Better than others

I have visited and stayed for an extended time in several European countries, lived in Russia, Ukraine and now in the US. In every country, I observed that people there felt special as a nation. Which is quite understandable – each of us feels somewhat special and unique. We have privileged access to our inner world of daring thoughts, good intentions and elaborate excuses for not following through on our goals. And we do not know what other people think. We guess, based on what they do, and we tend to excuse them less for not achieving their dreams. It seems that a similar attitude exists in a whole nation toward other nations.

There is even hard measurable evidence that supports this claim. We define progress in terms that are beneficial to us: do they have a TV? railroads? nuclear power? bombs? If they do not have all these things, we feel sorry for those people. To commiserate is in human nature.

Naturally, we would like to do something about it, to help those less fortunate to get on their feet. But what can we do? To answer this question, we need, I think, to understand why such a difference developed in the first place?

Many people tried to answer this question, but, for me, the best answer was given by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel

To summarize this book is not easy, because Jared writes very clearly and logically (I enjoyed every page of it), so to remove any of his statements would mean to make his message less supported. It covers a huge variety of facts and aspects of civilization. To give you an idea, here is the table of contents:

• Yali’s question: The regionally differing courses of history
• From Eden to Cajamarca. Up to the starting line: What happened on all the continents before 11,000 B.C.?
• A natural experiment of history: How geography molded societies on Polynesian islands
• Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not capture King Charles I of Spain
• The rise and spread of food production. Farmer power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel
• History’s haves and have-nots: Geographic differences in the onset of food production
• To farm or not to farm: Causes of the spread of food production
• How to make an almond: The unconscious development of ancient crops
• Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to domesticate plants?
• Zebras, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle: Why were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?
• Spacious skies and tilted axes: Why did food production spread at different rates on different continents?
• From food to guns, germs, and steel. Lethal gift of livestock: The evolution of germs
• Blueprints and borrowed letters: The evolution of writing
• Necessity’s mother: The evolution of technology
• From egalitarianism to kleptocracy: The evolution of government and religion
• Around the world in five chapters. Yali’s people: The histories of Australia and New Guinea
• How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia
• Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of Austronesian expansion
• Hemispheres colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas compared
• How Africa became black: The history of Africa
• The future of human history as a science
• Who are the Japanese?
• 2003 afterword: Guns, germs, and steel today.

He argues that the peoples of the Middle East and Europe conquered or displaced many other peoples on other continents not because of some biological advantage, but because of a particularly auspicious combination of features (especially well expressed in the Middle East, where the modern civilization originated):
– its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and
– its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticated animals, people, and technologies for long distances with little change in latitude.

European civilization took off a bit later than in the Middle East because of the colder climate. The Ice Age in Europe started around 110,000 BC and lasted up to 9,700-9,600 BC. By that time the monuments of Göbekli Tepe existed for 2,000 years already.

He explains that only a few species of wild plants and animals are suitable for domestication and almost all of them originate in Eurasia.

Then he shows how local food production led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, and centralized political organization.

After that, he compares it with the development of food production and of human societies on other continents.

That is about reasons for the advancements in the development of social systems in Eurasia. The population concentration created conditions for epidemic infectious diseases, which in turn fortified the immune system of the future conquerors.

But Jared does not stop there. Based on his “33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies”, he drops the bomb on our hubris: “From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.”

And he points to two factors that explain New Guineans’ superior intelligence:

– European cultures have spent thousands of years in areas so densely populated that infectious disease spread and became the major cause of death, while centralized government and law enforcement kept murder at a relatively low rate. In New Guinea, on the other hand, societies were too sparse for epidemics to evolve, making murder, accidents, and tribal warfare the primary causes of death. Smart people were more likely to escape murder and avoid accident, passing their intelligent genes forward;

– modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television and computer. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.

And he wrote it in 1997! Since then, the second factor affected the whole generation of westerners even more.

Those are just a few of striking statements, facts, and inevitable conclusions.

After reading it, one (at least me) has to admit that to correct unfairness in the world, we have to share what we got. I know, it sounds naive and socialistic – two “No!No!” in a cultivated and polite society. But I could not help feeling this way after reading the book. Please, let me know if you have the same or opposite reaction.

And while thinking about it, check out, if you have time, the two ideas:
– free culture movement, and
– a world without borders here and on Quora.

For me, they are all related ideas that together provide the solution. I am not saying it is easy, but it makes sense to me. Even more, I think, this solution is inevitable, and the idea of the world without borders provides us an opportunity to preview some aspects of our future. And you? What do you think?