A Sunday of Fun in the Sun

Today, Janna and I went to Mt. Zion African Baptist Church. Apparently, a lot of folks who have left Trinity Episcopal have gone there; Janna was invited by someone who used to go to Trinity that works with her. What a tremendous experience—it was so dreamlike for the first hour, because it was an experience I have come close to before, but never actually fully realized en vivo. The folks there were very welcoming, and Janna and I both saw numerous people we know from elsewhere in the community.

Maybe this would be a place where I could grow spiritually at a more real level. The sermon today was an excellent critique of dualism without once mentioning the word. Rather, the sermon dealt with the subject on the most basic level. The preacher was referencing Romans 12:1 as it refers to offering the body as a living sacrifice as a spiritual act of worship. He mentioned that folks will often respond, “I’ll be with you in spirit,” when they really mean, “Forget you, I’ve got better things to do.” What a simple and profound statement.

Anyways, it seemed like a warm, welcoming place, and being from Chicago, the home of gospel music, I couldn’t get enough of the choir. Amen! Anyways, who knows, I think Janna still has her heart set on St. Paul’s.

At the pool today, I also almost finished—I have 20 pages left—Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Anyways, Mr. Diamond is not the crazed liberal out to destroy individual responsibility as Victor Davis Hanson suggests he might be.

It is a tremendous marshalling of scientific evidence to prove things that, at the end, seemed sort of self-evident to those of us who took World History 151. However, this is a rare book, because it finally gives one a comprehensive look at pre-historic and archaic human society from the end of the last major ice age circa 13,000B.C. Even if one is tempted to oppose his general historical principle of “location, location, location,” it is probably the only book I have ever read that has dared peal away the mists of pre-history to give us in such detail the story of how humans went from being the smartest of the apes, to the conquerors of the world.

In fact, Diamond is no sentimental, namby-pamby liberal. He is not afraid to describe the brutality of the hunter-gatherer world, along with all of the environmental disasters that early farmers wrought upon their own world—did you know that the Middle East used to be covered with trees? However, he is also quick to demonstrate that although hindsight is 20/20, it generally wears rose-colored glasses. He vividly demonstrates the actual real choices that societies could have made around 8000B.C., and how the history of conflicts between continent-wide racial groups was more or less pre-determined at that point.

However, according to his theories, any coastal temperate-zone Eurasian state could have eventually been world champ—except for maybe the Middle East—since they completely destroyed their environment early on into the agricultural revolution. In fact, the determining factor, once “location, location, location,” has played its part, is the principle of pluralism. This is vividly demonstrated by the contrast in the 15th century between backwater Western Europe and powerful, wealthy China. Columbus had to go to five different monarchs to get the go-ahead for his journey. Whereas, at approximately the same time—and the recent issue of National Geographic has a great story on this—the emperor of China forbade all overseas travel and dismantled his navy. However, 500 years later—which is a true drop in the bucket in the scope of this book, the Chinese are catching up, are they not?

Diamond is the first to admit that his theories about history are in no way predictive of the future, because it is quite possible the rules have completely changed, given the internet, globalization, airplanes, satellites, etc… However, this book presents a fascinating view of human history, if first you acknowledge, as Diamond does, the particular weaknesses of this kind of history. If this were Reading Rainbow, and I were Levar Burton (who I wish I was), I would say, “But don’t take my word for it,” and then segue into a bunch of precocious nerds talking about books they read. So…