The Great Divide

Peter Watson  is an English intellectual who has written a book on the origin of ideas. The Great Divide follows in the line of works, as those by Charles C. Mann, and Jared Diamond. 

Humans are environmental products; if we are to understand why we are the way we are, we have to understand, how is the land we are born on, which shaped the way we think. Mann started by pointing out that there was Intelligent Life in America before 1492, and Diamond proposed one answer to Yali's Question : ""Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

Diamond writes his answer in Guns, Germs, and Steel. He makes us aware of the importance of the South to North orientation of America, and the West to East orientation of Eurasia. Americans took a longer time to build  agricultural societies, because corn had to adapt to different latitudes, as opposed to wheat, which was domesticated in different longitudes. It is ironic, that it is relatively easy to measure latitude, and harder to measure longitude. On this, you can read Dava Sobel's book: Longitude. And maybe the more fun, Umberto Eco's: The Island of the Day Before.

Returning to Watson; he points out the existence of psychoactive plants in America in greater numbers than in Eurasia, and the more fragile environment as well. He proposes that this combination made the first Americans' Gods, malign, and the other hemisphere's single God more benign. Order vs. Chaos.

The interesting fact is that we are both: Our Earth as a big Brain, with two communicating hemisphere's, Left Brain, and Right Brain. If we could only live together. I am afraid an Indian War is starting in Mexico, and one already started in Peru. Shining Path, and Zapatista Army of National Liberation. It doesn't have to be that way.

Oh well.