[was RE: [PEN-L] Jared Diamond] I don't think European immorality is any stronger or weaker than any other culture's immorality (at least if you compare class societies). Rather, "high tech" weapons (and sometimes organizational techniques) have allowed the greater expression of European immorality than other immoralities. (One evil person can kill millions, by dropping the Bomb, whereas in the "good old daze," one evil person could only kill a few hundred.) And capitalism (which started in W. Europe) encouraged the spread of European rule and the use of that technology. It seems that CB is letting capitalism off the hook in order to blame one ethnic group over another. JD ------------------------------- in response to my comment below, CB wrote: Nope. It seems clear that the Great Power nations of Europe established a new level of inferiority with their qualitatively new -global- conquest. This is a new level of moral inferiority for a culture.
But even in the way that Western Europeans treated each other,say in WWI and II, is suicidally whatever. Western Europe "beat" China at being the worse, not only by luck , but by its cultural premises at that concrete time in history. For some reason, Western Europeans' culture degenerated into savagery and barbarism ( and by the way, in the process went around the world calling other cultures savage and barbarian.). The Western European response to achieving certain technological advances was to institute permanent global imperialism. Gotta call a spade a spade. ========================= JD: Diamond doesn't say that the "environment made the Europeans do it." Rather, it's a matter of the environment creating the creation of medical immunities, technologies, and organizational forms that _allowed_ the Europeans to do so. But, strictly speaking, in Diamond's theory, it's not "Europe" that's central. Rather, it's Eurasia, north of the Himalayas, which includes Siberia and China. The fact that Western Europe beat China seems to be a matter of luck in his story. I don't know how anyone can say that any ethnic group has a culture that is inferior than others. Almost all cultures with armies have tried to conquer others.
