Ian Morris. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

Abstract

This challenging but interesting book by Ian Morris is an unusual publishing venture, since it is largely a 400-page technical appendix to the author's popular work Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future (2011). In that earlier book, as support for his argument, Morris introduced a social development index, detailed in an appendix. The Morris index is designed to quantify “social groups' abilities to master their physical and intellectual environments and get things done in the world” (p. 3). The current volume describes in extravagant detail how this index was devised, seeks to justify its value as an indicator of the social development of societies, and specifies how each year of the index was calculated, from 14,000 b.c.e. to 2000 c.e. It is thus a worthy scholarly exercise, which will be appreciated by numbers-loving cognoscenti. But it is an enterprise that likely has a limited audience beyond the circle of people who think that the future of history is as a quantified science. It will not serve well as an ambassador to those skeptical of quantification for the numbers-heavy approach to history that Morris favors. This is the equivalent of introducing a lifelong vegetarian to the pleasures of meat-eating through a trip to the slaughterhouse.