Ron Braithwaite 2008-09-29
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I was tempted to give Jared 5 stars based on the extent of his information and his strength of his argument. I gave him only 4 stars because, although I think he is 75% correct, I think he has ignored or denies factors that may be important.
Early in his book, Kali, an intelligent New Guinean and would-be shaker and mover asks a significant question. "Why does the white man have more cargo [goods, stuff, useful things] than we do? Jared, correctly in my opinion, refutes the politically incorrect view that New Guineans must be less intelligent than whites. Quite the contrary, Jared asserts. New Guineans, on the average, are more intelligent than whites.
A little like Jared, I've had the opportunity to live with 'primitive' people and have seen their superiority to me in things like bushcraft, tracking, spacial orientation and other things....yet.... they are not necessarily more intelligent than I am. Their experience is simply different than mine. I agree, however, that they are, on the average, intelligent people dealing with problems somewhat different those of 'civilized' individuals.
Jared attributes the dominance of Western Man over almost all other peoples of the earth because of our geographical location and because of the fortuitous presence of large wild animals that had the potential for domestication i.e. animals like the auroch, wild horse, ibex, wild sheep etc. In the Americas, for instance--despite the fact that the meso-Americans and Andean peoples may have been superior to Western peoples in terms of agriculture--the only domesticatable wild animal available to them may have been the vicuna. Therefore, native-americans were obliged to carry things themselves. Hence Cortes conquered Mexico, rather than Montezuma conquering Spain.....but....We know, from toys discovered that the ancient Americans understood the wheel. Why then didn't they discover the wheel-barrow propelled by a single person? It would have made the construction of monuments and almost everything else, a lot easier.
Maybe. On the other hand, the horse, cattle, sheep, goats and a myriad of other creatures were available to the peoples of the entire 'old world.' Despite this, Europeans and Middle Easterners made the most effective use of them. Why?
Indeed, why? Let me postulate another couple of scenario. Let us imagine, that human societies spread over the earth are like the atmosphere spread over the earth. Why a storm in one place and not another? Perhaps a very minor, almost imperceptible perturbation, causes major changes down the line. A slight shift in atmospheric pressure over China and there's a devastating hurricane in Louisiana...a slight cultural perturbation, perhaps in now Albania, and Pizarro burns Atahualpa at the stake? Maybe the 'superiority' of Western culture is no more than a happenstance.
Also, although now largely discredited, who really knows if there are differences in the way that different brains work? This is not to say that certain brains are necessarily 'better' than others but that they might be different. Also, who is to say that industrialized, 'civilized' society is better than hunter gatherer societies? In many ways, it isn't. Civilized society is ulcerogenic. Hunter-gatherer societies are probably more satisfying and fun. Genesis, in the Bible, talks of man being thrown out of Paradise and having to work by the sweat of his brow. This is almost certainly an allegory about the replacement of enjoyable and care-free hunter-gatherer existence as opposed to the drudgery of early civilization.
Why is domination a function of a pressure wave produced by black powder in a pipe propelling a leaden slug? Luck?
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Conquest of Mexico
