The Munk Debates Podcast - Ian Morris Dialogue - Geography is Destiny

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

In 2016, the UK stunned the rest of Europe by voting to leave the European Union. The split was close, 48 per cent of people voted to stay but 52 per cent voted to leave the geopolitical and trade alliance. In his book, Geography is Destiny, Ian Morris argues Brexit should not have come as a surprise. Instead he says, this has been playing out for 10,000 years, when the landmass now known as Britain first became an island. Morris argues that Britain is uniquely positioned due to its proximity to Europe while able to stay insular thanks to the English Channel. This wasn't always the case. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were bit players on the edge of the European stage. But by 1500 CE, advancement of ships and governments of the day turned  Britain into a worldwide power. By 1900, Britain was beginning to see the sun set on its empire thanks to rapid globalization. Now Morris says, the great question facing Britain now is how to keep up with Beijing and is it “chaps or maps” that make a country great.  Joining the Munk Debates for this Dialogue is Ian Morris, author of Geography is Destiny.  QUOTES: “The title of the book is “Geography is Destiny”. That's because nothing that was said or done during the Brexit debate was in any way new. It was like it was the latest round in an 10,000-year-old argument that we can trace back to the history and archaeology about “what do insularity and proximity mean” and “what do we do with them?” -Ian Morris   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Kelly Linehan Editor: Adam KarchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I want to introduce to you today a new feature for this podcast feed. Over the course of the summer of 2022, we're going to be recording for your listening pleasure a series of munk of dialogues. These are going to be in-depth one-on-one conversations with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We're going to dig into the issues and trends that are shaping our world and do that through.

through a one-on-one interview format. Our first guest in this, our new Monk Dialogue series, is Ian Morris. He's a celebrated historian and archaeologist who holds Stanford's Gene and Rebecca Willard professorship in classics. He's the author of a whole series of big international bestselling books on history and geography. You may remember his international bestseller. why the West rules for now, the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. His most recent book is Geography is Destiny, Britain and the World, a 10,000-year history.

Up next is Ian Morris in conversation with me, Rudyard Griffiths, about geography is destiny, his latest book. I hope you enjoy this interview. Ian, great to be in conversation with you. Well, thanks so much for having me on the show under that very kind introduction. Ian, let's dive right into the book, and I just want to situate your considerable kind of contribution to our understanding of history and the importance of geography as a device, as a field of human knowledge and endeavor that can help us better understand our past and arguably give us some creative ways to think about the future. So why the title of the book, Geography is Destiny, what is the argument you're trying to make here? Yeah, well, this is the ladies in a series of books I've been writing over the last 10, 15 years. I started my career as a pretty straightforward historian archaeologist, looking at one particular part of the world over a reasonably short space of time.

But what I found was that the bigger I made the geographical and chronological framework, the newer and more surprising answers, started to come out. Until I got to the point I found myself talking about the whole world over thousands of years and generalizing broad sweeping theories about history. And then it kind of occurred to me that these grand global theories, they're not really worth very much unless you can scale them back down to explain actual things that happen to real people. And so I'm thinking along these lines. Then along comes Brexit in 2016, British vote to leave the European Union. And I just because of me, oh, of course, this is the perfect test case, the perfect place to take these grand theories and see, can we bring them back down to a more human scale? And admittedly,

you know, for me, a more human scale is still 10,000 years long. But so the question I found myself asking was, well, can Britain's long-term geographical, geostrategic position in the world, does that help us understand what happened in June of 2016? Are there these long-term continuities? And the reason it's a 10,000 year history is 10,000 years ago is basically that's the point at which rising sea levels, as the glaciers melt at the end of the ice age, rising sea levels start cutting, well, start making the British Isles into Isles, because they're not Isles up till then. And this is the point at which we see these two geographical facts, which have dominated British history ever since, one being the fact that the British Isles are islands, crucial, the other

one being that they're really close to Europe. So there's like insularity and proximity. And so I start trying to look at this story, ask myself, can I see long-term forces driving the outcomes we've recently had and where things are likely to go next. And if so, what are they? So that's kind of the basic thinking behind the book. Okay, well, let's dig into that because I think, you know, there is a bias out there. You know it, Ian, that it's, you know, traps, not maps to reverse your phraseology, that define history.

And if you're going to understand Brexit, well, you've got to understand, you know, the personalities of the moment of when that historical event occurred. But then more importantly, you're going to go. go back into history, you're going to study the great men, and let's hope we throw in a few great women, too, to come up with a kind of chain of causality that leads from, you know, A to B to C. So why Maps, not Chaps in this case, to understand Brexas? I want some data points for me. Yeah. Yeah, well, one of the nice things with writing this book, like I was saying, it's an attempt to get down a little bit, at least a little bit more to the human level. It became a lot clearer

to me as I was writing the book, the extent to which it's maps and chaps. And you take either end of that explanatory spectrum, you're going to miss a lot of what's going on. And, you know, Karl Marx has this famous line in the middle of the 19th century that men make their own history, but not in ways of their own choosing. I think he was absolutely right about that. And so, I mean, the title of the book, Geography is Destiny. And that's because really nothing that was said or done in the Brexit debate was in any way new. And it was like Brexit was the latest round that is 10,000-year-old argument that we can trace back in the history and the archaeology, are people arguing about what do insularity and proximity mean?

And what do we do with them? And the story I felt came out of this long-term history was that while geography drives history, you can't ignore the geography. Geography drives history. At the same time, history drives what geography means. And so insularity and proximity, they keep changing their meaning, and particularly because as technology and organization change, what the insularity and the proximity mean,

that becomes abruptly different from one period to another. And so it's like, geography is destiny, but it's up to us to decide what to do about it. And so that was kind of the basic idea running through the book.

And so what I tried to do was sort of get into what was happening in each period of time and see how people, how well did they understand the cards that geography were dealing to them?

And then how well did they play them? Because you get some people who just, they just don't get it. They just never quite grasp. what Britain's geography means for them. Then you get other people who get it, but then they just interpret it in such really stupid ways.

It turns out disastrously. And so this, I think, is the storyline. If you want to be a great statesman, a great geostrategist, you must understand the geography, and then you must figure out what you do about it. Well, let's just experiment with the counterfactual. Let's say sea levels never rose. The trench wasn't filled in.

The channel didn't exist. Would we have had Brexit? Would we even have a Britain, in your view, that is anywhere close to our understanding of the culture, the people, the dynamics of that society today? Yeah, it's a great question. I love counterfactual questions, because I think they are the only way

you can really think about causal questions. You say A cause B, then you're implicitly asking, well, what if not A, do we still get people? And in this case, this counterfactual, like most of them, it gets a little bit tricky, because of course you've got to ask yourself, well, how could we live in a world where the sea level didn't rise? Would the ice age... Did the ice age have to continue? And if it did, of course, the whole discussion is off the table.

But if we have the fantasy world where we can have the ice age ends and still, for some reason, the water's dump full in the channel. It's a big, I don't know, something blocks it. Then I think British history, in some ways it wouldn't have been wildly different. What happens? Like when the waters do rise, you get these three big phases of British history since the end of the Ice Age. And the first one, by far the longest, last so about the year 1500. You've got water in the channel.

But it actually kind of doesn't matter. Through most of the British history, the channel has been more of a highway than a barrier. Like, if you can get to the continental side of the English channel, you can pretty much automatically get to the English side as well. Because the levels of technology and the organisation of governments are such that nobody can stop you. You can still capsize and drown, but barring that, you can get across the channel. And so British history has almost always just been an extension of continental history. The great inventions and breakthroughs and developments all happen off to the south and east, down in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, India, China and so on. Then they kind of roll north and west.

So they get to the edge of Europe, and they hop straight across the English Channel because it's simply a highway, not a barrier. Wash across the British Isles, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, usually. for a mix of those. And so that has been the standard story. If there were no English channel, that word just have continued. And what makes British history so peculiar is that about 500 years ago, the British were able to reverse that story, suddenly make insularity trump proximity. They could close the English channel. And that's when weird stuff starts to happen in British history. Well, let's talk about some of that weird stuff and maybe just an idea that some of our listeners are having, tuning into this conversation about the effects of technology,

because it's really 500 years ago that you begin to have the basis for a technological revolution that completely transforms and changes British society. It creates a British Navy that rules the seven seas, that creates, in turn, empire that allows for Britain to project force in ways that you know, you couldn't have predicted maybe or even conceived of for an earlier era of a British history. So how does technology interact with geography to shape destiny? Yeah, technology is one of the big driving forces in the story. I say technology and just the organization of society, that these are constantly changing what geography means. So between your 8,000 BCE, when the waters are starting to rise,

1500 CE. Obviously, huge amount of technological change, but none of it is enough to affect the basic geographical facts in British history. What changes that is starting in the 15th century, you're getting West Europeans, Portuguese especially, tinkering around developing new kinds of ships, and by the 16th century, the building these galleons, and the galleons, they're kind of expensive, like 16th century aircraft carriers, but they can do two things for you. And one is they can open the ocean. So these galleons can escort merchant ships across the Atlantic. It's still a bit risky across the Atlantic, but it's becoming reasonably safe and predictable. The Atlantic, which had been a barrier through the whole of history, just too big for anybody to cross with

a couple of minor exceptions. Atlantic is turning into a highway, linking Western Europe to North America and then onto the rest of the world. So these galleons open up the Atlantic, prove that Britain is no longer the edge of the world, but you have been for so long. So Britain not the edge of the world anymore. But then what you can also do with these galleons, so the English sailors start to realize this around about the 1560s, 1570s, you can put them into the English channel, and you can close the channel. For the first time in history, you can deny arrival the use of the seas and the way that it's sort of standard fare for naval strategists today. Talk about command of the oceans. Command of the oceans meant nothing before about 1550. So then you get these guys saying, aha, now here's an

idea. We have been like shaking in our boots for a generation or two now about the power of the Spaniards. They control the Atlantic. They can cross the English Channel any time the mood takes them. Well, now they can't. And they go and tell Queen Elizabeth this. And she is profoundly skeptical about that. She never entirely bites the bullet on this one. But this new idea has come up. You can close a channel, cut to England, because England, Scotland, Ireland, separate countries of this point more or less. You can protect England from any continental interference. Then Secure behind your moat's defensive, as they call it. This is a Shakespeare line.

There's no coincidence. Shakespeare starts all this talk about England being this, you know, blessed plot. It's secure behind the silver seas, a moat defensive. This is all in the 1590s. Because essentially before that, it simply made no sense. So Shakespeare talking about a moat defensive. English governments say, aha, we can hide behind the moat defensive. We can unite the whole of the aisles into a single kingdom,

and we can create this global. global empire, if we want to. That's the big question. Do we want to do that? That's where the organization thing comes in. Because this is like super expensive. You can't just have the boats. You've got to have new kinds of governments that can raise enough money consistently to build a lot of these boats and keep them at sea year after year after year. And this is a very new thing. And on the whole, English people say, you know, I don't want a government. They can reach down into the bottom of my pocket and steal all my money because that's kind of what the deal is here. We will give you Shakespeare's Blessed Plot and you give us all your money.

And then we'll make more money with it. This is the deal they're trying to strike. And so you get this sort of century of upheavals in the British Is, the Civil Wars of the 17th century, the most obvious example of this. These are basically arguments about what do we think geography means? Where do we think England and then Britain as a whole fit into the larger world? So it's a really violent process. And geography is dealing Britain these cards, technology and organisation. show me what the cards mean, but then you've still got to decide, do you really want to go down that path?

That's super helpful. A kind of hierarchy there, geography first, technology organization coming in after a sense to play the card the geography gives you. So was Brexit inevitable? If you have a thesis of view that Britain developed this consciousness of itself as not only succinct and different from the continent geographically, but that that difference, then compelled and produced for the country an incredible multi-century period of global preeminence, then doesn't Brexit seem like a very natural kind of intuitive reaction to a British people who felt under stress, under threat in a variety of ways, real or imagined? Yeah, I mean, I was saying not inevitable. I mean, I tend to think that pretty much nothing is inevitable in history. It's just that sometimes the cards favor, one decision so heavily over other ones. It becomes more or less inevitable. But yet, with Brexit,

I think you get this period starting to emerge around 1500, very much emerged by 1700, where the English and by extension the British see themselves as the centre of the world. In some ways, they are the centre of the world. Project power globally. And then by 1900, it's starting to fall to pieces. And actually, it falls to bits really for the same reasons it was created in the first place, that changing technology and organization change the meanings of geography. So basically the world keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller, about 1,500 on. A couple hundred years has this sweet spot where the British can, well, if you're British, it's sweet, where you can dominate the globe from your position at the edge of Europe.

By 1900, Britain can no longer do that. There are much greater piles of money of accumulated in North America, Western Europe, British thrashing around for ways to preserve their global diamonds. And this is the period when some British start floating ideas like imperial preference, like a union with Britain's overseas white settler dominions like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and that they'll create a new kind of British global dominance. But the British basically thrashing around, looking for ways to either to preserve the old system or to say to themselves, okay, we cannot do that.

So what is the best new states for Britain to take on in this changed geography? There's a very famous line, Dean Acheson, one time Secretary of State in the US, said, Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role. And everyone in Britain was mortally offended by this. But the guy was right. And this has really been what post-World War II British brand strategy has been about. What is the role now that the 18th to 19th century empires, they just don't function any more ridiculous to try to defend them because we'll lose about anything else.

So what are we going to do instead? And Brexit is part of this long-term debate, going back at least to Roman times. Should Britain try to, basically, to cozy up to the continent, to see itself, its destiny is primarily continental? Or is its destiny really different and insular? And the big question, of course, he said, well, what is geography now telling us? Was Brexit, in fact, a smart decision? Or, and I think the way, actually, the way people are going to judge Brexit, say, 50, 60 years from now, They'll look back on this and say, you know, what actually mattered in 2016 wasn't Brussels.

It was Beijing. You know, what's happening now, the big thing that's happening for us is the accumulation of this East Asian mountain of money, the power of China. The way they're going to judge Brexit, to say, well, as geography changes meanings, did Brexit, did leaving the European Union, improve Britain's position relative to the great Chinese mountain of money or make it worse? I think that's the question they'll ask in half a century's time. Well, and that's exactly where I want to go next. Apply these lenses of the first, the big lens, the focal lens of geography, and then organization and technology to China. Do you see a similar, you know, kind of hinge moment in history where these various factors line up?

And I think everyone could understand the argument in terms of technology and organization where China is surging in terms of its ability to. project influence and shape the global order. I guess I haven't done enough thinking about Chinese geography. Is this an asset in the same way that geography somehow became this lever in the United Kingdom to propel global power and dominance, again, far beyond when anyone could have reasonably expected from the British Isles?

What's your view on China's geography? Yeah, I think one of the nice things about writing this book was it kept striking me as I was writing the book, how the basic methods I was developing, these can be applied to any part of the planet. They are analytical tools for thinking about what drives history. This struck me particularly. I was invited to a conference in Kathmandu in Nepal,

which was great. I've never been to Nepal before. And Nepal, its geography is about as different from Britain's as you can possibly imagine, landlocked, mountainous, trapped between the Indian and Chinese giants. And geography's driven Nepali history, every bit as strongly as British history, but just different ways,

because it's a different place, different places are different. And China, yeah, of course, exactly the same sorts of things apply in China. Chinese geography, very, very different from Britons. And this is something people have been thinking about a long time. This is a classic essay by Halford and the Kinder, the British geographer from 1904,

talking about how the world breaks down, what he called a kind of core area within the Eurasian heartland, than the inner rim, the countries around the edge of the Eurasian, Asian land mass, so from China, through India, Middle East, to the Western Europe, then the outer rim, countries which abut directly on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And through most of history, the inner rim had been dominant, places like Britain, total backwaters. Then you get this

big revolution starting around 1500. Now outer rim countries, first Britain, then the US, and McKintern, is just beginning to see the rise of Japan when he starts writing about this. These countries become dominant because by controlling the oceans, now you can project power inward from the oceans into the inner rim. And that's why the British shoot up the Chinese fleet in the 1840s dictate terms to China. And for a full century, what the Chinese call the century of humiliation, this is what the maps mean. The outer rim dominates the inner rim. Then that has not yet entirely changed, but Chinese geography has changed. Part of it because of kind of organizational agreements, China is able to negotiate its way into the World Trade Organization, other groups, bring itself into the

American-dominated global order. And once they do that, their geography abruptly changes meaning. And so the first big thing, I think any Chinese strategist would say to you, if you asked this question, would be, well, the big fact in China's geography now is what they call the island chain. It's a chain of alliances running from Japan down to Singapore or Australia that the Americans constructed after World War II basically kind of constrains China. It has a potential to shut China off from access to the Pacific Ocean.

catastrophic effects that will have for the Chinese economy. So for China, the question geography is forcing on them is, how do we deal with this geographical problem? One answer is you break the island chain, either through negotiation, through cutting deals with Korea and other places, or through violence, you attack Taiwan. The other answer is you outflank the island chain. You build the Belt and Road Initiative across Central Asia,

down to the Indian Ocean, out to the Mediterranean, and you do all your maritime connections over it's a little less convenient, but you can do it. You can get around the American island chain. So I think Chinese strategists would say, well, absolutely. This is exactly the sorts of problems that we're dealing with. So the peripheral countries will try to continue to fight for the, primarily the naval dominance that allowed them historically to advantage of themselves over the larger landlocked great powers. It's a fascinating way to look at it. I want to end on just a little bit of a personal confession.

Over the course of this horrible war that we've seen break out in Europe, the first major conflict since World War II, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I've been thinking about you and I've been thinking about your book that really had a big impact on me, which was War, What Is It Good for, Everything. And the final chapter of that book, Ian, where you presented a, I think for me, really, again, compelling way of looking at this moment of history that we're in the middle of, this contest, as you put it between nightfall, where our technologies, including, as we're seeing in Ukraine, far too much discussion of the risk of nuclear weapons, kind of swamps our innovation

and our ability to manage kind of complexity. And I'm just wondering, you know, you wrote that book a while ago now, there's been some time. I'm wondering how you're feeling at this kind of this moment and whether you feel that the forces of nightfall are in ascendancy or whether you're still optimistic, not that you were necessarily optimistic in the book. You said it was a very kind of even an uncertain race between humanity's capacity to kind of innovate versus our capacity

to destroy ourselves. So I'd just would love to check in with you on that thesis. Yeah, well, actually, I mean, Ukraine is, I think, a classic illustration of the geography is destiny thesis. And even the name Ukraine probably comes to an old Slavonic word meeting borderlands. I mean, if you're given the choice, never live in a place called the borderlands, because everybody's going to fight over you. So in a way, there's nothing terribly surprising about what's happened.

I think of what the reason it's come to so many others as a shock is that it seemed like we've developed a new equilibrium where the use of violence to resolve major international problems. The costs were always going to outweigh the benefits. And so no great powers, again, likely to resort to force, especially if it sets you up down the nuclear path. And I think for all kinds of reasons, Vladimir Putin has drawn a different conclusion from what's happened over the last 10 or 15 years. And I'd say the Ukrainian conflict, you're coming back to your life, larger question about nightfall. In a way, this might turn out to be one of the benchmarks by which we can judge the progress toward our way from nightfall. Putin has been talking about the possibility of using nuclear weapons. This is bizarre Russian idea. They've been floating for like

20 years and about escalating to de-escalate. You use nuclear weapons in order to send a message to the West that if you continue supplying weapons to Ukraine, we're going to escalate still further. It's kind of a nutty theory, but some people apparently take it seriously. And so there's all kinds of indications that this conflict could be hastening, as speeding up our move toward nightfall. It's beginning to look now that maybe that isn't going to happen. And I think it might be, if all goes well in the Ukrainian country, this might be something that over the next 20 years,

people like Xi Jinping, keep looking back on Ukraine and saying, well, what we learn from that episode is that force is still not a good. good way to try to resolve your problems. Invading Taiwan, I'm sure it has a lot of attractions to some strategists in Beijing, but it's a really bad idea. The West actually is going to stand together and talking about escalating to nuclear weapons, just talking about it, that's not going to do it. The only way you could really fright people is by actually escalating, and then it's going to get really appalling really, really quickly. This was a lesson of all the war games that ran corporation and other people ran during the Cold War.

No, you can't play with nuclear weapons. So the minute you start down this path, all bets are going to be off. And so I'm hoping, in my optimistic mood, hoping that this is the outcome of the Ukrainian war. People say, wow, here was the definitive lesson that since 1945, since the invention of nuclear weapons, the whole, the rules of the game have changed. And that, you know, whatever happens, Ukraine is always going to be a geographical problem for any Russian ruler. If you're a ruler in Moscow, You're going to be terrified of the thought of having a hostile Ukraine just because of the geography. But the way to deal with that problem is not by invading them. It's by trying to make the Ukrainians like you, the way the Europeans have done. Well, thank you, Ian, for coming on this, the monk dialogues, to discuss this fascinating book. Geography is Destiny, Britain and the world, a 10,000-year history. I urge all of our monk debate podcast listeners to get a copy of Geography as Destiny. into Ian's thinking. It's time well spent. You can also, while you're at it, if you haven't

already, check out his other big international bestsellers, why the West rules for now, the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. And the book I was just discussing with Ian, one of my top 10 nonfiction books of the last decade, War. What is it good for? Ian Morris, thank you so much for coming on The Monk. Dialogs today. Well, thank you very much. This is a great thing on the show. Well, that wraps up this inaugural edition of the Monk Dialogues. I hope you enjoy the program. We're going to be offering you our usual mix of debates, our members-only Monk Debate podcast. We'll continue to come out each and every Friday with Janice Gross-stein. If you want to subscribe to that podcast and get it as part of our private feed for members only, you can do that right now by becoming

a free member at the Monk Debates. Simply go to our website, www.w.w.munkdebates.com. Register and we'll send you all that information on how to subscribe to our members-only private Monk Debates podcast. Thank you again for listening to the Monk Dialogues. I look forward to spending more time with you. And thank you again for all your time and effort that you're giving to the Monk Debates.

and our mission and mandate to restore the art of civil and substantive debating conversation in our time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aure and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Adam Karsh. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. and if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.