The Superiority of Western Civilisation: Part 1, By Brian Simpson

Eurocanadians.ca is a great site, and like us concerned with the survival of Western civilisation. It publishes long essays every few days on the same topics that we cover more briefly at the Alor.org blog. It is not explicitly Christian, but has a mixed, but polite set of writers and readership. At this late stage of the game in the 11^th hour, we take what we can get.

Thus, a very good piece has just appeared by L. Wechchao, on "The Superiority of the West," which aids in elevating Western spirits and helps with restoring pride, needed for survival in this time of unending existential threats. No mention of religious differences, that needs to be discussed in the future, especially the role Christianity played in building Western civilisation. Extracts follow, part 1 below, part 2 to follow:

https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2025/04/the-superiority-of-the-west-facts-and-possible-reasons

Introduction

Much discussion between races has been on the black and white, but it's much more nuanced, and thus perhaps more intriguing, to analyze the achievement gap between the west and the east.

Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton have produced credible and data-backed articles that show how East Asians fare better in a host of traits, primarily intelligence. However, during one recorded session with J. Philippe Rushton, he seemed to be not able to answer the question about how eastern societies had not been able to develop to the extent the Western ones had. This popular conception that Asians fare better than Whites in terms of intelligence contrasts with how East Asian societies fare compared to Western ones, both past and present, and with how the Chinese had been perceived.

In 1894, Arthur Smith published Chinese Characteristics, a collection of twenty-six essays. The author had great credentials: he had spent roughly two decades in China. This is a fairly accurate book, although a lot of the content seems to be more negative than positive. Throughout the book, Chinese are portrayed as little better than savages, vastly different from the current view. Judging from the essay titles alone, the ills of Chinese society are named in the title of nine essays, although many more are sprinkled throughout other essays: (5) Disregard of Time, (6) Disregard of Accuracy, (7) Talent for Misunderstanding, (8) Talent for Indirection, (12) Contempt for Foreigners (15) Indifference to Comfort and Convenience, (21) Absence of Sympathy, (24) Mutual Suspicion, (25) Absence of Sincerity.

Those who are both very poor and very ignorant, as is the fate of millions, have indeed so narrow a horizon that intellectual turbidity is compulsory. Their existence is merely that of a frog in a well, to which even the heavens appear only as a strip of darkness.

Life consists of two compartments, a stomach and a cash-bag. Such a man is the true positivist, for he cannot be made to comprehend anything which he does not see or hear, and of causes as such he has no conception whatsoever. Life is to him a mere series of facts, mostly disagreeable facts, and as for anything beyond, he is at once an atheist, a polytheist, and an agnostic.

Similarly, when Einstein visited China in 1922, high intelligence was not one of the traits that he observed of the Chinese people. Einstein opined that people there were "industrious, filthy, obtuse." He expressed disdain for the way the "Chinese don't sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods."

Little seems to have changed after over a century. In the present day, Chinese websites can be clustered, and sometimes clumsy and cumbersome. The amount of obscene content on the everyday Chinese web is gruesomely numerous, in contrast to popular websites developed in the West, which are clean and sleek. While Western media tends to censor white supremacy content, Chinese media, to the contrary, is promoting China supremacy propaganda.

In the winter of 2009, Robert Henderson and Steven Farron each published an article on such a topic. They are respectively titled "Why Have Asians Not Dominated?" and "Why the West Dominated". Both articles offer insightful explanations on the topic. However, society differences can be analyzed, in addition to the cultural or regional lens, through the lens of evolution, biology and most importantly, the individual, which is the ultimate resulting product of the former two. Why would such a smart population not produce the best societies? There is some truth in the saying that averages don't matter, only extreme cases do. Our lives are shaped by the best and brightest, and those tend to be white people.

To delve into this topic, it's best to look at the hard evidence for Western domination, as a framework to work on. Here is a wide range of areas in arts, sciences and engineering where statistics exist on which race dominates, the probable causes for that.

Statistics and facts on Western superiority

What does it mean for an individual to dominate or a certain race to raise to prominence? Evidence suggests the West has been ahead of the east for eons

It seems to be a consensus that China was ahead of the West for a long period of time in history, although it's quite intriguing how that perception had come about. Take one of the greatest cultural achievements of China—the great wall. Just like the Chinese civilization, it's stretched for a long range. However, it's not a symbol of technical wonder, unlike the pyramid in Egypt. It doesn't puzzle historians and architects in terms of how it was built as does the pyramid. There is much additional evidence that suggests the West has been ahead of the east for eons, at least when it comes to innovation and technology.

River valleys are an ideal setting for civilizations to develop, as the area has rich flood plains and fertile soil. The first civilization that was developed not close to such river valleys is the city of Crete, in what's now Greece. Known as the Minoan civilization, it began roughly three millennia ago. It's not hard to judge if it would be a huge technological challenge to develop a civilization where the environment didn't have the ideal settings to develop agriculture. It certainly implies a great deal of ingenuity.

Speaking of ingenuity, China seems to lack innovation in many areas during pre-Minoan times. "China was no earlier in their first use of metals than the Middle East and Mediterranean", which was estimated to have occurred in around 8,000 BC. China was also a later starter when it came to farming attempts. "One of the first attempts at farming began in the Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East.

Additionally, although the Chinese had invented various technologies, such as movable type printing, gun powder, and compass, those technologies were never further developed to the level of sophistication that Europeans managed to achieve.

Take those three major awards in science and technology: the well-known Nobel Prize for science, the Fields Medal for math, and the Turing Award for computer science.

As Table 1 in the paper Why Do Northeast Asians Win So Few Nobel Prizes? shows, East Asians are awarded in three different categories of Nobel Prize (Science, Literature, and Economics), and in the Fields Medal at rates substantially lower than those for Caucasians.

• At the per capita level, the rate radio is roughly 20 to 1, favoring Caucasians.
• Asians' rates of award for Nobel Prize in Literature and in Economics are practically nil.
• The rate ratio for Math (the Fields Medal) is tilted to favor Caucasians a little less, but still at around 12 to 1.

No such data on the rate of award has been found for the Turing Award, but similar results are expected. This Wikipedia article lists dozens of pioneers in computer science, and only a few Asian names can be found.

This article by The American Enterprise Institute also paints a grim portrait for the differences in being awarded the Nobel Prize for different populations. One of the striking statistics is that "Adjusted for the huge population of Asia (more than 4 billion), the number of Asian laureates per 100 million population of 1.45 is only slightly higher than the number of African laureates per 100 million (1.42)." Note that this article lumps all Asians together, while the psychology paper singles out "Northeast Asians".

What about chess grandmaster title holders per capita? The data, albeit not from a reliable and trustworthy source, as such research seemed to be lacking and calculation is a straightforward division, is at chess grandmasters per capita by country. It does convey a similar story: the per capita rates in terms of becoming a chess grandmaster for Chinese and Indians are merely a fraction of those for Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany. To illustrate the lack of chess talent in the east, consider this comparison. There are over two thousand holders of the grandmaster title listed in the Wikipedia article. As "technologically advanced" as Japan and Korea are, none of the holders have their federation listed in those two countries, whose combined population exceed 150 million. For comparison, the tiny country of Israel with a population of roughly ten million has more than ten grandmasters.

Asians are not known to be innovators, an important consideration of any prize. In the Illustrated Timeline section of the book The Innovators, a rough estimation gives a total of 90 names mentioned. All of them are White. (Notice that the timeline covers about two centuries of computing, although the majority of entry years are within the last century.)

Consider this factor: the longest life span, which is fitting to be considered as a human accomplishment. It is again a white woman at the top. Presumed by their country affiliation, six out of ten longest living women, four out of ten longest living men, are white. (The other four are three Japanese, and one Jamaican) Since all those women outlive those men by a fair margin and the oldest man has lived less than the 20th oldest woman, it's fair to call this another white achievement.

Asian achievement in the art sphere is also no comparison to their Western counterparts. Take films. Some of the Asian giants there are Jackie Chen, Bruce Lee and Ang Lee. Ang Lee has won the Best Director in Oscar twice, but his filmography doesn't escape the traditional martial arts Kung Fu genre. His film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, despite winning multiple Oscar awards, is a martial arts movie. His Life of Pi, a rather commercially and critically successful movie, has only two main characters: the tiger and the child. Likewise, Jackie Chen has directed, and acted in many movies, but most, if not all, are very much similar in plot, and are by no means the most complex movies. The movies Bruce Lee has acted in would be similar.

In contrast, Western arts are highly developed. Again, use films as an example, although it can be said for just about every domain. That's reflected on three fronts. First, it's a specialized art form. The roles of the producer, the director and the actor are rarely interchangeable. Spielberg has never acted in his blockbuster films, but he is the most commercially successful director. Second, the complexity of the plot is way beyond eastern movies, which tend to be black and white. Western movies tend to have multiple characters with intricate relationships. The villain is not merely the evil devil from hell, and the hero can often struggle in his private life. Lastly, the sustained development of a franchise in the West has no match in the East. There is no successful movie franchise from the East equivalent to those such as the Harry Potter series with eight films, trilogies such as Lord of the Rings and Batman.

Advantages of English

Perhaps the most important tool for communication, the language of a civilization can reflect a lot about the sophistication of the population. (Although the differences between English and Chinese are described below, it could be fair to extrapolate to, more broadly, Romance and eastern languages.)

There are numerous advantages of English over Chinese: efficiency, complexity, intricacy, abstraction, among others. It is no wonder that it is English, not any of the eastern languages, that's the lingua franca. With its smooth connection between words, English flows better and sounds more polite. Spoken Chinese sounds more disjoint than English and writing or typing in Chinese is not as convenient as in English. It's no wonder why English is the lingua franca.

Efficiency and convenience

For the same amount of information, it's argued that Chinese characters might take up less length or space than English ones. While that could be true, it is English that's way more efficient of a language to write, to speak, to print materials for, to store digitally and to type. It's a "more economical and powerful means of representation because it requires only a small number of symbols".

English is easier to write and to speak. In general, English letters have less strokes than Chinese characters, are easier to flow from left to right, and are especially easy to write curly. Take the slogan for the 2006 Beijing Olympics. The English version is "One World, One Dream", while the Chinese version is "tong2 yi1 ge shi4jie4, tong2 yi1 ge meng4xiang3" in pinyin.

Mandarin: 10 syllables, 8 words. 75 strokes (traditional) / 58 (simplified)

English: 4 syllables, 4 words. Approximately 25 strokes.

English is also an easier language to print materials for. Although it was China that invented movable type printing, it never reached the wide use that it had in Europe after Gutenberg invented it there (it was probably independently invented as there was no evidence that Gutenberg had any knowledge of its Chinese existence). This is probably because the English language uses an alphabet based on only dozens of characters while Chinese uses ideograms, each of which represent a character. The overhead for a printing apparatus in the ancient times would be orders of magnitude higher for Chinese printing than for English printing.

English is more efficient to store digitally. The Latin alphabet is way more efficient for digital storage as each letter is usually simpler than Chinese characters, and thus takes a lot less space in the computer memory. This difference in storage requirement is more pronounced during the early age of computing, when memory size was very constrained, measured in terms of kilobytes. Additionally, merely storing base units of a language requires much less memory for English than for Chinese. Those units are stored in a bitmap grid, where each individual pixel can take on varying shades of color. English letters are simple, and they were found to be able to be stored in a 5-by-7 grid, which only takes up less than 5 bytes of space. Such a grid would be way too small for displaying complex Chinese characters; it had to be stored in an at least 16-by-16 grid–that's exactly 32 bytes of memory—six times more than for its English counterpart. To store 8,000 most commonly used Chinese characters was an impossible task, requiring 256 KB, or four times the total capacity of most off-the-shelf personal computers at the time. (Apple II had just up to 48 KB of memory.) As a simple example for comparison, using the abovementioned bitmap grid for storing characters, storing the greeting phrase in English "hello" in memory would take up less than half of the space than that for the two-character phrase that's the Chinese counterpart.

English is also more efficient when it comes to typing. It can be a hassle to type in Pinyin, which is the method of typing characters with the alphabet, because many characters have similar or the same sounds, selecting the desired one from multiple options is cumbersome. Typing in English thus eliminates the intermediate step, making English more convenient of a means to convey thought.

Vast vocabulary

The white man has a tendency to categorize everything under the sun, and that tendency could be partially why English has such a vast vocabulary, although it's composed of simpler units. Chinese is on the contrary, with more complex building blocks but less dedicated "words". The fact that the basic building blocks are simpler doesn't imply the language itself is simpler: the periodic elements are the rather simple building blocks of chemistry, but chemistry is by no means a simple subject.

Consider those words. "Crud" is not "crude". "Crux" is not edible and "crust" is. "Cot" can be a small house or a collapsible bed. What's the difference between "consortion" and "consortium"? Even the Internet couldn't provide an answer, but the name of Car Connectivity Consortium seems to imply that consortium is more commonly used than consortion.

English has a word for a person whose age is in a ten-year interval up to 110 years old. Some common ones would be nonagenarian for a person between 90 and 99 and centenarian for between 100 and 109. When translated into Chinese, the meaning of the range is lost in Chinese translation. In other words, probably no words in Chinese would be the equivalent of those, and a string of many characters to literally describe the range would be required to convey the same meaning.

Intricacy and complexity

In terms of speaking, English is much more subtle. There are just a wide set of words that sound similar. For instance, "grant", "grand", "grind", and probably a lot more other words sound only slightly different.

English is also a more dynamic and more sophisticated language. In terms of speaking, in Chinese, "he", "she", "it" all sound the same. It can thus cause confusion, although it makes it easier for the speaker. Grammatically, there's also no tense changes at all in Chinese verbs; additional clauses are needed to specify the timing of the action.

Changes between Nouns and Adjectives. A man from America is called American, but he who is from Canada is not a Canadan, but a Canadian. The man from China is neither Chinan or Chinian, but Chinese. In Chinese language, the rule is much simpler: adding man to the country name: America Man, China Man, and so on. In a sense, the Chinese language has zero abstraction, because there's no new layer of words.

English has complex grammar rules, in terms of tense, of the relationships between verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

Abstraction, Ease of pronounce, Organized and systematic

Abstraction. With its use of the Latin alphabet, English seems to be a more abstract representation for meaning than Chinese, which uses largely characters. Such characters include logographs, with a small number of pictographs and ideographs. Those graphs are primitively pictorial, carrying out meaning through shapes and strokes. More primitive languages can still be found in many parts of the world, particularly in Africa, where the written language is merely visual representations (drawings) of their physical objects.

Ease of pronunciation. English words sound like how they're spelled, making it easier for the learner to pronounce. Chinese characters by their very nature are difficult to pronounce.

Organized and systematic. Multiple English words can originate from the same root (stem). Those roots are mostly Latin or Greek in origin. This makes the structure of English like a tree with a trunk, branches and leaves interconnected. This is not the case with Chinese characters, which seem to be more or less disjoint from each other.

In Arthur Smith's own words

Arthur Smith briefly describes the three main parts of speech, the noun, the adjective, the verb, in the Chinese language, and the deficiency of the language in his essay Intellectual Turbidity.

Chinese nouns, as is by this time known to several, appear to be indeclinable. They are quite free from "gender" and "case." Chinese adjectives have no degrees of comparison. Chinese verbs are not hampered by any "voice," "mode," "tense," "number," or "person." There is no recognizable distinction between nouns, adjectives, and verbs, for any character may be used indiscriminately in either capacity (or incapacity), and no questions asked. We are not about to complain that the Chinese language cannot be made to convey human thought, nor that there are wide ranges of human thought which it is difficult or impossible to render intelligible in the Chinese language (though this appears to be a truth), but only to insist that such a language, so constructed, invites to "intellectual turbidity" as the incandescent heats of summer gently woo to afternoon repose.

Probable explanations for these differences in achievement

Why the egalitarian school of thought doesn't hold

The egalitarian school of thought can hardly explain why whites tend to have lived the longest. To cultivate talent, it's literature that's more important of a resource for than schools, mentors, or anything else, and literature is abundant and very affordable in almost any society.

There's not much equipment or funding that's necessary for obtaining the above achievements, other than innate talent. The abovementioned paper cites interracial personality differences–inquisitiveness, psychological stability, and individualism—as the reason for these differences in achievement. It also found that, at the population level, both IQ and curiosity contribute to the per capita Nobel awards.

Instead of culture and environment, the phenomenon of white prominence could be analyzed through other perspectives: the Bell Curve, evolution and biology, differences in intelligence.

The seemingly apparent fact that unlike physical attributes that are innate, one speaks the language where he finds himself growing up might suggest that language one speaks is merely a product of culture. However, how the language is spoken might have as much to do with biology, if not more, as with the environment. Indeed, language ability is a function of the brain.

The Bell Curve

White people are more diverse, and thus have more people on both ends of the bell curve. Obviously, it's at the positive end of the diversity that they make a contribution. Despite tremendous accomplishment from whites, it's not easy to judge the distribution of altruism of whites. In the negative end, there is no match in the east for the efficient and cold massacres that happened in the West. On two ends of the scale: at the world stage, the industrialized war machinery during the two world wars, or at the individual stage, the premeditated mass shootings. Like the fighting depicted in the movies, Chinese use Kung Fu and fight with fists and swords. Whites fight with guns, tanks and planes. All evidence suggests whites are as extreme in the positive end as they are negative.

Intelligence

IQ test, its validity notwithstanding, is nevertheless a standardized tool. East Asians are also known to be more uniform than other races. So, it can be inferred that they have, for whatever reason, the ability to pick the right answer for the question. This rigid thinking pattern of Asians that helps them with tests probably wouldn't help with creativity and imagination.

Area that East Asians excel at is in spatial relations. Reasoning, logic, language, arithmetic, all of which are interwoven inside the frontal lobe, seem almost to be an exclusive asset to the Caucasian race. This is the prerequisite for systemization, for articulating numerous laws of all sorts from observation, and for creating coherent universes, and last but not least, for working effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, the Chinese seem to lack the propensity for abstract thinking, a necessity for language, mathematics, science, philosophy and logic. The difference of abstract thinking can be seen from how the Chess pieces are named. Chess pieces are named as pawn, knight, bishop, rock, queen and king. In Chinese chess, many of the pieces are named in a less abstract, and more object-oriented way: soldier, horse, elephant, vehicle. The reference to animals and their products is not only restricted to Chinese chess, but commonplace in everyday life.

This leads to the description of the characteristics of East Asian intelligence by Robert Henderson. "The greater aptitude on non-verbal tests could plausibly be interpreted as meaning that the Asian mind is adapted to solving what I would call bounded problems, that is, problems which have objective boundaries such as how do we build this canal? rather than problems without such boundaries such as what is good? and what is art?"

Asians are world-class learners, or in impolite terms, imitators. The game they tend to play is to race to the bottom: improve the new technology to the point where the common man can enjoy. They also have shown to be the most law-abiding and the most docile. The consistent pattern is the white man lays the laws and the Asian follows them.

Biology

Energy can be simply inferred from body mass. (Einstein's famous Energy Equation might tell a thing or two here too.) On average, White people are simply heavier, taller, and stronger. One cannot support a big brain, the organ that consumes twenty percent of the energy, without a great body build. The highest average height of males in all areas of a large part of Asia is only 176-178 CM, or 5'9-5'10. That's in sharp contrast to the average heights of Germany, Sweden, and Iceland, which are all over 180 CM, 5'11. Assuming the distribution of heights to be as diverse as that for many traits for white men than it is for Asians, it's reasonable to assume there are disproportionately a lot more white men at the taller end of the spectrum. Even if both distributions share the same standard deviation, given the higher mean for white men, they should have more taller people at the high end. Moreover, at the same Body Mass Index, there is strong evidence that shows Asians are more likely than Whites to suffer from weight-related illnesses. This could be a hindrance for Asian success.

Breeding patterns. Could it be possible that ancient Asians bred with Homo Erectus and that ancient whites with Homo Neanderthals? If so, and since Homo Erectus is considered to be less evolved than Homo Neanderthals, whites could be more evolved than Asians.

Genetic bottlenecking. Given the fact that the Asian continent is further away from Africa than the European continent is, would it be possible that Asians share fewer common ancestors? This hypothesis seems to have strong supporting evidence, as new genetic research shows, and could explain the lack of Asian diversity.

The effect of homogeneity due to the continuity of the land. The European continent is fragmented, which is not like the landmass of Asia. Populations in Europe had a better chance at being separated, and thus might have developed the observed differences absent in the east Asian population. It was probably a huge challenge of living in and traveling within a diverse geography in the European continent, an engine for their diversity. It might have laid the foundation for their later dominance, which would rely on the ability to solve complex problems.

Testosterone and psychopathy

White people tend to have more testosterone for both men and women. Testosterone is a mixed blessing: for dumb people, it's a curse, but a blessing for people with high intelligence.

All those geniuses have just the right dose of psychopathy, which can be, among other causes, a result of a high level of testosterone. At the same time, they change the game, they completely change the old paradigm. Such psychopathy is reflected in their ability to work hard for a long period of time, and in their high pain tolerance. Take Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as two famous examples. Steve Jobs is known for his temper and for his use of profanity towards others. Bill Gate, similarly, is known for saying, "this is the stupidest thing I have ever heard." He also once tried to dilute his co-founder's shares to almost nothing.

Genetic fitness

The Black Death, the bubonic plague pandemic, was estimated to have wiped out as much as half of the Europe population, which could be a huge eugenic event. In theory, the survivors might have all been selected, not only to be resistant to the plague, but also to be genetically fit. There was no such recorded event of similar nature for Asia. This line of reasoning centering on the concept of "genetic fitness" conveys more explaining power than the general descriptors such as "smart" or "talent". It's been a well-known phenomenon that various areas of intelligence, such as verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, are strongly correlated, but a less-known fact is even one's appearance is correlated to intelligence. Intelligence is merely one of many outward expressions of a person's genetic fitness, which can range from attractiveness to body build. A prime example that illustrates the genetic fitness aspect of a person, rather than merely intelligence, would be the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger's career spans not less than three industries, with enormous success in each: bodybuilding, acting and politics. Now, would anyone think he would score high on an intelligence test? With this, is it possible that East Asians just do not have as many genetically fit members as Whites?

A sport analogy

Bing gives the below answer about the differences between tennis and table tennis. It seems fair to extrapolate them to describe the differences between Asians and whites.

Tennis emphasizes endurance and power, while table tennis rewards hand-eye coordination and reflexes.

Tennis has a complex scoring system and longer matches, while table tennis uses a simpler point-based system with quicker-paced games.

Table tennis is generally more affordable and accessible, while tennis can be less accessible and more expensive."

Continued in part 2