environment. For example, Karl A. Wittfogel argued that despotic
government originated in the Orient with what he called the hydraulic
civilizations, where the work of building and maintaining irrigation
systems required organization of mass efforts. A quite similar form of
despotism evolved in the Andes, culminating in the empire of the Incas,
although there the labor undertaken was of a different kind. Be this as it
may, a farmer on arable land and a nomad in the desert not only live
differently, they think differently.

There are subtler influences too. For example, being blessed with
ample space and resources, Americans developed concepts of individu-
alism and privacy far beyond those of Europe and still more beyond
Asia. To this day, from an American viewpoint, they seem lacking, or
rudimentary, in Japan. And yet the Japanese have a strong, creative,
altogether admirable civilization. It simply is not the same as ours, and
much of the difference appears due to the fact that the Japanese have less
elbow room than we do.

Environment may work on even deeper levels than this. Oswald
Spengler developed a quasi-mystical concept of societies as organisms,
each with its unique "soul," its inherent capabilities, drives, limitations,
ways of understanding the world. He suggested that these arose from the
landscape of the Urheimat, the country in which the core society came
into being. For instance, the Apollonian Classical society, with its sense
of order and boundedness, was born in the narrow valleys of Greece,
while Faustian Western society, infinitely ambitious, was born on the
great plain and in the great primeval forests of central Europe. This may
strike you as pretentious twaddle, and I will agree that it goes far beyond
any verifiable facts, but it does have a certain suggestiveness. And in any
event, there is little doubt that the settings in which all of us grew up and
in which we now live have had much to do with making us the kinds of
people we individually are.

Imaginative literature can make this interaction vivid. The author is
free to construct radically strange environments, put people there,
simplify social factors, and thus show us societies, with the individual
persons in them, that are clearly shaped by their settings. An obvious
example is the late Frank Herbert's novel Dune. He imagined a planet
that is one vast desert but nonetheless has been colonized. In the course
of generations, human beings there have had to adapt all their institu-
tions and ways of thinking to the harsh conditions around them. One
might raise various technical quibbles about the likelihood of this or that

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