they created the character of Genghis Khan be-
cause he suited their needs for an origin story.
The differences between Christianity and
Islam, in terms of the relation of church/mosque
and state, are really about how they intertwined
with the power structure. When the Roman Em-
peror Constantine (r. 306-337) elevated Christi-
anity, he seemed only to know that the religion
featured one god, and this fit his desire to have an
empire with “one God, one emperor.” Because
Christianity was already three centuries old and
had a core message of sorts, certain aspects of the
faith did not fit well with the power structure;
hence the separation of secular and religious
powers that developed. Mohammed and Islam
were both created from whole cloth to establish a
religion/political power that suited the needs of
7th and 8th century Arabs who suddenly found
themselves ruling an empire roughly the size of
Rome at its height. No historical veracity at all
should be given to the gospels, Islamic tradition,
or The Secret History of the Mongols.Too many
world historians cite religious traditions as being
facts in the same category as, say, the 2008 elec-
tion of Barack Obama, and this causes confusion.V. World history is about Western Civilization in
the same way that Shakespeare’s Hamletis
about Hamlet.The University of Chicago’s
William H. McNeill (1917-2016), developed world
history into an academic field, but began his his-
torical career by writing about the “rise of the
West” and he never shied from making the West
world history’s protagonist. Neither, it should be
said, did any other writer of world history until
very recently.
Western civilization is the main character of
world history, and any attempt to tell the narrative
of world history from any other perspective falls
into the same kind of problem that trying to make
Hamlet about Ophelia would. Given what you
know about Ophelia, you can’t make sense of her
actions without knowing what Hamlet is doing.
Likewise, nothing about world history after 1450
can make sense unless the narrative focus is on
Western civilization because all the societies out-
side of the West were having to react to the West.
Along those lines, world historians and po-
litical scientists need to understand that we
should not call democracy, accountable govern-
ment, science, free markets, and guaranteed free-
doms “Western values.” These are universal
values that just happened to develop in the West.The Chinese government has, routinely,
snuffed out democratic movements in their
country. The Saudi government prevented
women from being able to drive until very
recently. There are no people in the United
States who are protesting to jettison the Con-
stitution and establish a one-party Communist
state. There are no women in the United States
who are protesting to have the right to drive
taken from them.
The universal model that happened to de-
velop in the West is superior to other governmen-
tal models. That case was first made by Francis
Fukuyama with his 1992 book The End of History
and the Last Man, and was essentially proven by
Acemoglu and Robinson in their book Why Na-
tions Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and
Poverty (2012). Both Steven Pinker and Michael
Shermer make empirical cases that the world is
getting better largely because of the spread of a
universalist (previously called Western) model.VI. However, we really need to talk about China.
China vexes modern political scientists because
the Chinese seem to be developing a capitalist
economy under a one-party political state with al-
most no democracy. Almost everyone who writes
about China misunderstands why. In the second
volume of his world history, Political Order and Po-
litical Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the
Present Day(2015), Francis Fukuyama wrote that
modern China is better understood as being con-
nected to the Han imperial past, with its Confu-
cian values, than it is to any Communist orthodoxy.
Such statements cloud our analysis of
China. First of all, modern China must be under-
stood through Communist orthodoxy. When
Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) sought to institute
capitalism after 1978, he did so by citing the New
Economic Policy, which had been a policy of one-
party control and the opening of free markets,
first instituted by Lenin in the wake of the Red vs.
White Russian Civil War. Everything that has
happened in the Chinese economy since 1978 is
justified by Leninist and Maoist doctrines.
Chinese Communism has not suffered the
fate of the Russians for three core reasons: (1)
The Russians had a fascination with Western cul-
ture that the Chinese have never shared. In the
1960s and 1970s, when Soviet teenagers shim-
mied to bootlegged copies of the Beatles while
shunning the geriatrics in control of the govern-
ment, Chinese teenagers shunned the Beatles5 0 S K E P T I C M A G A Z I N E volume 25 number 1 2020