Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ethics Page 7 of 8

Ethics and Responsibility in Relation to Paris

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On November 14, 2015

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To say that the Paris attacks are terrible is easy. To follow the consequences of that statement is hard.

First, let us start with responsibility. Those most responsible are those who commanded the attacks take place, and those who carried them out.

This seems evident.

Let us make another statement: Absent the Iraq war, there would be no ISIS. If ISIS is responsible, then no Iraq war means no Paris attacks.

The Iraq war was an attack on a country which had not attacked the US, Britain, or any other coalition member. It did not threaten any coalition member. It did not have “WMD” in any meaningful sense of the words.

No Iraq war, no Paris attacks.

If you want to punish those responsible for the Paris attacks, on that list are George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair, among others.

Nor can a case be made that they did something defensible which had unfortunate consequences. The crime they committed was the same one for which the Allies hung most Nazis: starting a war without caususbelli. At Nuremburg, that was held worthy of death because of all of the crimes that follow logically from war.

It’s hard to tell how many deaths the Iraq war has caused, but put it from hundreds of thousands to well over a million.

Those people are just as dead as the Parisians. Most of them were civilians.

It should be, but isn’t, an unexceptionable statement to say that the people most responsible for their deaths are the people who ordered those deaths, and the people who killed them.

“Just following orders” should be out of style as an excuse, but it isn’t.

Legitimate violence, to many, is violence sanctioned by a state. Since Bush and Blair were heads of state, their violence is legitimate.

Yet the International Criminal Court regularly tries and imprisons Africans for killing people with the power of the State.

This ethical spiral goes nowhere good. It is impossible not to conclude that what matters in violence is only who commits it. We kill civilians in large numbers. We say that our soldiers are only following orders. We are still killing large numbers of civilians in foreign countries.

We would never accept this excuse of someone who carried out the attacks in Paris, that they “were only following orders.”

There is no way to cut through this knot that does not involve an appeal to authority, that does not come down to: “We’re okay with killing people with whom we don’t identify.”

ISIS claims to be a state, and claims the right to order violence. It claims the right to kill innocents. So does the West. The history of medical sanctions or of direct attacks on civilian infrastructure like sewage does not allow the argument for “collateral” casualties to be taken seriously.

I am unable to see, on the basis of any ethics that isn’t tribal, particular, or supine to authority that the Parisian attacks are more worthy of condemnation than either similar attacks that occur regularly in the Middle East. I am also unable to see what difference it makes to the dead if they are killed by a “terrorist’s” bomb or bullet, or a bomb or bullet used by a “soldier.”

Either civilians are off limits, or civilians aren’t. Either war crimes that got Nazis hung are war crimes for everyone, including Americans and British (or French, in Libya) or the Nuremburg trials were simply victor’s “justice”; simple vengeance.

We should expect propaganda from the state. We should expect hysteria. But we should not allow our own thinking or sympathy to fall subject to it.

The Paris attacks are terrible. They are not more terrible, or less terrible than other attacks of similar sort, no matter who carries them out.

I will accord “the West” the ethical upper-hand when I see Bush, Blair, and their cronies on the dock for their crimes.

Because I will tell you this: While every life has value, and every murder is a tragedy, more murders are worse than less murders.

If we want to avoid the next Paris attack, we will try our own criminals and cease our violent meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Because, for the time being, we will not, the regularly scheduled tragedies, here and abroad, will continue.

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Social Facts Rule Your Life

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On August 20, 2015

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The most deadly forces in the world for most people, for much of history and certainly today, are not physical forces.

If you are homeless in America, know that there are five times as many empty homes as there are homeless people.

If you are homeless in Europe, know that there are two times as many empty homes are there are homeless.

If you are hungry anywhere in the world, know that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, and that the amount of food we discard as trash is, alone, more than enough to feed everyone who is hungry today.

It is very difficult to argue that the current refugee crises are anything but social facts: War and famine are social facts, straight up.

How likely you are to be in jail is almost entirely based on where you live, plus race and ethnicity. Born black in the US? Too damn bad.

How much money you make is almost entirely a social fact. Yes, that includes billionaires. Born back when the top tax rates were eighty or ninety percent? You wouldn’t be nearly as rich.

The value of the money you have is determined almost entirely based on where you live. For most people, this is based on where they were born.

North Americans and Europeans have better standards of living than most of the rest of the world because they conquered or subjugated most of the rest of the world. And I do mean most. Americans and Canadians do well because they virtually wiped out the original residents of North America (and the remaining Native Americans live in conditions that are generally as bad as third world countries).

Most of the prisoners in American jails are there for selling or using a prescribed substance which was not prescribed–nor stigmatized–for most of history. Social fact.

If you don’t have a job, well, that comes down to how many jobs there are. If your job is shitty, it has less to do with you than the time and place in which you live: 40 years ago, the largest employers in the US were car companies, who paid much better than the largest employer today: Walmart.

Even most environmental facts are social facts. Climate change, the collapse of ocean stocks, the terrible pollution in China: These are all a result of human action.

If you live in China, how happy you are is partially based on a social fact: Those still in traditional villages are happier than those who moved to the new cities with the new higher paying, but shitty, jobs. (In terribly polluted cities, to boot.)

Virtually everything that matters in your life is a social fact. It was created by human decisions. That’s the good news, of course, since it means human decisions could make it better.

It’s also the bad news, for what it says about human decision-making.

I want to emphasize something here: Progress is not always good for the people caught in it. The people who lived through the industrial revolution were mostly worse off than those before it. Idiots who sneer at the Luddites, who wanted to smash the machines, are clueless; the Luddites were right for themselves, for their children, and for their grandchildren. It took a long time for industrialization to pay off.

A great deal was lost with industrialization, including, and most importantly, community. The loss of community increased with the rise of the car. Community, my friends, is practically the most important thing when it comes to life satisfaction (about tied with equality), so long as basic needs, including safety, are met.

Heck, agriculture was a goddamn disaster for 95 percent of the world’s population. Hunter-gatherers lived better in almost every way than peasants, and peasants were most of the world’s population under agriculture.

We can remain victims of social facts, including our dominant technology, or we can decide that social facts are choices and make choices.

This is becoming more possible, not less, because of the rise of global culture. I’ll discuss this later. But for now, remember, while biology determines we all die, society generally determines how and when. (Including when you have a heart attack, how likely you are to get cancer, and so on.)

Social facts.

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The Problem with Identity

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On August 19, 2015

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We all have an identity, or rather, we all have identities. You may have a religion, a country, a profession, and so on. A Buddhist American Accountant female bisexual Patriots fan.

And so on.

Our identities are both accidents and predetermined. They are accidents of birth–the body we are born with, where we are born, who are parents are; the nature (the body, including the brain) and the nurture (the conditioning we receive through our lives and the physical changes our lives impose on us–starting with nutrition. Few things will screw you up for life faster than bad nutrition as a child).

We take these identities to be who we are in different contexts. You are never more your nationality than when in another country, for example: ex-patriot communities can be very strong and if there aren’t a lot of you, suddenly just coming from the same country is a very strong tie. As a teenager in Bangladesh, I experienced this first-hand. Every Canadian was a potential pal. Anyone who spoke English and was from a western country ranked close.

Within our own countries, we often identify first by what our work is: The first question we ask others is usually, “So, what do you do for a living?” We assume this is important.

One can base their identity on skin color or gender–or the rejection of gender norms.

Identity  is often strongest if the identity is in conflict with society. To be gay in 1950, or Russia today, is defining. To be a public cross-dresser matters. To be dark-skinned in America gets you a ton of unpleasant attention, to be visibly Muslim in Germany the same. Some identities mark you out as a safe target for certain types of aggression: transgenders, women, and black males, for example.

The more people treat you as an identity, the more you either become that identity or react against it. For every gay who makes that integral to who they are, there is one who thinks it shouldn’t be so important, who wants to be recognized for something else. The same for women or those whose skin color isn’t the norm in their country, and so on.

To be proud of an identity one didn’t earn is an odd thing. People who are proud of their heritage always strike me oddly: You didn’t chose your parents or ancestors, of what is there to be proud?

Most people who are religious just belong to their parents’ religion and don’t take it very seriously. If they’d been born in a different religion, they’d be at the same level of engagement.  Again, what is the source of pride?

Likewise, to be proud of your biologically and socially assigned gender seems odd. Did you choose to be male or female? Even if your society has norms that must be met to be a “real man” or “real woman,” well, you just did what almost every other man or woman does.

Proud of your parents? Well, I guess, but, ummm, if anything it should go the other way.

Identity, too often, is little more than tribalism.

It is, however, an advanced form of tribalism.

Humans are wired to operate in groups of up to about 150 people. That’s as many people as most individuals are able to treat as individuals.

You can treat those people as individuals, you can care about them and look after them as individuals. You can trust them because you know each of them individually

To care about more people, you must have an identity in common which allows you to see them as part of your band, and to trust them.

Tribes (the step above bands) did this. Nations did this. Religions did this. The Zeus cult was used to allow people to trade safely together, since they worshiped (and feared) the same God.

To have a shared identity is to belong to a community. There are shared communities everywhere. One woman I know travels the world and finds friends and places to stay because she is a long-time fan of a particular band, and knows other fans.

Identity can become community, and members of communities can care for each other.

The strength of shared identities can pretty much be determined by looking at how much they care for each other or trust each other.

Shared identities leading to caring communities (which can mean caring enough to pick up weapons to defend each other) is the bright side of identity.

The dark side, of course, is that anyone you don’t share an identity with is someone you don’t owe as much care to.

“Not one of us” is one of the most dangerous statements in the world; ostracism is often death. You can see it today in all the refugee deaths: They aren’t “us.” You can see it in the refugee camps, statements of, “We aren’t going to let them become one of us.”

We find ourselves in four types of games. Me against the world. My group against the world. Humanity against the world.

And then there’s “We are the world.”

It is jejune to act as if me against the world, or my group against the world, or even humanity against the world doesn’t work. North Americans and Europeans have higher standards of living than most others because they out-competed many other groups, and that includes “wiped entire other groups out.” They won their wars.  They ruled or bullied almost every part of the world at one point or another.

As individuals we can certainly create “good” lives by out-competing everyone around us. Many people extend this to their own families.

And humanity can use the entire world as its preserve, without caring much (if at all, in practical terms) what happens to other life forms, including ones like dolphins, which are clearly sentient. We can “win” from this, and we have.

But we can also lose by doing this, because we are not isolated from other people, other animals, other plants. Heck, from microbes (especially not from microbes).

How we treat other people comes back to haunt us. We hurt them, they hate us. We make them poor, they pollute, that pollution eventually hurts us. We deny them medicine, they get sick, that sickness pool eventually hurts us.

We treat other beings and, indeed, the unliving world, as something other than us, not caring for them, or for it, and we get climate change. We pollute, which is a win for the industries who do it, and we suffer huge levels of chronic illness.

Etc.

We do this because we do not identify with other people. America is against Russia, against China. India is against China. Muslims and Christians are against each other. The rich are against the poor.

Blah, blah, blah.

We certainly don’t give a damn what happens to other animals, not in any practical sense; the number of large fish in the ocean, for example, has dropped about 90 percent since the 30s, and the 30s had already seen huge drops. The Grand Banks, off the Canadian Maritimes, in the 15th century, were so rich with fish you could simply drop a bucket in and come up with fish. Today that fishery is gone.

We are killing trees that create the oxygen we need to live. The ocean’s oxygen cycle is in danger.

Our identities, our refusal to identify with everyone, and especially with everything, is going to wind up killing a lot of us. A hell of a lot of us.

But I want you to consider this another way.

What sort of people do you like being around?

I will posit that most people enjoy being with other people who are happy. People tend to be happy when they are healthy, have enough stuff, and do work they enjoy.

Happy people are just way better to live with. Happy people also don’t commit nearly as much violence. Security for others is security for us. Happiness for others is happiness for us. People who are prosperous in the truest sense, which is to say, people who are not scared of losing their prosperity, are generous. (Most people in the world are not prosperous in that sense.)

Identity links us to others, but it also cuts us off from others. We can win from that, as individuals and groups, but we are at the point now, due to limited resources and carrying capacity, where we cannot win as a species that way.

And perhaps we have always lost as a species, and as individuals, if you consider the highest good to be love. For those who truly love, want the best for others.

I recognize in identity the attempt to connect with others, to overcome human limitations. I hear in it the attempt at human choice, when our identities are not the ones approved of by our communities.

But I believe, in the end, that if someone’s most important “identity” doesn’t allow them to identify with all life, that identity has become mal-adaptive to our survival.

Identifying with all life doesn’t mean tolerating all behaviour, rather the contrary, by the way. The problem we have can be boiled down to selfishness, greed being a species of selfishness.

That doesn’t mean people have to live like crap; that’s a myth. Yes, we will need to reduce carbon expenditures and environmental impact and make room for other species, but that can be done in a way that is win/win because we live in ways that are terrible for our health, for our sense of meaning, and for our happiness. We will have to live differently, not worse.

That’s another article, though, but to want to do the right thing, you have to believe it is the right thing. If your identity doesn’t include the rest of humanity, or the rest of life as worthy of life, and a good life, you will not and cannot do the right thing.

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How to Be Liked or Even Loved by Blue Collar and Service Workers

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On May 27, 2015

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Be friendly, interested, and acknowledge their existence.

You will be amazed how soon they think you’re a wonderful person.

What I find amazing is how little it takes: make eye contact, smile, ask a question or two. They’re in a near complete drought for people who treat them with even a smidgen of kindness, respect, and interest.

If you need a self-interested angle: Once you’ve established this relationship (shallow as it is), you will be astounded at what they will be willing to do for you, often without you even asking.

File this post in “absolutely obvious things most people don’t do.”

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Noam Chomsky Owns Sam Harris and Indicts Bill Clinton

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On May 2, 2015

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Picture of Noam Chomsky

Picture of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky had a private email session with Sam Harris about Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory which Clinton allegedly believed was also manufacturing a nerve agent. I really recommend reading the entire exchange, which is hilarious and horrifying on multiple levels. First, because Harris just doesn’t get that Chomsky is smashing him flat and asks for permission to publish it. Second, because the sort of ethical reasoning Chomsky uses is so alien to so many people in the world (and, sadly, especially to Americans).

To put it simply, Clinton’s destruction of that factory meant that many people didn’t get the drugs they needed to survive. So they died. The number of people who died was much larger than the number of people who died in 9/11. Harris just doesn’t seem to get it, he thinks “intent” matters more and that Clinton deserves the benefit of the doubt. Chomsky points out that any intelligent person would have predicted the effects of bombing that factory and Clinton did it anyway.

If he did it without malice, well, that means he felt nothing even though he had to know he was killing all those people. Feeling nothing about mass murder–and that’s what it was–is arguably worse than murdering someone you acknowledge as human, as having worth.

(There is also a a brief discussion of the Iraq sanctions of the 1990s, which were a terrible crime, as well.)

The point I want to emphasize is this: If you knowingly do something which a reasonable person knows will lead to large numbers of deaths, you are on the hook for those deaths. It may be the “least worst option” in some cases (though not, I think, in either of these cases), but you are still responsible.

A reasonable man (and Clinton is a brilliant man, famed for staying up all night doing research, right down to reading all the appendices and footnotes, unlike many executives), is responsible for the effects of his actions that a reasonable man forsee.

This is Ethics 101—it is also Democracy 101. If you cannot understand this, you cannot hold your legislators and executives responsible.

Chomsky also dismisses questions of motives as irrelevant; virtually everyone says they have great motives, including the Japanese during their mid-20th century wars. At the end of the day, you can only judge with reasonable expectations and by results. Everything else is BS.

I will finally note something a lot of people don’t seem to understand, because they have been exposed more to propaganda about Chomsky rather than his own writings or his seminal work in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Like him or hate him, Chomsky is one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. Even at age 86 and slowing down, getting into the intellectual ring with him is like trying to bear hug a grizzly. It is unlikely to end well for you

It sure didn’t for Sam Harris.

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Is Violence Ever Justified? Does Violence Ever Solve Anything?

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On April 28, 2015

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Painting: Washington Crossing the Delaware

Painting: Washington Crossing the Delaware

I notice a fair number of sweet, well-meaning people saying “violence is never justified.”

This is a position I have a lot of respect for, though it’s not my position. The hard-core pacifist, who always opposes violence, is a person of great bravery.

But to say NEVER is a strong statement. In the US, if you are saying “violence is never justified” with respect to the Baltimore riots, for example, you must also oppose all the wars and killing the US is involved in.

In practical terms, that must mean that you believe that every politician who voted for war is more unethical than any rioter. You must believe that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are far fouler individuals than any rioter.

Ethical outrage must be proportionate to the violence and the violence in Baltimore is nothing compared to the scale of the Iraq War, or Afghanistan, or drone murders. Nor is it anything compared to the scale of police violence against Americans, especially African-Americans.

NEVER is a big word.

What most people really mean is that they condemn non-state sanctioned violence, except sometimes, like, say, in the American Revolution, or the Maidan protests.

In fact, they approve of some violence and not of other violence. Most such people, were you to dig down hard enough, are hypocrites, but some aren’t, even if one disagrees with them. If you were to allow the USSR the right to crush revolutions along with the US, and condemn the American revolution, you wouldn’t be a hypocrite, just not a very nice person.

Trying to argue about popular will and/or democracy is a slippery road, mind. For example, the numbers on the American revolution with which I’m familiar don’t show the majority of the population being for leaving British rule. Maidan overthrew a democratically elected government in the Ukraine and the French revolution was made by the Paris mob, while most people living in rural areas of France (the vast majority of the population) would have preferred to keep the Ancien Regime.

Relatedly, violence often does solve problems. The Native Americans cleansed from North America were “problems” to the settlers, and violence dealt with that problem just fine. Fascist Germany was a problem to most non-German countries, Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Gays, and many others and violence solved that problem. Carthage was a problem to Republican Rome and violence solved that problem.

And riots, rather better organized than the Baltimore ones, granted, solved the Parisian problem with the old Regime, while the Terror, terrible as it was, did make sure that there was to be no going back–even if France was to alternate between Republics and Empires for some time.

Violence often solves problems and it often does so rather permanently.

Here is what history actually teaches us about violence: People who are better at violence than those they fight get the spoils and often keep them for a long time. You do know that the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain, yes? Then the Normans? Those people did very well out of killing the locals and wiped them almost entirely from the most fertile parts of what is today England.

Europeans conquered most of the world and Europeans today (and their descendants) are powerful and relatively rich compared to almost everyone they conquered. Many economic historians believe that imperialism and colonialism were required for the industrial revolution to really take off; and definitely for capitalism to find sufficient markets. Violence worked very nicely for Europe and especially for England and the United States.

Of course, history marches on, and eventually everyone will get their turn at the curb, their face stomped on. But history can take a long time, and multiple generations can enjoy the fruits of violence–theirs or their ancestors. Violence only doesn’t solve anything in the sense that nothing solves anything—extend history enough in any direction and all peoples eventually have a really bad day (or really bad hundreds of years or millennia). Heck, eventually, all species will go extinct.

I don’t know if violence is ever justified. But I do know that violence often does “solve” problems and I do know that peoples who insist on being entirely non-violent or bad at violence eventually discover that everything they have they hold at the sufferance of those who are good at violence.

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Circles of Belonging

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On March 23, 2015

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Fractals and CirclesI’ve recently been reading about some Hollywood folks who are very concerned with how women are treated.  One of them, the director Lexi Alexander, tweeted the following:

A crew guy just said that he follows me on Twitter & wanted to thank me because he has 2 daughters. Will it always take daughters to care?

This is the fundamental problem suggested by my article on ethics vs. morals, and discussed by more philosopher and social scientists than one could possibly list. What does it take to care about people we don’t and will never know?

I care about how women are treated because they’re humans.  Why wouldn’t I care?

But why stop there? The murder of dolphins and whales, who are sentient, offends me greatly as well. Why prioritize human intelligence?

Where does the circle of belonging, of inclusion, stop?  Where do we say “That person’s problems are not my problem?”

It’s perfectly natural to care about our families, our loved ones, and especially our children, more than we care for others.  We are responsible to them to an extent we aren’t responsible to someone who lives half the world away—responsible for feeding them, housing them, clothing them, and indeed providing love to them, a need that virtually all sentient creatures have. (Remove whales or dolphins from their mothers and they are profoundly effected; while elephants clearly mourn their dead.)

At the same time, to overly prioritize those we know is to become monsters.  To say “my child is worth a hundred other children’s lives” is to have crossed over the abyss and descended into hell. The hells created by those in the “I’ve got mine, screw you, Mack” crowd are legion.

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The history of human civilization can be read as expanded circles of belonging—from bands (not families, bands) to tribes, to kingdoms and empires and on to nations.  The national impulse, responsible for so much evil, also saw the rise of benefits like pensions and unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.  Those who belonged to my nation deserved such things.  They were “one of us.”

For the longest time much of this was done through religion: The Zeus cult allowed those who belonged to it to not be strangers. People who belonged to the cult, even if of different polis or tribe, could trade together, because they were members of the same cult. If they did not treat each other properly, they believed Zeus would punish them.

Powerful, self-identifying groups of this nature, from followers of Confucius to Christians, from secular humanists to enlightenment thinkers, have brought people together and forged bonds of trust, duty, and belonging that crossed barriers of tribal, local, or even other religious circles.  The humanist claims a duty to all of humanity, believing that everyone has certain rights, including to food, shelter and fair law (justice).

There are those who go further, giving rights to non-human sentients and even animals that are traditionally our food animals.

One can make a full ethical case for all of this, but one can also make a pragmatic argument. Healthy, happy people are better to live around. Economic cripples don’t contribute to civic or economic life nearly as much as they could; the poverty of others, whether material, spiritual, or ethical impoverishes me, because I lack whatever they could have given to the world, were they able.

The same is true of the larger web of life. As animals and plants die, what they contributed to the ecosphere is lost and that loss diminishes the world in ways that will effect me, whether through loss of seafood, loss of oxygen, loss of key nutrients, or loss of potential scientific discoveries, now impossible. Every dead species is lost genetic code, code which may have held secrets to make us much richer: medicines, chemicals, genetic modifications, and so on.  We are killing the web of life which supports us and killing the wealth that nature has created for us.

The pragmatic argument is important, but pragmatics alone are never enough: Without an ethical argument, many people will violate the norms as soon as it is convenient to them; while without the pragmatic argument others will violate the norm because it makes no sense to them. (Why not kill if it’s in my interest?  Sure as heck the people who lead us have no qualms about doing so.)

To manage an ecosphere, and to manage a world full of sentients, requires valuing them intrinsically, as well as functionally—both for what they do for us and for themselves, irrespective of their utilitarian value. Until we create an ethics which does this, not only will we be far less happy and prosperous than we could be, but we will lurch from ecological disaster to ecological disaster.

The creation of an ethics of inclusion, a broad circle including all life and much that is not alive, is one of the key tasks before us.

How We Can Change Our Destiny As A Society

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On March 5, 2015

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Globe on FireI have written in the past of how the nature of everyday life creates the character of commoners and elites.  What we do, the habits we lay down, is our character.

Now our everyday life is created by our technology, where we live (geography), and our culture—how we choose to use our technology and interact with our environment.

A Russian in one of Lee Blessing’s plays once said “History is Geography Over Time.”  This is a near pure form of 19th century romantic nationalism.

Assume that humans are basically the same.  Go to different countries, or even different locales within a large country.  Notice that they are different from other people in ways which are similar—southerners have characteristics in common, bedouin have characteristics in common, Italians have characteristics in common, but within Italy where they come from also changes their character.

This is a common-sense observation, and before the modern era it was even more true: people were very different depending on where they lived.

Why?

Well, the simplest explanation is geography: to live in the tropics is to live a different type of life than to live in cold climes.  To live a rain forest is a different type of life than to live in a desert.

This is a hard argument for rich moderns to entirely understand: with our air conditioning and heating: with food delivered from all over the world to our supermarkets; with our travel being almost entirely inside mobile boxes; with almost everyone now wearing western style clothes; with every office looking more or less alike and everyone using the same few word-processing programs;, we can drop half the world away and feel somewhat at home in many of the essentials.  A certain type of life has been exported to as much of the world as can afford it, and most of the rest of the world, familiar with western media, aspires to that life.

But it was not always thus.  To live in Bengal was to live a vastly different life than to live in London. Heck, to live in northern Scotland was to live vastly different from living in London.  To live in the country vastly different from living in a city, but to live in Canton was massively different than in Tenochtitlán (one of the largest cities of its day.)  Being a rice farmer in southern China was much different from being an Iroqois farmer in the Great Lakes area.

What you did, each day, was very different.  Much of this difference was based on the simple requirements of making a living from that type of land.  Much of the rest was the difference in technology: the tools you had available to work with.  Some would include social organization in that toolkit, but let’s spin that off to culture.

Culture: the catch-all for the rest of it.  But how does culture arise?  Given the same pre-modern technology, and dropped on the Pacific Northwest or into Great Plains or into the Russian Taiga, you will live differently.  Start off with people with the exact same culture, give it a few generations and you will be different people, because you will have grown up doing different things.  And your technology will have changed, because what works best in each of those place is different.

Those differing lives become character, character is reified into culture, and soon you have tradition.

(And all this is before discussing the role of geography on such things as warfare, access to key resources like iron and copper, the role of geography in encouraging or discouraging diseases, natural trade routes, the difference between ocean and land transport, and so on.)

So, Geography is a big deal. It’s a big deal even today: Saudi Arabia cannot be understood without understanding its geography, including the (happy?) coincidence of vast oil reserves.  Canada’s population clusters along the southern border, with spars out into areas with resources worth exploiting.  Siberia is vast—and underpopulated, for good reasons based on its soil, climate and resources.

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But it’s also true because of the way cultural drift works: culture is not a completely dependent variable.  Drop different people with different cultures into the same approximate geography and they will develop differently: there will be clear similarities (intensive rice agriculture in multiple SE Asian societies), yet the cultures will not be identical.

So, even in the modern world, with our ability to denature the environment, there are geographical effects: but there are also the more than residual effects of culture developed in the pre-modern era.  These all swirl about to create our daily lives, and that forms the character of the commons, that point about which, despite our individuality, we coalesce.  That mass-character determines how we react to the events of our lives: to how active or passive we are, what we’ll fight for, and how we’ll fight.  Change is constrained and channeled by character, by who we are.

Character is destiny, both personally and en-masse.

Does that means some warped form of Panglossianism? Our character is our destiny, and we cannot escape our destiny because our character is formed by forces beyond our control (usually when we are children, and under the control of others similarly formed)?

I would suggest this is not the case.  Oh, it’s hard to change character and destiny, but it can be done, especially for the future.  We need to decide what destiny we prefer, what character is required and work to change our every day lives to create that character.

This is possible.  Huge swathes of the population despise their own characters: guilt and regret and self-contempt are part of humanity as much as smug self-regard.  We look on these things ill, but a better way to look on them is as fuel for change: if we do not like who we are, we can change.  And we can change as societies. If we don’t want to live in vastly unequal societies, we can change that: it has been done before. If we want to live in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment, we can do that.  And if want to live in actually free societies (i.e. not police and surveillance states), we can do that as well.

Within the matrix of what is made possible by technology and geography are vast social universes.  What is required to seize them is not despair at how we are conditioned by our lives, but an understanding that that conditioning can work for us as much as against us.

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