Intellectuals and Race (3 page)

Such examples could be extended almost indefinitely,
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and so could the reasons for the disparities. But a more fundamental question must be faced: Was there ever any realistic chance that the various races would have had the same skills, experience and general capabilities, even if they had the same genetic potential and faced no discrimination?

Different races, after all, developed in different parts of the world, in very different geographic settings, which presented very different opportunities and restrictions on their economic and cultural evolution over a period of centuries.

There is no way, for example, that the patterns of economic and social life which originated and evolved in Europe could have originated among the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, where the horses that were central to everything from farming to transportation to warfare in Europe simply did not exist anywhere in the Western Hemisphere when the European invaders arrived and began transplanting horses across the Atlantic to the New World. Take horses out of the history of Europe and a very different kind of economy and society would have had to evolve, in order to be viable. Not only horses were lacking in the Western Hemisphere, neither were there oxen, which were common in both Europe and Asia. There were, in short, no such heavy-duty beasts of burden in the Western Hemisphere as existed on the vast Eurasian land mass, where most of the human race has lived throughout recorded history. The way of life in these different regions of the world had no basis on which to be the same— which is to say, there was no way for the skills and experiences of the races in these regions to be the same.

The wheel has often been regarded as fundamental to economic and social advances but, for most of the history of the human race, the value of wheeled vehicles depended to a great extent on the presence of draft animals to pull those vehicles— and there were no wheeled vehicles in any of the economies of the Western Hemisphere when the Europeans arrived. The Mayans had invented wheels, but they were used on children’s toys,
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so the issue was not the intellectual capacity to invent the wheel but the circumstances that make wheels more valuable or less valuable. Clearly, the way of life among the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere could not have been the same as that on the Eurasian land mass, when there were neither wheeled vehicles nor draft animals in the Western Hemisphere when the Europeans and their animals arrived. Regardless of which race lived in Europe or in the Western Hemisphere, they would have faced very different opportunities or restrictions as regards their economic and cultural development before they encountered each other, and could hardly have been the same at that time.

Geographic differences between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa are even more numerous and more drastic than those between Europe and the Western Hemisphere.
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In addition to severe geographic limitations on the production of wealth, due to deficiencies of soil and unreliable rainfall patterns,
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sub-Saharan Africa has had severe geographic restrictions on
communications among its own fragmented peoples, and of these peoples with the peoples of the outside world, due to a dearth of navigable waterways within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a dearth of natural harbors, the difficulties of maintaining draft animals because of the disease-carrying tsetse fly, and the vast barrier of the Sahara desert, which is several times the size of any other desert in the world, and as large as the 48 contiguous states of the United States. With an expanse of sand that size standing between them and the outside world to the north, and with three oceans on the other sides of them, the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the most insulated from the rest of the human race.

Isolated peoples in many parts of the world have for centuries lagged behind others, whether the isolation has been caused by mountains, deserts, or islands far from the nearest mainland. Eminent French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, “mountain life persistently lagged behind the plain.”
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The inhabitants of the Canary Islands were people of a Caucasian race who were living at a stone-age level when they were discovered by the Spaniards in the fifteenth century.
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On the other side of the world, the similarly isolated Australian aborigines similarly lagged far behind the progress of the outside world.
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Sub-Saharan Africans have been part of a worldwide pattern of isolated peoples lagging behind others in technology, organization and in other ways.

In addition to having many geographic barriers limiting their access to the peoples and cultures of other lands, sub-Saharan Africans also faced internal geographic barriers limiting their access to each other. The resulting internal cultural fragmentation is indicated by the fact that, while Africans are only about ten percent of the world’s population, they have one-third of the world’s languages.
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Eventually, the severe isolation of many sub-Saharan Africans was ended in the modern era, as that of other severely isolated peoples was ended, but that was after millennia in which these isolated peoples had developed whole ways of life very different from the ways of life that developed among those peoples of Europe and Asia who had far greater access to a far wider cultural universe. Moreover, cultures— whole ways of life— do not simply evaporate when conditions change, whether among Africans or others.
Long-standing and deep-seated cultural differences can become cultural barriers, even after the geographic barriers that created cultural isolation have been overcome with the growth of modern transportation and communication. As distinguished cultural historian Oscar Handlin put it: “men are not blank tablets upon which the environment inscribes a culture which can readily be erased to make way for a new inscription.”
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As another noted historian put it: “We do not live in the past, but the past in us.”
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Even the geographic differences between Eastern Europe and Western Europe
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have left the peoples of Eastern Europe with a lower standard of living than that of Western Europeans for centuries, including in our own times a larger economic disparity between the people in these two regions of Europe than the per capita income disparity between blacks and whites in the United States.
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As Professor Angelo Codevilla of Boston University put it, “a European child will have a very different life depending on whether that baby was born east or west of a line that starts at the Baltics and stretches southward along Poland’s eastern border, down Slovakia’s western border and along the eastern border of Hungary, then continues down through the middle of Bosnia to the Adriatic Sea.”
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Both geography and history have for centuries presented very different opportunities to people born east and west of that line.
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In addition to the inherent geographic advantages that Western Europe has had over Eastern Europe— for example, more navigable waterways leading to the open seas, with Western European rivers and harbors not being frozen over as often or as long in winter as rivers and harbors in Eastern Europe, due to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream on Western Europe— another major historic advantage growing out of geography is that Western Europe was more readily accessible to invasion by Roman conquerors. Despite the ruthless slaughters in those conquests and the subsequent brutal oppressions by the Roman overlords, among the lasting advantages which the Roman conquests brought to Western Europe were Roman letters, so that Western European languages had written versions, centuries before the languages of Eastern Europe did.

To the enormous advantages of literacy, as such, Western Europeans had the further advantage of a far greater accumulation of written knowledge in their languages, even after the languages of Eastern Europe began to
develop written versions, but still had not yet caught up with the centuries-long accumulations of knowledge written in Western European languages.

Literacy was not the only thing that moved from west to east in Europe. So did coins, printing presses, castles, crossbows, paved streets, and vaccinations, among other economic and social advances. But all of this took time, sometimes centuries. Moreover, people from Western Europe— Germans, Jews and others— were often a majority of the population in Eastern European cities in earlier centuries, while Slavs remained a huge majority in the surrounding countrysides. For example, before 1312 the official records of the city of Cracow were kept in German— and the transition, at that point, was to Latin. Only decades later did Poles become a majority of the population in Cracow.
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The towns of medieval East Central Europe were often cultural enclaves of foreigners— again, mostly Germans, but with many Jews as well and, in the Balkans, Greeks and Armenians, joined in later centuries by Turks.
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In short, there has been for centuries, not only a disparity between the opportunities and advances in the two halves of Europe, but great disparities within Eastern Europe itself between the indigenous peoples of the region and the transplanted Western Europeans living in Eastern Europe, the Baltic and the Balkans. Neither genes nor discrimination are necessary to explain this situation, though some intellectuals and politicians have chosen to claim that the differences have been due to race and others have chosen to blame social injustices. Many other racial and other groups in many other parts of the world have likewise ended up with large disparities in opportunities and achievements, for reasons that range across a wide spectrum and cannot be reduced to genes or injustices.

How could people living in the Himalayas develop the seafaring skills of people living in ports around the Mediterranean? How could the Bedouins of the Sahara know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific— or the Polynesians know as much about camels as the Bedouins? How could Eskimos be as proficient at growing tropical crops as the people of Hawaii or the Caribbean?

Such considerations are far more crucial for practical knowledge than for academic knowledge. Ph.D.s in mathematics can have the same knowledge
in Delhi as in Paris. However, in the world of mundane but consequential knowledge, how could an industrial revolution have originated in places which lack the key natural resources— iron ore and coal— and are too geographically inaccessible for those resources to be transported to them without prohibitive costs? The industrial revolution could hardly have begun in the Balkans or Hawaii, regardless of what people were living there—
and neither could the people in those places have developed the same industrial skills, habits and ways of life
at the same time as people in other places where the industrial revolution did in fact begin.

There is no need to replace genetic determinism with geographic determinism. While there are other factors which operate against the presumed equality of developed capabilities among people with equal potential, the point here is that geography alone is enough to prevent equality of developed capabilities, even if all races have identical potentialities and there is no discrimination. Nor is it necessary to determine the relative weights of geographic, demographic, cultural and other factors, when the more fundamental point is that each of these factors makes equal outcomes among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species progressively less likely.

Among the many different groups in countries around the world, very few have ever matched the major role played by the Jains from India in the cutting of diamonds for the world market, whether the Jains lived in India or in Amsterdam. People of German ancestry have been similarly prominent in the brewing of beer, whether in Germany or in the United States, where the best-selling brands of beer were created by people of German ancestry, as was true of China’s famous Tsingtao beer. In nineteenth century Argentina, German beer drove English ale from the local market, while Germans also established breweries in Australia and Brazil, as they had brewed beer in the days of the Roman Empire.

Jews have been similarly prominent, if not predominant, in the apparel industry, whether in medieval Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, Argentina or the United States. Yet intellectuals’ emphasis on external circumstances over internal cultures led an academic historian to say that Jewish immigrants to the United States were fortunate that they arrived in
this country just when the garment industry was about to take off.
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The

same coincidence seems to have occurred in a number of other countries, just as the arrival of large numbers of overseas Chinese in various countries in Southeast Asia galvanized particular sectors of the economies there, and the arrival of the Huguenots galvanized the watch-making industry in seventeenth-century England.

In addition to intergroup differences in particular occupational skills, there are large and consequential differences in median age. Some groups differ by a decade in median age and others differ by two decades or more.
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Large differences among groups in median age occur both within nations and between nations. Just among Asian Americans, the median age ranges from 43 years old for Japanese Americans to 24 years old for Americans of Cambodian ancestry.
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Among nations, the median age in Germany and Japan is over forty, while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under twenty.
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How a group of people, whether races or nations, whose median ages are decades apart could have the same knowledge, skills and experience— or have the same outcomes that depend on such knowledge, skills and experience— is a question that need not be faced by those who proceed as if disparities in outcomes must indicate differences in genes or discrimination, rather than numerous other factors that create disparities in inputs.