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Oct. 26, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
41:29
Re： Environmental Determinism： Crash Course Human Geography #1
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Today we're going to be taking a look at a video that was uploaded to Crash Course, which is run by the Vlog brothers Hank and John Green, and this particular video was done by someone else.
Hi, I'm Miriam, and this is Crash Course Human Geography, and we're going to start this series with a little talk about how not to do human geography.
I want to let you know up front that all the ideas we're talking about today are terrible ideas.
So our kind host starts off with an incredibly intellectually dishonest tactic of poisoning the well.
Before she's even told us anything about the arguments we're going to hear, she's already making sure that we understand in advance that they're bad and we should disagree with them, even if, after hearing them, they sound like something with which we would normally agree.
Mostly, we're going to look at and debunk a view of the world called environmental determinism, which some people call geographical determinism or climatic determinism.
Whatever you call it though, it's bad science.
It's like online dating.
You've got to look at a lot of bad profiles before you find love.
I actually can't think of a worse analogy than that for what she's just said.
She's suggesting that science is subjective and people get to choose their own based on their own personal preferences.
As far as I'm aware, in this video, she does not explain why this is bad science, and if she doesn't explain why this is bad science, and doesn't give any kind of reason for saying it, I'm going to assume that this is her further poisoning the well.
Basically, environmental determinism is the idea that the physical environment, like climate, landforms, vegetation, and soils, determines the character of cultures across the surface of the Earth.
This includes both specific cultural behaviours such as human temperament or personality, clothing styles, food habits, architectural forms, language, religious beliefs, as well as the course of civilization's history and its level of social and economic development.
Well, doesn't it?
Isn't that a reasonable explanation for the various differences in cultural attitudes around the world?
I mean, doesn't it make sense that people are a product of their environments?
And in what way are you going to disprove this?
This determinism sees the interaction between the environment and humans as a one-way street.
Humans are passive agents in a stimulus response system.
This is absurd.
There is simply no question as to whether there's a two-way relationship between humans and the environment.
In fact, the whole point of what you're describing here is to explain how humans exercise their agency on the environment, and what role the type of environment that the human beings find themselves in shape their ability to use their agency.
For example, there is a reason that there has never been a Tibetan navy.
This is what he's saying.
These people simply couldn't express their agency in such a way because the physical limits of geography around them prohibit it.
This theory has been very seductive over time because it's so intuitively simple and people love straightforward explanations.
But to quote my friend John Green, truth resists simplicity.
Maybe you should have tried coming with some facts instead of some rhetoric, because that's all you've presented here.
If you don't provide any evidence for the claim that any of this is simplistic or reductive, I'm just going to dismiss your criticism as you overthinking it.
And I'm going to do that because the theory presented gives an adequate and accurate model of why human civilizations evolve as they do.
Environmental determinism is reductionism.
It's an attempt to explain an extraordinarily complex phenomenon by reducing it to its simple elemental parts.
I'm not trying to be facetious here, but isn't that how people normally explain things by reducing it to its simple components and then explaining how these things interact?
I mean, do you feel like doing this at all, or are you just going to tell us it's wrong and reductive, and so what we should do is listen and believe?
This kind of reductionism has been popular for a long time, and today I want to look at the history or genealogy of environmental determinism using examples from three different time periods.
We'll look at the ways people have fallen for this reductive thinking in European antiquity, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how we still fall for it today.
Well, I mean, if you keep calling it reductive, I suppose it must be, even though you're not actually telling us what factors they're ignoring when they give you this theory, and so it doesn't seem like they've reduced it past any level of complexity needed to further explain these phenomena.
I mean, what are you actually saying that they're leaving out?
Before we do that, however, let's take a quick side trip to South Louisiana, where historical French culture is dominant, and people bury their dead above ground in these raised tombs, whether they're in rural or urban areas.
If you ask anyone why bodies aren't buried below ground or at ground level, like they are in cemeteries pretty much everywhere else in the US, the likely response will be so that bodies in caskets won't float away during a flood.
Which sounds sensible, but is it right?
Why then are raised burial tombs on high ground common in Mediterranean regions that haven't flooded in thousands of years?
I'd argue that the above-ground tombs in South Louisiana are the result of the persistence of Latin Catholic traditions that the French immigrants brought to the New World.
Even cemeteries in high ground sections of New Orleans are primarily populated by raised tombs, and the Jewish sections in these same cemeteries are at ground level, which seems to point to cultural tradition.
The point is that this burial practice grows out of the human cultural practices, not a blind reaction to environmental conditions.
Okay, walking this back in reverse order, there's no such thing as a blind reaction to environmental conditions, because such a reaction must be the result of empirical observation and rational decision-making on the part of the people experiencing whatever it is the environment is presenting them with.
And sure, there probably isn't an environmental reason to inter the dead above ground or below ground.
There is probably nothing to the story of it prevents flooding, carrying away the caskets, and there is every reason to think that this is a cultural practice, the impetus of which didn't come directly from the environment.
I mean, that is possible.
It's entirely possible that people get silly ideas into their head and decide to do something to fulfill these silly ideas.
In this case, this is probably something to do with Christianity, and this may well be Christianity being influenced by Zoroastrian towers of silence or something like that.
Or it could be that this was a common Roman practice as a way of aggrandizing one's family by having a huge family tomb.
Who knows?
I don't see how this disproves the idea that the environment has a powerful effect on shaping human societies.
Nobody said it's the only effect.
There are obviously going to be cultural artifacts like this that have an effect on a civilization, but do you think that this is somehow responsible for a civilization's advancement or perhaps being held back in some way?
Or is this simply a minor idiosyncratic quirk?
Anyway, let's start with environmental determinism in ancient Europe.
Before there were academic disciplines and universities, it was the job of philosophers to figure out how the world worked.
Aristotle was one of many philosophers who attempted to make sense of the physical world and bring order to the human world.
He built on the works of Hippocrates and divided the world into three climate zones.
In the tropics was the hot torrid zone, followed by the mid-latitude temperate zone, and finally the cold frigid zone of the polar regions.
Aristotle, being Greek, thought that the Greeks were pretty solid evidence that the temperate zone was obviously the best for turning out great people.
Okay, I don't know why you had to make that into a moral judgment.
You could have said the most advanced people or the most well-balanced people or something like that, but instead you say great.
But anyway, I don't think you're accurately representing Aristotle's philosophy here.
I don't think he would have included Scandinavia in the temperate zone.
I suspect he would have made the temperate zone looking more like this.
And I think that you have deliberately extended what you consider to be Aristotle's temperate zone so you can include northern Europeans, you know, the later colonizers of the world, in this theory.
Geographer Clarence Glacken once paraphrased Aristotle's theory like this.
The peoples of the cold regions, including those living in Europe, are spirited but deficient in skill and intelligence.
They preserve their liberty but they lack political organization and are incapable of governing others.
The peoples of Asia are the opposite.
They are intelligent and inventive but lack spirit and are in subjection and servitude.
The Greeks living in the region intermediate between these extremes of hot and cold enjoy the advantages of both.
They are high-spirited and intelligent.
I think Aristotle was probably wrong here.
I think that what he's describing is a causal effect that is probably two or three times removed from the most direct causal effect of the people of Europe being different to the people of Asia in character.
And that's what he's talking about here.
For example, when she says, The peoples of the cold regions, including those living in Europe, are spirited but deficient in skill and intelligence.
They preserve their liberty but they lack political organization and are incapable of governing others.
This is a remarkably accurate and concise description of pre-Roman Europe.
While the Gauls and Germans were slightly less technologically advanced as the Greeks and Romans, they weren't nearly as backwards as historians and popular culture would have you believe.
But what they're referring to there is political organization.
And in that respect, the Gauls and the Germans, the tribal peoples of Northern Europe, were remarkably deficient.
I suspect this is to do with a lack of urban centers.
The Mediterranean world was very urbanised.
There were lots and lots of large walled cities.
However, the tribal areas of northern Europe weren't.
The population was spread relatively evenly across the landscape in middling-sized villages.
These people were not as technologically advanced, they were not as well educated, and they did not have sophisticated political organizations like the Greeks and the Romans, because they didn't need to have them.
These things are a consequence of living in large urban environments.
And on the other hand, when she says, The peoples of Asia are the opposite, they are intelligent and inventive, but lack spirit and are in subjection and servitude.
Again, this is another concise answer, and there is definitely something to it.
I don't think this has anything to do with the temperature of the Middle East.
I think this has to do with the geographic layout of the Middle East, as in, it's very easy to walk from one end to the next.
And not only that, it's very easy to walk into the Middle East from practically any direction.
If you find one of those time-lapse videos of empires across the world, you'll be able to see exactly why the people of the Middle East live in subjection and servitude.
This is the Middle East around 600-700 years before Aristotle put penned paper.
You can see on the left that the pink are the Greek city-states.
To the right of them are the diverse empires and kingdoms of the Middle East.
And you'll see as we go along that these change with remarkable frequency.
Because as soon as you defeat someone, you can just keep going.
There is no landmass to stop you.
There is just city after city that you can take.
In particular, look at the blue blob in the middle called the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
You can see how that is already expanding and consuming its neighbours.
Of course, what you're not seeing here are the dozens of cities that were burned, and the piles of bodies that would have been heaped up outside of them, as the Assyrians pacified the Middle East.
And you're not seeing them resist the invasions of barbarians from almost every direction as well.
To get to this point required the deaths of untold numbers of soldiers and civilians, and barbarian invaders from every direction around the Middle East.
And finally, the Assyrian Empire reaches its zenith by conquering Egypt.
The Assyrians have finally subdued the entire Middle East, and they keep the Middle East subdued in exactly the same way as Negan from the Walking Dead.
If there is any resistance, if there is a city that dares consider resisting the Assyrian approach, they will raise it, enslave everyone in there and cart them off somewhere to be a subject people elsewhere in their vast empire.
They are utterly without mercy.
Honestly, I really doubt it's possible to overstate the scale of the suffering caused by the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
For hundreds of years, they had destroyed everything that would not submit, and so the only things left standing are things that would submit.
And I just want to point out that this isn't like the end.
Aristotle isn't going to be born for like another 250 years.
Let's keep going.
You'll notice that while all of this is going on in the Middle East, the Greek city-states are expanding.
But they're not expanding as a single political unit.
These are individual cities sending out colonists to go and settle new independent city-states around the Mediterranean.
And this cultural attitude was caused by the environment of Greece itself.
It's very mountainous.
Again, it naturally balkanizes into small political units because it's difficult to control over a large distance because of the terrain and the technology available.
So when Aristotle says that the Greeks happen to have their liberty and high intelligence, he's right.
He's absolutely right.
And it was geographical fortune that gives them this.
Close proximity and trade links with Asia gave them access to Asiatic inventions and discoveries, such as writing.
However, being geographically separated and in an inconvenient place for invaders means they got to preserve their liberty with little effort, because no one was trying to invade them.
The Greeks, living in the region intermediate between these extremes of hot and cold, enjoy the advantages of both.
They are high-spirited and intelligent.
Honestly, I think the geographical location of Greece in comparison to the nature of the geography around them is what allowed them to be like this.
As with pretty much everything Aristotle said, both the marginally correct stuff and the flat-out wrong stuff like this, it would be commonly accepted as truth about the world for around 2,000 years.
By the mid to late 1800s, we had universities and the earth and life science departments were frantically churning out theoretically informed research, thanks in large part to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Physical geographers, like the people who drew maps, were considered a different kind of geologist, and they were actually respected as real scientists.
But those who wanted to explore the intersection of humanity and geography found it hard to earn the respect of their peers because people thought they were just describing things.
But they wanted to be real scientists too, so they hitched their cart to a modified form of Darwinism, even though the origin of species was evolutionary biology.
Okay, but that intersection doesn't actually discredit any other theories about the environment playing a specific role in the development of human society.
These early human geographers loosely applied evolutionary theory to the human world and decided that natural selection could be applied to the evolution of cultures, societies, and civilizations.
The application of this revolutionary theory of evolution to the social world got these geographers a lot of attention and academic respect, but it wouldn't last because it was a terrible idea.
That's really bizarre because it seems self-evident that the environment has a large role in the kind of civilization you can see in a specific area.
For example, Eskimos have never invented the concept of the god-king.
They've never had that.
They've never had millions of workers underneath a single person who subjugates them with a professional military and whom they all worship as an avatar of the sun.
It doesn't happen with Eskimos.
It could well be because they can't get millions of people.
They don't have harvests.
And there's no need for them to care about the sun rising and setting when it rises once in six months.
What I'm saying is it's simply impossible for certain kinds of cultures to form because the environment simply won't permit it.
Of course, I've preempted your rebuttal, so let's see if your rebuttal involves Nazis.
Ellen Churchill Semple was one of the most influential human geographers of that time.
Semple studied under the German Frederick Ratzel, a historical and political geographer who was trained as a zoologist and heavily influenced by Darwin.
Ratzel spoke of the role of the natural environment in governing human migrations, using biological metaphors like living space or Liebensraum.
Ellen Churchill Semple was an American, and judging by the name, I'm guessing she was an American of English descent.
Why would she feel the need to give the German translation of the term living room?
And he also applied concepts like survival the fittest and Darwinism to nation states.
You may also remember this idea of Liebenstraum as Adolf Hitler's justification for invading every other country in Europe.
And there we have it.
Godwin's Law in Action.
And I just want to stress that you said because it was a terrible idea.
And you did not refute it.
All you said was, well, it's what the Nazis also thought.
Well, the Nazis were also anti-smoking.
Is that a terrible idea?
Of course not.
You know better than this.
I know you know better than this.
This was an intellectually bankrupt way of persuading your audience via pathos, via the manipulation of their emotions.
They hear Nazis, they think bad.
This is actually a disgraceful way of arguing.
And honestly, I'm genuinely shocked in The Green Brothers that they would host something like this.
That they wouldn't vet this in advance.
To honestly, it's genuinely shocking to me.
Semple used what she learned from Ratzel to construct her own distinctive brand of environmental determinism that she applied to multiple cultures and places across many centuries.
She believed that environmental factors influenced humans both mentally and physically.
She wrote, Man is a product of the earth's surface.
This means not merely that he is child of the earth, dust of her dust, but that the earth has mothered him, set him task, directed his thought, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits.
She has entered into his bones and tissues, into his mind and soul.
Another prominent determinist was Ellsworth Huntington, who was a teacher and research associate at Yale beginning in 1907.
I just want to take issue with these little jokes at the person's expense.
He was hunting the most dangerous game of all, racism.
Well, actually, he kind of was, because the theory that these people are proposing is an anti-racist theory.
But you haven't actually brought up racism yet, but you will, and we'll talk about that when we get to it.
I just wanted to point out another one of these little poisoning the well statements that you make constantly throughout this video.
He published books titled Civilization and Climate and the Character of Races.
God, that just sounds bad, doesn't it?
That must be bad.
I mean, I haven't read them, so God, they must sound bad.
But do you know what I'm in the middle of reading?
I'm in the middle of reading Towards a Political Philosophy of Race by Falguni Sheff.
And I'll do a video review of it as I normally do with these interesting books.
And this is by an author who is currently employed as a professor right now.
Falgooni Sheff, Google it.
If you want to talk about, well, I mean, they were talking about racist.
This person was talking about races 100 years ago plus.
This person is doing it now.
Huntington's environmental determinism was almost a throwback to Aristotle as he applied these flawed theories to large-scale geographic regions in search of the relationship between climate cycles and civilizational development, or what was euphemistically called human progress.
Huntington attributed the dominance of Western Europe and the northeastern United States to temperate climate conditions.
He basically thought that changing seasons produced a stimulating atmospheric environment or climate efficiency that led to a healthy and hard-working population, which is ridiculous.
While I don't think this guy was correct either, he does strike on an important point.
The easier it is to live in one's environment, the more one can get done that isn't simply about survival.
If you have to walk five miles to get a drink of water living in sub-Saharan Africa, or if you live in the frozen wastes of the north where there isn't a tree in sight, you are going to have a much more difficult time simply living than you would if you were in, say, river-covered, temperate Europe, or China.
Anywhere that has moderate temperature, reasonable access to water, and a climate that doesn't include, I don't know, monsoons, or an environment that doesn't include volcanoes, or tropical malaria-filled jungles and things like this, are going to be natural advantages to human beings in general, regardless of who lives there, because these things are obstacles to humans progressing and developing and just existing in these locations.
Not having a day-to-day battle with the environment around you just to merely exist is an obvious advantage for any civilization, and you simply say that this is ridiculous.
Why?
He used weather data to construct maps of civilization, health, genius, and climatic energy, and when he compared each of their geographical distributions, he decided that climate was destiny.
And surprise, it turned out that the ideal climate for fostering genius just happened to be right where he lived.
And in what way does that refute what he's saying?
Are you suggesting that he can't have an accurate assessment of the world because he happens to live in a part of the world that he is assessing?
I mean, why don't we just look at some evidence?
Let's see how things correlate, shall we?
For example, if we look at his map and then overlay on that, I don't know, a map of Nobel laureates, how does it look?
Don't get me wrong, I know that I'm not proving a causal relationship here, but I'm certainly suggesting that maybe there is something to look into here.
Don't you think?
I mean, unless you're one of those biological determinists who thinks that the white race is just superior to everyone else.
But then again, that doesn't explain why the Chinese have a higher average IQ than us, but have fewer Nobel Prizes.
I mean, it would really suggest that there may be some other mechanism at play.
His conclusions were far too simplistic, and critics accused him of manipulating the data to promote a Eurocentric ideology.
That's interesting because what he's proposing is actually not Eurocentric.
This is the result of a specific set of geographical features.
This is not because Europeans are fundamentally better.
This is actually because Europeans are fundamentally luckier, although for most of their history, you wouldn't have known it.
Huntington's peers weren't big fans, and he was especially unpopular among non-geographers.
Is that because he was refuting their theories?
But either way, let's get to the real crux of the issue that you want to talk about.
And the thing that is, I mean, all of this is reasonably speculative.
I mean, it's reasonable.
Well, it's definitely a combination of factors, but environment certainly is setting the limits of what humans can do with their agency.
And so far, this girl has done quite a good job of hiding her ideological biases.
But now we're about to see them on full display.
If you haven't picked up on it already, all these ideas are super racist.
They all boil down to the claim that only Europeans were capable of creating great civilizations.
No, that's fucking stupid and the total opposite of what they're actually trying to tell you.
They're actually saying that anyone given these geographical advantages would be able to capitalize on them in the same way Europeans have done.
He's actually saying that it doesn't matter if it was Europeans or if it was someone else, Asians or whoever, placed in the same geographical frame as Europe, they would have the same potential and would probably fulfill it.
Because why wouldn't you?
You seem to be unable to separate the people from the environment.
If it had been Europeans as the people who found themselves in India, they would probably turn out a lot like the Indians.
If the Indians had been in Europe, they would have probably turned out a lot like the Europeans.
It is the environment that shapes the course of their histories.
That's what they're saying.
They're not saying that only Europeans could have been like this.
Environmental determinism was short-lived in academic circles, but these bad ideas continue to be popular, especially among officials in charge of colonial government.
What are you talking about?
This is a discipline that still exists today, and still has peer-reviewed academic journals.
Again, you just appear to be trying to poison the well against anyone even looking into this by saying, well, I mean, this has all been totally discredited.
And, you know, I mean, this is what colonial officials did.
As with your comparison to the Nazis, this seems to be more guilt by association.
Environmental determinism turned out to be an ideal tool for the project of European imperialism.
Eurocentric ideologies dressed up as scientific facts turned out to be really popular for justifying Euromeddling in Asia, Africa, and the world at large.
Native peoples in tropical climates were perceived as lazy, lacking in discipline, immoral, and quick-tempered, because climate supposedly conditioned human behaviour.
This was almost entirely political.
I mean, you seem to be forgetting the, and I'm not going to mince my words here, the frankly barbarous state that the Europeans found most of the world in when they discovered it.
I mean, you have to understand the world was not as technologically or politically or culturally sophisticated as Western Europe.
And that isn't to do with racism.
That is just a fact.
That is the state of the world at the beginning of the colonial era.
And there is a reason why the Europeans were able to conquer everyone else.
They were more sophisticated.
They had better technology.
They had better organization, better discipline.
There is simply no excusing this.
You can't pretend like that didn't happen.
Because we know it did, and we know that's the reason that they were successful and colonized the world.
The question is not whether this happened.
The question is why this happened.
And if your reason for this isn't that the Europeans were fortunate in the geographic location and all of the various advantages it gave them towards the latter half of the second millennium after Christ's death, then your answer must be something different.
And from the way you're describing it, you make it sound like the Europeans were just genetically superior.
After all, if this wasn't the result of rational logical opportunities presented to Europeans that, again, any human would have taken if this opportunity was available to them, then you have to explain it in some other way, and you make it sound like the Europeans were just inherently superior.
The environmental determinist argument is that they're not, and that anyone given these opportunities would have done the same.
Sadly, environmental determinism is still a thing today, although in a milder form.
Let's go to the thought bubble.
In 1997, UCLA physiologist and ecologist Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies.
The book was a big hit, received a Pulitzer Prize, won the Aventus Prize for Best Science book, and was made into a National Geographic documentary.
I've read Guns, Germs, and Steel twice.
It's a very good book, and it is a very convincing argument for why the Europeans were so successful at the expense of more primitive native people.
Most importantly about it is that it is, as everything we have discussed so far, an anti-racist treatise.
It does not assume that the Europeans are simply racially superior.
In fact, it is an explanation as to why they don't need to be racially superior to have accomplished what they accomplished.
I know you're probably going to suggest that this is racism, but I'm starting to think that you are in fact a total ideologue.
Diamond recognized the importance of culture and technology to explain civilizational attainment, but nevertheless leaned quite a bit on environmental causes for the rise and collapse of empires from Asia to the Americas.
Diamond credited stuff like the shapes of continents and mild climates to explain the emergence of productive agriculture, food surpluses, and the diffusion of technological and social innovation.
Well, talk about simple and reductionist.
But anyway, yes, this is actually exactly the problem, right?
If, for example, Eurasia has, I think, about twice as many productive beasts of burden as Africa or the Americas had, just as native species.
They used beasts of burden like horses and cattle, which could be domesticated and could be used for domestic chores to improve the amount of agriculture possible.
So while the Native Americans are plowing by hand, the Europeans are doing it with animal labor, saving them far more time and effort and making a much more productive system.
Not only that, they get exposed to various kinds of viruses and diseases that hop between humans and animals due to this close proximity over thousands of years.
Something, again, that did not happen in the Americas, which is why when we go to the Americas and give them the smallpox blankets, it ends up decimating like 95% of the population because they have no innate resistance to it, Because they haven't been brought up with it.
I mean, this is just, it's obvious.
You say, oh, it's simple and reductionist, but there's simply no other way of explaining that.
That is the causal effect of living with these beasts of burden.
You get diseases.
If you don't have them, you don't get them.
And in the Americas, they didn't have these beasts of burden, which is why they were so primitive in comparison to Eurasia.
And incidentally, the opposite went for Africa.
When the Europeans landed in South Africa, they went for the further north they went, the more tropical diseases they encountered.
The worse it got for them, and the more difficult it was.
He saw mid-latitude Europe's ability to take over sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1880s, not as a result of the nature of colonialism, but as, quote, due to accidents of geography and biogeography, in particular to the continent's different areas, axes, and suites of wild plants and animal species, that is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe, stem ultimately from the differences in real estate.
What does the nature of colonialism mean?
What does that mean?
Not from the nature of colonialism.
Okay, let's assume that the Europeans were utterly genocidal.
They weren't just colonialists.
They were literal Nazis intent on wiping out every other variant of human around the entire globe.
Right?
So the nature of colonialism is far worse than you think it is.
How can they do that?
That's the question.
How can they do it?
That is what Jared Diamond is explaining.
He is not making moral judgments.
He is not saying that these other people are inferior.
He is saying that they can only do it due to a specific set of advantages that the Europeans looked into by where they lived.
I can't believe there would be anyone who would contest this.
This is obvious.
This is axiomatic almost.
If I were to speculate, I would suggest that you saying the nature of colonialism is you actually saying the nature of Europeans.
As if Europeans are by nature, innately, more barbarous and savage than other people around the world.
And I'm sorry, but after reading the history of vast swathes of Asia, I do not think they are.
And to ignore the violent and aggressive nature of European colonialism in this context is, well, wrong.
And again, it really just sounds like you think the Europeans are more destructive than other people.
You think that if the Mongols didn't have access to the technology and potential the Europeans had, that they wouldn't have done the same?
What about the Assyrians?
What about the Timurids?
What about the Ottomans?
What about anyone?
Any fucking culture would do this.
In fact, the Europeans could be considered to be remarkably restrained by the standards of many other Asiatic cultures.
This is not objective science you're presenting.
This is your personal opinion.
You seem to be riddled with guilt as to how bad you think European colonialism is.
Well, I've got some news for you.
All colonialism is the same.
It's all bad, no matter who is doing it.
And it wasn't just Europeans that did it.
Diamond doesn't dismiss culture in his explanations, but sees the ultimate factors as being environmental.
And proximate factors, such as social organization and technology, as being byproducts of those environmental factors.
They absolutely are.
They absolutely are.
You cannot suggest that technological advancements can occur when the environment does not permit these technological advancements to occur.
I mean, you must be some kind of ideologically driven lunatic to suggest that.
According to Diamond, those ultimate factors explain why Europe's physical disunity and China's physical unity led to China losing its technological preeminence to Europe.
Europe has a highly indented coastline with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments.
But China's coastline is much smoother.
China's connectedness eventually became a disadvantage because a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation.
In contrast, Europe's geographic falconization resulted in dozens or hundreds of independent competing statelets and centers of innovation.
Yes, and we have many, many examples to demonstrate why this kind of political disunity was in fact highly advantageous for technological advancement and just discovery in general.
The first one would be the Ottomans' conquest of Constantinople.
There was, I think it was a Hungarian engineer who went to the Emperor of Constantinople when Constantinople was, I mean, literally that was all that was left.
And he said, I can make you a cannon that can break any wall.
Needless to say, the Emperor of Constantinople was being kept in his position by his great walls and didn't want this guy to go somewhere else.
However, he couldn't afford him.
And so the man left.
And he went to the court of the Ottoman Sultan, who could afford to have one of these great bronze cannons made.
And so that's what they did.
The largest cannon in history.
And what did he do with it?
He used it to break down the walls of Constantinople.
Or, if you like, Christopher Columbus.
He went to the King of Portugal and said, I would like to sail west and I want you to sponsor an expedition.
The King of Portugal's experts said, unfeasible.
And so the King of Portugal rejected it.
He went to Genoa, Venice, England.
They all rejected him.
Until he went to the King of Spain, who accepted, funded his expedition, and lo and behold, Spain becomes one of the great superpowers of the world due to their financing of his voyage.
Jared Diamond appears to be absolutely correct in his assessment of why Europe was successful, where China, which having every other natural advantage, should have also been successful.
So Gunns, Germs, and Steel subtitle Fates of Society says it all.
The book concludes that humans and societies possess little agency and are forever governed by the dictates of nature.
No, he is saying the agency contained within these societies can only find expression in ways that the environment will permit.
The Mongols were never a great seafaring people because they did not have an ocean on which to travel.
The Cretans did not have a massive standing army because they were an island power.
There are certain things that are just inevitable based on your position on the earth.
The geographer James Blout eloquently places Diamond's work and centuries of environmental determinism scholarship in the same intellectual box.
And I think we should give Blout the last word today.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be compellingly scientific.
Diamond is a natural scientist, a bioecologist, and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and within Eurasia of Europe are taken from natural science.
Yes, he's not starting from an ideologically informed position such as Europeans are just naturally superior and then backward engineering this thesis to explain why Europeans are superior.
He's actually taken the original roots of what's happened and built his conclusions on top of that.
And let's see who James Blout is.
I don't know who this is, so I had to do a bit of googling.
I wonder what I found.
So it turns out that James M. Blout, affectionately known as Jim to his friends, died in 2000, and on the University of Utah website I found an archived mailing list of tributes to him by his friends.
Marxism.
Tributes to Jim Blout.
To activists and scholars in Marxist tradition.
Subject Marxism.
Tributes to Jim Blout.
From Louis Project.
Date Wednesday, 29th September, 2004.
Does anyone want to claim to be surprised by any of this?
Before I carry on.
So they give a biography of James M. Blout, which they call a necrology.
I've never heard that term before.
I don't know why they wouldn't just call it a biography, but hey, I'm not a Marxist scholar.
Jim Blout, who passed away on the 11th of November 2000 after a battle with cancer, played a formative intellectual and political role in geography and the social sciences.
One of the most singular, seminal, and far-sighted figures in modern geography, he consistently followed a road not taken in critical scholarship of tropical culture ecology, colonialism and environmental determinism, environmental recognition and questions of race and nation.
In tackling these questions, Jim explored new terrain in contemporary Marxism, but because of the breadth of his work, also contributed widely to theories of agricultural development and to cultural ecology.
He is perhaps best known for his critiques of diffusion theory and always argued against diffusionist models of European capitalism and cultural hegemony.
Jim argued against the view that capitalism began in Europe and, contra the major tenets of environmental determinism, nor were there any privileged qualities to European peoples or their environments that made them natural agents of capitalism.
So just to be clear, we know that Jim Blout was in the habit of denying reality.
If he's suggesting there was not some kind of advantage of living in Europe over, oh I don't know, living in the North Pole.
But remember, there were no privileged qualities to European peoples or their environments.
The diffusion model of European civilization ignored a vital counter-traffic in ideas and goods from the periphery, and it was invented to justify European economic and political expansion.
No, it was invented to explain it.
We know it happened.
How did it happen?
The argument is either Europeans are just naturally more gifted than others, or there was some kind of environmental factor involved.
And this is what Jared Diamond and all of these other people are postulating.
At Clark University, Jim remains something of a legend.
With Dick Peet, David Steer, Ben Wisner, and other radicals, he participated in Antipode's Modest Beginnings and contributed several seminal and off-printed contributions to that journal in his pioneering Radical Years.
Brilliant.
Jim was presented with a Distinguished Scholarship Award from the AAG in 1997 for his original, influential scholarly contributions to geographical theory and practice.
As an uncompromising and articulate supporter of the academic left, involved in both academic debate and activism, he was committed to a vision of geography as a means to social justice.
I'm not going on any further.
Hank and John Green, you should be ashamed of presenting this unscientific work of propaganda on your channel.
This is nothing but ideologically informed Marxist bullshit.
It is an agenda in practice.
We are watching this person push her agenda, which is not informed by empirical reality, and suggesting that fucking science that is informed by empirical reality is false because it doesn't align with her ideological ideals.
Her video was an absolute disgrace, and you should be ashamed.
Just listen to this.
I suppose environmental determinism has always had this science-y feeling.
I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history.
So she says that Jared Diamond's thesis feels science-y, probably because it uses the scientific method.
That seems like a good idea to.
Because it is a good idea.
It's how science is done.
But the claims that this can produce reliable scientific answers to these problems just isn't true.
Except it appears to be true, and you have in no way refuted anything about this.
She just says it.
It just isn't true.
Why?
Because I say so.
Because I've said other things are ridiculous and racist throughout this video.
I haven't disproven anything.
I've just asserted things.
And Diamond resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism.
Jared Diamond is not a Marxist.
That's what you're saying.
He is not someone who is prepared to ignore reality in favour of his ideological preferences.
And that's why I take him a lot more seriously than I take this lady.
That is bad science.
And that's not what we're going to do in this series.
Bullshit.
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