Sir Francis Galton, by Charles Wellington, credit Wikipedia
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Bernd Roeck, The World at First Light; A New History of the Renaissance, translated by Patrick Baker, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2025, 1144pp, hb, reviewed by Leslie Jones
According to Sir Francis Galton, “The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek” (Hereditary Genius, 1869), for at its apogee, the relatively small population of Attica had produced “unsurpassed masterpieces” in “the principal departments of intellectual history”. (In his census of 317 B.C., Demetrios of Phaleron, the Governor of Athens, refers to 21,000 citizens in Attica).[i]) Galton cites fourteen illustrious men from the period 530-430 BC, including statesmen and commanders such as Pericles and Themistocles, and literary and scientific men such as Thucydides, Socrates, Plato and Aeschylus. What, for Galton, was the cause of Greek superiority? Attica, he observed, was open to immigrants but only those able to benefit from its rarefied social life. A system of unconscious selection had thereby produced “a magnificent breed of human animals”. Galton concluded that judging from the capacity of the common people to appreciate great literary and artistic works, the average ability of the Athenian race was two grades higher than our own. Tragically, this “marvellously gifted race” declined when marriage became unfashionable and, immigration and emigration remaining constant, the population was maintained by “the incoming population of a heterogeneous class”.
Professor Roeck, whose scholarship is not to be gainsaid, is a no less fervent admirer of the ancient Greeks. He considers them “the most important intellectual founders in world history”. Without Greek thought, he avers, the Renaissance and European modernity would be “unthinkable”. Attic democracy, in his opinion, encouraged rational philosophy and science. Some of the authors’ assertions on this subject are frankly hyperbolic. Writing about the ancient Greeks, he maintains, is “tantamount to reconstructing the genetics of modernity”. The Greeks of the 5th century were “the greatest inquirers in world history”, in his opinion, for they introduced historiography, ethnology and anthropology. Socrates and Plato, likewise, made the first attempt to “predicate the norms that governed every aspect of life on reason alone”, while Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, emphasised empiricism, i.e. what can be perceived and observed, one of the pillars of modern science.
The author acknowledges that thanks to the influence of the ancient Greeks, competition, the rule of law, science, modern medicine and freedom appeared in the West and only there. But he insists that “people outside of Latin Europe were not [therefore] less intelligent than the Europeans”. Professor Roeck is evidently anxious to avoid accusations of penning “hymns to Europe and its offspring”, in view of what he calls the “crimes of colonialism and imperialism”.
In an indicatively entitled chapter entitled ‘The Luck of Geography’, the author endorses Jared Diamond’s thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies (1997), that the Eurasian landmass “offered optimal conditions for the diffusion of cultural innovations”. Luck then, not innate ability, is for Roeck the basis of Western exceptionalism. Diamond is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist. Magisterially dismissing psychometric evidence of ethnic differences in cognitive ability, he accuses his “white” colleagues in psychology faculties of “trying for decades to demonstrate that black Americans…are innately less intelligent”. Indeed, observation has convinced Diamond that peoples often called primitive, such as hunter gatherers in New Guinea, are “more intelligent, more alert…than the average European or America” because kept up to the mark by selection. In short, Diamond espouses an inverted form of social Darwinism.[ii]
Diamond’s objective is to debunk the “myth” that “…history’s pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves”. Not that Professor Diamond disputes the superior might of those who have the most advanced technology (the guns and steel of his title) compared to those still using stone tools/weapons. But he finds the suggestion that the different technological levels of Aboriginal Australians and Europeans are rooted in racial differences “loathsome”.
Diamond gives an impressively detailed account of those aspects of the bio-geography of the Fertile Crescent (its climate, topography and wild plants and animals) that made possible the early and independent emergence of agriculture, the sine qua non of political organisation and technology. Present Eurasian dominance has its origin, in his judgement, in the precedence of civilisation in the Near East which then spread to Europe.
Why did agriculture fail to appear independently in certain seemingly favourable locations, such as California, sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia? Jared Diamond supposedly has the answer. Insufficient attention has been paid to ecological factors, in his opinion. There was a lack of suitable native plants for domestication in California, sub-Equatorial Africa and Australia. Then there was a distinct shortage of domesticable animal species in Central America and difficulties in producing a staple grain. Concerning rivers, Diamond contrasts Africa and the Americas, main axis north-south, with those of Europe, main axis west-east. Rivers are vital for cultural exchange and historians, he complains, have underestimated how geography has hindered the spread of crops and livestock in Africa and the Americas. Tropical zones and topographical barriers delayed the spread of livestock and crops.
Diamond emphasises the inherent environmental advantage of a continental landmass, Eurasia, with no major geographic barriers to the spread of agriculture and which enjoys sufficient rainfall to support long-term, intensive farming. He notes that almost all domesticable big wild animal species are native to Eurasia. And that extensive west-east zones with similar climatic conditions facilitated the spread of crops and animals adapted to particular climatic regimes.
Roeck eloquently describes the Socratic dialogue as “the mightiest weapon of all enlightenment, dedicated to the search for truth and wisdom, edifying but also corrosive”.[iii] One can imagine such a dialogue between Professor Roeck and Sir Francis Galton, in which the former, who rejects all evidence of group differences in mental ability, is quite unable to explain the intellectual superiority of the ancient Greeks.
ENDNOTES
[i] These figures should be taken with caution
[ii] See Leslie Jones, The Galton Institute Newsletter, issue no 29, June 1998, pp 6-8, review of Guns, Germs and Steel
[iii] The World at First Light, p32
Ideological bias and circumspection are easily detected in the writings of both Diamond and Roeck. To assume cerebral uniformity throughout all lineages of Homo sapiens is a “big ask” as they say and has no evidence to justify it.
The intellectual superiority of New Guinea hunter-gatherers over ancient Greek philosophers can easily be demonstrated by translating Aristotle into Hiri Motu. Diamond has been criticised in turn for Eurocentric assumptions and ignoring the effect of western colonialism in the “collapse” of societies.