Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.
My son, grandson and myself had planned on a three day trip to southern Utah to see a national monument with interesting geological features. That was postponed because of scheduling and so decided to visit the Salt Lake so as to see buffalos, but that was aborted by a snowstorm, and finally accomplished this morning, when we visited Antelope Lake, which really shows buffalos at a distance, and also has a building that shows the evolution of the Great Salt Lake and pictures of the local birds and sand mites and has a gift shop and a brief movie, the trappings of any number of other tourist sites. My grandson said we would go to it next ten years from now or unless some people from far away, like New York City, come to visit. Actually, it was quite nice to go there and to drive back to Salt Lake City. We drove through a variety of colors and textures, which means that you are in a panographic and 3-D painting. There were the various parts that came together so that at some points there were snow peaked not too remote hills, the blue of the lake in the center when the vista is composed as a painting, and closer, the green of the marshland and, closest still, the light brown of the hills and the sagebrush that came right up to the road on which we were driving, all of these under a grayish overcast, light tone, as usual, putting a painting together. A very different experience of its environment than I would find in the East. The experience was harsh rather than lush, fewly populated, the distances difficult to judge as hills rolled back slowly to their distances where it was difficult to see a dark mound that was a buffalo or just a rock. Some hardy souls enveloped themselves in these long sloping hills, and I might have joined them when I was considerably younger. A sense of things worth experiencing, but did it amount to a different social much less political experience? It is the physical West, but is it a different way of life?
The truth of the matter was that the visit to Northern Utah was, indeed, just a junket. It was a destination point to travel to for a visit, one that is not so far away that you can do it as a day trip and so be pleased that the thing to see is not too far away. Visiting the national monuments in southern Utah will have to wait for when people can schedule it. The visit is an interest, or else a sidebar, however spectacular, as is going to the Empire State Building, which I did as a kid, when with my children and, after that, with my grandchildren, but didn’t otherwise visit except to an entrance level beer joint so as to have lunch with a friend who worked nearby. You don’t consider returning to the United Nations if you are not a tourist and visiting tourists come to the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art just to have been there, while I went to these places regularly because I was a habitue of art galleries. The same would be true of Utah: these are exhibits to see, for memory or atmosphere, rather than place people as their fixed settings that tell them what they feel themselves to be as a people.
If you want to see what you traverse as providing you with the spirit of a people, you might look more closely at the roads you went on to go to our destination point. There are two lines of hills between which is the Salt Lake City Basin. Between them are major highways that look alike anywhere, in all the states of the nation, thanks to the interstate highway system. The road markings are uniform everywhere and so they are an object of familiarity. Moreover, along the sides of the highways are national and international corporations, such as Ikea or McDonald’s, and local gasoline franchises that are functionally equivalent to any of the local service stations across the country even if they have unfamiliar names. There are developments along the highway which I am told were farms ten years ago, and the new homes seemed to be to me flowering all over America, in Cheyenne and Omaha and before that in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
If I go sauntering on a walk in my neighborhood, I see the things that have been created, these city-scapes and suburban-scapes, as telling me more about their point of view than is conferred by mountains and streams and cultural or geologic monuments. The area I live in has a number of single family ranch houses, mostly built in the last twenty or so years but each with a different architecture and so there is no sense of there being a development. People greet their neighbors and do the usual things of collecting leaves or washing the car or tending to children. The neighborhood looks like anyone you could find across America. It reminds me of Long Island, but only because I am familiar with it. In fact, it is everywhere in the world where the bourgeois lifestyle has established itself, and even to the further reaches of that. The boulevards of Kazakhstan have the road surfaces and signages and lane markings that are uniform everywhere.
What made my experience in Salt Lake City so immediately familiar and satisfying, as that is opposed to Utah’s for me exotic and strange topography, were the supermarkets. I had come home to giant places stocked with multiple varieties of the same product, whether in jams or crackers or milk and cheese as well as multiple products to meet every craving or impulse. There are kosher and Chinese and Spanish food specialties; there are numerous kinds of toilet tissue each one specialized as soft or firm.I couldn’t find Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda but i found Shasta cherry soda, even if it is not quite as good. Many have remarked that supermarkets are the epitome of consumer culture, each customer deciding which of your goodies will find appealing and designed to cater to the customer whether through taste choices or because of the pleasantness of the store’s clientele. Voting may be more weighty than selecting a breakfast cereal, but the consumer reigns and does not, like the voter does or should do, ponder the merits of a choice. The availability of the supermarket makes America as the cornucopia of abundance that American commentators said was its trademark, even as its supermarket deserts in ghetto areas shows just how deprived people are because they cannot get fresh meat and produce at low prices but have to go to McDonalds to get what is hardly a well balanced meal even if a satisfying one.
Moreover, the availability of supermarkets is a measure of whether a nation has made good on its middle-class culture. Paris has Carrefour and London has Harrod’s which, last I checked, sold food. Even Moscow, during the Soviet Union, had Gum. One of the first things the Kurds did when they established some autonomy from Iraq was to open a shopping mall. A mountain hill country I visited on a trip from San Juan to Ponce passed villages that were a few hours from the capital but people there may not have visited the seashore even while they had shops that included Tampax, batteries and a few plantains such as might be found in a bodega in Manhattan. Indeed, the architecture and organization for a town, if not the supermarket, are recognizable as part of the urban scene at least as far back as to the time when Lot was visited in Sodom. There was a gate to keep strangers out at night, while people loafed around the streets, while families stayed inside the privacy of their families while welcoming visitors while yelling to strangers down into the street to let them alone. Yes, farms are different, as well as remote places of Russia and Africa, but there is a universal urban culture for a very long time, as that has been enhanced by the global communications whereby cellphones are ubiquitous throughout the world, both rural and urban.
So I am struck by the universal infrastructure of the modern world that makes everybody familiar with the way things work. I notice that the new physician I have contacted in Salt Lake City uses initial visits through a video portal, as did a new physician in Brooklyn which I had recently visited. Everybody knows how to manage the internet, or are much the worse if not. Bureaucratic hassles are everywhere the same, as are conventional pleasantries when talking to pharmacists and hospitals. Maybe ethnic distances persist, though less so than a cosmopolitan culture that reaches back to Aristotle. I remember a Black nurse trying to comfort me when I complained about how my mother was being dealt with in a hospital by saying that he wanted me to get better, which was the wrong advice, acting condescending to my insistence that my mother not be borrowed with another test when she was dying in a few days, but maybe what he said wasn’t ethnic but the right advice to give to uneducated people who had to be told to have faith. Ethnicity, I suspect, is overrun by standardization, and that is to the good.
This fact is a very deep one in that political systems will become overwhelmed by the infrastructure, both physical and electronic, that engulfs all of us. The homogeneity of the world population as expressed in a bourgeois consumer culture, will make people interdependent and so unlikely to engage in wars. Owning separate geographies had created warfare in the first place in that people fought about property and sheep. Warfare will end when everyone engages in the multiple dependence of the world civilization, It took the implosion of the Soviet Union to allow the world to avoid a nuclear war while the ever greater interdependence between China and the United States will resolve things without war. Every nation has to find its full supplies in its supermarkets, whatever are the places in which they are created. This the ultimate triumph of structure over geography.