March 14, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES had no domestic animals other than dogs. It is an observed fact that peoples who have no domestic animals other than dogs generally have no writing and no cities. Add turkeys to dogs, however, and the argument weakens. The Maya and the Aztecs, without beasts of burden, were able to build vast cities, towering stone temples (the insides were dirt, but some of them are still standing) and calendars that people still worry about today in terms of end-of-the-world predictions. The Quechuan peoples of the Andes, who culminated in the Incas, had only the llama as a beast of burden, but they built cities of marvelous stone architecture and engineering, with aqueducts and drains, and diverse and effective agriculture including the use of bird and llama droppings as fertilizer. The Incan people even appear to have had an agricultural research center at a place in the Andes called Moray, where they conducted systematic experiments to see just which subspecies of potatoes, beans, or corn would flourish at which altitudes. The Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas also had corn as a protein staple, augmented by potatoes and beans in the Andean cultures. The Melanesian islanders and the Africans had to rely, for the most part, on low-protein crops like manioc, and on hunting and fishing, which involve large amounts of labor in the simple gathering of food. Some African peoples, including the Zulu of South Africa, the Masai of Kenya, and the Herero of Namibia raised large herds of domestic cattle and goats, but lived on land that was generally too dry for large-scale farming. These people developed into warrior cultures like the Highland Scots or the ancient Irish and Vikings. This can either prove or disprove Diamond’s argument: Better protein sources take people out of caves and straw huts, but not necessarily into Athens. For that, you might need extensive trade. However, when you have extensive trade, you have wars for commerce, marriage for money, and the use of money to expiate taboo and vengeance and all the things that Spengler associated with “the decline of the West.” Diamond listed a number of factors that could contribute to our own decline in America, which he regarded as highly possible but not completely inevitable. As with his theory about the development of higher civilization, these are plausible. Diamond’s first culprit was defeat in war. No argument. A nuclear war could take civilization down around the globe, and continuing to rent an Army to everybody with a lobby in Washington will eventually exhaust that sliver of the U.S. population that is brave enough and smart enough to soldier, but not informed enough to see that overseas adventures for causes other than our own defense are expensive and damaging to America’s best interest – which IV • Page 15 Professor Jared Diamond says America is now engaged in a horse race of tremendous importance – and he is not referring to the Republican primaries. Professor Diamond’s metaphorical race features “the horse of destruction running against the horse of survival and prosperity and we don’t know for sure who is going to win the race.” Some years ago, Diamond wrote a book called “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” one of several attempts to explain the differences between the industrial cultures of northern Europe, northern Asia, and North America as opposed to the relative poverty of the rest of the world. Charles Darwin tried to explain this disparity purely on the basis of race. Darwin said the British and the Nordic peoples were evolved furthest from the monkey, and the least prosperous cultures were the least evolved. This is racism at its worst masquerading as science. While a lot of people still fall for it, there have been several dissenting opinions that appear to be more plausible, and less obnoxious. Oswald Spengler, writing a few decades after Darwin, fixated not on race as in color, but in “racial age.” Spengler argued that cultures go through a life cycle that begins with the rule of the priest and the warrior, but gradually slides into the rule of the businessman, followed by a slow collapse of prowess, if not total destruction. Spengler’s blinders were not as limiting as Darwin’s, and he was not as consistent a racist. Spengler, sadly enough, did not think much of Africa, but he understood that the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Arabs, and the native peoples of Mexico and of Peru had developed civilizations with cities, literature, commerce, and technology without input from Western Europe, and he absolutely understood the vast cultural debt that the Nordic peoples owed to Greece and Rome. Arnold Toynbee came just shortly after Spengler, and Toynbee cited the importance of climate. In countries with extreme climates, Toynbee said, people have to struggle so hard to live that they have no time for any artistic expression beyond love charms and hunting rituals. The Innuits, also called Eskimos, have remarkable mechanical skills but never built cities or developed a written language because they spent so much time hunting that they had no time, he said. Conversely, in areas like Polynesia, food from the sea and the tree is so easy to acquire that the people never developed large-scale agriculture, let alone record-keeping or organized thrift. My contact with California through my daughter and son-in-law confirms this. Nobody ever seems to stay inside long enough to read anything but e-mail. Diamond, at the end of the trail, came up with a theory that can be criticized as slightly PC, but is less racist than Spengler’s and much less racist than Darwin’s. Diamond based the lack of civilization in the Melanesian islands like New Guinea and Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, North America, and South America below the Andes on a lack of protein crops and plausible domestic animals. Old-fangled anthropologists used to define “savages” as people who Our horse race between survival and catastrophe is America. Another culprit is maladaptive internal politics. These are my words, not Diamond’s, but any intelligent economist knows that inventing more and more non-productive jobs and pointless college educations funded by taxes will not improve the troubled economy. The reverse is true. Neither should we invent corporate tax breaks that can increase the gap between the rich and the poor with the hope that more jobs will be created. Foreign trade? The website showed a Chinese flag as the backdrop for this one. Keep that thought. Is there anything still made in the U.S.A. that is not cigarettes, handguns, or a weapon of mass destruction? Somebody needs to develop a small, safe car that runs on electricity and never wears out. People would buy that even if it were made in America. Trousers with durable zippers would also be nice, but perhaps too much to hope for. Global warming. The schools keep punching Darwin’s ticket even though people in Europe and Israel know he was a dangerous fake and a crude racist, but there are not any “equal number of scientists” who argue that global warming is not man-made. There are a handful of hacks for the oil companies whose moral equivalents are those who advance the “controversial” aspect of cigarettes and cancer, and slip perilously close to Holocaust denial and other forms of junk history. People who still believe in white supremacy and that our high level of technology and civilization are based on race need a fly-around that covers Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, and Seoul. Where are all those quaint pagodas? Why are the streets so clean? How come the kids can do math? Of course, we are all safe from any real menace because they don’t do well at football. People who still believe there is no global warming need a slow boat to the fringes of the North Pole or the South Pole where they can see the polar caps shrinking and duck the icebergs falling off and melting down to threaten Venice and Brooklyn. Professor Diamond may not have the whole answer, but he has some big pieces of it. The fact that we defeated the Axis 70 years ago and the fact that we withstood Soviet communism, when most Russian people hated their own government, should make us feel grateful to the men and women who served, and relieved that the whole mess is over. Those victories should convince us that we were, and in most ways still are, the greatest country on Earth. They should not convince us that we are invulnerable in trade wars, impervious to environmental catastrophe, or destined to rule the world through the waste of American lives through bungled diplomacy. If the American people are great enough to face the facts with honesty and common sense, we can still win the horse race, but we had better realize we are in it. Making memories Top left: Dater Elementary School in Ramsey recently celebrated Read Across America. The children read ‘Wild about Books’ in Mrs. Kirch’s fourth grade class. Top right: Mrs. Horton’s fourth grade class celebrated Dr. Seuss’ 108th birthday by reading ‘Horton Hears a Who.’ Bottom left: Hubbard School kids read ‘The Cat in the Hat’ and ate green eggs and ham. Bottom right: Bruce Whitaker reads to his grandson Max and Max’s classmates Marcus, Kimmy, Holly, and Sydney.