Rationally Speaking #138 - Ian Morris on, "Why the West rules -- for now"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2015

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For several centuries, historians have tried to answer the question: "Why is Western Europe (and later, North America) the dominant world power?" Past explanations cited culture, or "great men" who influenced the course of history. Stanford historian Prof. Ian Morris casts doubt on those explanations, instead taking a data-driven approach to the question that attempts to measure "social development" over history and find explanations for it. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia delves into Morris' method and conclusions, and asks: can we make causal inferences about history?

Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics and Fellow of the Archaeology Center, Stanford University. He is a historian and archaeologist. He has excavated in Britain, Greece, and Italy, most recently as director of Stanford's dig at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian site from the age of Greek colonization. He is also the author of a number of books, among them: "Why the West Rules--for Now". "War! What Is It Good For?", and "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Want to read rationally speaking and not just listen to it? Come to our website where we're posting complete transcripts of every episode. That's rationally speaking podcast.org.
0:27.3	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City Skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:32.5	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEptics.org.
0:45.9	Thank you. please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:52.2	I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me today is our guest,
0:56.2	Professor Ian Morris. Ian is a professor of classics and professor of history at Stanford
1:02.2	University and a fellow of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has published 12 books now,
1:09.4	I think that's right.
1:15.2	And today we're going to be talking about two of his most recent books,
1:20.7	Why the West Rules for Now, The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, and a companion volume titled The Measure of Civilization, How Social Development Decides
1:27.3	the Fate of Nations.
1:28.8	Ian, welcome to the show.
1:30.5	Well, thanks for having me on.
1:32.1	So maybe you could just give us an introduction to the, what the question is you were
1:37.6	trying to answer with these two books.
1:41.1	Just expand on the question of why the West rules for now.
1:45.5	Right, yeah.
1:46.0	Well, I started thinking a lot about, this would be like five to ten years ago,
1:51.2	thinking a lot about why it is that the whole balance of the world seems to have changed
1:55.2	in the last 50 years or so.
1:57.4	But since about 200 years ago, a pretty small group of nations around the shores
2:03.6	of the North Atlantic started dominating the whole planet in a way that nothing like that had ever
	...

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