01x06 - Europe: The Barbarian West

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It's a freezing February midnight

in northern France.

Former enemies, French and German,

meet to commemorate

the bloodiest battle in history,

which began on this night



Verdun.

The tragedy of the First World w*r

is etched into the collective memory

of European people.

It was a watershed

in their self-confidence,

questioning their common faith

in progress, patriotism,

in civilization itself,

and even in the existence of a benign God.

Under the flags of past battles,

the old familiar rituals of

Christian sacrifice take place.

Only a lifetime ago,

three-quarters of a million people

died here for a couple of

square miles of ground,

when the heirs to the culture of Voltaire

were bled white by the heirs of

Goethe and Beethoven.

A memory still terrible,

but fading now as only the very old

remain to remember

the pointlessness of it all.

Those of us born later can only imagine.

We that are young, said Shakespeare,

shall never see so much,

nor live so long.

And now, in the 1990s,

after centuries of conflict,

the Europeans are finally moving to unite.

The descendants of the barbarians,

of the Franks, Goths, Angles and Saxons,

the first people in history

to spread their civilization

across the whole planet.

The b*ttlefield of Verdun

is the most poignant reminder

of how a supposedly rational

and humane civilization

can descend to terrifying violence

and irrationality,

all in the name of civilization.

And that brings us to that most

difficult of tasks,

which is to see ourselves

as others see us,

to see our culture

as we would a foreign country.

And there, the inescapable

lesson of history

is that for all the great achievements

of the West,

for all its humanistic values

and its egalitarian principles,

its character is touched by

deep strain of violence.

And that's the paradox which confronts us

as we look to the future of civilization,

at a time when all across the world,

the values of the West

are supposed to have triumphed.

We Greeks live around the sea

like frogs around a pond,

said Socrates.

This is Samos,

and here began the quest

which would lead Western man

to the exploration of space

and the conquest of nature itself.

Here for the first time,

Western man speculated

on the composition of the universe,

observing the geometries of nature,

questioning the role of

humanity in this order.

The existence of God.

On Samos and its neighboring coasts

were born the scientists

who laid the foundations

of our modern view of the universe.

The most famous was Pythagoras,

author of the theorem

we all learn at school,

and in a mountain cave here,

a tradition of him has still survived.

It might sound like a simple folk tale,

but the tradition was first recorded

not long after Pythagoras' day,

and it contains an important
kernel of truth

that for all their brilliant
qualities of mind,

the Greeks had to borrow from Africa

and Asia to create their civilization.

In the West, we look upon this moment

as the birth of science and reason,

but it would be more
accurate to describe it

as the birth of Western science and reason,

because right across the Old World

at this time, around 500 BC,

it was an astonishingly creative epoch.

The Axis Age, the time of Confucius

and Laozi in China, of the Buddha

and the great grammarians

and philosophers in India,

of the Zoroastrians, the Jewish prophets,

and the philosophers and poets

here in Greece.

All of them grappling in their own way

with the ultimate question,

the nature of reality itself.

Still the ultimate question,

whatever your line of business,

whether it's poetry, religion,

or particle physics.

But this was the first time

that the West, Europe,

had participated in these great currents

of civilization emanating from Asia.

And here in Samos, it's easy to see why,

because that's Asia over there,

it's that close.

In fact, the Greek word Asia

originally meant simply

that coastline in front of us.

So that's the beginning

of the great land mass,

the teeming heartland of civilization,

stretching away

across the fertile crescent

to Iraq, Iran, India, and China.

So not surprisingly,

Pythagoras and his contemporaries

had imbibed Asian ideas,

Babylonian astronomy and mathematics,

Indian ideas about

the soul and about rebirth.

They may have transformed them

with their own genius,

but the Greeks still shared

the basic beliefs

of those other civilizations,

that the universe was an ordered,

beautiful, and harmonious whole.

In their language, a cosmos.

Man is by nature a political animal,

said the Greeks.

The new scientific view of the world

was the catalyst for a new politics,

democracy.

And the first democracy was Athens.

Buildings of classical Athens,

like the Parthenon,

are monuments to that new order.

Like 18th century Britain or America,

Greek democracy was limited.

It excluded sl*ves and women.

But it took the essential step of putting

politics into the hands of the citizens.

That was what the Greeks called politismos,

civilization.

For the Greeks, the essential quality

of civilized life

was humanism.

The idea that man is

the measure of all things,

that the fulfillment of

each individual's potential

was the goal of civilization.

This idea permeated

all the legacies in art,

philosophy, and literature,

which the Greeks bequeathed

to our modern world.

In the dramatic festivals,



fate and freedom acted out for all to see.

The Greeks understood early on

that civilization is fragile,

that it is a hard thing

to maintain an open society,

that the irrational will always threaten

to burst out in human life

with terrifying force,

no matter how noble

society's ideals.

The Greeks, said Aristotle,

are intelligent and free

and have the capacity

to rule all mankind.

And in the 4th century BC,

under Aristotle's pupil

Alexander the Great,

they invaded the Near East.

The valley of the Nile

thronged with Greek colonists.

In Upper Egypt, the monuments

were covered with graffiti

by awestruck Greek tourists.

To think, fumed an Egyptian priest,

we taught these upstarts all they know.

And at Luxor, in the inner shrine of

the ancient Egyptian temple,

striding like a pharaoh of old,

is the violent golden boy of

Western history,

Alexander himself.

The Greeks now crossed the Khyber Pass

and poured into India,

building their colonies

on the northwest front.

Alexander's successors went further still.

In the 2nd century BC,

they sent devastating expeditions

down the Ganges, sacking

the ancient religious centre of Benares.

And at the little village of Kasambi

is graphic evidence of

the trail of destruction.

Here a Buddhist monastery

has been excavated,

which was swept by a Greek firestorm,

torched by Greek mercenaries,

sweltering out here

so far from home.

These were terrible times,

said the Indians.

The vicious but valiant Greeks

ruined our land with fire and famine,

k*lling women and children,

and even our cows.

Such was the first time

the West went out to the world.

But the Greek conquests liberated

tremendous historical energies.

Trade routes now opened

through central Asia

on the Silk Route to China.

In earlier times,

said the historian Polybius,

the world's history had been a series

of unrelated episodes,

but from now on

history becomes an organic home.

The affairs of Europe and Africa

are connected with those of Asia,

and all events bear a relationship

and contribute to a single end.

Riding the monsoon winds,

Greek and Roman merchants now sailed

into the Indian Ocean

to trade in spices.

Each year the Roman balance of payments

ran millions into the red

to fill the pepper barns

by the River Tiber.

It was the beginning of a vast

exchange of cultures and ideas,

the first glimmering

of a world economy.

The Romans had united

the Mediterranean world,

conquering the Iron Age cultures of Europe,

along with the sophisticated city dwellers

of Greece, Syria and Egypt.

Brilliant architects, engineers

and military planners, like all empires,

theirs was based on military might,

on sl*very and cruelty.

At its height, the empire extended

from Hadrian's Wall in Scotland

to the Persian Gulf,

and you could call yourself

a citizen of Rome,

whether you lived in Manchester,

Athens, Luxor or even briefly Uruk

in the baking south of Iraq.

But unlike India or China,

there was no binding

religious or social ethic

to hold its disparate parts together,

and in the fourth century

it entered a great crisis,

economic, social and especially spiritual.

And the vacuum was filled

by an obscure cult,

one of many new religions

arising out of the spiritual ferment

of the late antique world,

Christianity.

In Egypt in particular,

a form of Christianity developed,

which would exert a profound

and lasting influence

on the Western mind,

monasticism.

Christianity became

the official religion of the Roman Empire

in the fourth century,

and with that a set of beliefs,

myths and taboos,

deriving from the Iron Age

people of Palestine and ultimately

from the Bronze Age cities of Iraq,

was accepted by the rulers of the West

as the final revelation of history.

And even though the Roman Empire itself

fell to the northern barbarians

in 410 AD,

this sense of historical mission

was never lost.

The triumph of Christianity

was another product

of the extraordinary fertility of ideas

born in the intractable landscapes

of Syria, Palestine and Iran,

a testimony to the continuing inspiration

which the West has drawn

from the more ancient cultures

to the East.

After the fall of the Roman Empire,

tribes of Germanic barbarians

made their new home

in the ruined provinces.

Out on the wild shores of Britain,

with a religion from the near East,

a monasticism from Egypt

and a written language from Italy,

the Anglo-Saxons started from scratch

to build their new order,

with the optimism of all immigrants

thrown on strange shores.

The ruins of that order

are still around us.

Silent shapers of our modern world.

Here on the river Tyne in Northumbria,

the searcher for that past

has to travel back through many histories,

through the ruins of later empires

built on coal, steel and ships.

But here at Jarrow is a place

as crucial as any in the Western story.

To get to it now,

you have to cross muddy slakes

and reclaimed slag tips.

Here in the monastery of
St Peter and Paul,

the first great history of the West
was written,

which spelt out the West's
view of its own destiny.

The author was a monk here,

the venerable Bede.

Bede was the first to use

the Anno Domini system of

dating history from Christ's birth,

which is now used throughout the world.

The books written here

give clues to his time.

The biblical hero David, for example,

was a model

for the rulers of the barbarian West.

Portrayed as the teacher of his people,

the psalmist.

He's a reminder that

the great Western tradition of

social legislation and welfare

comes not from Greece or Rome

or even the Victorians,

but from the Dark Ages.

And here's David with the spear of God

waging just wars against non-believers.

Put the two ideas together

and you have the ideal Western ruler

from the Crusades to the Gulf w*r.

Bede's history was the most remarkable

and the most successful attempt

to show how the peoples

of the barbarian West

in the Dark Ages

transformed themselves

through the agency of civilization.

Christian, Latin, Mediterranean

civilization.

Bede was a thoroughgoing European

in that respect.

In comparison with, say,

contemporary tongue China,

Bede's Anglo-Saxons

and the people of Europe

were indeed barbarians.

They were impoverished, underdeveloped

third world immigrants,

as we would say today,

in the patronizing language of the rich.

And yet here on the Northumbrian coast

in the eighth century

are already the key elements

out of which the culture of the

modern West would emerge.

Judeo-Christian religion and ethics,

the remains of Greek and Roman

humanism and law,

a native Germanic society and language.

In the hands of a historian like Bede,

that mixture could be made to tell

a powerful story.

That the peoples of the barbarian West

were the appointed Christian

heirs of the Roman Empire.

A chosen people

destined to lead us on

into the last phase of human history,

from the city of man to the city of God.

The idea that history is purposive

and leads to an appointed end

would become one of the driving themes of

world culture,

from St. Augustine to Marx

and from Jarrow to Tiananmen Square.

In the medieval era,

between the 11th and the 13th centuries,

the barbarians came of age.

They created the greatest epoch of

art and architect

which the world had ever seen,

the age of cathedrals.

Inspired in part by Islamic forms,

this was still the first full expression

of a distinctively Western genius.

And more than that, of the Western soul.

But even during the cathedral age,

social forces were at work,

which would eventually loosen

the hold of the Church of Rome

on the former barbarians.

This is Norfolk in eastern England.

Here, 800 years ago,

changes can be detected

in ordinary peoples' lives,

which would have a crucial bearing

on the future.

This brings us to one of the most

fascinating questions

in the story of The Rise of the West.

How was it that such small-scale

countries and economies

could end up dominating the world

as they've done?

As late as 1550,
England only had 2.5 million people.

China and India, with their vast

and highly developed economies,

had passed 100 million centuries before.

They'd made all the great inventions

necessary for scientific

and industrial revolutions.

How had it happened?

Was there something distinctive

about the character of the West,

or was it just historical chance?

A graveyard in Norfolk may seem

a strange place to ask such a question.

But some answers may lie here,

because across northwestern Europe,

and especially here in East Anglia,

records of birth, marriage and death

suggest that as early as the 12th century,

a distinctive character was emerging,

of late marriage,

of small nuclear families,

but of also

a possessive property-based individualism,

and a free market philosophy,

which seems uncannily like

the seeds of later Western ideology.

Of the ideology which,

through the English, French

and American revolutions,

became the dominant philosophy of the West,

and which rules our lives even today.

In parts of Western Europe,

men and women were already marrying

in their late twenties

and having small families.

So Western people were beginning to do

what today's Chinese, for example,

have had to enforce by law.

This was the key

not just to population control,

but to the accumulation of wealth.

For with security of life,

inheritance and property,

you don't need big families.

It was the start of a revolution in values,

which would see the West

diverge from all traditional societies.

The first signs of Western individualism.

And individualism is the key

to the Western conception of freedom.

An idea which comes

not from ancient Athens,

but is rooted here in Western Europe.

Here, a property-based conception of

freedom took shape early on.

The beginnings of capitalism.

So here, for the first time,

we meet modern Western people.

Economically free, property-owning,

upholders of individual

rather than collective values.

It was a philosophy

which would inherit the earth.

All this while,

the great powerhouse of Western culture

was still the fertile crescent.

For the Muslims inherited

the legacy of the ancients.

And it was in medieval Baghdad

that the first great attempt was made

to bridge the religions of East and West.

Through the universities

and libraries here,

Babylonian astronomy, Hindu mathematics

and Chinese science was transmitted

to Europe by Arab humanists.

It was one of the great multicultural

epochs of all time.

If one could combine Arabic faith

and Jewish intelligence, said one,

with an Iraqi education,

Christian conduct, Greek knowledge,

Indian mysticism and a Sufi way of life,

this would be the perfection of humanity.

That dream still stands

as one of the greatest of all declarations

of faith in an international civilization.

Now there comes the event

on which the whole course of

modern Western history rests.

An event which opened

unimaginable mental horizons

and brought undreamed-of wealth

flowing back to Europe,

renewing and transforming

the spiritual empire of Rome,

gilding its roofs with Aztec gold.

The conquest of the New World.

From Mexico to the Andes,

the Europeans appropriated

the almost limitless resources

of the New World,

studying its landscape

with the churches of Christian gods.

The conquest was accompanied

by a genocide unparalleled in history.

In the century after Columbus,

over two-thirds of the

native population of the Americas

died through disease and violence,

perhaps as many as 50 million people.

Columbus wrote to the Queen of Spain,

Our European civilization will bring light

to the natives in their darkness.

But for ourselves, we will gain gold.

And with gold,

we will be able to do

what we want in the world.

The discovery of the New World

shifted the centre of gravity of the West,

away from its old heartland

in the Mediterranean,

to the seaboard of north-western Europe,

to nations like Holland and England,

Protestant and Capitalist.

Here in Maldon,

a small port on the east coast of England

is a symbol of that age.

The intact library

of a 17th century scholar, Thomas Plume,

who endowed the professorship of astronomy

at Cambridge.

His 7,000 books

enable us to step back

into the intellectual world

of this new civilisation of the West,

at the point of its rise

to world domination.

Here are translations of

Greek and Arabic science.

Here's Galileo's vision of the cosmos.

Descartes,

anatomising the marvels of the human body.

But the key figure in the new learning

was Francis Bacon.

For Bacon saw

how science and technology

would be used in the future

to subdue the other peoples of the planet,

and ultimately to conquer nature itself.

It's Bacon who now appears

the prophet of our age,

and the quintessential Western scientist.

This new science, new learning,

had fateful implications for the future,

as Bacon himself understood.

For if it were true, as Bacon said,

that henceforth in human affairs

what was most useful in practice

would also be most correct in theory,

then truth itself could be defined

in terms of utility, usefulness,

not in terms of religion and morals.

And so, man could become

a law unto himself, as Bacon said,

and depend no more on God.

It's one of the founding ideas

behind our modern Western

scientific civilisation

which would go out and exploit

and subdue the entire world

in the name of that new science.

Now the workings of the human body

would give up their secrets.

The stars and planets could be measured,

the world itself subjected to

Western definitions of time and space,

mapped on a meridian based on Greenwich.

And when the Jesuits first showed

the Chinese a map of the whole world,

they were taken aback by the

knowledge of these so-called barbarians.

Up till then, said one,

they'd printed maps of the world

in which China was all.

But when they saw the world so large,

and China only a corner of it,

they knew in truth

that their world had changed.

It was industrial revolution

which now enabled the small-scale

societies of Northern Europe

to take a world lead in trade.

And this happened first in Britain.

Here the two, most of the great

technological advances in history,

have come from Asia.

But now the West leapt ahead,

its mobile, individualistic populations

becoming predominantly city dwellers

in a few generations.

The effects on human beings

and the environment

are still being counted.

The industrial city has now spread

across the landscape of the world

from the plains of India

to the Yellow River in China.

But it began here in Manchester.

Its great buildings,

like the Town Hall from the 1860s,

stand as monuments

to the ideals of that new civilisation.

The statues in the entrance

are not to poets or gods,

but to men of science,

Jewell, Dalton and Rutherford,

who split the atom here for the first time.

The 19th century badge of the city

was the busy bee.

Its motto,

through prudence and hard work,

the ideals of the new age.

Foreign visitors were deeply impressed

by this heroic materialism.

This is an extraordinarily talented people,

said a Chinese diplomat.

How can we continue

to call them barbarians?

For they have taken on

the mantle of civilisation.

On the ceilings are the emblems of

virtually all the countries in the world,

countries under the trading dominion

of the British Empire,

the greatest the world had ever seen.

Among them,

the ancient civilisations of

India, China and Japan,

all now connected

by this new form of international culture,

manufacturing capital.

The first cities of the great civilisations

in India and China and the Near East

had all been in some sense

sacred enclosures.

But these were emphatically

places where money

was to be made by hard work.

The problems that they encountered

in creating these industrial cities

were now familiar with all over the world.

Population, poverty, health, housing,

social order, democracy,

and the ways in which they attempted

to solve them here,

the amenities which they thought

were necessary for a civilised city life,

have now become the blueprint

for the modern city.

But the Victorians differed from us

in one important respect.

But they were optimists

about the role of the city

as an ordering and liberating force

in human affairs.

It's early summer in Washington DC.

The leader of the modern west

prepares to celebrate victory

in the Gulf w*r of 1991.

All around, Egyptian obelisks,

Greek and Roman temples

proclaim that the United States

is the inheritor of the legacy

not only of Europe,

but of Greece and Rome and Egypt too.

Never in history has so much power

resided in the hands of one nation.

The ideals of this new order

are enshrined in marble all around.

They're noble ideals.

The Lincoln Memorial,

modelled on the Parthenon in Athens,

commemorates one

who through a brutal civil w*r

held onto the ideals

of the European Enlightenment,

the French and American revolutionaries.

The belief that all are born equal,

with equal rights to freedom and happiness.

To walk this sacred space

is to be reminded too that

there are many ways of seeing history.

That history is ever changing,

never definitive, never black and white,

and usually with right and wrong

on both sides.

And each generation

must reinterpret history

in the life of the nation

just as in the life of the individual.

In this way, like the pilgrims

at the memorial to the Vietnam w*r,

each of us tries to come to terms

with our victories and our defeats,

our wrongdoing and our suffering,

our collective myths

and our most cherished ideals.

There we go.

You work the plane along and

all of a sudden you saw a bad guy.

All you have to do is basically

look at him and you can sh**t him.

In our time, the astonishing growth of

technology and communications

has seen the global village arrive.

As a world ideology,

our own liberal democratic capitalism

would seem to have no rival.

And yet,

throughout the countries of the rich West,

there's a growing and profound disquiet,

a feeling that

the Western way of life itself

is no longer supportable,

morally or practically,

because of pollution,

environmental destruction

and the continuing exploitation

of the mass of humanity.

If that disquiet is justified,

which surely it is,

then the great question

for the next generation is simple.

Are the values of the West alone

enough to guarantee

the continuing health of the planet?

Those values, as we've seen,

are writ large in our history.

Individualistic, competitive, acquisitive,

always pushing outwards,

never happy in an empty room,

as Pascal said.

And yet it's the bearers of

that vision of life,

the rulers of the West,

who hold in their hands

the future of the planet.

It feels at this moment as if the West,

at the very moment of its triumph,

has reached that point

which comes to all civilizations,

when if they're not to decline,

they must transform themselves

by learning from others.

The crisis of earth and spirit we now face

cannot be solved by any one nation,

but only by reaching out

to the other peoples,

traditions and religions of the planet,

in a dialogue beyond anything seen before.

Great alternative traditions

are still alive

at the end of our destructive century.

Living testimony

to the riches of humanity's past.

As valuable to all life on earth

as the rainforests,

these are the rainforests of the spirit.

The goal of civilization,

said the greatest of all historians,

the Arab Ibn al -Haldun,

is settled life and the
achievement of luxury.

But there is a limit

which cannot be overstayed.

When prosperity and luxury

come to a people,

they're followed by excessive consumption,

and extravagance.

With that, he says, the human soul itself

is undermined,

both in its worldly well-being

and in its spiritual life.

There's one last journey

in this search

for the origins of civilization.

A journey back to the starting point,

to southern Iraq, to the Garden of Eden,

and to Uruk, the first city on earth.

Here, the great revolution happened



when people first tried to live

in large-scale urban societies.

It's now reduced to barren desert

by ecological catastrophe.

Here, the ancient Sumerians,

the creators of civilization,

told a myth about its origins.

It was, they said, a devil's bargain,

for it offered all the joys of life,

the arts of music and sex, law, justice,

and the noblest ideals of humanity.

But it also brought destruction,

violence, cruelty, and fear.

All this is civilization,

said the Sumerian god of wisdom.

And if you wish its benefits,

you must take all its qualities.

It is for you to use them with restraint

and with wisdom.