Climate and Culture

As some readers may have realized I have lately become interested in the history of the American West. Reading Zane Gray more or less to go back to a more readable style of prose for my philosophic creative writing. I found another cheap book with articles from Harper's magazine called the West.

Just as in Gray's books there is language from an earlier time which in our time would seem politically incorrect. The use of the word Greaser for the Mexican settlers for example- and yet the themes and movies I have seen lately based on our myth of the West, we are all cowboys just as we all speak with a Mafia accent in the eastern establishment, wall street and main street? But the political differences seem to be that of the viewpoint of Lincoln on how we help each other in turn to accumulate wealth- or those that with further education come to accept and "know their place". Apparently, as in the early days of our frontier several colonies or social experiments were undertaken- for example Greeley in Colorado or Ruby in Tennessee. But let us not forget the Mormon experience in Utah Territory.

There were two articles on the Mormons and both were not very flattering. Interestingly both compared the leaders of that church to Islam and aspirations to be like Mohamed. Both suggested the enslavement of women and a cultural hierarchy that gleaned the poor so as to accumulate vast wealth and power by tithing.

It is noteworthy that those colonies with reasonable planning (it seems that irrigation is a goad to more government cooperation to awaken the soil from its former plush richness-but some planning and government is needed for impartial deciding of such water rights issues.) were the ones with more individuality and more private property capitalist interests ameliorated- yet the socialist or semi-socialist experiments did not survive.

Sometimes when isolated in the wilderness the cost of transporting things such as large trees from the mountain tops outweighs the usefulness and profits. Alfalfa was the crop that led to the potato field awakening due to no need to import fertilizer. Again, small changes and surviving hardships while not losing faith make for a world of shared wealth eventually- but clearly the old New England and in the West self-reliance so as not to disdain hard work while promoting things like education for the general good create the data for these first social experiments.

Now, to combine the idea of culture determined by climate (certainly there is an influence here- Arabia Felix or the more fertile time of the explosion of Aramaic peoples- even the golden age of wisdom from the flowering of Greece when it was not so difficult to travel areas now only the hardiest can cross of deserts- sends forth its sons to new grazing- to what extent then does hunger drive us- and as in new scientist today this relates to ideas of our mental development of language.) in our day is the explosive issue of what is scientific and how we may as humans be the cause of climate changes (global warming, AGW) rather than our cultural and evolutionary changes adapting to some natural events or cycles.

Since, as on Leibniz book we have the traditional arrangement of our earlier ideas of the cosmos as the wet and dry and hot and cold of Aristotelian logic, I would be interested in if our study of the wet and dryness of that interplay in the temperate zones could yield better data, more scientific data, to decide the issue. What do you think Lubos? In the short range if I am reading this graph right why does it seem to over time become dampened as to the range of changes between wet and dry? Perhaps this is an artifact of our mathematical modeling- perhaps just social wishing from those who would impose further control and restrictions for a global state that maintains the evolution of the powers that be.