this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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deterministic theorizing without peer reviewed does not a proof make.
I loved GGS, but only as good storytelling. Poor support for many main points, but it is a good template showing you don’t have to resort to racist tropes to explain the world. It may be shoddy scholarship, but I was raised Mormon and it runs circles around the books by Cleon Skousen they tried to get me to believe.
I think something that GGS offers is the concept of a "theory of world" that frankly, it's surprising that no one has attempted before. For those who haven't read it, it's an attempt to offer an explanation for "why are things how they are, rather than how they are not" that is grounded in geology, geography, ecology and environment, rather than the almost exclusively either racist or religious explanations which had come before.
The actual argument falls flat and is fairly easily contradicted, but the principal behind it, that you can explain, at least in part, why the world is the way it is by a function of ecology and geography, I think is compelling.
The one bit of reasoning I especially liked was connecting the fact that it is harder for plants to adapt to different latitudes than to move east-west to the difference between empires in South America versus in Eurasia.
It is a very reasonable idea, armies travel on their stomachs and good crop plants are essential. Yeah it’s full of holes in reality, but it represents a way of thinking that can be the beginning of wisdom if pursued in a disciplined way.