the Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Mayans and Aztecs, and that may have been true of all cultures with hieroglyphic script: its use was chiefly as propaganda, to boost a society’s self-esteem, confirming the genealogy of the ruling regime and reinforcing social stratification. So all societies with writing are not necessarily literate. This is a useful gloss, and an advance.
We can now see that some profound differences have grown up between the peoples of the two hemispheres and we are at last in a position to put those differences into context.
We may say that, at its most basic, people ‘become human’ – become the rounded, integrated, reflective observers that they are – by means of a three-stage process.
The first element in this three-stage process is that people are placed, unavoidably, in a landscape, an environment. They live – or settle – on mountainsides, or in valleys, in the jungle, by rivers or next to the sea. They inhabit arid deserts, cold, tundra-like forests, or extensive grasslands. Some move between different landscapes. They are surrounded by animals – by birds or fish, by predators perhaps. They share their landscape with plants – grasses, shrubs, trees and flowers, some more nutritious, more medically useful and more psychoactive than others. And people live among weather: they live surrounded by different and systematic admixtures of sunshine, rain, wind, hail, lightning, they suffer natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis. They live under the heavens – the sun, the moon, and the stars including the Milky Way. And finally they live on land, on continents, that are scattered randomly across the spherical globe and are in different relationships with the great oceans. That land is primarily north-south in orientation, or east-west, configurations that are basic to weather and climate and to the history of weather and climate. All of these factors, we can now see, come together to create, broadly speaking, two great entities across the world, two configurations whose similarities and differences help explain the separate development of mankind on the two great hemispheres.
What is also clear from the story this book has told is that these combined factors – let’s call them environmental factors – operate on human beings to produce in them, and this is the second stage of the three-stage process, an ideology , a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding and interpreting that world, a way of making sense of the Earthly phenomena that manifest themselves and surround human beings everywhere. It is straight away evident from this book that ideologies vary much more in the Old World than they do in the New, in ways that are discussed later.
In the third stage of the process, the ideologies that people adopt as a result of their surrounding environment, and the technologies they develop, continue to interact with that environment, which of course itself continues to change, partly as a result of the evolution of the Earth, of cosmological, astronomical and geological events, and partly as a result of the changes that overtake humankind itself as a result of the first two stages. 4
And this perhaps is the second most interesting generalisation to emerge from our story, after the initial formulation of ideology based on the environment/climate/human conjunction: this is the determinant of what Fernand Braudel and the French historians would call la longue durée . History is in effect the narrative of humankind’s changing ideology and its continuing interaction with the environment – economic, ecological, technological. 5
If this analysis is correct, then it helps us understand the very different trajectories followed in the two hemispheres. As was outlined in chapter five, the Americas are a much smaller landmass than Eurasia, even without Africa added on. Moreover the New World is, as Hegel, Jared Diamond and others have pointed out,
We can now see that some profound differences have grown up between the peoples of the two hemispheres and we are at last in a position to put those differences into context.
We may say that, at its most basic, people ‘become human’ – become the rounded, integrated, reflective observers that they are – by means of a three-stage process.
The first element in this three-stage process is that people are placed, unavoidably, in a landscape, an environment. They live – or settle – on mountainsides, or in valleys, in the jungle, by rivers or next to the sea. They inhabit arid deserts, cold, tundra-like forests, or extensive grasslands. Some move between different landscapes. They are surrounded by animals – by birds or fish, by predators perhaps. They share their landscape with plants – grasses, shrubs, trees and flowers, some more nutritious, more medically useful and more psychoactive than others. And people live among weather: they live surrounded by different and systematic admixtures of sunshine, rain, wind, hail, lightning, they suffer natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis. They live under the heavens – the sun, the moon, and the stars including the Milky Way. And finally they live on land, on continents, that are scattered randomly across the spherical globe and are in different relationships with the great oceans. That land is primarily north-south in orientation, or east-west, configurations that are basic to weather and climate and to the history of weather and climate. All of these factors, we can now see, come together to create, broadly speaking, two great entities across the world, two configurations whose similarities and differences help explain the separate development of mankind on the two great hemispheres.
What is also clear from the story this book has told is that these combined factors – let’s call them environmental factors – operate on human beings to produce in them, and this is the second stage of the three-stage process, an ideology , a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding and interpreting that world, a way of making sense of the Earthly phenomena that manifest themselves and surround human beings everywhere. It is straight away evident from this book that ideologies vary much more in the Old World than they do in the New, in ways that are discussed later.
In the third stage of the process, the ideologies that people adopt as a result of their surrounding environment, and the technologies they develop, continue to interact with that environment, which of course itself continues to change, partly as a result of the evolution of the Earth, of cosmological, astronomical and geological events, and partly as a result of the changes that overtake humankind itself as a result of the first two stages. 4
And this perhaps is the second most interesting generalisation to emerge from our story, after the initial formulation of ideology based on the environment/climate/human conjunction: this is the determinant of what Fernand Braudel and the French historians would call la longue durée . History is in effect the narrative of humankind’s changing ideology and its continuing interaction with the environment – economic, ecological, technological. 5
If this analysis is correct, then it helps us understand the very different trajectories followed in the two hemispheres. As was outlined in chapter five, the Americas are a much smaller landmass than Eurasia, even without Africa added on. Moreover the New World is, as Hegel, Jared Diamond and others have pointed out,
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