I’m writing this on the most precious object I own: a chaise longue I found in one of those treasure furniture stores in East Hollywood. It took ages to complete the trip to London. During the wait, too, there are pet owners who don’t worry about dogs in cargo. The 2022 shipping delay is a reminder of what I think globalization has lost: geography.
Yes, I ham it, about this denatured urbanite, but the reality is even worse than the shtick. I don’t know about pressure systems or crops or water tables or fauna. I’m confused by the river. As a way of British public life, I studied abstraction. Human rights: a step forward for the species or hogwash? Which side should they fight on Marston Moor? Who invented liberalism, David Hume or, with his insistence on the moral equality of all, St Paul? I could do this all day.
But it’s not the stuff that makes the world go round. If the events of recent years have shown us anything, it is that life does not depend on man-made ideas, but on the unchanging reality of nature. Few countries have accessible fossil fuel deposits. Some have metal that turns into chips. Some have long boundaries for paranoid. Some have more to lose from global warming than others. Some lack and crave warm water ports. Some favor detachment from the continent but find the geographic logic of trade a hard sell. Geography, if not everything, almost everything.
Back when this was rejected, when technology and trade held has shrunk and “flattened” the world, some intellectuals continue with their heresy. Ian Morris supports that Geography is Destiny. David Landes says that the climate is not discussed as a country’s enrichment or impoverishment. Jared Diamond descends to the level of plant and animal life to explain the differences between civilizations. Tim Marshall, in the work of Naipaulian bleakness, said that war is almost inevitable in certain terrains. (If geographic determinists have a recurring obsession, it is with the plains, which they say instills self-defense paranoia in the population by exposing them to land invasion. Beware of Nebraska.)
This world view can be fatalistic to cross into quackery. Russia “must” attack its neighbors to the west, such as the vulnerability of the plains. Xinjiang, at the hinge of east-west traffic over the millennia, will “always” be a trouble spot. The denial of human agency here is more about religion than science.
But it’s also a useful corrective to elites who often err on the other side. England in particular gives prestige to the study of ideas that do not apply to the subject of the earth. (I remember a friend mocking Theresa May as a “geographer”.) The life of the mind is just a little more circular in America. Perhaps it all comes back to the Enlightenment view of the world as whatever human will and reason desires. The idea that we are oppressed by the rude facts of geography is not just boring to think about. This is an insult to the very foundation of our civilization. It was one in the eye for Descartes.
But the reality is all around us. Rice has more calories than wheat per hectare. How much of the history of the world – the large population that Asia bears, for example – is simply turned on its head? Why didn’t China do transoceanic conquest when it had the power? A lack of Christian zeal or all that bounteous land itself?
Although the idea seems paramount, there may be an element of geographical accident. Would Germany be less conflicted about the Enlightenment, more like England and the Netherlands, if it had more beaches? Is the relative lack of maritime contact with other countries slow to absorb ideas?
You can get lost down the rabbit hole of conjecture. But that is healthier than not thinking in natural-physical terms at all. Francis Fukuyama still gets in the neck for The End of History. At the end of geography there is a rasher call.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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