The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com



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The Revenge of Geography What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate ( PDFDrive )

He
did see Pan
. A vision of the god was likely, given his fatigue, the pantheon
inherent in his belief system, and the wonder-filled fear of the physical elements
that has since been lost to human beings. The ancient world was “settled so
sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man,” Boris Pasternak writes in
Doctor Zhivago
. “Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so
fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still
full of gods.”
41
 If rationalism and secularism have taken us so far that we can no
longer imagine what Phidippides saw, then we are incapable of understanding—
and consequently defending ourselves against—religious movements that
reverse the Enlightenment and affect today’s geopolitics. For while space across
the planet has filled up, and the natural world is not what it was, the new
geography of slums and shantytowns and neither-nor landscapes likewise
manifest an equally intense psychological effect on human beings, in a different
way of course. And to understand this new geography, the premium it puts on
space, and its consequent psychic impact it helps to first appreciate the antique
landscapes as described by Herodotus.
42
The crux of Herodotus’s 
Histories
is the lure of that seething-with-culture
archipelagic landmass of Greece, lurking just to the west beyond the
mountainous tablelands of Persia and Asia Minor. Here is geographical
determinism writ large, it would seem, for the peoples of Asia to the east and
Greece to the west have fought each other over the millennia, culminating in our
own day with the tense relations between Greece and Turkey: a tension that has
not led to outright war since the 1920s mainly because of the mass transfers of
population that occurred in that decade, creating two neat, uniethnic states. Peace
reigned, in other words, only after ethnic cleansing that went according to the
dictates of geography. And yet this is ultimately not the line of thinking that
Herodotus imparts.
For Herodotus evinces a receptivity to the province of the heart and the
attendant salience of human intrigues. He illustrates how self-interest is
calculated within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion. Atossa, a wife of Persia’s


King Darius, appeals to her husband’s male vanity in bed while begging him to
invade Greece. She does this as a favor to the Greek doctor who has cured a
growth on her breast, and who wants to revisit his homeland. It is all about
geography, until it becomes all about Shakespeare.
Herodotus’s 
Histories
at its deepest level is about understanding the
complexities of fate: 
moira
in Greek, “the dealer-out of portions.” And because
heroes are the ones who overcome fate, they form the superstructure of
Herodotus’s narrative. It is none other than Hodgson who notes in his
introduction to 
The Venture of Islam:
Herodotus wrote his history, he said, to preserve the memory of the
great deeds done by the Greeks and the Persians: unrepeatable deeds
that have an enduring claim to our respect. Those deeds cannot be
imitated, though they may be emulated and in some sense perhaps
surpassed. But even now we dare call no man great whose deeds
cannot somehow measure up to theirs.
43
Hodgson writes this early in his epic to make it clear that men ultimately have
control over their destiny, even as he will often engage for three volumes in the
description of grand historical and environmental trends over which, it might
seem, individuals have little control. Without the admission of individual
struggle, there is no humanism in the study of history, Hodgson says. Thus, he
weaves his tapestry of Islam: “a morally, humanly relevant complex of
traditions” that assumes the nature of a global force, but started with the actions
of individuals in Mecca.
So we are back to the battle against fate, and it is well that we are. For we now
need to be especially fortified by the likes of Herodotus, Hodgson, and McNeill,
since we are about to enter exceedingly rough terrain: that of geopolitics and the
quasi-determinist theories that emanate from it. The fact is, the broad outlines of
history have, indeed, been predicted, and might still be again. This is, to say the
least, unsettling given how individuals can alter history. But, as we shall see, it is
true. The men I am about to introduce should make liberal humanists profoundly
uneasy. These men were hardly philosophers: rather, they were geographers,
historians, and strategists who assumed that the map determined nearly
everything, leaving relatively little room for human agency. Human agency, to
the degree that it did matter to them, mattered mainly in regards to military and
commercial dominance. Yet it is such men with whom we now have to engage,
so as to establish the framework for what we are up against around the world,
and what can be achieved in it.



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