若要描述西方世界的崛起乃至它对当代世界无与伦比的影响，此刻可不是什么好时机，而且势必会发展成为一种辩护。如今西方处于守势，经济上受到中国崛起的挑战，政治与军事上则需面对伊斯兰文化高涨的仇恨情绪。同样巨大的挑战也许还来自内部。
自“二战”后统治着美国教育的西方文明研究，一直备受攻击，在当今的学院里已经愈来愈难觅踪迹。就算有这门课，西方文明也因其奴隶制度和殖民制度而受到抨击，还有所谓的好战，以及将妇女和非白人族裔排斥在平等权利和特权之外。有些人批评西方研究过于狭隘、局限、充满傲慢与歧视，认为它对欧洲文明以外的文明意义不大乃至全无价值。也有人主要将西方文明当作恶劣的典范来进行研究。
哈佛大学商学院教授尼尔·弗格森(Niall Ferguson)却并不这么想。他熟知西方文明的所有缺陷与污点，但却直截了当地否定那种认为西方文明一无是处的观点，斥之为“荒谬”。他认同西方文明既有好的方面也有坏的方面，并认为与其他文明相比，西方文明还是好的一面“居于首位”。
弗格森的著作《文明：西方与其它》("Civilization: The West and the Rest")中的许多言论并不能为他在当今学术界的风头人物中赢得盟友。他批评那些把“欧洲中心论”视为令人反感的偏见的评论家们。“从任何科学标准而言，科学革命都是完全以欧洲为中心的，”弗格森对中国和伊斯兰文化在智力与科学上对人类文明所作的贡献表达了应有的尊敬，但他认为，现代科学与技术基本是西方的产物。他提出这样一个问题：任何一个非西方国家倘若不接受其他西方文化的关键制度，如“私有财产权利、法治和代议制政府”，是否还能孤立地获取那些科学知识？
弗格森甚至为帝国主义进行不合时宜的辩护：“帝国主义是所有现代问题的总根源，这在西方世界的学界似乎是一个获得普遍公认的真理……，这真是贪婪的独裁者们方便的托词，譬如津巴布韦的罗伯特·穆加贝。”而那些持反对意见、支持殖民地官员的学者，“在道德上视为等同于纳粹和斯大林主义者”。他还指出在大多数亚洲与非洲国家，“（人口平均）预期寿命在欧洲殖民统治结束前就开始出现增长”。
弗格森没有试图对所有针对西方的指责做详尽调查研究或逐条进行反驳，而是集中探讨其中最有趣与最困难的问题，比如：“从1500年左右开始，西方的几个小国家竟结束了欧亚大陆对世界其他部分的统治，这是为什么呢？”他说，这本书的方式是通过许多小故事来讲述一个“大故事”。但这其实并不是一个准确的描述。这本书是按编年叙述的，弗格森特意提出其中6章，将之戏称为自己的“杀手锏”，每一章都重点讨论一个（西方文明）的重要元素，可以作为他对“西方何以统治世界”这个问题的回答：1）存在于欧洲各国国内以及国与国之间的竞争；2）始于16-17世纪科学革命的现代科学；3）建立在私有财产权与选举代表组成立法机构基础上产生的法治与代议制政府；4）现代医学；5）由工业革命引发的消费社会；6）职业道德。他认为，这些因素对西方势力的增长起到决定性作用，但在其他社会中不是非常薄弱就是根本不存在。
弗格森认为，西方的飞速崛起或许正是得益于在这些领域内的杰出表现。但是自从19世纪末以来，“西方之外的其他国家”，特别是日本，开始全面赶上，只是没有学到内部竞争与代议制政府两项。上世纪50年代以来，东亚国家，特别是目前发展中的中国，在经济现代化方面取得了重大进展，如今已经可以成功地与西方竞争。弗格森认为当前我们正在经历“500年西方盛世的末期”（the end of 500 years of Western predominance），并预言世界上衰落和崛起的力量之间有发生冲突的可能，并提出问题：“较弱一方是否会由弱势转为彻底崩溃”。
更糟的是，弗格森认为当前的经济危机“为已经根深蒂固的西方相对衰落趋势推波助澜”。他担心或许会有这样一个时刻，“某个看似随机的坏消息——诸如对某个信用评级机构的负面报道”会造成投资者的恐慌，导致他们失去对美国信用体系的信任。这会造成严重的危机，“对于一个复杂适应性系统来说，当维持其存在所需的最小规模成员对系统生存发展能力丧失信心时，系统就会面临重大危机。”
但弗格森并没有放弃西方，相比其他国家而言，西方仍具备“由来已久的优势”。缺乏政治竞争、法治、信仰自由以及媒体自由，可以解释中国、伊朗和俄罗斯等国家“何以在‘国家创新发展’和‘国家创新能力’等定性参数上落后于西方国家”。不过，他对西方国家继续保持优势的希望看上去有些底气不足——尽管“西方的这套完整体系”可以提供“迄今最好的经济、社会与政治制度”，但他质疑西方人自己是否有能力认识到这一点。
教育是认识这一切的核心因素，特别是历史教育。历史与西方世界知识教育的衰退令弗格森忧心忡忡。他的结论令人沮丧：“对西方文明的最大威胁不是来自其他文明，而是来自于我们自己的懦弱——对历史的无知进一步滋养了这种懦弱。”
“文明”是他所提供的部分解决方案。这本书是英国一个电视系列片的脚本，他对采访者说，这本书的目标读者是“17岁左右的男孩和女孩……，里面以非常容易理解的方式讲述了很多历史”。然而，必须说读者从本书中得到的只是历史的片段，而不是人们需要了解的那种关于西方文明与其他文明的特点和发展进程的“大故事”。我们仍然需要一种详尽的描述，去解释一桩桩历史事件如何并且为何相继发生，去发现这其中的因果关系，以及偶发因素与传统势力之间的关系。
最后，弗格森呼吁人们向传统教育归复，因为“传统教育的核心，学校所教授的课本都是关乎一种文明，学生们学习它，在苦难的时刻回忆它”。在这里，他的“课本”是指西方经典名著(Great Books)，特别是莎士比亚的作品。他写道，我们正面临的最大危险或许不是“中国、伊斯兰势力的崛起或二氧化碳排放的增加，而是我们对从祖先那里传承下来的文明丧失了信心”（ The greatest dangers facing us are probably not “the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions,” he writes, but “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.）。
本文最初发表于2011年11月27日。最近作家尼尔·弗格森因为发表在《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)上的一篇名为《滚蛋吧，奥巴马》（Obama’s Gotta Go)的文章而引发争议。本文所介绍的这本著作概述了弗格森对“西方中心论”和“中国崛起”等问题的看法——编注。
本文作者唐纳德·卡根（Donald Kagan） 耶鲁大学历史学和古典学权威教授，美国国家人文学科奖章获得者。主要著作包括《伟大的对话》（1965，希腊政治思想史），《伯罗奔尼撒战争的起源》（1969，四卷本），《尼西亚和约与西西里远征》（1981），《雅典的伯利克里和民主政治的诞生》（1991） 等。
翻译：董楠
Donald Kagan：A Good Run
作者 唐纳德·卡根(Donald Kagan) 2011年11月25日 The
New York Times
This is a difficult time in which to present an account — and what amounts to a defense — of the West’s rise to pre-eminence and its unequaled influence in shaping the world today. The West is on the defensive, challenged economically by the ascent of China and politically and militarily by a wave of Islamist hatred. Perhaps as great a challenge is internal. The study of Western civilization, which dominated American education after World War II, has long been under attack, and is increasingly hard to find in our schools and colleges. When it is treated at all, the West is maligned because of its history of slavery and imperialism, an alleged addiction to war and its exclusion of women and nonwhites from its rights and privileges. Some criticize its study as narrow, limiting, arrogant and discriminatory, asserting that it has little or no value for those of non-European origins. Or it is said to be of interest chiefly as a horrible example.
Niall Ferguson thinks otherwise. A professor at both Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, quite aware of the faults and blemishes of the West, he flatly rejects the view of those who find nothing worthwhile in it, calling their position “absurd.” He recognizes both good and bad sides and decides that in comparison with other civilizations, the better side “came out on top.”
Many of the observations in “Civilization: The West and the Rest” will not win Ferguson friends among the fashionable in today’s academy. He upbraids critics who speak scornfully of “ ‘Eurocentrism’ as if it were some distasteful prejudice.” “The scientific revolution was, by any scientific measure, wholly Eurocentric.” Ferguson pays due respect to the intellectual and scientific contributions of China and Islam, but makes it clear that modern science and technology are fundamentally Western products. He asks if any non-Western state can simply acquire scientific knowledge without accepting other key Western institutions like “private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government.”
Ferguson is so unfashionable as to speak in defense of imperialism: “It is a truth almost universally acknowledged in the schools and colleges of the Western world that imperialism is the root cause of nearly every modern problem, . . . a convenient alibi for rapacious dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.” Contradicting historians who “represent colonial officials as morally equivalent to Nazis or Stalinists,” he points out that in most Asian and African countries “life expectancy began to improve before the end of European colonial rule.”
Ferguson does not attempt a thorough investigation of the many charges made against the West, or a defense against them. Instead, he addresses the interesting and difficult question: “Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?” The book’s method, he says, is to tell “a big story,” along with many little ones, but that is not a proper description. Rather than a chronological narrative, Ferguson offers six chapters of what he calls “killer apps,” each addressing a major element in his answer to the question of Western domination: 1) competition, both among and within the European states; 2) science, beginning with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries; 3) the rule of law and representative government, based on the rights of private property and representation in elected legislatures; 4) modern medicine; 5) the consumer society that resulted from the Industrial Revolution; and 6) the work ethic. These, he argues, were crucial to the growth of the West’s power, but weak or nonexistent in other societies.
Excellence in these categories, Ferguson says, may explain the West’s remarkable rise, but late in the 19th century “the Rest,” especially Japan, began to catch up in all but internal competition and representative government. By the 1950s states in East Asia, especially and increasingly China, made great strides in economic modernization and now compete successfully against the West. At present, he says, we are experiencing “the end of 500 years of Western predominance,” and he foresees the possibility of a clash between the declining and rising forces. He wonders “whether the weaker will tip over from weakness to outright collapse.”
What’s worse, Ferguson sees the current financial crisis as “an accelerator of an already well-established trend of relative Western decline.” He worries that there may come a moment when a “seemingly random piece of bad news — perhaps a negative report by a rating agency” panics investors, who lose confidence in the credit of the United States. This could cause disaster, “for a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when a critical mass of its constituents loses faith in its viability.”
Nonetheless, Ferguson has not given up on the West; it still has more “institutional advantages than the Rest.” The lack of political competition, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and a free press help explain why countries like China, Iran and Russia “lag behind Western countries in qualitative indices that measure ‘national innovative development’ and ‘national innovative capacity.’ ” Still, his hopes for continued success do not seem very strong. Although the “Western package” offers “the best available set of economic, social and political institutions,” he questions whether Westerners are still able to recognize it.
An element central to all this is education, especially history, and Ferguson is appalled by the decline of historical teaching and knowledge in the Western world. His conclusion is not encouraging: “The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”
“Civilization” is part of his solution. The book is the basis for a television series in Britain, and he told an interviewer that it aims to give a “17-year-old boy or girl . . . a lot of history in a very digestible way.” Yet it must be said that bits of history are what they get, not the kind of “big story” one requires to understand the character and development of Western and other civilizations. We still need a full account of how and why one thing followed another, of cause and consequence, of the role of chance versus the force of inherited tradition.
Over all, Ferguson calls for a return to traditional education, since “at its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation” — by which he means Great Books, and especially Shakespeare. The greatest dangers facing us are probably not “the rise of China, Islam or CO2 emissions,” he writes, but “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors.”
Donald Kagan’s latest book is “Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.”
