Exams are exciting

The previous passage from my beloved Guns, Germs and Steel was just exciting trivia to prove that cougars existed even before Barney hit on Marshall’s law professor…

 

But here are two passages from the book that have set me thinking on this cold night.

One can think of other individuals whose idiosyncrasies apparently influenced history as did Hitler’s: Alexander the Great, Augustus, Buddha, Christ, Lenin, Martin Luther, the Inca emperor Pachacuti, Mohammed, William the Conqueror, and the Zulu king Shaka, to name a few. To what extent did each really change events, as opposed to “just” happening to be the right person in the right place at the right time?

Its begs the question really, can somebody change the world? I’d daresay I want to change the world. So what lessons, can an amateur wannabe revolutionary learn from this textbook? Is changing the world a matter of fate after all?

 

While one can contest my subjective impression that New Guineans are on the average smarter than Eurasians, one cannot deny that New Guinea has a much smaller area and far fewer big animal species than Eurasia. But mention of these environmental differences invites among historians the label “geographic determinism,” which raises hackles. The label seems to have unpleasant connotations, such as that human creativity counts for nothing, or that we humans are passive robots helplessly programmed by climate, fauna, and flora. Of course these fears are misplaced. Without human inventiveness, all of us today would still be cutting our meat with stone tools and eating it raw, like our ancestors of a million years ago. All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.

Diamond has provided very compelling logical and factual arguments to support his theory and I am inclined to take them into view.

Yet, the more pertinent question would be – if all humans started on the same line, are we still at the same line now, after millennia of evolution? Have the various races taken their own paths with regards to intelligence?

I used to be a fervent believer that we are all destined to our fates, as determined by our genes – if I cannot sing, then I cannot sing. Diamond’s arguments and John Locke’s theories of Tabula Rasa (and some psychological revelations on my part) have pushed me to the middle ground of confusion.

I think in conclusion,the only solution is divine assistance. And the theological discussions that were to accompany that statement is far beyond my scope of knowledge and faith.

One must learn to have faith.

Note to self – 13 more days to go. Hard is not hopeless.

P.S. On a sidenote, i f***ing hate APEC for making so much noise when I was trying to read the stupid Guns, Germs & Steel.