Cleopatra’s nose and butterfly
I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. After its demise, when I traveled to western Europe the first few times, I had the bitter feeling of not being able to answer this question: why they lived so much better than we did?
I could not accept the simple “because they are smarter” or “because they work better” or “because their government is less corrupt”. I could not accept these simple answers because the difference in the prosperity was huge, while the difference in the number of the smart people and har-working ones, and the number of corrupt politicians was not that big (I am talking about early post-Soviet years, not Russia of today when corruption is breaking national records and is the root cause of many problems).
The more complex answers, like “the difference in the culture and tradition”, “historical wealth accumulation”, “better social and economic systems” sounded more promising to me, but were vague for an average layperson, like me, not familiar with cultural or social-economic studies. So, the question remained unanswered then. Even after I lived in the west for a dozen of years and talked to many people about it, I still could not come up with a satisfactory explanation of such wealth inequality in the world.
I have read many books about the world history, including the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant (I have read it even twice: the first time — by listening to the audio version, and the second time — by reading together with my wife Luda, aloud). I saw the logic and continuity of the development that brought us to the current state, but I was still in the grip of the idea that world history could be very different if this or that event would not happen.
The famous French mathematician, Blaise Pascal in his posthumously published book titled Pensees (Thoughts) stated: “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” In Pascal’s time, it was assumed that a big nose was indicator of a strong will. Thus, by his statement Pascal meant that without such an influential person as Cleopatra, Julius Cesar and Mark Anthony could have made quite different political decisions, and the great civil war in the Roman Empire would end up differently or would not happen at all. And we could be, for example, Roman citizens, for crying out loud.
This point of view has been shared by many historians and has its followers even today. It is a fascinating thought game to speculate “what if” about various big and small historical events. In 1952, in his short story A Sound of Thunder (about time travel), Ray Bradbury brought this idea to the logical extreme and even coined the term a “butterfly effect“, according to which our universe is so interdependent that even death of one butterfly can eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent world history.
Like many others, I believed Cleopatra’s nose theory and butterfly effect despite my loving of the Tolstoy’s point of view on the historical process, advanced in his War and Peace, which showed very convincingly (that’s the power of great writing!) that history is shaped by the multitudes of small and not so small events, while the subsequent generations create a narrative (or many narratives, each in the context of their lives) that creates a logical chain of the causes.
Then, after I observed first hand the dissolution of the USSR, I started to doubt that the nose theory and the butterfly effect are applicable to the historical processes. Some individual events can happen accidentally. But in the case of the USSR, I saw how many different forces interplayed all the time and felt there were less visible long-term historical undercurrents that shaped world history on the big scale. Yet I still could not put my finger on what was that and could not answer the question, why they lived much better than we?
The answer I got from Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It identified for me those underlying advantages that European countries had over many other regions of the world. The book is more than 500 pages thick, so I am not going to abbreviate it to a half-page summary. I just would like to mention three reasons that explained to me the current state of affairs.
The more or less continuous line of our current civilization development can be traced back to the Fertile Crescent at 11,000 years ago. At that time, some of the societies moved ahead of the societies in other regions, and the peloton was not able to catch up with them.
Here are the three advantages those in the Fertile Crescent had, which secured them the victory in the race:
1) East-west expanse without constraints of a single empire. (That’s what bothers me in the US now — the concentration of power and the decrease in the quantity and diversity of the influential participants of the democratic process.) They had many different groups spread on a big territory with the same climate, which allowed many diverse groups to freely participate in the trying and sharing of similar knowledge and experience. As Jared put it,
because crop and livestock species, and people using technologies and social behaviors associated with those species, can spread more rapidly at the same latitude, where they always encounter constant day length and seasonality and similar diseases, than across bands of latitude, where they must adapt to different day lengths and seasonality and diseases.
2) The above would not give the Fertile Crescent an edge unless it did not have domesticatable plants and animals. And here is the second advantage in Jared’s words:
2.1) there are 56 “large-seeded wild grasses (cereals) such as wheat and barley, which contribute more calories to human diets than any other plants. Of those 56, almost all are native to Mediterranean zones or other seasonally dry environments, and 32 are concentrated in the Mediterranean zone of Western Eurasia. The world’s four other Mediterranean zones — those of Chile, California, South Africa, and Southwest Australia — offer respectively only 2, 1, 1, and 0 large-seeded wild grasses.“
2.2) “of the world’s 14 species of valuable domestic mammals, 13 were Eurasian, only one American (lama), and none Australian.“
3) The closeness to the domesticated animals, imposed on the humans many new deceases, which almost killed them (coronavirus today allows us to have a glimpse of how it happened). Those, who survived, became immune and passed this advantage to the subsequent generations. From then on, wherever these people arrived, they — without their knowledge — brought along the germs, unknown in the areas that did not have domesticated animals or very few of them. The germs “cleared” the native population and thus provided another reason for European domination.
The rest of the historical events were still important, but they happened in the context of these three conditions. The climate change and overproduction devastated the nations of the Fertile Crescent, but their discoveries and achievements were picked up by Europeans. The other continents and areas of Eurasia were just not able to catch up since then.
So, even if Cleopatra had a very short nose or did not have a nose at all, the world would not be very different.
This conclusion is not widely advertised for “political” reasons, I think. The problem is similar to 1% problem: their passive income will keep them at the top no matter how hard the bottom 99% work.
But the problem is not to be the wealthiest country in the world. For the majority of the nations, the goal is to be wealthy enough. And the world moves in this direction. That is another closely guarded secret, by the way, released recently by the Gates Foundation: “By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.” Why Gates was criticized for saying it? Because it is perceived that such data could decrease the motivation of poor countries to work hard. I do not think so. Even the relative notion of being poorer is motivating.
So, I got my answer. It does not demotivate me. On the contrary, it removes truly demotivating suspicion of having a lower IQ or something. This answer gives me hope to catch up with those ahead of us if we are trying harder.
Riding in the peloton of Tour de France is still an achievement, even if you are not dressed up in the yellow jersey of the leader.