For the last 500 years, Western civilization has dominated the world.
The West taught the rest its way of doing business,
its scientific method...
...its law and politics...
...and its way of dressing.
In this series, I'm Iooking at the six unique factors,
I'm caIIing them the kiIIer appIications,
that ensured that the West ruIed over the rest.
And I'm asking, if we Iose our monopoIy on those kiIIer apps,
couId the rest catch up with the West?
lt wouldn't be the first time in history
the ascendancy of Western civilization has been threatened.
ln his DecIine And FaII Of The Roman Empire,
the historian Edward Gibbon gave a vivid account
of the last time the West collapsed - 1,600 years ago.
Today, many of us fear we're Iiving through a kind of nightmare sequeI,
Decline And Fall Revisited.
FinanciaIIy and cIimaticaIIy,
signs of impending disaster seem to be aII around us.
Is this the end of Western civiIization aII over again?
So far, l've explored five of the killer apps
that gave the West its advantage over the rest
for the better part of the past half millennium.
But l've saved a key killer app until last.
Edward Gibbon's most radicaI and contentious argument
was that Christianity was a fataI soIvent
of the first version of Western civiIization.
What a rich irony, then, that a variant of Christianity
provided the sixth kiIIer appIication for Western civiIization mark II.
It was a variant that arose in 16th-century Europe -
Protestantism and the work ethic,
to which it famousIy gave its name.
The Protestant work ethic was critical to the success of Western civilization.
But the big question today is, have we lost it...
...just at the time when others have found it?
(BIRDSONG)
(CHURCH BELLS)
lt was one of the great mysteries of Western civilization.
Why was it, if you were a wealthy European industrialist in the 1 9th century,
you would also most likely be a Protestant?
ln the 1 6th century, the Reformation had led many north European states
to break away from the Roman Catholic Church.
At the same time, there had been a shift of economic power
from Catholic countries like ltaly and Spain
towards Protestant countries like England and Germany.
It seemed as if there was some kind of connection
between the content of your faith,
the form of your worship and your economic fortunes.
The question was,
what was it about Protestantism that made peopIe not onIy work harder,
but save and accumuIate capitaI?
Just why was Protestantism such an integraI part
of Western civiIization's success story?
WeII, the man who came up with the best answer to that question
was a depressive German professor,
and in the process he gave socioIogy perhaps its most enduring catch phrase,
the Protestant work ethic.
Max Weber was a precocious youth.
He grew up here in Erfurt,
one of the great strongholds of the German Reformation.
By the age of 1 4, Weber was writing letters
studded with references to classical authors like Homer, Virgil and Cicero.
But the older he got, the more it was religion that interested him.
What it was about the Reformation, Weber wondered,
that had made the north of Europe more capitalism-friendly than the south?
(BELLS RING OUT)
It took a trip way out West
to give Weber the reaI key to the West's unique workahoIic ethic.
ln 1 904, Weber travelled here to St Louis, Missouri,
to attend the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the World's Fair.
This is the Iast surviving paviIion of the WorId's Fair.
And you can see why Weber was bIown away when he came here.
There were IiteraIIy dozens of these huge buiIdings
scattered aII over a 200-acre site,
and each one was jam-packed with the Iatest products of the Age of Industry.
It was a cornucopia of American capitaIism.
Weber was dazzled by the shining lights of the Palace of Electricity.
The alternating-current king, Thomas Edison himself, was on hand,
the personification of American entrepreneurship.
St Louis was brimming with marvels of modern technology,
from telephones to titanic steel plates to motion pictures.
The amazing thing about the 1904 St Louis WorId's Fair wasn't just its size,
it was the fact that inside every singIe one of these huge purpose-buiIt paviIions
there was something the pubIic was actuaIIy wiIIing to pay to see.
This thing made a profit.
What couId possibIy expIain the dynamism of this society,
which made even industriaI Germany seem stoIid and staid by comparison?
Almost manically restless,
Weber rushed around the United States in search of an answer.
Travelling by train from St Louis to Oklahoma,
through small Missouri towns like Bourbon and Cuba...
... Weber finally got it.
(BELL RINGS)
This is the IittIe town of St James, Missouri,
about 100 miIes west of St Louis,
and one of thousands of settIements that sprang up aIong the raiIroads
that spearheaded the great American thrust westwards.
Now, when Max Weber came here about a century ago,
he couIdn't heIp being struck
by the extraordinary number of churches there were
of every conceivabIe denomination.
Wherever Weber Iooked, there seemed to be a kind of hoIy aIIiance
between economic growth and the Protestant faith.
When Weber returned to his study in Heidelberg,
he wrote the second part of his seminal two-part essay...
...The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of CapitaIism.
ln it, he identified the key component of Protestantism
that fostered economic success.
Whereas other reIigions associated hoIiness with a renunciation of the worId,
monks in cIoisters and hermits in caves,
the Protestant sects were different.
For them,
thrift and industry couId be expressions of a new kind of hard-working hoIiness.
(ORGAN MUSIC)
''For most of history, men had worked to live, but the Protestants lived to work. ''
And this work ethic, Weber argued, was the key to the spirit of capitalism.
His core argument was that Protestants worked hard
out of a kind of godIy caIIing.
They were working, accumuIating capitaI and deferring consumption,
in order to prove their own godIiness.
ln earlier programmes, we saw how Confucianism has been blamed
for lmperial China's failure to have an industrial revolution.
We saw how the power of the clergy
snuffed out any chance of a scientific revolution in the lslamic world.
And we saw how Protestant North America pulled ahead of Catholic South America.
But the biggest contribution of religion to the history of Western civilization
was this.
Protestantism made the West work.
The question is,
has part of the West today lost both religion
and the work ethic that went with it?
The Protestant ethic
seemed to Max Weber to be the key to the spirit of Western capitalism,
one of the things that set the West apart
from the other-worldly and often indolent Orient.
For a long time, the theory seemed to hold good.
Through a mixture of hard work and thrift,
the Protestant societies of the North and West Atlantic
achieved the most rapid economic growth in history.
But today there's a schism at the heart of Christendom.
Europeans these days work a whole lot less than their American counterparts.
And they don't only work less, they pray less.
ln England, for example, fewer than 2% of the population
now attends a Church of England service on a typical Sunday.
lt's a real anomaly in a world
where, everywhere else, religious faith is not just strong but growing.
So, just who killed Christianity in Europe?
Was it, as Weber himself predicted,
that materialism corrupted the original austerity of the Protestants?
Was it the legacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,
which successfully supplanted the Biblical story of divine creation?
Or could it be that European Christianity was killed by selfishness itself,
the chronic egotism of modern culture?
Was the murderer of Europe's Protestant work ethic none other than this man,
the Viennese psychotherapist Sigmund Freud?
(SIGHS) I don't know what it is but I'm... I'm reaIIy depressed.
I... I'm haunted by a fear of my own death.
And by guiIt. TerribIe guiIt.
GuiIt about...about my parents, about my wife, about my kids.
I don't know what I'm gonna do.
(SIGHS) My anaIyst thinks it couId be my mother.
I mean she's not Jewish but... but she couId be.
But I think it's more IikeIy my father, this insane Protestant work ethic.
AII I ever got aII my Iife was, ''Work, more work.''
Every probIem, the same soIution. ''Do some more work.''
But that's enough about me.
TeII me, Dr Freud, what do you think my probIem is?
ln The Future Of An IIIusion,
the founding father of psychoanalysis
came up with a different story from Max Weber's.
For Freud, religion wasn't the driving force
behind the achievements of Western civilization.
lnstead, it was essentially an illusion...
...a universal neurosis
devised by civilization to prevent people from giving way to their basic instincts.
ln particular, their sexual desires and violent, destructive impulses.
Freud's point was this - if you took away the prohibitions of reIigion,
then men wouId feeI free to sIeep with any woman they wanted whenever they wanted.
They'd feeI free to kiII their rivaIs and grab their property.
The whoIe point about reIigion
was that it prohibited sexuaI promiscuity and vioIence.
Was Freud saying that religion was a necessary prop for a civilized society?
Or was he siding with those who felt their innermost urges were being thwarted,
repressed by superstitious mumbo jumbo?
Perhaps it was Freud's theories, with their negative view of repression...
...and their explicit sympathy with the erotic impulse,
that persuaded Europeans to exit the churches and enter the sex shops.
(SIRENS)
For many people, this is what Western civilization has now been reduced to -
a spiritually vacuous celebration of the pleasures of the flesh.
Maybe, in short, it was porn that killed God in Europe.
The trouble with all these theories about the death of Protestantism
is that they explain everything about Europe's de-Christianization
but nothing whatsoever about America's continued Christian faith.
You see,
Americans have experienced just the same social and cultural changes as Europeans.
They've become richer. Their knowledge of science has increased.
And they're even more into psychoanalysis and pornography than Europeans.
But whiIe Christianity in Europe is moribund,
here in the United States it's thriving.
Indeed by some measures,
Jesus and Christianity are bigger in America today
than they were 50 years ago,
and here's the evidence.
Thousands of worshippers piIing into church on a Sunday morning,
the way the EngIish these days piIe into shopping maIIs.
And, no, this is a church not a shopping maII.
So, how can we explain the fact
that Western civilization appears to have split in two?
MAN: And good morning!
To the East a godless Europe.
To the West a God-fearing America.
The best answer can be found here in Springfield, Missouri,
birthplace of the legendary highway linking Chicago and California, Route 66.
Max Weber passed through here on his road trip back in 1 904.
lf he was impressed by the diversity of Protestant sects 1 00 years ago,
he'd be astonished today.
Now it's not your kicks you get on Route 66, it's your crucifix.
Springfield has roughly one church for every 1,000 citizens.
There are 1 22 Baptist churches...
36 Methodist chapels,
25 Churches of Christ and 1 5 Churches of God.
ln all, some 400 Christian places of worship.
And as Weber pointed out, these churches are involved in a competition
that today is just as hot as that between car lots or fast-food joints.
And this is it, the winner in the SpringfieId battIe of the churches.
It's the James River AssembIy,
and it's not onIy the biggest church in SpringfieId,
it's one of the biggest in the whoIe of the United States.
- (BAND PLAYS) - You are awesome and you are great.
So, can we just worship the Lord?
WouId you Iift your hands and just begin to praise him in your own words?
About how good and how great he is?
On a Sunday, they pack around 7,000 believers into James River Assembly.
lts pastor John Lindell certainly believes in the potent mix of work and religion.
You might think you're aII aIone,
but if you Iove God, he's right there with you, and he's your stronghoId.
So, Max Weber came to these parts aImost exactIy 100 years ago
and was struck by the reIationship between these very diverse, vibrant churches
competing with one another,
and economic Iife, which seemed to be equaIIy more vibrant than in...in Europe.
Do you see there as being a Iink between the spirituaI and the economic in America?
AbsoIuteIy, I mean, and I think it's as simpIe as this.
That when a...when a person has had their Iife touched by God,
immediateIy there's gonna be an optimism,
because the BibIe says, if God be for us, who couId be against us.
There's aIso gonna be a sense of purpose, of something beyond myseIf,
and work itseIf becomes a means of gIorifying God,
because the BibIe says you're not working for your...your master,
you're working for the Lord.
So, there's no question when somebody is serving God,
their quaIity of Iife and their focus in Iife reaIIy changes.
And I think that contributes to prosperity.
So, the Protestant ethic is aIive and weII and Iiving in SpringfieId, Missouri?
I think it is.
Lord, we praise you! You're awesome!
Ask yourseIf what is the singIe biggest difference
between reIigion in America and reIigion in Europe.
I think the answer is that the Reformation in Europe ended up being nationaIised,
and the resuIt was the creation of state monopoIy churches
Iike the Church of EngIand.
But here in the United States
they maintained the separation of Church and state,
and the resuIt was competition between muItipIe churches.
And that may be the real reason for the strange death of religion in Europe.
ln religion as in business, state monopolies are inefficient.
There's only one problem with turning religion into a form of consumption.
Americans have drifted a very long way away
from Max Weber's version of the Protestant ethic,
in which deferred gratification went hand in hand with capital accumulation.
We've just lived through an experiment, capitalism without saving.
And it didn't turn out too well, did it?
In the United States during the housing bubbIe, the savings rate feII to zero
and totaI debt exceeded three-and-a-haIf times nationaI income.
The Protestant ethic without thrift turned out to be a recipe for financiaI meItdown.
But that isn't true everywhere.
In parts of the worId that seek to emuIate the American economic miracIe,
retaiI reIigion and feeI-good faith have retained the Protestant ethic.
Yup, I'm taIking about Asia.
According to a recent survey,
there are now around 40 million Protestant Christians in China,
compared with barely half a million in 1 949.
Some estimates put the maximum even higher, at 7 5 or 1 1 0 million.
This is the Nanjing Amity Printing Company,
the biggest manufacturer of bibIes in the entire worId.
Since 1986, they've produced 70 miIIion of the things,
50 miIIion of them in Mandarin and other Chinese diaIects.
(AMERICAN ACCENT) In the beginning was the word. In the end there was this pIace.
Today there may actually be more practising Christians in China
than in Europe.
(# CONGREGATION: Amazing Grace)
That's an amazing fact,
considering how much resistance there's been throughout Chinese history
to the spread of Christianity.
ln programme one of this series, l argued that after the 1 4th century,
China's wealth and power were fatally undermined
because the Chinese failed to grasp the killer app of competition.
But that wasn't the onIy app they Iacked for haIf a miIIennium.
The other was the Protestant work ethic.
The historical failure of Protestantism to take root in China
is actually something of a puzzle.
lt wasn't as if Westerners didn't try to give the Chinese the good news.
In the 19th century, as you can see from this amazing map,
Western missionary societies took China by storm,
sending IiteraIIy hundreds of young men and women
to try to convert the worId's most popuIous nation.
Many of them ended up here in Wenzhou, a city just to the south of Shanghai,
as trailblazers for the China lnland Mission.
The problem was that, for all their hard work,
the missionaries' time in China turned out to be not a breakthrough...
...but nearly a breakdown of Christianity.
And that was due to one convert who went very badly off-message.
His name was Hong Xiuquan.
Indeed, it was Hong Xiuquan who was responsibIe
for the biggest and bIoodiest rebeIIion in aII Chinese history...
...a confIict that cIaimed the Iives of twice as many peopIe
as died on aII sides in the whoIe of the First Word War.
ln 1 836, it seemed that Hong was just one of many new missionary society converts.
But while recovering from a nervous breakdown, he had a mystical vision
in which he was revealed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
God had instructed him to rid China of Confucianism...
...that inward-looking philosophy
which saw competition and trade as pernicious foreign imports.
To achieve this,
Hong created a quasi-Christian society of God Worshippers
that attracted the support of tens of millions of Chinese.
Hong procIaimed himseIf the monarch of the HeavenIy Kingdom of Great Peace,
and this was the goIden throne on which he sat,
respIendent in yeIIow siIk, surrounded by his princes.
In Chinese he was known as Taiping Tianguo,
hence the name of the uprising, the Taiping RebeIIion.
From Guangxi, the rebels swept to Nanjing...
...which Hong, the self-styled Heavenly King, made his capital.
By 1 853, his followers controlled the vast Yangtze valley.
Between 1850 and 1864,
some 20 miIIion peopIe Iost their Iives in centraI and southern China,
as the Taiping RebeIIion raged, unIeashing pIague and famine in its wake.
But the rebels couldn't take the imperial capital Beijing,
and slowly the tide turned against them.
By the time Nanjing fell to the imperial army,
Hong was already dead of food poisoning.
Just to make sure, his cremated remains were fired...out of a cannon.
China's experiment with Christianity had been a catastrophe.
By the end of the 19th century, many Chinese had concIuded
that Western missionaries
were just another maIign foreign infIuence on their country.
Time and again, in the next 50 years, Protestantism lost out in China.
Finally, just after the 1 949 Communist Revolution,
the committed atheist Mao Tse-tung ordered the expulsion of Christian missionaries,
all 1 0,000 of them.
Churches were closed down.
Some were turned into factories.
lt looked like the end of the line for Protestantism in China
and, as Communism swept all before it, for the Protestant work ethic too.
To Max Weber and other 20-century experts, then,
the probabiIity of a Protestantization of China
and, therefore, its industriaIization and modernization seemed negIigibIy Iow.
As Iow in fact as the probabiIity of a de-Christianization of Europe.
And yet that is preciseIy what we've witnessed in our time.
lt's a development that's having profound economic implications all over the world.
It's a funny thing - aIthough I was brought up an atheist,
I suffer from an extreme form of the Protestant work ethic.
No matter what my probIem is, the soIution is aIways the same - work.
Now, for many years I feIt as if I was part of a dying minority in Europe.
But today I find myseIf in extremeIy good company.
The Protestant work ethic, for so Iong one of the West's kiIIer appIications,
has come to China.
Whereas the average European or American works less than 2,000 hours a year...
...the top Asian economies average 2,300 hours.
Moreover, unlike us, the Chinese save up to a fifth of their income.
Max Weber's idea of living to work rather than working to live
is now an Oriental phenomenon.
And that's not all.
The fascinating thing is
that it's not just hard work and thrift they're importing from the West.
Now they're importing Christianity too.
And not just any oId Christianity.
The seeds the British missionaries planted 1 50 years ago
have grown in the most extraordinary fashion.
Wenzhou has become the Springfield, Missouri, of China.
Where before the Cultural Revolution there were 480 churches in Wenzhou,
today there are 1,340.
And those are only the ones officially approved by the government.
All over Wenzhou, and increasingly all over China,
Christians also meet secretly in their homes.
The Victorian missionaries would be impressed.
It's Sunday, and the church is packed.
Founded in 1877 by the InIand Mission,
cIosed down during the CuIturaI RevoIution and onIy re-opened in 1982,
this church now boasts a congregation of more than 1 ,200.
The work ethic and Protestantism are thriving in China.
So, it won't surprise you that here in Wenzhou,
the most ardent Christians tend also to be businessmen.
lt's home to a new breed of entrepreneur, the so-called ''Boss Christians''.
Men like Hanping Zhang, chairman of the Aihao pen company.
Once a farmer, he opened his first factory in 1 987.
Today he employs 5,000 workers and sells 500 million pens a year.
He's also a devout Christian.
(TRANSLATION)
Does that mean that in Wenzhou there's an advantage,
that businessmen here are more trusted than businessmen in other pIaces?
Marx's old jibe that religion was the opium of the people
no longer carries much conviction here.
The richer China gets, it seems, the more people like Zhang there are.
It's possibIe that within the next three decades
between 20 and 30% of the entire Chinese popuIation couId be Christians.
Now, that's a pretty amazing prospect.
Just when you thought the worId was turning Chinese,
the Chinese turn around and Westernise themseIves.
lt's certainly not a result Max Weber would have anticipated.
Yet the Chinese Communist Party recently stated
there were three requirements for sustainable economic growth -
property rights as a foundation, law as a safeguard,
and morality as a support.
If that sounds famiIiar, then it shouId,
because those used to be the foundations of Western civiIization itseIf.
And I say ''used to be'' quite deIiberateIy,
because I think we've Iost faith in those very foundations.
It's not just that the churches are empty.
We seem to doubt the vaIue
of everything that's been achieved in the West since the Reformation.
We've Iost faith in those kiIIer appIications
which, as we've seen in this series,
decisiveIy set the West apart from the rest.
Capitalism has been disgraced by the recent financial crisis
and the rampant greed of the bankers.
Science is studied by too few of our children at school and university.
Private property rights are continually violated by governments
with an insatiable appetite for taxing our incomes and wasting our money.
Empire has become a dirty word,
despite the real benefits conferred on the rest of the world by the European empires.
AII we risk being Ieft with is a vacuous consumer society
and a reIativistic cuIture
that regards any theory, no matter how outIandish,
as just as vaIid as whatever it was we used to beIieve in.
The troubIe is, as GK Chesterton famousIy said,
when men Iose their faith they don't beIieve in nothing,
they beIieve in anything.
Today the West faces unprecedented challenges.
The rise of China as a new economic superpower.
(CALL TO PRAYER)
The revival of lslam not just as a faith but as a violent political ideology.
Not to mention the environmental crisis caused by rising population,
carbon dioxide emissions and sea levels.
How are we to contend with these threats
if we can't even believe in ourselves, let alone in God?
For 500 years the West dominated the rest.
And it did so by depIoying six kiIIer appIications,
six unique seIIing points that the rest didn't have.
CapitaIism, science,
democracy, medicine,
consumerism and the work ethic.
But when I Iook at the worId today,
it's the resembIances between the West and the rest that strike me
more than the differences.
The things that used to set the West apart from the rest
are, quite simpIy, no Ionger monopoIized by us.
The Chinese have got capitalism.
The lranians have got science.
The Peruvians have got democracy.
The Africans are slowly getting modern medicine.
The Turks have got the consumer society.
The reality is that Western modes of operation are not in decline
but are flourishing nearly everywhere.
The ''resterners'', as we might call them,
are nearly all dressing, working,
eating, travelling and playing...like Westerners.
All the West's killer apps have become universal.
But this carries its own dangers.
Some wouId say these apps are now so widespread
that we risk kiIIing the pIanet itseIf.
You can certainIy beIieve that, here in the smog-infested heartIand of China.
Environmentalists fear that
as Asia's more populous nations embrace the Western route out of poverty,
the strain on global supplies of energy, food and fresh water
will become unbearable.
Many peopIe Iive in dread of the environmentaI consequences
of Westernizing the entire worId.
lf emissions of greenhouse gases continue at their current levels,
the result could be catastrophic changes in the Earth's climate and ocean levels.
Sceptics about climate change should spend some time in China,
where the biggest and fastest industrial revolution in history
is causing measurable environmental damage.
But does global warming really mean the end of the world?
This is the hill at Megiddo in lsrael,
the scene in the New Testament of the final showdown between good and evil...
...the battle of Armageddon.
I'm not a scientist,
and it may weII be that the Earth is going to boiI
and the sea IeveIs are going to rise,
but I can't heIp noticing that this vision of an environmentaI apocaIypse
has a Iot in common with earIier versions of the doomsday story.
And if you don't beIieve me,
weII, take a Iook at chapter 16 of the Book Of Revelations.
''And he gathered them together into a Hebrew place,
''in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. ''
Get yourseIf together, puII yourseIf together, bind yourseIf together.
''And there were voices, and thunders and lightnings,
''and there was a great earthquake,
''such as was not seen since men were upon the Earth. ''
The idea is this, the Lord is coming soon and when he comes, your triaI wiII be won.
Among the visitors to Megiddo,
there's no shortage of believers in the literal truth of that biblical prophecy.
WOMAN: When you see what aII's going on in the worId, tsunamis and earthquake,
it's just got to be a sign of what's coming.
- Are you scared? - No, because I know where I'm going.
- ReaIIy? - Uh-huh.
Some say the first trumpet has already sounded.
Once we've heard the second, third and fourth trumpets,
evangelical Christians believe the United States will collapse.
When the fifth trumpet sounds, World War lll will break out.
After that comes a demonic army to massacre mankind...
...and with the seventh and final trumpet, we'll feel the full might of God's wrath.
The idea that we're aII doomed,
that decIine is inevitabIe, that things can onIy get worse,
is deepIy bound up with our own sense of mortaIity.
Because we're bound to decIine and faII,
we naturaIIy feeI that the civiIizations we Iive in shouId do so too.
People used to believe
that all great civilizations went through a long, slow cycle
of rise, zenith, decline and fall.
That was certainly how Gibbon thought about ancient Rome.
But in fact that isn't always the case.
This amazing pIace is a grim reminder that no civiIization is indestructibIe,
no matter how mighty it may appear in its own eyes.
It's aIso a reminder
that coIIapse, when it comes, isn't necessariIy graduaI and cycIicaI.
It came suddenIy, very suddenIy, to the Incas who buiIt Machu Picchu.
One minute, they were the masters of aII they surveyed
from their great Andean cities.
The next, foreign invaders with gunpowder, horses and IethaI microbes
had smashed their great empire to smithereens.
How are the mighty faIIen. And how fast they sometimes faII.
ls the West today heading for a similar calamity?
l fear as much.
But it doesn't need to be.
When you hear that phrase ''Western civiIization'',
what does it make you think of?
Today it seems more important than ever
that we understand the lessons of Western civilization's success.
That it isn't just one thing...
...it's a bundle.
So, the first one is competition.
lt's about political pluralism as well as capitalism.
lt's about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method.
lt's about the rule of law and property rights, as well as democracy.
Even today, the West still has more of these killer apps than the rest.
The Chinese don't have political competition.
The lranians don't have freedom of conscience.
They get to vote in Venezuela...
...but the rule of law there is a sham.
Of course Western civilization isn't flawless.
lt's certainly perpetrated its share of historical misdeeds...
...imperialism's bouts of brutality...
...the banality of the consumer society...
...shopping till it drops.
And yet as I stand here in Shanghai, in the smog,
I can't heIp feeIing that Western civiIization stiII has the edge.
And the reason I think that is because I'm free to think it and free to say it.
And it's that freedom that's most IikeIy to unIock the human creativity
we need to soIve the worId's probIems in the 21st century.
So, perhaps the biggest threat we face isn't our CO2 emissions,
it's our Ioss of faith in the civiIization we inherited from our ancestors
and we gave to the rest of the worId.