David Lloyd-Jones wrote:
> > we have to recognize the importance of immaterial factors,
> > I would think. God perhaps, or more likely superior amounts
> > of will, stamina, determination, zeal, "heart", pluck on the
> > part of Europeans, and sloth, laziness, inefficiency, corruption,
> > fatalism, etc. on the part of the non-European natives.
>
> It amazes me that Mike can't get this right -- but then he is an
> American, from the land where a gun is called an "equalizer"or a
> "peacekeeper" and the big bombs are called a "nuclear umbrella." The
> thing that has distinguished north Europeans over the past five hundred
> years, The Gunpowder Years (tm), is simply the will to mass violence,
> and the willingness to direct it at other cultures and individuals, and
> their cats, dogs, libraries, customs, tax policies, and gods.
Well, splendid! You've identified an immaterial factor. Which
more or less bears on my implicit point-- that explanations which
are not of a materialist bent don't seem to work too well these
days. They've gone out of style, and I wonder if they will someday
swing back into style.
-- Mike Shupp Graduate Student Department of Anthropology California State University, Northridge ms44278@csun1.csun.edu http://www.csun.edu/~ms44278/