The Revenge of Geography (9 page)

That raises the question of the rise and eventual fate of an urban Western civilization, morphing as we speak into a world civilization, and increasingly divorced from the soil. That inquiry will come later in the book. Meanwhile, I want to continue with McNeill, who, through it all, far more so than Spengler even, and far more intelligibly, is attentive to climate and geography.

McNeill writes, for example, that the Aryans developed a different, less warlike cultural personality in India’s Gangetic plain than they did in Mediterranean Europe because of the influence of the subcontinent’s forests and the monsoonal cycle, which encouraged
meditation and religious knowledge. In another example, he writes that Greek Ionia’s “precocity” was because of proximity to, and intimate contact with, Asia Minor and the Orient. And yet here, too, McNeill pulls back from outright determinism: for despite Greece’s mountainous terrain, which favored the establishment of small political units, i.e., city-states, he is careful to note that in a number of cases, “contiguous expanses of fertile ground were broken up” into different city-states, so that geography can only be part of the story. And above all, of course, there is the history of the Jews, which goes against the entire logic of the geographical continuity of major religions (particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism), and which McNeill therefore takes pains to include: the utter destruction of the Jewish community in Judea, the consequence of the crushing of first- and second-century
A.D
. revolts by the Romans, did not end Judaism, which went on improbably to evolve and flourish in scattered cities of the western Diaspora, a two-thousand-year-old story averse to the dictates of geography, which shows once again how ideas and human agency matter as much as physical terrain.
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And yet, too, there is the story of Europe, reaching back to the dawn of human history, a story very much about the primacy of geography. As McNeill points out, Western Europe had distinct geographical advantages which developments in technology during the so-called Dark Ages brought into play: wide and fertile plains, an indented coastline that allowed for many good natural harbors, navigable rivers flowing northward across these plains and extending the reach of commerce to a greater extent than in the Mediterranean region, and an abundance of timber and metals.
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Europe’s was also a harsh, cold, and wet climate, and as Toynbee, who, like McNeill, was, at a crucial level, not a fatalist, nonetheless writes: “Ease is inimical to civilisation.… The greater the ease of the environment, the weaker the stimulus toward civilisation.”
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And thus Europe developed because of a geography that was difficult in which to live but had many natural nodal points of transport and commerce. For civilizations are in many ways brave and fortitudinous reactions to natural
environments. Take the proximity of Scandinavia and the military pressure it brought to bear on Western European seaboards, which led to the articulation of England and France as national entities. England, moreover, being smaller than the feudal kingdoms of the continent, and, as Toynbee writes, “possessed of better-defined frontiers [after all, it was an island],” achieved far sooner than its neighbors a national as opposed to a feudal existence.
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Of course, some landscapes, the Arctic, for example, prove so difficult that they can lead to civilizational collapse, or to an arrested civilization. What precedes this, according to Toynbee, is a cultural tour de force—say, the Eskimos’ ability to actually stay on the ice in winter and hunt seals. But once having accomplished this feat of survival, they are unable to master the environment to the extent of developing a full-fledged civilization. Toynbee, as well as the contemporary UCLA geographer Jared Diamond, write legions about civilizational difficulties and downfalls among the medieval cultures of the Vikings of Greenland, the Polynesians of Easter Island, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, and the Mayans of the Central American jungles, all of which were connected to problems with the environment.
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Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.
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Witness Vasco da Gama’s mastering of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean, which allowed for the outer edges of Eurasia to become a focus of the world’s sea lanes under European dominance. But in McNeill’s narrative, it is not only the material advancement of Europe, under a challenging physical environment, that leads to the rise of the West, but the closing, as he puts it, of the “barbarian” spaces.
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McNeill talks of the “inexorable, if not entirely uninterrupted, encroachment of civilizations upon barbarism”:

This civilizational closure of the earth’s relatively empty spaces, mainly in the temperate zone, began in a fundamental way with the voyages of discovery: those of da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, and others. And it continued through the well-known stages of revolutions in industry, transport, and communications to the globalization we experience today. In between came the final collapse of the steppe peoples, with Russia, China, and the Habsburg Empire partitioning the relatively empty central Eurasian plains and tablelands. There was, too, the collapse of indigenous populations with the violent securing of the western frontier of the North American continent, and the European colonial encroachment on sub-Saharan Africa.
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The world, as McNeill describes it, is now finally united under a largely Western, increasingly urbanized culture. Remember that communism, while an extension of the totalitarian tendencies within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and, therefore, an affront to liberalism, was still an ideology of the industrialized West. Nazism, too, emerged as a pathology of an inflation-wracked, rapidly modernizing West. McNeill is not talking about political unity, but of broad cultural, geographic, and demographic tendencies.

While a central theme of
The Rise of the West
is the closing up of empty spaces on the map, obviously this is true in a relative sense only. The fact that two rail lines coming from opposite directions meet and touch each other does not mean that there still aren’t many empty or sparsely inhabited spaces in between. Frontiers may be closed in a formal sense, but the density of human population and electronic interaction keep increasing at a steep rate. And it is this rate of increase that helps to form the political drama of the world we inhabit today. McNeill could consider as united a world where no part of the civilized earth was further than a few weeks
from another part.
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But how does geopolitics change when the remotest places are separated by only a few days, or hours, as in our time? The world was, in a sense, united in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that world bears little relation in terms of demography and technology to that of the early twenty-first. The core drama of our own age, as we shall see, is the steady filling up of space, making for a truly closed geography where states and militaries have increasingly less room to hide. Whereas mechanized, early-modern armies of a century ago had to cross many miles to reach each other, now there are overlapping ranges of missiles. Geography does not disappear in this scenario, it just becomes, as we shall see, even more critical.

To look at the argument in another way, let me return to Morgenthau. Morgenthau writes that the very imperial expansion into relatively empty geographical spaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Africa, Eurasia, and western North America, deflected great power politics into the periphery of the earth, thereby reducing conflict. For example, the more attention Russia, France, and the United States paid to expanding into far-flung territories in imperial fashion, the less attention they paid to one another, and the more peaceful, in a sense, the world was.
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But by the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of the great nation-states and empires of the West was consummated, and territorial gains could only be made at the expense of one another.
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Morgenthau sums up:

Whereas Morgenthau’s vision, written during the tense, early Cold War years, spells danger, that of his university colleague McNeill, written in a later, more stable phase of the Cold War, spells hope:

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly seems to have borne out McNeill’s optimism. Yet the world is arguably as dangerous today as it was during the Cold War. For the map keeps closing in a multiplicity of ways. Take China: Mao Zedong, at great cost to be sure, consolidated China as a modern state, and China now rises economically (albeit at a slower pace) and militarily as a great power, filling up the Eurasian chessboard even more than Morgenthau could have imagined. Meanwhile, even the remotest parts of the world become further urbanized, and while Spengler could see the decline of culture in the desertion of the soil and agricultural life, sprawling and teeming urban conglomerations are, as McNeill intuited, now leading to the metamorphosis of religion and identity in vigorous and, albeit, troubling ways:
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Islam, for example, becomes less of a traditional, soil-based religion and more of an austere, in some cases ideological, faith, in order to regulate behavior in vast, impersonal slum settings where extended family and kinsmen are less in evidence. This leads to a Middle East of megacities and other urban concentrations in the former countryside that, while poor, are generally low in crime, even as the offshoot is occasionally a destabilizing global terrorism. Christianity, too, becomes, as a consequence of the stresses of suburban living in the American South and West, more ideological, even as a loose form of environmental paganism takes root in the cities of Europe, replacing traditional nationalism, given that the super-state of the European Union has only abstract meaning to all but the elite. Meanwhile, war is no longer, as in eighteenth-century Europe, the “sport of kings,” but an instrument of nationalist and religious fanaticism, whether on a large scale as in the case of Nazi Germany, or on a smaller scale as with al Qaeda.
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Add to that the awful specter of
nuclear weapons in the hands of radicalized elites at both the state and substate level. And in the midst of all these awkward, turbulent shifts, classical geography again rears its head, shaping tensions among the West, Russia, Iran, India, China, Korea, Japan, and so on, all of which we will need to explore in detail. McNeill’s thesis of interactions across civilizations has never been truer than today. But it would be a mistake to equate an emerging world culture with political stability: because
space
—precisely because it is more crowded and therefore more precious than ever before—still matters, and matters greatly.

Whereas McNeill’s scholarly eye scanned the entire earth, Marshall Hodgson’s scope, for our purposes, was narrower, encompassing the Greater Middle East. Still, Hodgson, a passionate Quaker who died at forty-six, demonstrates a prodigious ambition in his three-volume
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
, published in full in 1974, six years after his death. For this largely forgotten University of Chicago historian, so much less well known among contemporary journalists than other distinguished scholars of the Middle East, say, Bernard Lewis of Princeton or John Esposito of Georgetown, has in this monumental work put Islam geographically and culturally, according to McNeill, in the context of the larger currents of world history. Hodgson’s style can veer toward the academic and the opaque, but if the reader perseveres, he or she will be rewarded with an explanation as to how Islam was able to emerge, take root, and spread in the fabulous and often speedy way that it did, across not just Arabia and North Africa, but throughout the Indian Ocean littoral, and on land from the Pyrenees to the Tien Shan.
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It is important to note that Hodgson wrote much of
The Venture of Islam
in the 1950s and 1960s, when the media spotlight generally gave primacy to the Cold War in Europe. Yet he unfolds his theme in the first volume with the notion that this Eurocentric vision of the world has always been wrong, with the prejudice inherent early in mapping conventions.
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The “absurdity was disguised by the increasingly
widespread use of a drastically visually distortive world map, the Mercator projection, which by exaggerating northward manages to make an artificially bounded ‘Europe’ look larger than all ‘Africa,’ and quite dwarf that other Eurasian peninsula, India.” Hodgson then proceeds to shift the reader’s geographical focus southward and eastward, to what he calls the Oikoumene, the ancient Greek term for the “inhabited quarter” of the world, the temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass stretching from North Africa to the confines of western China, a belt of territory he also calls “Nile-to-Oxus.”
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There is a vagueness in these definitions, which at times contradict each other. For example, Nile-to-Oxus connotes a region with Egypt at its western end, whereas the Oikoumene could mean a zone that begins much further west along the Mediterranean’s African littoral. The point is that the rigid distinctions of Cold War–area expertise, at their apex when he wrote, with the Middle East sharply differentiated from both Anatolia and the Indian Subcontinent, fall away as Hodgson shows us a more organic geography, delimited by landscape and culture: i.e., that vast and generally parched expanse between the civilizations of Europe and China, Herodotus’s world actually, which Hodgson intimates holds the key to world history.