Civilization: The West and the Rest (86 page)

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Late in life, Galton wrote a novel,
Kantsaywhere
, which imagines a eugenicist utopia in which the individual’s right to reproduce was contingent on examination performance and where ‘the propagation of children by the Unfit is looked upon … as a crime to the State’.

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Kahn, a pupil of the philosopher Henri Bergson, was ruined by the Depression, bringing his grand photographic project to an end. A selection of the images can be viewed at
http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/photos.html
.

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Clark’s, the firm that built it (and provided Kenneth Clark with the means to be a gentleman scholar), was founded in 1812. The mill we know today was built in 1886 in a utilitarian style that Jeremy Bentham would have admired. It closed in 1968, having been rendered unprofitable, like most of the British textile industry, by Japanese competition.

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The population of England surged by more than a third between the 1740s and the 1790s; by the 1860s it was more than three times larger. Average age at marriage fell from twenty-six to twenty-three, fewer women remained unmarried and there were more illegitimate births. Gregory Clark has argued that the tendency for the children of richer individuals to live longer than those of the poor explains the Industrial Revolution, since ‘Middle-class values, and economic orientation, were most likely being spread through reproductive advantage … Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were imbuing themselves into communities that had been spendthrift, violent, impulsive and leisure loving’ (Clark,
Farewell to Alms
, pp. 132, 166). But presumably rich French and Italian children also fared better than poor ones.

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Comparative advantage means one country’s ability to produce a good or service with a lower opportunity cost/higher relative efficiency than another. Ricardo’s famous example concerns the trade between England and Portugal. In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth more easily and cheaply than in England, but in England it is much harder and therefore more expensive to produce wine than cloth. Both sides therefore gain if Portugal focuses on producing wine, where its comparative advantage is greatest, leaving the English to produce only cloth. The Portuguese exchange their surplus wine for surplus English cloth. The former get more cloth than would be the case if they produced their own; the latter get cheaper wine. This theory, when applied to Ireland, had catastrophic results. Specialization in meat production for the English market led to an excessive dependence on the potato to feed the rural workforce and therefore acute vulnerability to the blight of that vegetable,
Phytophthora infestans
, which struck in the mid-1840s. True to Ricardian principles, the British government declined to send emergency food to alleviate the famine; a million people died, vindicating not Ricardo but Thomas Malthus, the author of the
Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798), which predicted such calamities. The surviving Irish were reduced to exporting themselves, mostly to America.

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The ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the text may well refer to the Albion Flour Mills, built by Boulton & Watt in London in 1769 and destroyed by fire in 1791.

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The following list of names speaks for itself: Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Estée Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Helena Rubenstein, Levi Strauss. So does the list of department stores: Abraham & Straus, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Saks and Sears, not forgetting the British clothing retailer Marks & Spencer.

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In reality, a kimono does not require the kind of tight stitching produced by a sewing machine.

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James Poole, the father of Henry Poole, had begun working in London as a ‘taylor’ in the early 1800s, establishing his premises at 4 Old Burlington Street, with an additional entrance at 32 Savile Street, in 1828. He started making military uniforms. His son’s coup was to devise a royally acceptable court outfit for civilians.

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It was here, in the Deer Cry Pavilion, designed by the Englishman Josiah Conder, that the Japanese elite donned their ballgowns and frock coats and danced the quadrille, waltz, polka and mazurka to the latest European tunes. Ironically, this wholesale adoption of Western culture coincided with a Western fashion for Japanese art – which even Vincent van Gogh briefly embraced – though this was altogether more transient.

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It was Richard and Francis Trevithick, grandsons of Richard Trevithick, who helped the Japanese build their first locomotive at Kobe in 1893. They were among the so-called
yatoi
(live machines) whose expertise the Japanese hungrily imbibed in the Meiji era.

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Boss’s Metzingen-based company had been bankrupted by the Depression in 1930. Having joined the Nazi Party the following year, he was soon established as one of the principal suppliers of uniforms to the ‘Hitler Movement’.

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The Jewish role in Western intellectual life in the twentieth century – especially in the United States – was indeed disproportionate, suggesting a genetic as much as a cultural advantage. Accounting for around 0.2 per cent of the world’s population and 2 per cent of the American population, Jews won 22 per cent of all Nobel Prizes, 20 per cent of all Fields Medals for mathematics and 67 per cent of the John Clarke Bates Medals for economists under the age of forty. Jews also won 38 per cent of the Oscars for Best Director, 20 per cent of the Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction and 13 per cent of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards.

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Their biggest hit, ‘Zelva’ (Tortoise), had lyrics evidently inspired by late John Lennon: ‘If you don’t pay attention to turtles / They can trick you. / It is hard to catch turtles / When they are in the water.’

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Among the first official guests Havel invited to Prague after his appointment as president on 29 December 1989 were Frank Zappa and Lou Reed.

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The most uncannily accurate prophecy was by the American journalist James P. O’Donnell in an article entitled ‘The Ghost Train of Berlin’, published in the West German
Reader’s Digest
magazine
Das Beste
in January 1979, which foresaw the destruction of the wall ten years later and even the sale of pieces of the wall as souvenirs. Sadly, the rewards for such foresight are paltry – as were the penalties that should have been paid by a generation of clueless academic ‘Sovietologists’. The business of political prognostication remains a highly inefficient market.

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The ideal of covering the female head (the Arabic term is
hijāb
) and body (
jilbāb
) derives from the Koran, which commands women to ‘subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty’ (Sura 24 (Al-Nur): 31). The
hadith
, which recounts the acts of Muhammad, goes further, requiring the covering of the neck, ankles and wrists. Zealous Muslims promote the wearing of the
burqa
, a term usually taken to refer to the
niqāb
and the
abaya
.

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These events inspired Orhan Pamuk’s seminal novel
Snow
(2002). Anyone wishing to understand the psychology of Islamic terrorism must read Pamuk’s imagined last conversation between the Kars Director of Education and his murderer.

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Jews have in fact outperformed Protestants in the United States over the past century, with significantly higher earnings and rates of self-employment. Of the chief executive officers of
Fortune
magazine’s 100 largest companies in 2003, at least 10 per cent were Jews as were no fewer than 23 per cent of CEOs of the Forbes 400. Not only have Jews been disproportionately successful in starting financial firms; they were also founders or co-founders of some of the world’s biggest technology companies, for example Dell, Google, Intel and Oracle.

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These transatlantic differences are smaller than used to be the case, however. Unemployment has risen much higher in the United States than in most of the European Union as a result of the financial crisis; within the OECD, at the time of writing, only Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain have a higher jobless rate than the US. Measured as a five-year (1996–2000) average of days not worked due to strike action per 1,000 employees, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Italy and France are all more strike-prone than the United States, but the other members of the European Union are less so.

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The song was later covered by the British singer, record producer and convicted paedophile Jonathan King (Charterhouse and Trinity, Cambridge), also noteworthy for having produced ‘Leap Up and Down (Wave your Knickers in the Air)’ and the original cast album of
The Rocky Horror Show
.

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Even at the real Woodstock, the Who had premiered parts of
Tommy
, Pete Townsend’s rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind messiah.

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Chiang had converted to Christianity in 1930. His wife was one of the daughters of the Methodist millionaire Charlie Soong. I have used the more familiar Wade-Giles form of his name and also of Sun Yat-sen’s (pinyin: Jiang Jeshi and Sūn Yixiān).

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Comparable organizations in the United States include the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS). There are also American branches of the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

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In his 1966 book,
Tragedy and Hope
, Quigley attributed great power to a mysterious Anglo-American ‘secret society’ allegedly founded by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner and the journalist William T. Stead and devoted to ‘extend[ing] the British Empire’ and converting it into a federation. The ‘Rhodes–Milner group’ and its Round Table affiliates, Quigley claimed, were responsible for the Boer War, the weakening of the Versailles Treaty and the appeasement of Nazi Germany. After Milner’s death in 1925, this group continued to exert a malign influence through the Rhodes Trust, the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Quigley exaggerated both the secrecy and the success of Milner’s activities.

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Born in Yorkshire in 1881, Richardson was a Quaker, a conscientious objector during the First World War (though he did drive ambulances on the Western Front) and a proponent of Esperanto. It depressed him that he could find no evidence of a trend towards less war, nor any strong statistical predictor of when and where war would occur, beyond two relatively weak relationships: wars were more common between neighbouring states and more likely between states with different religions.

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In fact the total current dollar gross domestic product for all the countries defined by Huntington as Western has remained remarkably constant at between 61 and 69 per cent of the global total since 1960.

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The only commodities in the comprehensive International Monetary Fund database that have not gone up in price since February 2009 are natural gas, wood, olive oil, shrimp and chicken – good news for anyone planning a surf and turf barbecue.

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I would suggest the King James Bible, Isaac Newton’s
Principia
, John Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government
, Adam Smith’s
Moral Sentiments
and
Wealth of Nations
, Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
and Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species
– to which should be added William Shakespeare’s plays and selected speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. If I had to select just a single volume as my Koran, it would be Shakespeare’s complete works.