“So if competition and conflict are the mainsprings of Western Civ, we appear to be entering a new golden age. I hope the body count isn’t too high.”
Well it’s not unbridled competition. The competition is tempered by the rule of law.
So it’s not totally the rule of the jungle. There is a “greater power” (the state) that makes sure that the competition doesn’t become (too) physical.
That applies within a country. Between countries the rule of the jungle is still pretty much alive and well. There are extra-national organization such as the UN to try to keep the peace, but their impact is limited.
The author misses the real reason for the success of the west. People are naturally competitive everywhere. What separates the west from the rest is we, somehow, stumbled upon the idea of letting people be free to pursue their happiness within the context of the rule of law.
Legal codes are more or less ubiquitous. Legal codes, law enforcement, a system of courts and methods of punishment are fundamental to the mechanics of rule, no matter whether by monarchs, oligarchs, or any democratic form of government.
Perhaps one innovation is that western law codes create impersonal associations with legal rights and obligations that are independent of individuals or government offices, e.g. the corporation. These enable greater collective action to compete.
Rather than defend the idea of competition by denying its inherent bloodiness, or suggest it needs to be tempered by government, I prefer to point out the deadly consequences of the alternative to competition: stagnation, poverty and mass starvation.
Lack of competition, while perhaps less bloody than competition, creates mass poverty on a scale orders of magnitude more deadly than war.
And even that is a bit generous to the Chinese emperors who stifled competition - for their solution to poverty was often mass genocide - which is as bloody as it gets.