The Cowan/Clark position is an almost exact replay of the conservative position in a 19th-century debate with economic liberals of the time (among them John Stuart Mill) on the "Irish problem."
E.g., Mill wrote in his Principles (1848): Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretensions, imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences. Vs. this take by conservative savant W.R. Greg (1869): "Make them peasant-proprietors," says Mr. Mill. But Mr. Mill forgets that, till you change the character of the Irish cottier, peasant-proprietorship would work no miracle. He would fall behind in the instalments of his purchase-money, and would be called upon to surrender his farm. He would often neglect it in idleness, ignorance, jollity, and drink, get into debt, and have to sell his property to the newest owner of a great estate. ....In two generations Ireland would again be England's difficulty, come back upon her in an aggravated form. Mr Mill never deigns to consider that an Irishman is an Irishman, and not an average human being--an idiomatic and idiosyncratic, not an abstract, man." [I took these passages, by the way, from an interesting article by Nicola Tynan, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy, the latter of George Mason University.] Gil
It's all very mysterious. If genetics made India ripe for British takeover, because American workers changed parts on their machines so much faster than Indians or something, then why is India such a hotbed of capitalist growth today? Did the gene pool completely turn over in a couple of centuries, which is a microsecond in evolutionary time? Doug
