Madam, - I am dismayed by Fintan O'Toole's meditation on the nature of Europe (Opinion, April 27th).
He argues that Europe's low population at the beginning of the Middle Ages promoted human rights because it placed "a premium on human life". Perhaps; but I wonder if Chinese readers will be happy with the sequel, that people in Europe enjoyed "a higher status than they enjoyed in the crowded fields of Asia"? What conclusion is possible from this, except that human life was - and perhaps still is - devalued in Asia?
Did Europe's sparse population create a "need to substitute machines and tools", thus boosting science and technology? Perhaps; again there is no way to prove it. But will Asian readers be happy with the implication that Asian science and technology lagged behind?
The geographical explanation of ethnic characteristics is a venerable tradition, first practised in the 18th century. It is also a dubious tradition, which has passively supported racism and actively fed xenophobia.
In the 1930s historians such as Josef Strzygowski compared nations with their geographies and reached racist conclusions. The moral is: geographical determinism based on generalities is treacherous. I admire Mr O'Toole's lucid insistence on unpleasant statistics in books such as After the Ball. But notoriously, statistics do not solve the problem of the nature of nations: they defer it by dispersing assumptions about national character among tables of numbers, and allowing larger notions to thrive unnoticed. - Yours, etc.,
Prof JAMES ELKINS, History of Art, University College, Cork.