William H. McNeill's "The Rise of the West"

The world of the paperback the University of Chicago invites you to join us for the

series of 15 minute programs dedicated to the discussion of literary topics and the

review of significant paper bound books each weekly program will bring to the

microphone a different author authority or educator with his particular viewpoint towards the

topic for discussion. The book selected for today's discussion is the

rise of the West. Our guest is the author of the work William H McNeil

professor and chairman of the Department of History at the University of Chicago.

Here is your discussion host from the University of Chicago Robert C. Albrecht

McNeil the rise of the West is a very very big book even in paperback almost 900

pages. But perhaps even more remarkable is a large number of maps and

photographs that appear on the maps and photographs. The decorations are they really

part of the text.

Well in the strict sense I suppose they're not part of the text but they were certainly designed or

intended to be part of the unified whole. I had the ambition

to. Use the photographs which are

reproductions of art objects almost always as

illustrative of changes in social context from which they

may have come. One of the really quite surprising to me and very

exciting things that came as I worked on the book was an awareness that

use of visual art as an historical source as a

litmus paper for stylistic affinities is

really very sensitive and very effective. One of the facts about

historical sources when they are when you restrict yourself to literary

sources is that you tend to segment humanity into a series of

linguistic communities in the fact that you have to learn another language and

one often very different from that you're familiar with before you can learn to say take

Chinese literature seriously he has meant to that in the past as soon

as high culture got frozen into a series of literary languages a

series of rather sharp borders. But the visual arts do not suffer or do not are not

so restricted have to suffer again. They are not so restricted. And a

man can see a statue from China today and whether it comes from Tang China or

from some more recent period. And no matter what

associations and ideas and aims they are the creator of that statue may have

read into it perfect and perfectly naive and untutored. I can look

at it and see something in whatever he makes of it may be quite different than normally I should think

would be quite different from what the maker or the persons who lived at the time it was first made would make.

But it is still it still can communicate in a way that words could not.

Some of the things you've just been saying suggest that you look to look if

you look upon history as history of the world not as a

group of civilizations unrelated but in some sort of continuity.

Yes yes this is the central thesis of my book. The

efforts immediately preceding to write histories of the world had tended.

I don't know that exception had tended to emphasize the separateness of a series of

civilizations whatever number you might may choose. And this is

plausible and indeed almost the necessary conclusion that one draws.

If you use little resources for your history. But if you are willing

to expand the source material to art and to

archaeology and think of technology as well as visual arts because

technology also is very percolates easily from one

community to another. And then the links that exist I believe to exist

between civilizations and peoples even over rather long distances in very primitive times

become next to undeniable they become undeniable I would say one of the very

interesting examples of this if you want this sort of extreme case is the

issue which I do not regard as closed at all of whether or not there were

historical relationships between the Amerindian civilizations in the New World and the

old the old world civilizations are either Europe. The West or

the east. Now there are in Mexico and Peru a

number of metallurgical objects.

Copper bronze and so on that very closely resemble objects

from Southeast Asia. This was first pointed out by a German by a hyena gelding

and I find it extremely difficult to believe that the

resemblances could be so close without some historical continuity some carrier

across the ocean. But we do not have any literary record of this and it is a

matter of judgement and taste and I do not think it's firmly established as a

extreme case of looking for looking with visual arts

that look into the visual arts as a source for historical

assertions about interrelationships of peoples.

Well if it is the case that visual arts are less time to civilization than language

less tied to a language group to a locality they move more easily. Well then or you can think. Look at

international style today and I get architectures right around the world. This is an example where

you talk Portuguese or one of the African languages you are your modern

architecture is almost you almost are replaceable in Africa in Chicago and Los

Angeles in Timbuktu. And is technology even

less time. Well English depends on the level of the technology. Simple technology

technology which rests upon handicraft skills is relatively easy to move from one part of

the world to another. If you have technology that rests upon a whole chain of other

technologies and of course this is always to some some degree.

But the more recent development of technology is much more difficult to set up at a say in

time the energy plant in Timbuktu. That is to build another building with

glass and steel.

Is the International School of Architecture the results of the international art

architecture the buildings that they've done. Is this unique. Virtually in the history of the world it is

well I was not aware of anything that has gone that rapidly.

You see an art style in times past spread much more slowly one can observe one

of the classic instances of this is the migration a Greek text or a

Greco influence type of Arc of sculpture from the

original Aegean homeland first into the Near East.

That is what is today. Syria and Mesopotamia

and Iran. And there it became tied to Buddhism that is

the Buddhists of the northwest frontier of India developed an

iconography which was borrowed from AS Thats not too strong borrowed from the

Greek habit of carving statues of their gods and certain

details such as the way they treated the hair of the top knot on the top of Apollo's head which then

is translated into a top knot on top of Buddha's head. They are accepted into Buddhist

iconography and then they move on across Asia and arrive in China by

about probably one hundred fifty two hundred eighty notes from say

600 B.C. when this Greek style really emerges or perhaps uses say

500 B.C. in the Aegean to 180 700 years 600 years

and it can be seen geographically step by step. When this was worked out

the early decades of the century by a man named fouché and others. It's a

classic example of artistic migration.

If land you see it moves from several different languages ends up in Japan.

And as it moves the Greek ness of

the style is attenuated so that a Chinese but it is not really very Greek.

And yet the continuity can be demonstrated step by step as it moves

across it's undergoing a transmutation and yet there is a historical

continuity from the Begun statues of ancient Greece to the Buddhist

statues of China.

Continuity seems to be one of your key one of the key motifs in in your book

which is which you subtitled A History of the human community. Though the main

title is The Rise of the West. This is an answer to Spangler's

decline. Well that's of course one of the reasons I chose the title.

The other is that in a certain shorthand way it does describe

the upshot of the history of the world if by west one means the style of life

the style of civilization which originated in Western Europe and has

now spread around the world come to dominate the cultures of other parts of the

world. One of the things that seems to me

very shortsighted of westerners today is to suppose that

when colonial empires let us say are dismantled that thereby

somehow the West is sinking. What is happening is that various techniques and

ideas of political social organization and ideas of what is

right and what is wrong. Freedom liberty democratic government and so

on have been transported to Africa into Asia

by Westerners or by students who come to the west to study and then they

use these ideas to overthrow political jurisdiction. But

actually our Westernizing themselves as fast as they can far more rapidly than a colonial

regime could do. So that this is what I mean by the rise of the West we were headlong

Westernizing all around the world.

One might read this to imply something about your view at least of the East.

This is perhaps well Aisha's but I don't want to set a sort of

antagonism or duality in east and west it seems to me there's a cultural pluralism at all

times in the past there's been one or more centers of primary disturbance of the ecological

cultural balance ecumenical cultural balance and at the

moment it's the West and the West on a much larger scale and with improved means of

communication is against anything known before. It does seem to have broken

down the autonomy of other cultural heritage. And this is a

new regimen for the world. And you can describe it by calling

it the rise of the West and that's what I had in mind in that title.

From what period do you date the recent rise of the West is

880 15:00 is the West really responsible for

the thing which is sometimes called the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century or is assembling

here her voice in the West do it in Britain as a matter of fact you can be quite

exact it occurred not only in Britain but in the midlands of Britain.

There have been of course movements in that direction elsewhere and you have

what some people think of as abortive industrialization in China but the

11th century tantalum centuries. And but the Industrial

Revolution is the creation of the English midlands and if you entrepreneur probably you know a

couple hundred men is what made the Industrial Revolution take the path and which it did

take.

Has this led us closer than we've ever been before to a kind of world

civilization.

And turns of to the only thing you can possibly compare it was the old stone age when you had

over infinitely long periods of time the diffusion of. There are only two types of really two

types of old stone age tools. The world is divided between. I don't remember the technical

terms so you had really two great culture areas and apparently I mean

this must be said with some reservations as archaeological up to exploration is

after all limited and the only unification of the world a comparison that is ever

present as the old stone age.

You don't see a series of compact or compartmentalise

civilizations confronting one another on was that isn't true.

But I do think how do they relate to civilizations are a civilization is a

meaningful concept and that human beings do associate

in two styles of life is what I call them which fade out toward the edges and fade out down the

social scale a newborn baby doesn't belong to any civilization and after about 20 if you are going to

be civilized you are in a particular style. And

the think of it as lines of flow was analogous to fields of

force in some. Often there is a rather intense and identifiable geographical

center. A few urban communities perhaps. And then it

peters out it weakens in varying degrees as you move further and further away and

presently another style of life will its radiating force will come and it will be

a zone of trance of meeting and it's in the zones of meeting

that the most fruitful interactions are likely to take place. But this isn't a universal rule either.

It depends on patterns of communication and the receptivity and

resistance to foreign ways that vary from time to time.

And this is the tangled texture of history as I understand it.

The guest for today's discussion of his book The Rise of the West was William H McNeil

professor and chairman of the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Your host

for the world of the paperback is Robert C. Albrecht assistant professor of English at the University of

Chicago. Next week Mrs. ora Lempert an actress with the

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will discuss several literary protagonists who search for

self-identity. The world of the paperback is produced for a national

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This is the national educational radio network.