Dominance—In
this era of heightened awareness of multiculturalism, empathy for dominance
itself becomes a likely
and popular response. With an
imaginative leap, it is temping to go no further than to focus in a predictable
and racist way on one element of Euroamerican contact with other cultures.
The societies seem very different, but the most egregious difference is
one that leads directly to behavior. Native
societies, especially Amerindians but also Chinese as well as others, welcomed
Europeans and strove to cooperate and to share.
What was the response? Land
takeover, broken treaties, technology used to conquer and oppress, standing
armies of professional soldiers used to subdue and corral.
Out of all the differences we’ve traced—political, technological,
biological, philosophic, and economic—the last difference can usurp balanced
judgment because it seems so paramount, so documented by history, so immediately
apparent. Why?
It leads most directly to action.
It is actions that an empathic, sentimental description tends to
demonize, ascribing the nature of the encounter to an essentialism in white
Euroamerican culture, an essentialism that manifests itself either by an innate
desire to dominate or by an uncontrollable greed. This reading of
history gives an explanation that centers on single cause--either a
racial/cultural need to dominate or a racial/cultural
greed. Greed, solely greed, motivates using superior technology to
dominate. Greed alone motivates
marshaling the resources of a professional soldier class to dominate and to
exploit. Greed alone motivates even
the most egregious examples of biological warfare in which germs were used as
weapons. Greed motivates political
machinations by which treaties were broken and good-faith negotiations
eviscerated. Greed motivates
individual land grabs and a westward movement that regarded native resistance as
worthy of all-out war.
However, single cause always oversimplifies—especially when applied
with broad brush to an entire people. It
is as implicitly racist to claim that white Euroamericans are universally,
biologically, genetically, racially greedy as it is implicitly racist not to ask
“Why Europe?” and to assume by default that white Europeans were uniquely
inventive, uniquely capable of understanding wheels and steam and gunpowder and
cannons and steel production and all the rest.
In the encounter of white Europeans with other peoples, the whole suite
of accidental conditions operated. Each
society followed its own imperatives, acting in ways appropriate to its purpose,
function, organization, and development. White
Europeans lived in state societies with money economies and highly specialized
classes and functions, with long histories of technological development and with
a ground-breaking philosophic tradition generating new ideas about the
relationship of the individual and society.
Such a society regards land, the individual, and individual land
ownership absolutely, diametrically differently from nomadic, hunter-gatherer
societies or from chiefdoms with a mix of agriculture and hunting and gathering.
In those contexts, everything changes.
Everything, not just the degree of greed.
When such different societies encounter each other, each acted consistently with its most deeply-held assumptions . . . assumptions that permeated the very nature of their different societies. Though it is tempting to see white Europeans as unaccountably greedy, it is far more accurate to see them as accountably, predictably greedy. In fact, the entire legacy inherited from the Fertile Crescent, passed to Greece, passed to Italy seems to make them understandably so. In pursuing silver and gold, in claiming land in order to improve it, in pushing for state advantage through technological virtuosity, in fact, in demanding that the state act as a sovereign individual in its own self-interest, Euroamericans were following the imperatives of their own history, their accidental latitudinal advantage, their rich flora and fauna, and the head-start of millennia. In short, to vilify Euroamericans as greedy misses the point by sentimentalizing the clash of different civilizations. It is not, of course, that Euroamericans did not act greedy from the point of view of native societies but that they could hardly have acted differently. From the native viewpoint, tribes and chiefdoms simply did not, could not, act like that. From the Euroamerican viewpoint, the models for state societies (Greece and Rome) had acted like that quite successfully, and European state societies were contemporaneously acting like that.
The Six Characteristics
Politics
Economics
Technology
Biology
Philosophy
Dominance
Back to Geography as Premise