According to folklore, Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization.

He replied that he thought it would be a good idea.

This was supposed to be a joke, but forgive me for taking the other side.

I think Western civilization was and is a good idea.

This is the nearest thing to heresy that exists in modern academic life.

At most universities in the English-speaking world, there are demands to decolonize the curriculum.

As a result, fewer and fewer students now graduate with any understanding of what has differentiated

the West from the rest of the world.

They leave with the misleading view that the defining features of Western civilization

are slavery, imperialism, and war.

No one would deny that after they began to expand overseas in the late 1400s, the peoples

of Western Europe engaged in all of those things.

But the point is that these were the least original things they did.

Prior to that time, nearly all major civilizations enslaved people, built empires, and made war.

In many of the places that Europeans went, South America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia,

and East Asia, they encountered empires.

The West first surged ahead of the rest thanks to a series of institutional innovations

that I call the killer applications.

One, economic and political competition.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies

and republics.

These in turn were internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors

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