U.S versus Vatican: A clash of cultures

National Catholic Reporter ^ | 5/23/2003 | John L. Allen

[FITZ]

Thanks ---it sounds like a good book ---much of Mexico and S. America are temperate ---I know corn, potatoes, beans, and squash were developed by the Indians long before Europeans came and they brought wheat, oats, and barley. I think one big reason for differences we see today is what stage Spain was in when it was the major power of the world ---Catholic but just free of the Muslim invasion and they had decided the Inquisition was a good way to go. Between the time Spain began to decline and the rise of England, all of Europe became transformed, the new ideas obviously spread to Spain too ---but it's colonizing days were over.

The Conquistadors settled Latin America, the Pilgrims settled the 13 colonies.

[Torie]

One problem is that crops and animals did not cross the tropical divide between South and North America. Thus the one productive domesticated herd animal in the New World, llamas, did not move north from the Inca empire, and corn and potatoes did not move south and north, respectively. And both did not have the productive aspects per natural and selecive breeding that wheat et al. had, for somewhat attendant reasons.

[CatoRenasci]

Ya' think?

[CatoRenasci]

I have read Guns, Germs, and Steel and, as an historian, found it reductionist, speculative, poorly-documented and ultimately unconvincing with respect to every major thesis.

[Torie]

Do elaborate. I am all ears.

[CatoRenasci]

Your view, emphasizing the unique effect of the frontier, has respectble historical support: Frederick Jackson Turner, one America's leading historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, published his "frontier thesis" in the mid-1890s. It has been the subject of much debate over the past 100 years and more in historical circles. As attractive as it is to me as a Californian, I have always been somewhat skeptical of the thesis in its stronger forms, believing it gives short shrift to other factors. But, then, I am attracted to ideas and chose to study intellectual history, so my own approach may be suspect as well.

[FITZ]

The "frontier" is interesting ---but I wonder how much of that was because of the American way of looking at the frontier. The SW-USA was already a Spanish frontier but they weren't really utilizing it, they were having trouble getting people to move into those northern territories so they decided to let Americans move in ---and then we took it over. Mexico had a very centralist form of government which probably made distance to the capitol city important and the US was more decentralized and could spread out further. There was probably a different mindset about moving out further from the center ---you see that in their cities still ---Americans head to the suburbs but they don't have those in Mexico ---they like to be close to the center of town and you don't see them living out in the boonies unless they have to.

[FITZ]

The French also settled in North America ---but they never seemed to take much interest even though some of the good explorers were French.

[CatoRenasci]

Well, you have to remember Mexico didn't exist until 1820....it was all New Spain until then. As a colonial power, Spain was very dirigiste, with authority centralized in the Spanish Viceroy. The Church, too, had tremendous power in the Spanish colonies, with the Inquisition active into the 19th century.

The Spanish settled California beginning in 1776 with Misson San Diego; the last mission, San Francisco de Solano, at Sonoma, was built in 1820, the year Mexico became independent.

The mindsets in Anglo-America and Mexico are, of course, incredibly different: they enslaved and converted their Native Americans, killing most of them. We pushed ours West and ended up killing most of them, but we never tried very seriously to enslave the Indians. I suppose the Spanish were more thorough, but we can see the difference in the results: Mexico is a third world country, corrupt beyond hope.

[CatoRenasci]

The French were more active than you might think. You really need to read Francis Parkman's great multivolume classic, France and England in the New World, which, 150 years hence, has not been surpassed for the broad sweep of the history of Frence exploration and colonization in North America and their interaction with the English. One cannot even enter the discussion without reading Parkman.

[FITZ]

We didn't enslave the Indians but we had slaves being brought over from Africa. So did the Spaniards in Mexico and of course Cuba and other Latin American countries but the Spaniards ended slavery in Mexico before we ended it here. They also had an Indian president ---Porfirio Diaz, so I'm not sure they were racist in the way we think of racists but his presidency was overthrown in the Mexican Revolution and he had to exile in Spain. I think it was after the Mexican Revolution that Mexico became more and more corrupt with it's one party system and the drug trade has made them very corrupt.

[FITZ]

I know individual French were active in exploring all of North America and they had some settlements but the French government doesn't seem to have been very involved. They sold their portion pretty easily for not much money ---I always wondered how those French in Louisiana felt when they knew their government practically gave them away. I guess just Quebec was enough for them.

[CatoRenasci]

There's really not much to elaborate. Diamond does a great deal of speculative assertion and says historians may not find his arguments convincing, because there's not much in the book historians would consider reliable evidence. He's right.

He never explains why various peoples reacted to circumstances differently. He says, e.g. the grains were different, and some were more easily domesticated than others, but never, ever explains why some peoples who had them prospered and others didn't. Or why technologies emerged in one area and spread.

If all he were doing in his book were suggesting things to think about, it would be unobjectionable. However, he claims he's going to answer the question why the West has "more Cargo", i.e., why the West has been uniquely successful. He does a very poor job of what he claims to do.

Much of his speculation is interesting, but is merely that, speculation.

I commend to you especially pp. 408ff:
The answers to Yali's questions are longer and more complicated than Yali himself would have wanted. Historians , however, may find them too brief and oversimplified. Compressing 13,000 years of history on all contiennts into a 400-page book works out to an average of about one page per continent per 150 years making brevity and simplification inevitable.....Naturally, a host of issues raised by Yali's question remain unresolved.

Indeed. Diamond is not trained as an historian and hasn't a clue about how historians consider evidence; rather he has a vague inkling a knows what he's done won't wash with the professionals.

The book is most impressive to the layman without much historical knowledge, but fails utterly as serious history.

[CatoRenasci]

Louisiana was a survival -- the French were really no longer a force in North America after Wolfe took Quebec in 1759. The French and Indian War (the Seven Years War in Europe) was the end of French colonial power in both North America and India. Louisiana went back and forth between the French and Spanish before Napoleon sold it to Jefferson, because he was desperate for cash to fight his continental wars.

[Dubya]

Does anyone in the USA actually care what the Vatican thinks or is interested in?

NOT ME.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

This reserve has been rekindled in recent months not only by the war, but also by the sex abuse crisis, both of which have suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture.

So is Hobbes, as in Thomas Hobbes... And I'm sure they don't want to talk about this, from Leviathan:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness

[21] ...For from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succsession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy (or kingdom of darkness) may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night). And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start upon a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

[22] The language also which they use (both in the churches and in their public acts) being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

[23] The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

[24] The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and church-yards.

[25] The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which (in what town soever they be erected) by virtue of holy water and certain charms called exorcisms have the power to make those towns cities (that is to say, seats of empire). The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts that domineer over the regions round about them.

[26] The fairies are not to be seized on and brought to answer for the hurt they do. ***So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.***

Notice the last sentence...

[CatoRenasci]

The sale of Louisiana was a good deal for Napoleon, because he was in no position to defend it if the United States determined to take it by force.