Been thinking a lot about the underlying assumption here.
When I was halfway between reactionary to moderate lib, I accepted racism as bad, but didn't know why specifically its foundation is incorrect. I just went along with the consensus that it's bad.
Something nagged at the back of my mind. Why DID some cultures never develop much technology?
It turns out, technological development relies on natural features of the land. The people occupying certain areas were always going to build up faster.
In short:
Some areas have useful domesticable animals. Those create stability.
Some areas have long east-west stretches. You can evacuate a drought zone and plant the same crops somewhere else, and survive. Going north or south means you don't know how to grow there.
Some areas are easier to defend than others.
Ultimately, this happened:
The middle east had nice docile useful animals
They also had easy east west movement
Technology advanced there, and spread to Europe. It couldn't and didn't originate in Europe.
Horsemanship made most of Asia really easy to raid. (Later, horses would make North America really easy to raid, and nomads took over from previous sedentary inhabitants there too.)
Suddenly Europe had the most stability, because it was easier to defend against Scythians, Parthians, Mongols etc
From there, Europe was capable of trashing the rest of the world, who never benefited from these very particular circumstances. Everyone else was blocked by geography essentially.
It's obviously a gross oversimplification. But learning about that made it finally click for me that the disparities in different races positions today are just the inevitable results of material conditions spanning tens of thousands of years. And I had never heard the words "material conditions"
It broke down the latent nagging mystification of white supremacy in my mind, and going into it, it seemed like nerdy archaeology stuff.
This is environmental determinism isn’t it? I’m far removed from my attempt at a history degree these days but I know it’s controversial among historians for its roots in eurocentrism and imperialism. Not that it isn’t always useful analysis (and your thought process isn’t wrong), but it also ignores human agency and cultural differences.
Can’t really go into much more since I’m not very well read on this stuff though.
I mean it's sort of that, but when you're talking about this scale of change... there aren't many decisions individual hunter-gatherers could have made 5,000 years ago that would have made agriculture not suck in their area, or individual decisions that a modern day hunter-gatherer could make today that will move anything tomorrow.
All historical figures we talk about had some connection to real power - either they directly wielded it or they had some influence over it. Individual decisions could change the course of history, flip power dynamics, etc. but only to a certain degree. The environment can be a strong limiter on human choices. If you can't eat or can't drink, you die.
I think that controversy must be centered around specific applications of environmental determinism, where it's deemed to be over applied. Nobody would argue that like, getting hit by a tsunami doesn't matter and it's really down to the individual choices of the people getting hit by a tsunami.
There's other environmental factors like not having the metals readily available that you can forge to mine other metals, etc. that can hold back an area from advancing.
I could definitely see where people could get obsessed with this deterministic line of thinking and totally mis-analyze all kinds of situations.
Been thinking a lot about the underlying assumption here.
When I was halfway between reactionary to moderate lib, I accepted racism as bad, but didn't know why specifically its foundation is incorrect. I just went along with the consensus that it's bad.
Something nagged at the back of my mind. Why DID some cultures never develop much technology?
It turns out, technological development relies on natural features of the land. The people occupying certain areas were always going to build up faster.
In short:
Ultimately, this happened:
The middle east had nice docile useful animals
They also had easy east west movement
Technology advanced there, and spread to Europe. It couldn't and didn't originate in Europe.
Horsemanship made most of Asia really easy to raid. (Later, horses would make North America really easy to raid, and nomads took over from previous sedentary inhabitants there too.)
Suddenly Europe had the most stability, because it was easier to defend against Scythians, Parthians, Mongols etc
From there, Europe was capable of trashing the rest of the world, who never benefited from these very particular circumstances. Everyone else was blocked by geography essentially.
It's obviously a gross oversimplification. But learning about that made it finally click for me that the disparities in different races positions today are just the inevitable results of material conditions spanning tens of thousands of years. And I had never heard the words "material conditions"
It broke down the latent nagging mystification of white supremacy in my mind, and going into it, it seemed like nerdy archaeology stuff.
This is environmental determinism isn’t it? I’m far removed from my attempt at a history degree these days but I know it’s controversial among historians for its roots in eurocentrism and imperialism. Not that it isn’t always useful analysis (and your thought process isn’t wrong), but it also ignores human agency and cultural differences.
Can’t really go into much more since I’m not very well read on this stuff though.
I mean it's sort of that, but when you're talking about this scale of change... there aren't many decisions individual hunter-gatherers could have made 5,000 years ago that would have made agriculture not suck in their area, or individual decisions that a modern day hunter-gatherer could make today that will move anything tomorrow.
All historical figures we talk about had some connection to real power - either they directly wielded it or they had some influence over it. Individual decisions could change the course of history, flip power dynamics, etc. but only to a certain degree. The environment can be a strong limiter on human choices. If you can't eat or can't drink, you die.
I think that controversy must be centered around specific applications of environmental determinism, where it's deemed to be over applied. Nobody would argue that like, getting hit by a tsunami doesn't matter and it's really down to the individual choices of the people getting hit by a tsunami.
There's other environmental factors like not having the metals readily available that you can forge to mine other metals, etc. that can hold back an area from advancing.
I could definitely see where people could get obsessed with this deterministic line of thinking and totally mis-analyze all kinds of situations.