Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
While opposing Spengler, Toynbee, and later the “Clash of Civilizations” theory of Har-
vard professor Samuel Huntington, in emphasizing the interaction of civilizations rather
than their separateness, McNeill's
The Rise of the West
, nevertheless, engages the read-
er with the whole notion of civilizations formed in large measure by geography, that rise
from precisely definable landscapes, achieve their own identity, and then interact with other
phorically describes the process:
Civilizations may be likened to mountain ranges, rising through aeons of geolo-
gic time, only to have the forces of erosion slowly but ineluctably nibble them
down to the level of their surroundings. Within the far shorter time span of hu-
man history, civilizations, too, are liable to erosion as the special constellation of
circumstances which provoked their rise passes away, while neighboring peoples
lift themselves to new cultural heights by borrowing from or otherwise reacting
to the civilized achievement.
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Such erosion and borrowing terrifies the purity of the early-twentieth-century German
Oswald Spengler, who writes of the “deep soil ties” that define the best of High Cultures:
how the inner evolution of sacral practices and dogmas remain “spellbound in the place
of their birth,” since, “whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.”
High Culture, he goes on, begins in the “preurban countryside” and culminates with a “fi-
nale of materialism” in the “world-cities.” For this dark romantic, who can at once be tur-
gid, hypnotic, profound, and, frankly, at times unintelligible in English translation, cosmo-
politanism is the essence of rootlessness, because it is not tied to the land.
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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 topic. Meanwhile, I want to continue with McNeill, who,
through it all, far more so than Spengler even, and far more intelligibly, is attentive to cli-
mate 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 medita-
tion 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 care-
ful 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
