written for:
Facts, Evidence, Analysis seminar with David Warner
The Facts about Causation
And now we deal with blanca
culpa, white
guilt, and the manner in which Western historians apologize and explain
Europe’s imperialism, from within a culture created by Colonialism, or
what Crosby once called “Biological Expansion”[1]. It is interesting that many of these
works describing the reasons for the greater impact of one society on the rest
of the world do not examine how much of that intrusive impact is still active,
following an inertia of its own, while scholars and educators think that their
opinions on the ethicality of this have made enough of an impact. I’d like to note that I am more
aware of any potential political incorrectness in such a discussion than the
fervently conscientious J.M. Blaut in The Colonizer’s Model of the
World, and
nevertheless consider my mind infected with certain Eurocentric manners of
thought. That said, I will
occasionally deliberately break from such constrictions of terms, because
overly differentiating terms are generated by the differentiations of
history. People are not all born
equal, although looked at from far enough away (which actually isn’t that
far) the qualities of their cultures can be. Sometimes, Eurocentric apologeticism will provide too many
excuses, leading to a kind of historical inevitability that makes alternative
writings of history like those in What If? 2 as vague and uninventive as
they are. The difference between
an introspective explanation of European uniqueness and an extraspective one like Blaut’s
counterargumentative The Colonizer’s Model of the World is a quantity of excuses or of
historical causes. While Crosby
tends to exalt a number of interrelated qualities of society and their
evolution, Blaut disproves every possible excuse but one. That one (income from the New World)
has its own causes examined in other works I will present.
The ideas of greatest interest
in The Measure of Reality are those concerning time, and thus the invention of the clock
is pivotal for Crosby in the profligation of quantitative measurement. The inventor of clockwork is unknown,
so it is presumptuous of Crosby to assume it was someone within Europe. Blaut claims that until contact with
the New World, technologies tended to diffuse throughout the world system so
rapidly that they rarely contributed to one society’s superiority over
another. In many ways, cyclical
time weds itself with the idea of qualitative eras, and cyclical time can also
apply to Blaut’s debunked Orient express idea, allowing the imaginary
center of civilization to circle around and around the globe, given
environmental balance. Crosby
associates one era with a rather nebulous kind of change, while Blaut defines
another era with a specific economic change. These two studies are in fact particularly notable for their
segmentation of time. When one
isolates an era one associates a quantity with a quality, in the inverse to the
way in which Crosby describes the backward medieval European view that
“the different qualities of the different ages could even cause
quantitative differences.”[2] All quality can ultimately be read as
quantity; one has to add the corollary that this only applies to certain
qualities of perspective.
Nevertheless individual quanta do have qualities, similar to the way
historians are attempting to define their respective eras ( either
Crosby’s fifty years between approximately 1250-1350 or Blaut’s
temporal-landmark-bordered 1492-1688A)
by qualities, in Crosby’s case one of rationality and in Blaut’s a
resolute dependence on quantitative causes. The idea that quantification is superior is placing these
qualities along a scalar measurement.
Believing an individual historical argument, is a “flying leap of
faith” similar to assuming the world “is temporally and spatially
uniform and thus susceptible to such examination.”[3] Sometimes all that matters is how
interesting the idea is. In
Blaut’s case, the argument becomes superior through its political
correctness as well as the burden of faith-taken evidence: it is better for
education and application for a theory of extreme equality to be feasible than
one of miraculous qualitative superiority. Blaut and Crosby tackle what is probably the main issue of
world history, best explained by Jared Diamond in his half-anthropological work
Guns, Germs, and Steel when he quoted his New Guinean friend Yali’s
question(apparently translated rather awkwardly from Yali’s language):
“why is it you white people had so much cargo and carried it to New
Guinea, while we black people had little cargo of our own?” The Measure of Reality is only one of Crosby’s
several studies on this topic, and the most Eurocentrically inward-looking; he
always considers Europe’s apparent imperialistic success (in measuring
reality quantitatively, it is that comparison of cargoes that is most
revelatory) within what Blaut calls “tunnel-vision”. Tunnel vision is perhaps too extremely
antagonized; after all, separate cultures do focus on their own histories more
than those of others,, for reasons of expediency, language, etc. Part of the problem of studying the
rise of Europe is that it depends on divisions into “worlds”: the “Inside
and outside” as Blaut puts them, which he seems to convey derived from
the original division of old world and new. Crosby, in his more expansive, although less thematically
exciting, book Ecological Imperialism, addresses the old/new world division by devoting
his first chapter (obviously with no chronological limits this time) to the
splitting of Pangaea, and ultimately claims that the old world dominated the
new not only through “infection” of its human population but
hostile takeover of its entire ecology which, because humans had arrived more
recently, had been thrown off balance by the addition of that new
predator. However, most of his
comparisons with this New World success, which Blaut uncharacteristically skims
over, are those of Europe’s other attempts at Imperialism: as if the
history of the world was dependent solely on Europe just finding the best place
to take over. Diamond, like Blaut,
determines that the quality (the “geographic determinism” of which
Blaut is only slightly less wary than other inherent qualities) of geography
led to Europe’s accumulation of cargo, that is: Eurasia is oriented
laterally so that ecological elements helpful to civilization can diffuse along
areas of similar climate, while the Americas are “oriented”
longitudinally and land crops couldn’t diffuse. This idea is somewhat deterministic and invites the
increasing sense of inevitability of history one gets when listing
excuses. Diamond, when askedB about relocation off-planet in a Really
New World manner of species preservation, seemed entirely dumbfounded by the idea
of humanity in any environment other than earth: the constants of geographical
determinism then instantaneously vary to a much greater degree than they did
during the millions of years it took for Pangaea to split. Later in Guns, Germs, and Steel he pursues the kind of
argument about Europe’s divisive coastline that Blaut also declines to
entertain, directly comparing it with China and implying that geography
fostered multiple nations and thus a capitalist spirit of competition that
allowed Christopher Columbus, once rebuked by several Italian princes, to
propose his journey to Isabella of Spain.
Theodore Cook’s essay in What If? About the potential discovery
of America by the Chinese (a successor to Zheng He leading the expedition
across the Pacific) fails to take into account the naval improbability of this,
although Blaut notes that Europe really was best situated for contact with the
Americas, as does Crosby in Ecological Imperialism, although he seems inclined to
offer a greater quantity of causes for the Iberian exploratory drive than
this. Blaut, in his overemphasis
of the date 1492, fails to consider the example of Leif Erikson and the Norse,
who did encounter Vinland via the northern route, established a settlement, and
then died out, either killed by the local indigenous Vinlanders or by the small
Ice Age that followed. So
technological superiority (caused, Diamond might argue, by a faster developent
of surplus-generating societies) may have had something to do with the Iberian
successes in Blaut’s later proto-Capitalist age; the quality of the
expedition played some part.
Perhaps it was simply again a matter of quantity of diseases.
Both Crosby’s and
Blaut’s comments on scientific cosmology are particularly annoying and
demonstrate the problems of a practicioners of the humanities attempting to
regulate science. Crosby describes
astrophysicists as using the “nose-thumbing titele the big bang in order to minimize the
drama” [4]of
creationism. The term was actually
chosen by the nose-thumbing Einsteinian opposition who believed in a temporally
infinite universe. Blaut goes even
further in his misunderstanding, with his usual normalizing contempt thrown in:
“the so-called big bang theory, the theory that everything began at one
space-time point and this point was here, seems to be diffusionism on the largest canvas
of all.”[5] This is wrong: there is no center of
the universe except possibly that of the observer, and space-time expands in
all directions, just irregularly enough to have stars, planets, people, and
other variable densities of matter.
To claim this concept is an “infection” of diffusionist
ideas feels the same to one knowledgeable in science as claiming to an Iroquois
that only Europeans could have invented democracy. Blaut barely even considers non-centric ideas of
diffusionism, and doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the meaning of the
date with which he divides his history.
The number of people in Columbus’s expedition, and the amount of
time they stayed on a few islands off the coast of South America, in miniscule
compared with the populations of Europe or the Americas at the time, and
signals only the tiniest change in the trends of history that would rightly
take the next 300 and more years to play out. One cannot, like Crosby, wield the tendencies of an entire
culture just to explain the actions of a few people. It must be from these few people that the wealth and news of
the New World, according to Blaut’s model, diffused.
Blaut, J.M. The
Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric
History. New York/London: The Guilford Press,
1993.
Cook, Theodore F.
“The Chinese Discovery of the New World, 15th
Century” from What If? 2, see McNeill below.
Crosby, Alfred W.
Ecological
Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
(An
inherently diffusionist book, but with a fascinatingly global
hypothesis.)
The Measure of Reality:
Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.
McNeill, William H.
“What If Pizarro had not found Potatoes in Peru?” from What
If? 2 ed.
Robert Cowley. New York: G.B.
Putnam’s sons.
[1] Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
[2] Crosby, The Measure of Reality, p. 29
A John E. Wills Jr. produced a book, 1688, which attempts to narrate events throughout the world in that single year alone, an example of history-as-entertainment based on quantitative limits
[3] Crosby, Measure, p. 17
B by myself, yes.
[4] Crosby, Measure, 27.
[5] Blaut 219