When Stalin and Roosevelt Argues

"Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples with farmers powers—those who have food—and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times. Storing food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists, and certainly for supporting whole towns. Hence, nomadic huntergatherer societies have few or no such full-time specialists, who instead first appear in sedentary societies. Two types of such specialists are kings and bureaucrats," Laluna set up a talk, after saying Basmalah and Salaam.

"They said," Laluna carried on, "once, Stalin and Roosevelt had an argument—either this is true or not, or they are just guessing—about why the West rules. They said, again, that Roosevelt said, 'The West rules because of geography. Biology tells us why humans push social development upward; sociology tells us how they do this (except when they don’t); and geography tells us why the West, rather than some other region, has for the last two hundred years dominated the globe. Biology and sociology provide universal laws, applying to all humans in all times and places; geography explains differences.

Biology—Darwin's theory, whether it's true or false—tells us that we are animals, and like all living things we exist only because we capture energy from our surroundings. When short of energy, we grow sluggish and die; when filled with it, we multiply and spread out. Like other animals, we are inquisitive but also greedy, lazy, and fearful; we are unlike other animals only in the tools we have for pursuing these moods—the faster brains, more pliable throats, and opposable thumbs that evolution gave us. Using these, we humans have imposed our wills on our environments in ways quite unlike other animals, capturing and organizing ever more energy, spreading villages, cities, states, and empires across the planet.'

Stalin refuted, 'In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plenty of Westerners thought biology was the whole answer to why the West rules. The white European race, they insisted, had evolved further than anyone else. They were mistaken. For one thing, the genetic and skeletal evidence is unequivocal: there is one kind of human, which evolved gradually in Africa around a hundred thousand years ago and then spread across the globe, making older kinds of humans extinct. The genetic differences between modern humans in different parts of the world are trivial.

Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else, but anyone who does want to take this line will need to show that all the mettle was somehow bred out of Westerners in the sixth century CE, then bred back in in the eighteenth; or that Easterners bred themselves into superiority in the sixth century, then lost it in the eighteenth. That, to put it mildly, is going to be a tough job. Everything suggests that wherever we look, people—in large groups—are all much the same.'

Roosevelt argued, 'We cannot explain why the West rules without starting from biology, since biology explains why social development has kept moving up; but biology alone is not the answer. The next step is to bring in sociology, which tells us how social development has increased so much.'

Stalin denied, 'Adding sociology to biology explains much of the shape of history, telling us how people have pushed social development upward, why it rises quickly at some times and slowly at others, and why it sometimes falls. Yet even when we put them together, biology and sociology do not tell us why the West rules. To explain that, we need geography.'

'Let me put it this way,' says Roosevelt, 'At the end of the Ice Age, around fifteen thousand years ago, global warming marked off a band of Lucky Latitudes (roughly 20–35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New) where an abundance of large, potentially domesticable plants and animals evolved. Within this broad band, one region, the so-called Hilly Flanks of southwest Asia, was luckiest of all. Because it had the densest concentration of potential domesticates it was easier for people who lived there to become farmers than for people anywhere else. So, since people (in large groups) are all much the same, Hilly Flankers were the first to settle in villages and domesticate plants and animals, starting before 9000 BCE. From these first farmers descended the societies of the West. About two thousand years later people in what is now China—where potential domesticates were also plentiful, though not so plentiful as in the Hilly Flanks—moved the same way; from them descend the societies of the East. Over the next few thousand years people independently began domesticating plants and/or animals in half a dozen other parts of the world, each time beginning another regional tradition.

Because Westerners were the first to farm, and because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners were also the first to feel the paradox of development in a serious way and the first to learn what I have called the advantages of backwardness. Rising social development meant bigger populations, more elaborate lifestyles, and greater wealth and military power. Through various combinations of colonization and emulation, societies with relatively high social development expanded at the expense of those with lower development, and farming spread far and wide. To make farming work in new lands such as the sweltering river valleys of Mesopotamia, farmers were forced practically to reinvent it, and in the process of creating irrigation agriculture discovered advantages that made this rather backward frontier even more fruitful than the original agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks. And some time after 4000 BCE, with the biggest farming villages in the crowded Hilly Flanks struggling to manage, it was the Mesopotamians who worked out how to organize themselves into cities and states. About two thousand years later the same process played out in the East too, with the paradox of development exposing somewhat similar advantages of backwardness in the valleys that fed into the Yellow River basin.

Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery. After 1550 BCE Western cities and states bounced back from the disasters and expanded around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extraordinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges. When social development reached about twenty-four points the forces of disruption on this wide-open frontier spun out of control, and around 1200 BCE the horsemen of the apocalypse rode (or, to mix the metaphor, sailed) again. The Western core collapsed even more dramatically than before, ushering in a centuries-long dark age.

Thanks to the paradox of development, the lead in social development that geography had given the West at the end of the Ice Age was long-term but not locked in. Collapses are unpredictable things. Sometimes a few different decisions or a little good luck can postpone, reduce, or even head off disaster; our choices can make a difference. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought. Because Westerners failed to reorganize and rethink around 1200 BCE, their lead over the East in social development narrowed; and because Westerners and Easterners both succeeded in making the necessary adjustments as development rose in the first millennium BCE, they remained neck and neck for a thousand years.

Westerners and Easterners alike created more centralized states and then full-blown empires, and after 200 BCE reached a scale that began changing the meanings of geography again. In the West, the Roman Empire brought the unruly Mediterranean under control and social development spiked up past forty points. By the first century CE, it was pressing against the hard ceiling. At the same time, though, the rise of the Roman and Han empires, also changed the meaning of the vast spaces that separated East and West. With so much wealth at each end of Eurasia, traders and steppe nomads found new reasons to move around, tentatively linking the cores and beginning the First Old World Exchange. Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart after 150 CE.

Both East and West slid into new dark ages in which second-wave Axial thought (Christianity, Islam, and new forms of Buddhism) displaced older first-wave ideas, but in other ways their collapses were quite different. In the West, Germanic invaders broke up the less-developed part of the Roman Empire around the western Mediterranean, and the core retreated into its older and more developed heartland around the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, Inner Asian invaders broke up the older and more developed part of the former Han Empire around the Yellow River, and the core retreated into the less-developed lands beyond the Yangzi River.

This geographical contrast made a world of difference. By 450 CE a new frontier of rice agriculture had begun booming around the Yangzi; by 600 China had been reunited; and over the following century the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, gave China a system of internal waterways that functioned rather like the Mediterranean had done for ancient Rome. In the West, though, where the Arab invaders were strong enough to break up the old Mediterranean core but not strong enough to remake it, social development kept falling until 700.

Around 541 Eastern development rose above Western (proving beyond all doubt that Western rule was never locked in) and by 1100 was pressing against the hard ceiling. As economic growth outran resources, ironworkers tapped into fossil fuels, inventors created new machines, and Song dynasty intellectuals plunged into a veritable Chinese renaissance. But like Rome a thousand years before, the Song Chinese could not break the hard ceiling.

To some extent, events in the early second millennium BCE, paralleled those in the first, but with East and West, reversed. Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again. Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean suffered most, and by 1400 a new core was forming and having its own renaissance in western Europe.

These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and—to their surprise—bumped into the Americas.

Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the riches of the Indian Ocean than into the empty Pacific and by pushing inland into the steppes, which had been the greatest threat to their security for nearly two thousand years.

In the seventeenth century, the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, disaster was held at bay long enough for western European entrepreneurs to respond to the incentives of the oceanic highway by unleashing the awesome powers of coal and steam.

Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners—which meant that because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first.'

'I don't believe that such kind argumentations, 'cause it's just a way to crook my brain.  It's not Geography, it's Capitalism, which we've both adopted,' Stalin denied, 'All right then, let's put it this way, to prove who's more right, how about to prove, whose bodyguards are more loyal, and let's order them to jump out of the window, on the fifteenth floor.'

'Well, who's who, let's do it!' Roosevelt answered the challenge. Sadly, Roosevelt’s bodyguard flatly refused to jump, saying, 'I’m thinking about the future of my family.'

Stalin’s bodyguard, however, jumped out of the window and fell to his death. Roosevelt was taken aback. 'Tell me, why did your man do that?' he asked. Stalin lit his pipe and replied, 'He was thinking about the future of his family, too!'"

Laluna wrapped up the talk by saying, "That's the way it is. And Allah knows best."

Citations & Reference:
- Ian Morris, Why the West Rules for Now, Profile Books

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