"Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive."

Somehow I doubt today's Indians will be lighting firecrackers in celebration.

Yes, but now they have gunpowder if they need it.

The idea that, yesterday, today or tomorrow, a stone age culture would be left alone on a new continent is ludicrous on its face.

As much as I tend to agree with the basic sentiments here, the idea that North America was sparsely populated in 1492 is apparently not true. See this fascinating article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/03/mann.htm

Seems that diseases caught from some of the earliest explorers killed off a huge fraction of the native populations. Not only that, but there's evidence that the Amazon rain forest may be, to a significant extent, a human artifact.

Ali, while you may be right in doubting whether Native Americans will be lighting any fire crackers to celebrate, it would be more provocative if you wondered why they would not. I suspect theit angst may be driven more by self-pity and envy as opposed to righful indignation. (I am not trivializing the sentiments that give rise to the former, we have all felt it as individuals; but when you let ot define your race/culture, you have real problems. Just ask Mohammed Atta...)

David is precisely right--human nature is what it is. Why the West should take the blame for that isn't at all clear.

Well, they had figured out the wheel, they just didn't have the kind of draft animals necessary to make it worthwhile. Blame Darwin for that.

Among the more fascinating episodes of history is the abandonment of the wheel in north Africa-west Asia after the barbarian invasions of Europe.

MG: Victimhood is the disease of our times.

oj: American humour literature is potentially losing a great talent. Write a book.

oj-

How did you get stuck? Were you trying to make a play on one of the hippie chicks?

I think anyone who advocates giving the land back to the Indians on Columbus Day should be told they will be taken seriously when they also commit to rounding up all the Palestinians and throwing them back into the Arabian Peninsula.

Harry:

They had buffalo, dogs, deer, etc.

Papaya:

Sparsely by both 15th century Europe's, and today's, standards, which the primitive native cultures could never have accomplished.

Buffalo, dogs & deer as draft animals. Now that's a laugh.

If all Britain had was buffalo, today they'd look like Holsteins.

I'm amenable to a bio-climatic explanation of
pre-Colombian backwardness (rather than racial).
But that's no excuse.

Many Europeans and their descendants who would
have lived in utter misery on a crowded denuded
continent have Columbus and the others to thank.

JH:

That's Jared Diamond's inane thesis, that civilization was sort of inherent in the biosphere in some places but not in others, with Man's presence being quite coincidental, so Europe had oxen just waiting to be yoked:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/529

Anthropologies have long agreed on the origin of
many of the major agricultural/domestication
innovations and very few of them occur in Europe.

Actually O.J. Europe's location is beneficial
in the sense that it borders on the mediteranean/near-eastern region which was unarguably an incubator for innovation several
thousand years ago.

The point is that Europeans were excellent at
adopting innovations when they were able to
see them first hand.

Diamond is a leftist, but I actually thought much of the argument was a fairly traditional physical antrhopology/ physical
geography approach.

By the way the notion that civilization sprang
largely from the Biblical homeland neither refutes
nor support the concept of theism.

Mesopotamians would have domesticated the buffalo.

An even more interesting question is why the
Indians didn't establish large scale agriculture
along the Mississippi basin? Clearly that would
be the place to do it?

The standard explanation for domestication is
that it is typically spurred by some type of
scarcity and therefore the desire to ensure
abundance.

There is no indication that a massive shortage of game (other than cyclical) ever occured in pre-columbian times. And the evidence does suggest
that the most settled groups lived in more
Arid locations (American southwest, Mexican and
South American highlands).

Which begs the question of why anyone settled there if game was so plentiful elsewhere?

Of what benefit would there be to domesticating the buffalo? Meat was just as abundant from hunting it. To help with farming? Until the invention of good enough steel for plows, not even Europeans could farm the Great American Desert. Lucky for the Pilgrims though, the Indians in New England were civilized enough to help them survive, or what are we reenacting at Thanksgiving each year?

I personally find Jared Diamond's thesis to be quite persuasive. It's not as deterministic as OJ thinks it is. One can still be proud of Western civilization for its achievements even after one sees what "biosphere advantages" they had and what other civilizations lacked. Or what they had, and the West lacked.

Diamond was speaking as an anthropologist mainly, not as a historian, and therefore emphasized what natural advantages certain areas gave to the people who lived there. What the people there DID with those advantages or failed to do depends on their culture, and the actions of ideas of unique individuals. There's nothing wrong in describing how where a people live affects their culture. Herodotus did the exact same thing when he explained why the Greeks were free.

The literature that I'm familiar with uses
climate change as a possible explainer for why
people live in arid or certain other inhospitable
regions. Adaptation to increasingly harsh conditions is a possible explanation for
innovation. I think all people and groups of
people have adapt or flee options in various
situations and for various reasons at various
times they make different decisions.

The pattern goes something like this...

a) people live in the Garden of Eden
b) Eden starts getting drier (hotter, colder etc.)
c) People either leave for new locations or adapt
to the change with success or failure.

In the case of the Nile and Mesopotamian civilizations they flourished for a time.
However, as the climate continued to get even
hotter and drier the civilization that was
created could no longer be supported with the
contemporary technological and cultural regime.

This argument is no more strictly deterministic
than saying that putting on a coat in cold
weather is a sign that man has no free will.

The fact that vast numbers of Europeans fled
their homeland over the past 500 years doesn't mean that those same people did not also have great adaptibility
in other circumstances.

JH:

So, the Pilgrims left Britain for America because of the climate?

Most "western" ideas and techniques came from western Asia except the ones that came from eastern Asia. Samuel Noah Kramer once wrote a book about the innovations of the Sumerians. I believe there were about 21 in the first edition. A few years later, he had it up to around 40.

Among them, however, was not iron, since they had no iron ore, nor any resources except water.

It is far from clear why early inventiveness was so restricted, why it came about in river valleys, why it spread (or did not spread) as it did.

I am not much of an admirer of the noble Red Man, but it would be inconsistent to contend that our American ancestors were happier in the 1950s or the 1670s and that our material advances have not improved matters much; and not to allow the redskins the same break.

New World technologies were as ingenious as Old World, but they seem not to have had the same development potential that some Old World discoveries did. Singer's ruminations on this (in the Oxford History of Technology) seem pertinent.

Both in ancient Egypt and in 19th c. Britain, there were discoveries -- presumably happenstance at first -- that tended to multiply. The Egyptians kept fooling around with glass and faience, for example, and ended up knowing a lot about heat-making, which they then adapted to new purposes.

As far as I know, no New World people ever stumbled onto glass or faience, though they did know how to make enamel. Why didn't enameling lead to the same kinds of technological efflorescence as glassmaking?

Hard to say.

The aesthetic sense is unpredictable (one of many counters to Orrin's claim that Darwinism is deterministic). The Mexicans developed featherwork to heights never approached anywhere else. The Sumerians had feathers, too, but they preferred to decorate themselves with other things.

Harry:

You see the story today that 15% of Europeans are suicidal. Of course Westerners were happier back when. We're only more affluent now.

I didn't see that. You could be right. Suicide rates were high in the past, too, though. Murder rates were much, much higher, too.

I look forward to dying with my boots off.

If one takes the anthropological approach to why a certain aboriginal culture failed to thrive, one can come up with interesting theories like lack of wheels, arable land and draft animals, but that tends to miss the point that aboriginal cultures the world over have proven incredibly fragile and tend to wither fast on contact with any of the great religions or civilizations. The warlike among them fight suicidally and lose, and the peaceful simply collapse in social chaos and thereafter try to eke out mean lives in isolated communities marked by widespread social pathologies. Can anyone name an aboriginal culture that adapted, grew or thrived after contact.

They also tend to remain defiant and blame all thir woes on oppressors, generation after generation, which might explain their success in tapping our guilt.

Man, you're looking for a lot of adaptation.

Can you name me any European group that moved into a tough envirnoment and adapted and thrived? Not in the first generation. The history of the Arctic and Australia is littered with the bones of Europeans who didn't think the locals knew anything much and starved or froze to death in consequence.

It seems to me, based on Polynesian experience, that the aboriginal cultures that collapse the fastest are the most stratified. The simple ones are pretty resilient.

Hawaii had the most highly stratified and sophisticated Polynesian culture and collapsed the fastest.

The point about most European innovation coming from the East is a good one. I can think of three times that China could've ruled the world, yet they didn't. In one instance, they didn't just not, they DECIDED not to. Or rather, a very small group of men, who held all the political and military power, decided not to.