (a European city- the largest European city, in fact) but does not show the Christian cathedral that inspired them, because that would complicate his message: "They’re all the same, these Muslims: all acting in concert to overtake and overthrow the West". Stripped of its academic veneer and it’s little more than a Daily Mail article, an EDL leaflet, a rant by Glenn Beck.

I’m being unfair: Ferguson has clearly been very influenced by Huntingdon’s theory about “the Clash of Civilisations” (available here): the idea that after the Cold War solved the dispute between ideologies, the next stage of history would be dominated by conflicts between competing politico-religious groupings. Huntingdon in particular outlines the Muslim civilisation as a potential source of conflict, since it has the most ill-defined and “bloodiest” borders.

There’s a lot wrong with the theory, and refuting it here would take a whole book’s worth of material; besides, other people have taken the theory to task for it’s lack of historicity, it’s reductionism and it’s borderline racist view of human history. What matters here is that it’s simplistic. It plays into the old stereotype that other races and cultures are all the same, but “our” culture is unique in its plurality. This simply isn’t born out by fact: one could spend hours pointing out the pluralities of Western civilisations, it’s different religious, political, cultural and linguistic groupings, its competing ideologies, it’s petty rivalries. But ask a non-European to describe a white person and they’d probably say we were fat, greedy and obnoxious, with weird-coloured hair and girly skin. Then they might point to a nation like India, the birthplace of at least four world religions that I can name off the top of my head, with dozens of political subdivisions and a rich history of cultural and ethnic diversity but often dismissed as an impoverished and over-populated hell-hole fit only for Microsoft’s call centres. Ferguson himself refers to China (specifically the Ming Dynasty) as a monolith, a position the Chinese government would eagerly like to agree with but not born out in reality, even if they have abandoned the pre-communist/Taiwanese concept of five “official” races in China (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Uygher), the Chinese government now recognises freedom of religion, because despite their best efforts protests in Tibet and Xianjing demonstrate that it is simply not possible to impose uniformity on two billion people.

It also simplifies the conflict between the West and the Middle East as one of conflict, when it was also marked by periods of cooperation: Francis I allied happily with the Ottomans; France and Britain came to the support of Turkey against another European power (though Ferguson does not state whether he includes Russia within his ill-defined "West"); and of course, the same militaristic Prussia that Ferguson so admires, the same Prussia that united Germany, allied with the Ottomans during the First World War. Cultural boundaries rarely get in the way of international politics.

Ferguson, likes Huntingdon, wants history to be simple: West versus East; Christianity versus Islam; science versus religion; fundamentally, “us” versus “them”. History isn’t like that. It’s really fucking complicated, full of rich diversity and surprising contradictions that don’t make sense no matter how you try to sort them. Events never happen for one reason; they happen for a hundred. The truth is neither X nor Y, but usually some weird, inexplicable fusion of both. And it takes a lot more than six reasons to explain anything so huge and so important as the West’s domination of the globe. That’s what makes history special: it is the human story, and it presents humanity in all its magnificent, colourful, frustrating complexity. Ferguson and his ilk want to do away with that, to cut the intractable Gordian Knot of history’s thread and congratulate themselves for their ingenuity, without realising they’ve taken away from the mystery and beauty of the knot. And that they no longer have anything with which to pull their cart.

But there’s something more insidious to this oversimplification of history: it means simplifying the world. It means simplifying humanity, and there is already far too much of that in the world. It allows foolish politicians to think they can follow the old adage that he learns from history shall repeat it, without realising that history never repeats because each situation is unique. It gives idiot football fans excuse to riot because they can only see the world in terms of how the other fans are different with no regard with how the complexity of the world makes us all marvellously unique. It allows racist newspapers to publish racist stories about how a Muslim ate a baby and so every person with a different skin colour can be tarred with the same racist brush, without regard for their diversity or individuality.

Niall Ferguson is a bad historian. And bad history makes the world a worse place to live in.

* I should point out that in the period prior to the age under discussion Ottoman artillery was notoriously sophisticated: the famed walls of Constantinople did not fall, after standing unbreached for a thousand years (Latin treachery notwithstanding!), because Mehmed II beat Constantine XVI in a tiddlywinks contest. Awesome as that would have been.