It’s also unrealistic to think that cultures can (or should) stay frozen in time.
A problem of geography
The clincher that relegates this study to the curiosity box rather than place it at the scholarly cutting edge is that Laitin’s team forgot to read their geography textbooks. They succumb to an age-old fallacy – one academic geographers call environmental determinism.
It’s a doctrine stretching from Charles Darwin back to Hippocrates and Aristotle: that human culture is determined by surrounding ecological conditions. The doctrine has been discredited by academic geographers since the 1920s.
While patterns of habitation are coarsely linked to climate, aridity and availability of soil nutrients (that’s why the inland of Australia has always been more sparsely populated than the coast), environmental determinism invites false conclusions that culture or the mindset of individuals are dictated by climate or topography.
This once popular premise led early twentieth-century geographers to fanciful and hurtful theories about racial and cultural difference.
Infamously, climatologist Austin Miller argued that “the enervating monotonous climates of much of the tropical zone, together with the abundant and easily obtained food-supply” produced “a lazy and indolent people” more suitable to slavery than employment.
Even worse, German geographer Friedrich Ratzel’s theory of the organic state as biological organism provided an intellectual foundation for fascist imperialism.
Such ideas faded into obscurity in academic geography in the 1940s, in the wake of Nazism. Academic geographers now seek to study complex interactions between environmental, political, economic and cultural factors.
Heading in the wrong direction
Laitin and colleagues say nothing about “race”, yet the logic of environmental determinism engulfs their study.
They suggest that geography got in the way of cultural blending that could have prevented problems such as “low economic growth, high rates of generalised distrust of others, high likelihood of local violence”.
In contrast to reporting of their study, cultural diversity is, according to this skewed logic, a bad thing.
What is perhaps most frustrating about environmental determinism is its defeatism. If we trust Laitin’s results, it becomes all too easy to believe that no-one in particular is to blame when cultural diversity is undermined, and that we’re powerless to support it.
What counts far more than a country’s shape are its attitudes and policies towards cultural diversity, the treatment of indigenous peoples and how humans are embroiled within dynamic ecological change.
In a world faced with complex environmental challenges, we would be well served to spend less time thinking about the shape of countries, and more time thinking about the interactions between diverse human beings and environments at all scales.
