Our Own Worst Enemy

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Niall Ferguson is the most popular Scottish historian since David Hume. Like Hume, Mr. Ferguson went to London to make his fortune and has enjoyed great literary success throughout the English-speaking world. Unlike Hume, who wrote little after his best selling “History of England,” Mr. Ferguson has not been content to rest on his laurels. While holding chairs both at Harvard and Oxford, he still finds time to be a prolific columnist on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest work, “The War of the World” (Penguin Press, 808 pages, $35), is his most ambitious yet. Rather as Hume turned the prevailing Whig view of English history on its head, Mr. Ferguson enjoys provoking the liberal establishment. Now in his 40s, he reacted against the school of self-flagellation that dominated the academy when he was a student. He was fortunate to be a pupil of Norman Stone, another Scotsman of genius who blazed a trail for those who challenged the liberal orthodoxy at Cambridge and Oxford in the 1970s and ’80s. Stone was not a stuffy English Tory, but a working-class Glaswegian with a taste for fin de siècle Vienna and instilled in his students the notion that political and cultural conservatism did not necessarily go together.

Hence Mr. Ferguson’s conservatism is idiosyncratic rather than dogmatic. “The Cash Nexus” showed the triumph of capitalism, while “The House of Rothschild” told the story of one of capitalism’s great dynasties. “Colossus” and “Empire” are polemical responses to the tendency to blame the American superpower and its British predecessor for all the ills of the world today.

Mr. Ferguson loves to ask “what if?” and uses counterfactual — what he calls “virtual” — history to make polemical points. He once argued that the European Union would have been formed sooner and with much less bloodshed if Britain had not fought Germany in 1914. This style of argumentation occasionally leads Mr. Ferguson onto treacherous ground: His history of the World War I, “The Pity of War,” even suggested that humanity would have fared better if the Germans had won. How does he know that a German victory would have meant no Lenin, no Stalin, and no Hitler?

“The War of the World” is, of course, adapted from “The War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells, which more or less launched the genre of science fiction in 1898, with its tale of a devastating Martian invasion. The wars, revolutions, and genocides that broke out in 1914 and periodically flared up again ever since have been perpetrated not by extraterrestrial aliens but by all-too-human beings. The reality of the catastrophes that befell the world during the 20th century far exceeded the Wellsian fantasy.

Mr. Ferguson explains that he wanted to write a history of World War II, as a sequel to his account of World War I, but after investigating found himself confronted by the phenomenon of a “global hundred years’ war.” In the end, he elected to concentrate on the period from 1904 (the start of the Russo-Japanese War) to 1953 (the end of the Korean War). These dates seem to me pretty arbitrary, and Mr. Ferguson — rightly — does not stick rigidly to them. The source of Mr. Ferguson’s inspiration only emerges in the last pages of this huge book: the German “universal historian” Oswald Spengler, whose “The Decline of the West” was written during (not, as Mr. Ferguson states, soon after) World War I. Spengler’s magnum opus (more accurately translated as “The Descent of the West”) even supplies the present work’s subtitle.

Rightly, Mr. Ferguson attaches a health warning to the German prophet of doom. In a footnote, he concedes that Spengler “is now seldom read; his prose is too turgid, his debt to Nietzsche and Wagner too large, his influence on the National Socialists too obvious. “Things did not work out quite as predicted by Spengler, who foresaw that new “Caesars” would reassert “blood and instinct” against “money and intellect.” So they did, but in the contest with the democracies the Caesars ultimately lost. Even so, Mr. Ferguson writes, the dictators “accelerated the material, but perhaps more importantly the moral descent of the West.”

I am not sure that this Spenglerian analysis of our present predicament quite adds up. The great challenge facing the West is not one that Spengler foresaw, partly because his “morphological” theory did not allow for decadent cultures to revive. Islam, which was a formidable threat to Judaeo-Christian civilization from the seventh to the 17th century, seemed moribund in the early 20th century. It certainly did not loom as large for Spengler as nascent communism, fascism, or “the yellow peril” (by which he meant Japan rather than China). Yet it is Islam which, having absorbed elements from Nazi and Marxist ideology, now poses the main challenge to the West. And it is religion, not race or class, that now defines the global front line.

Even if his overall thesis is questionable, Mr. Ferguson’s narrative is lively and full of fresh insights. Indeed, Mr. Ferguson qualifies his main thesis, that the West has declined over the past century, by admitting that the decline had already begun before 1900: “The world of 1901 was a world of empires, but the problem was their weakness, not their strength.” If the old empires were weak, they had at least endured for a long time; the new empires of the 20th century — the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, and the Third Reich — were much more short-lived. They were, however, “exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction.”

Mr. Ferguson has a formula to explain the exceptional violence of the last century: ethnic conflict + economic volatility + empire states = genocidal war. These conditions were most often satisfied on the imperial peripheries, and these “fault lines” became the “killing spaces” of the period of maximum destruction, 1939–45.

The trouble with this formula is that it is too formulaic to answer the nagging question: “why?” Mr. Ferguson is closer to the truth when he points out that the descent of the West has been moral as much as political or economic. Unlike Spengler, who had a Nietzschean contempt for Judaeo-Christian morality, Mr. Ferguson recognizes that civilization requires a moral framework to survive. Yet he rejects previous attempts to explain the abyss into which much of humanity voluntarily hurled itself by reference to the rise of moral relativism and the repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values.

Thus he rejects Paul Johnson’s argument on these lines in his “Modern Times” on the ground that “the rise of new ideologies or the decline of old values cannot be regarded as causes of violence in their own right.” I must declare an interest here: Paul Johnson is my father. But it seems to me that an explanation in terms of ideas, morality, and religion is likely to be more satisfying than one that remains at the level of politics, economics, and ethnicity. The key dates in recent history — the Iranian revolution in 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the attack on America in 2001 — are only comprehensible in the light of intellectual history. Fortunately, Mr. Ferguson often ignores his own dictum, and in the course of his 700-odd pages there are plenty of ideas to season the drier stuff.

Mr. Ferguson’s overall reckoning is a grim one. The net result of this “War of the World” is to have weakened the West compared to the rest. The pre-1914 European empires, he writes, were relatively much stronger than the United States is today. The “narrative arc” was not the familiar one of the “American century,” but the reorientation of the world to the East — redressing the balance that had, he says, tilted too far in favor of the West since the 16th century. The limitations of American power have been all too manifest, most recently in the Middle East.

Western civilization, he thinks, is also much more vulnerable than it was, for reasons of culture, economics, demography, and geography: “A hundred years ago, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the neighborhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he writes. Now it seems to run through every European city. “The danger of a new war of the world is still with us, he warns.

Is he right? It is certainly true that the sacrifices necessitated by the two world wars put paid to the European empires, and the Cold War, too, cost the world — especially, as Mr. Ferguson demonstrates, the Third World — dearly. In many ways, however, the West emerged from the horrors of the 20th century stronger than ever. Humanity is only too eager to embrace Western politics, economics, and culture — if and when it is allowed to do so. The only alternative — militant Islam — is unpalatable to those who have a genuine choice. The greatest threat to the Judaeo-Christian world comes not from its rivals, but from within. As Mr. Ferguson says, “We shall remain our own worst enemies.”

Mr. Johnson last wrote for these pages about World War I.


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