More on the same: Matters of Scale -or- Do Ideas Have Consequences
Jordan 179 remarks
What Wright was saying was that the appearance of specific talented men was more important than environment. Wright’s objection is even true — when you look at the smaller scales of space and time. Diamond, IMO, is only correct regarding the millennial scales.
My argument is that expanding the scale from centurion to millennial does not change the basic human dynamic. Environment is one factor. Human action is another factor, and, as far as I can tell, a greater factor. Ideas are the deciding factor, and environment only rarely overwhelms the human factor. If an historian wants to argue that civilization could not develop in the arctic, he will hear no dispute from me: I do not care how smart the Northern Siberians are or the Southern Patagonians, they are not destined to be the cradle of civilization.
But once someone starts telling me that only in the dry land of Egypt can pyramids be built, or the wet jungle of Mexico, or the domestication of the horse was the crucial factor that made the American Indians submit to the Spaniards but not to the Vikings (whose ancestors also, by the way, domesticated the horse), the argument is unconvincing.
The argument does not become more convincing if taken to a larger scale, and talking about continents and millenniums rather than nations and centuries.
Even as one man can influence the men of his city during his life, just so his city, shaped by his ideas, can influence the works of their nation through that city’s time of greatness, and just in this same way a nation can influence the fate of countries and continents during that nation’s time of greatness, so that, ultimately, it is the words and thoughts of one man who shapes of character of continents and subcontinents.
Socrates and Jesus shaped the European Character, as Moses and Mohamed shaped the character of the Middle East, and as Buddha and Confucius shaped the character of the Far East. Obviously one man does not have so magnified an effect without the voluntary and involuntary cooperation of his city, his nation, his country, his continent. Jesus without Jerusalem, Socrates without Athens, Mohammed without Mecca and Medina; Athens without the Hellenes, Jesus without the Jews, Latins and Greeks of the Roman Empire, Confucius without the Mandarins, would none of them influenced so many.
In the Modern World, Europe has influenced the globe more than the globe has influenced Europe. This seems to be the same process again, at the higher scale.
Now, all that I am doing in opposition to Mr. Diamond is assuming that this process works basically the same way in peoples for whom we have no written records. I assume the inventor of the toggle-tip harpoon among the Eskimos was the Robert Fulton of their nation, even though we do not know his name. The way of life of the Eskimo would have been far different had seals not been available as a natural resource exploited by the Eskimo. Likewise for whatever ancient genius (in this case an evil genius) who persuaded the pre-Columbian South Americans to adopt small and then large scale human sacrifice and cannibalism. Likewise for whatever ancient genius taught mankind first to cultivate crops, whether his name was Osiris or Triptolemous or whatever it might have been.
Mr. Diamond just assumes (and, as far as I can tell, this assumption is never addressed or justified) that the pattern breaks down when dealing with the intercontinental scale or across millenniums. I have no reason to believe him.
He has listed what certainly are contributory factors. Certainly it was easier for the cavalry-using peoples to conquer the infantry-using peoples. Growing seasons and fertility of crops and the zones of environment also has a factor to play. But Mr. Diamond’s argument is simply assuming a homogeneous distribution of genius and uniform transmission and imitation of human characteristic across the paleolithic and neolithic. There are areas in the world today where the men do not even have the fire-bow, the clothing sewn with needle and thread, clay pottery, or the sea-going coracle: the technology has not been developed yet, or has been forgotten. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese.
In the modern world, the Europe, Christendom, the Roman Empire (three names for the same thing) influenced the globe. Nowadays in the China of Confucius, it is the ideas of the German Jew Karl Marx that form the intellectual skeleton of the government and their way of life. The students and intellectuals who face prison and death are moved by the ideas of Adam Smith and the Greek and Jewish notions of liberty and equality.
In neolithic times, ideas like the preservation of sacred fires by virgins, or the flint-napping of arrowheads, or polygamy, or animal holocaust, either were independently reinvented, or they spread by diffusion.
(Diffusion is not necessarily impossible across imposing natural barriers. It would only take one man in an outrigger canoe to show a tribesman on the coast how to make a bird-bolt arrowhead to make the idea catch on. if Buddhism could spread from one center all the way to Japan, why not the recurved bow?).
In some places, however, the ideas spread quickly and in others slowly. Geography must have been a factor, but I simply do not believe human element was not a greater factor. The spread of each idea laid the soil to be fertile for the broadcast of the next seeds of the next wave of ideas.
But Mr. Diamond did not answer Yali’s question. The reason why the White Man has all the Cargo is that our ideas were different from and more successful in the long run than your ideas.
Mr. Diamond assume ideas do not matter and that ideas do not have consequences. He states this as his starting assumption. His starting assumption makes it so that he concentrates on merely material factors at play in history.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
