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The following are my notes from the lecture that was given by Prof. Richard Bulliet of Columbia University on January 17, 2009.

13. From inequality to equality with limitations

Prof. Bulliet wants to turn to a topic that has been on the list of the top five topics of human thought for the last several centuries, and that is the subject of inequality. Inequality is a puzzling subject; it is evident that everyone is not the same. Prof. Bulliet says, “I’m on this platform, and you’re not. Hehehe!” (laughter) Inequality is evident, but in the present today you have an empirically correct as well as politically correct ideological orientation that there is an intrinsic equality within the human species that expresses itself regardless of external characteristics. All men are created equal, and perhaps a small handful of women (laughter). It is hard to get a clear expression of equality but nevertheless we take equality as a fundamental concept in a university like Columbia, although not all of our fellow citizens would necessarily agree, according to some e-mails I got from Mr. Obama on the campaign.

Equality has always been qualified in certain ways, so just thinking of your class readings, Aristotle would say there are natural slave populations. The Old Testament would say that the descendants of Ham should serve the descendants of Shem and Japheth. So you have notions of inequality in the ancient world. There’s no point in going into detail all the way through this, but then gradually you get down to the 17^th century, and you have someone like John Locke who writes an essay On Toleration. He says that everyone should tolerate religious difference, which is a wonderful idea–except for the Catholics (laughter), because they follow the Pope, except for the Muslims because I bet they follow the Sheikh of Islam in Istanbul (which they don’t, and he should have known better), and of course the atheists, because we can’t abide those.

Toleration depended therefore upon the size of the group. He was interested in whether the Protestants and the Catholics in England would continue to butcher one another over issues of who is destined to go to Heaven and things like that. So toleration grows but somehow toleration is still conditioned by the unit of analysis. You can Rousseau writing his book on the Origin of Inequality. He says that when man arrogates certain property to himself, property is the source of inequality. Then he proceeds to talk later on in his argument about natives from this or that part of the New World. Why didn’t any of those natives ever grab a piece of land and say, “this is mine?” He isn’t interested in inequality among peoples; he’s only interested in the problem of inequality within the European population that he is addressing. That is because it was assumed for the longest time that inequality among the races or among geographical regions was natural, and therefore inequality only applied to people within your fundamental unit of analysis.

14. Geographical determinism—Jared Diamond as example

So you get the American Constitution which says “all men are created equal” and yet has provisions for slavery, which is an inherited condition. Obviously, “all men” does not include all men living in bondage. There are further steps in this and clearly the Darwinian movement of saying that all humans are a single species that has a certain evolution plays an important role here. Eventually you get to an author like Jared Diamond who wrote a great prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel which Prof. Bulliet hates. He starts out by saying, “I know this chieftain in New Guinea who is as clever, as witty, as talented, as able to run the 40-meter dash in a good time, as anyone in the world, and he doesn’t have a cent to his name, whereas in America, everybody is filthy rich.” Why do you have this inequality, when Diamond’s friend in New Guinea is equal of anyone in Europe and America? The fundamental question he starts out with in his book is, “why do you have inequality at a world scale?” He starts out with the all assumption that all humans are equal, that this is axiomatic; therefore, inequality has to come from some extra-human source, which he finds in geographical determinism.

Some people were lucky enough to live where horses were, and other people lived where the anteaters were. They couldn’t domesticate the anteaters, so they fell behind, so the people who domesticated horses conquered the world. He has a whole bunch of other not-very-convincing arguments for geographical determinism. So he starts out with this idea that he has this friend in New Guinea and he doesn’t have any domesticated animals—except pigs and chickens, of course. Well, they don’t have any real good domesticated animals like cows and horses. And it’s very hot, and it’s a difficult climate, and they don’t have broad acres of grain crops. They have a lot of yams, potatoes and bananas, but they don’t have barley and wheat, and so on and so forth. So how, despite their native equality, how could they have accomplished as much as the Europeans did?

He never speaks about the Mayans in the Yucatan peninsula, who had no domesticated animals, who had little in the way of grain crops, who lived in a miserably hot climate, and who created one of the world’s great civilizations. He simply leaves that out because it is inconvenient to his argument.

15. The Long Life of The Idea of the Birth and Death of Civilizations

Other people, more of the last generation than now, took that issue more seriously, and asked whether there is something about civilizations that you can look at analytically to explain why some civilizations rise and some civilizations decline in certain parts of the world.

You can find this done in different ways by different people. Arnold Spengler one of the classiest writers although one of the more infamous (?) thinkers simply saw that civilizations born, mature, die, and then they live a sort of living death for thousands of years like the Chinese civilization.—it’s not a very helpful approach.

Arnold Toynbee classified a score of civilizations and talked about their birth, their adolescence, their senescence, and their eventual death using this biological metaphor and he wrote many, many volumes that nobody reads anymore because it just wasn’t a convincing argument—there were oo many variables, too many particularities, too little knowledge, so forth and so on.

Among non-European writers, the 14^th century Tunisian writer ibn-Khalduun used a biological metaphor of the birth and death of states or dynasties in his vocabulary, but he used it very differently. He saw the state as having a lifetime spelled out in a fixed number of generations, each of them 40 years long. So ibn-Khalduun could really count the years from the beginning to the end of a particular state formation. It is a theory that works fairly well because it is anchored to the human lifespan, but although it explains why it dies, it certainly does not explain very much where something comes from. He attributes that to the spontaneous and unpredictable emergence of a feeling of group solidarity somewhere out in the desert. He doesn’t really explain, however, why that occurs with the periodicity and the geographical locale that it does. So in other words, the study of civilizations has recognized the notion of rise and fall but has failed to come up with a very conclusive explanation for it, although there is a recurrent tendency to look for biological metaphors.

15. European exceptionalism and the imperialist imagination

In modern Western thought there has been deeply embedded the idea of a Western Euroamerican exceptionalism, which no matter why states rose and fell in the past, the states that arise in modern Europe and north America rise to a greatness which they will retain unchanged until the end of time.

So you can all report that to your parents, and it will be comforting to know that despite everything, America will never fall. Now this clearly is nonsense. Nobody argues that great moments are permanent, but it was very puzzling for Europeans. In the context of the war fought by the Greeks against Ottoman domination in the 1820s, it was asked “why is it that the Greeks we are hoping will achieve independence and whom we support so strongly don’t seem to be a damned thing like Plato or Aristotle?” The Greeks are supposed to be blond, and the last time the Europeans looked they didn’t see any blonds in Greece. I wonder if something happened to the Greeks; perhaps all the great Greeks all died from a terminal case of overripe greatness. Gee, I’m so great I think I’ll just … die (laughter). Well, the Europeans didn’t understand what happened to the Greeks.

When the scientists went to Egypt with Napoleon at the very end of the 18^th century, they saw that Egypt is filed with all this really cool stuff like the pyramids, sort of dilapidated but really, really impressive. But the Egyptians can’t be the same as these ancient Egyptians. Racist archeologists and historians came up with theories to explain all this. They came up with theories devoted to the idea that civilization was something that was brought to different parts of the world as a gift by certain tall, white, probably blond, European guys, who went to a benighted area and taught them how to be civilized, and then quietly withdrew from the scene. Egyptologists said there was a civilizing race in early Egypt that came from somewhere else who told the semi-barbaric and unfortunately dark-skinned Egyptians how to build pyramids.

Stonehenge? They could explain Stonehenge: some Greeks or other great people sailed over from Greece, got to a place where a bunch of local Brits were living in caves and said, “okay, let’s all get together and start schlepping big stones now and put them on top of each other.” And once they had done that, they left (laughter). These theories about great conquering races were built into early archeological thought and early imperialist thought when Europeans encountered people in other parts of the world. And of course there was a subtext: if great people in the past had brought civilization and if we in the present are really great, then we can bring civilization and we can do what those civilizing tall, white people did to Egypt or what the Greeks to Stonehenge. We can bring civilization. In other words, you can’t separate this notion of the rise and fall of civilizations and the hypothesis that it is rooted in the incredible achievement of an intrusive population from the imperial imagination of Europeans in the 18^th and particularly the 19^th century.

16. Modernization and inequality

Nobody believes in this stuff anymore—well, some people do. But academically every each one of these theories has been thoroughly demolished and sometimes politicized in the process. Then we are left with the question that Jared Diamond addresses of accounting for this inequality. One way to do this is to say that modernity as it comes into being in the Northwestern Europe area and in North America is a unique, one-time, totally different phenomenon. It is the template for the future of the world through the process of globalization and modernization, and therefore no other examples need be given because we are dealing with a unique situation, in which it happens–not in some ancient time but happens empirically now–that the Europeans and Americas just really are better and they are the model for the future. That was the dominant view certainly in the 1960s, the heyday of modernization theory, and it is widespread to a certain degree in the present day.

But it also rests on this idea that you take this Northwest quadrant and you pick only one part of it to characterize the whole. If you decide that you’re going to deal with the quadrant altogether, then you look at the movement over time of power and importance from one part of the quadrant to another. If you’re an avowed believer in European exceptionalism, you have no discomfort in saying that the Renaissance took place in Italy,  the voyages of discovery took place in Spain, the Industrial Revolution took place in England, and it’s all the same thing because it’s all Western Europe–the fact that Italy and Spain end up in a less prosperous condition by 1900 isn’t as important because you are dealing with the same area.

If you take the entire quadrant, we have to think not just of Northwestern Europe, but we have to think of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa. We have to look at this holistically and think about why certain areas within a cultural zone move from greater or lesser prominence at any particular point in time. This comes to a head in a debate that has been very important in the field of Middle Eastern studies, which Prof. Bulliet will start his next lecture with, and that is the debate on the so-called decline of the Ottoman Empire. There are some people who say that, if you say a people declined then that is a moral failing, unless you say there is a decline of the British Empire, which of course is a good thing (laughter). And there are other people who say that “decline” is the proper word to use.

This concludes the third lecture of Prof. Richard Bulliet of Columbia University on the Modern Middle East.

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