"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 looking at the six unique factors," "I'm calling them the killer applications, that ensured that the West ruled over the rest." "And I'm asking, if we lose our monopoly on those killer apps, could the rest catch up with the West?" "It wouldn't be the first time in history the ascendancy of Western civilization has been threatened." "In his decline And fall 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 living through a kind of nightmare sequel," "Decline And Fall Revisited." "financially and climatically, signs of impending disaster seem to be all around us." "Is this the end of Western civilization all over again?" "So far, I'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 I've saved a key killer app until last." "Edward Gibbon's most radical and contentious argument was that Christianity was a fatal solvent of the first version of Western civilization." "What a rich irony, then, that a variant of Christianity provided the sixth killer application for Western civilization mark II." "It was a variant that arose in 16th-century Europe " "Protestantism and the work ethic, to which it famously 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)" "It 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?" "In 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 Italy 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 people not only work harder, but save and accumulate capital?" "Just why was Protestantism such an integral part of Western civilization's success story?" "well, the man who came up with the best answer to that question was a depressive German professor, and in the process he gave sociology 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 real key to the West's unique workahoIic ethic." "In 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 pavilion of the world's Fair." "And you can see why Weber was blown away when he came here." "There were literally dozens of these huge buildings scattered all over a 200-acre site, and each one was jam-packed with the latest products of the Age of Industry." "It was a cornucopia of American capitalism." "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 world's Fair wasn't just its size, it was the fact that inside every single one of these huge purpose-buiIt pavilions there was something the public was actually willing to pay to see." "This thing made a profit." "What could possibly explain the dynamism of this society, which made even industrial 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 little town of St James, Missouri, about 100 miles west of St Louis, and one of thousands of settlements that sprang up along the railroads that spearheaded the great American thrust westwards." "Now, when Max Weber came here about a century ago, he couldn't help being struck by the extraordinary number of churches there were of every conceivable denomination." "Wherever Weber looked, there seemed to be a kind of holy alliance 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 capitalism." "In it, he identified the key component of Protestantism that fostered economic success." "Whereas other religions associated holiness with a renunciation of the world, monks in cloisters and hermits in caves, the Protestant sects were different." "For them, thrift and industry could be expressions of a new kind of hard-working holiness." "(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 godly calling." "They were working, accumulating capital and deferring consumption, in order to prove their own godliness." "In earlier programmes, we saw how Confucianism has been blamed for Imperial 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 Islamic 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." "In England, for example, fewer than 2% of the population now attends a Church of England service on a typical Sunday." "It'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 really depressed." "I..." "I'm haunted by a fear of my own death." "And by guilt." "terrible guilt." "guilt about...about my parents, about my wife, about my kids." "I don't know what I'm gonna do." "(SIGHS) My analyst thinks it could be my mother." "I mean she's not Jewish but..." "but she could be." "But I think it's more likely my father, this insane Protestant work ethic." "AII I ever got all my Iife was, "Work, more work."" "Every problem, the same solution." ""Do some more work."" "But that's enough about me." "tell me, Dr Freud, what do you think my problem is?" "In The Future Of An illusion, 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." "Instead, it was essentially an illusion a universal neurosis devised by civilization to prevent people from giving way to their basic instincts." "In particular, their sexual desires and violent, destructive impulses." "Freud's point was this - if you took away the prohibitions of religion, then men would feel free to sleep with any woman they wanted whenever they wanted." "They'd feel free to kill their rivals and grab their property." "The whole point about religion was that it prohibited sexual promiscuity and violence." "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 while 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 piling into church on a Sunday morning, the way the english these days pile into shopping malls." "And, no, this is a church not a shopping mall." "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." "If 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." "In 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 springfield battle of the churches." "It's the James River assembly, and it's not only the biggest church in springfield, it's one of the biggest in the whole of the United States." " (BAND PLAYS)" " You are awesome and you are great." "So, can we just worship the Lord?" "would you lift 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." "Its pastor John Lindell certainly believes in the potent mix of work and religion." "You might think you're all alone, but if you love God, he's right there with you, and he's your stronghold." "So, Max Weber came to these parts almost exactly 100 years ago and was struck by the relationship between these very diverse, vibrant churches competing with one another, and economic life, which seemed to be equally more vibrant than in...in Europe." "Do you see there as being a link between the spiritual and the economic in America?" "absolutely, I mean, and I think it's as simple as this." "That when a...when a person has had their life touched by God, immediately there's gonna be an optimism, because the bible says, if God be for us, who could be against us." "There's also gonna be a sense of purpose, of something beyond myself, and work itself becomes a means of glorifying God, because the bible 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 quality of Iife and their focus in life really changes." "And I think that contributes to prosperity." "So, the Protestant ethic is alive and well and living in springfield, Missouri?" "I think it is." "Lord, we praise you!" "You're awesome!" "Ask yourself what is the single biggest difference between religion in America and religion in Europe." "I think the answer is that the Reformation in Europe ended up being nationalised, and the result was the creation of state monopoly churches" "like the Church of england." "But here in the United States they maintained the separation of Church and state, and the result was competition between multiple churches." "And that may be the real reason for the strange death of religion in Europe." "In 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 bubble, the savings rate fell to zero and total debt exceeded three-and-a-haIf times national income." "The Protestant ethic without thrift turned out to be a recipe for financial meltdown." "But that isn't true everywhere." "In parts of the world that seek to emulate the American economic miracle, retail religion and feeI-good faith have retained the Protestant ethic." "Yup, I'm talking 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 bibles in the entire world." "Since 1986, they've produced 70 million of the things, 50 million of them in Mandarin and other Chinese dialects." "(AMERICAN ACCENT) In the beginning was the word." "In the end there was this place." "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." "In programme one of this series, I 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 only app they lacked for half a millennium." "The other was the Protestant work ethic." "The historical failure of Protestantism to take root in China is actually something of a puzzle." "It 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 literally hundreds of young men and women to try to convert the world's most populous nation." "Many of them ended up here in Wenzhou, a city just to the south of Shanghai, as trailblazers for the China Inland 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 responsible for the biggest and bloodiest rebellion in all Chinese history a conflict that claimed the lives of twice as many people as died on all sides in the whole of the First Word War." "In 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 proclaimed himself the monarch of the heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, and this was the golden throne on which he sat, resplendent in yellow silk, surrounded by his princes." "In Chinese he was known as Taiping Tianguo, hence the name of the uprising, the Taiping rebellion." "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 million people lost their lives in central and southern China, as the Taiping rebellion raged, unleashing plague 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 concluded that Western missionaries were just another malign foreign influence 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." "It 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 probability of a Protestantization of China and, therefore, its industrialization and modernization seemed negIigibIy Iow." "As low in fact as the probability of a de-Christianization of Europe." "And yet that is precisely what we've witnessed in our time." "It's a development that's having profound economic implications all over the world." "It's a funny thing - although I was brought up an atheist," "I suffer from an extreme form of the Protestant work ethic." "No matter what my problem is, the solution is always the same - work." "Now, for many years I felt as if I was part of a dying minority in Europe." "But today I find myself in extremely good company." "The Protestant work ethic, for so long one of the West's killer applications, 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 old 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 inland Mission, closed down during the cultural revolution and only 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." "It'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 places?" "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 possible that within the next three decades between 20 and 30% of the entire Chinese population could be Christians." "Now, that's a pretty amazing prospect." "Just when you thought the world was turning Chinese, the Chinese turn around and Westernise themselves." "It'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 familiar, then it should, because those used to be the foundations of Western civilization itself." "And I say "used to be" quite deliberately, because I think we've lost faith in those very foundations." "It's not just that the churches are empty." "We seem to doubt the value of everything that's been achieved in the West since the Reformation." "We've lost faith in those killer applications which, as we've seen in this series, decisively 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 left with is a vacuous consumer society and a relativistic culture that regards any theory, no matter how outlandish, as just as valid as whatever it was we used to believe in." "The trouble is, as GK Chesterton famously said, when men lose their faith they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." "Today the West faces unprecedented challenges." "The rise of China as a new economic superpower." "(CALL TO PRAYER)" "The revival of Islam 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 deploying six killer applications, six unique selling points that the rest didn't have." "capitalism, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic." "But when I Iook at the world today, it's the resemblances 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 simply, no Ionger monopoIized by us." "The Chinese have got capitalism." "The Iranians 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 would say these apps are now so widespread that we risk killing the planet itself." "You can certainly believe that, here in the smog-infested heartland 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 people live in dread of the environmental consequences of Westernizing the entire world." "If 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 Israel, 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 well be that the Earth is going to boil and the sea levels are going to rise, but I can't help noticing that this vision of an environmental apocalypse has a Iot in common with earlier versions of the doomsday story." "And if you don't believe me, well, take a look at chapter 16 of the Book Of Revelations." ""And he gathered them together into a Hebrew place," ""in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. "" "Get yourself together, pull yourself together, bind yourself 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 trial will 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 all's going on in the world, 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." " really?" " 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 all doomed, that decline is inevitable, that things can only get worse, is deeply bound up with our own sense of mortality." "Because we're bound to decline and fall, we naturally feel that the civilizations we live in should 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 place is a grim reminder that no civilization is indestructible, no matter how mighty it may appear in its own eyes." "It's also a reminder that collapse, when it comes, isn't necessarily gradual and cyclical." "It came suddenly, very suddenly, to the Incas who built Machu Picchu." "One minute, they were the masters of all they surveyed from their great Andean cities." "The next, foreign invaders with gunpowder, horses and lethal microbes had smashed their great empire to smithereens." "How are the mighty fallen." "And how fast they sometimes fail." "is the West today heading for a similar calamity?" "I fear as much." "But it doesn't need to be." "When you hear that phrase "Western civilization", 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." "It's about political pluralism as well as capitalism." "It's about the freedom of thought as well as the scientific method." "It'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 Iranians 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." "It'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 help feeling that Western civilization still 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 likely to unlock the human creativity we need to solve the world's problems in the 21st century." "So, perhaps the biggest threat we face isn't our CO2 emissions, it's our loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors and we gave to the rest of the world."