| | Well, yes, Dean, but WHY was Russia the "Soviet Union" when Marx expected Britain France and Germany to be the first proletarian dictatorships?
Why do southerners all over the world suffer so much when they have all the resources -- and always had. For 10,000 years, they walked over the gold, the diamonds, the oil, the uranium. They had trade and commerce. I think that the story of Timbuktu is fascinating: salt from the sea across the desert for gold from Egypt. ... but it never changed or really improved the cultures it touched... I mentioned having a lesson from the Dalai Lama. The story of Tibet includes elements of capitalism that most people miss. How did this cold, dry place with no agriculture to speak of have a need for silver coins, such a need that these Buddhist monks went to war -- via a mercenary army -- to protect their currency from debasement! and yet... nothing came of that... The history of China shows inventions contemporaneous with or ahead of similar technologies in the West. Everyone knows that "spaghetti" is really ramen noodles. But nothing came of it...
The factors are complex. "Individualism" (so-called) is one factor, but Nigeria is regarded as an "individualist" place because of certain norms within the dominant populations: your success in life is up to you, basically, not a reflection of or on your family or tribe. It didn't do much for them...
In this case, I point to the fact that life is easy in the south. It is warm and pleasant. You get too hot if you run around and there is no need to run around: a little resource management goes a long way -- slash and burn, rotate your fields... It's pretty easy... So easy that they never rewarded intelligence the way people on the edges of the ice sheets did.
Then, there is the problem of "race" (so-called). The people who succeeded were those who were a genetic "melting pot" (i.e. dumping ground). They call new sailors "swabbies" and their first duty is to "swab" the deck. That is "Schwaben" the Swabians from upcountry Rheinland who followed the river down to the lowlands (Nether-lands) in search of adventure. England with its Britons, Romans, Saxons and Vikings and Normans constantly churned with new genetic inputs grew the people who founded a workable America. Spain was almost there... almost... Arab, Berber, Jew, German, Celt, Spain had it all, but the hegemony of Isabella cleared the table and Spain starved for intellecutal achievement. And then there is America, the classic case. Find me an American who is purely anything. The race-conscious tallies from Washington DC now have to let us pick which "Other" fills in our blanks. Statistically speaking, every population group has the same distribution, but not every group rewards the same individuals in the same ways.
So, there is ideology, culture, climate, genetics... to say nothing of weather... In this case, I would just say that the way to cure their problem is to bring a glacier all the way down to Tallahassee.
|
|
