Indeed not. I think it is most likely that the majority of Thule by 2000 are Christians, but that isn't to say that other potential outcomes are without chance.
I just don't see it.
I've even been trying to work out how Muslim or Buddhist Thule could come about...
LOL. I don't see that either.
I think Thule Shamanism (or at least an evolution of it, much like the Ghost Dance evolved out of the previous spiritual practices) will survive into the modern era, if only because I don't think there will be enough time between intense contact (which I am betting will start in the 1700s some time) and the modern day for other traditions to completely out-compete it. And Thule Shamanism will certainly be responding to encroaching traditions. There is some chance that it remains the dominant form of spirituality in Thule lands. But I think that is highly unlikely - it is more likely to have declined to a minority religion. Even the highly successful Ghost Dance spirituality was only able to slow the Christian penetration of the Southern tribes...
Well that was in the context of the continual subjugation of the Southern Tribes. Christianity did a relatively poor job of displacing Animist faiths in Africa, and made very little headway displacing Hindu polytheism, establishing itself only as a middling presence in India. In French indo-china a hundred years of colonialism produced only a Christian minority. In Thailand... not much. Christianity had a minority presence in pre-communist China.
One of the things with geniuses is that we are getting more and more evidence that genius isn't anything magical - it's just people who practice something alot (usually because maths, music, physics or whatever is a game to them and so they constantly do it for fun).
I will disagree here. I don't believe in magic or mysticism, and that's been pretty clear. Nor do I believe that 'genius' is capable of magical feats. Leonardo Da Vinci was not going to be building a sports car.
Nevertheless, there is a genuine intangible quality that for want of a better word we will call genius which is distinct from simply being smart or driven. If I had to define it, I would call it the ability to take what appears to be an intuitive conceptual leap which is not previously apparent and are able to incorporate that intuitive leap into conceptual frameworks.
Human progress or human activity is incremental in nature. Think of it using the analogy of road construction. Humans build roads in an incremental fashion, by continually adding bricks to the end of the road, continually extending it further. A genius is someone who, at the end of the road, comes up with the idea and technique to build a bridge. In one sense, it's still an incremental addition within the framework of the culture, but there's a qualitative difference.
I think in the modern era, geniuses are increasingly rare in sciences and technology, simply because the accumulated volume of incremental progress and knowledge is so utterly vast. Prior leaps of genius are simply long buried, and incorporated as yet another incremental tool.
And I'll agree that concentration and persistence, something which leads to or overlaps with high degrees of training, accompany genius. But that in itself does not produce genius, rather, it seems to be a symptom. It is easy to have hyper-trained persons who are not genius, or even not particularly smart.
Personally, I am an extraordinarily smart person. Nothing arrogant about that, it's just one of those things, no more distinctive or meaningful than hair colour or freckles, height or body mass. I am also a highly trained person, both academically and in a variety of physical skills.
In my life, I've met a large number of very smart people, including several smarter than me. And I've met a large number of highly trained people, including much more than a few who were better trained than I was.
I have met one genius. I could tell the difference.
That makes it worth asking: are the Thule at the point of development where they can develop a genius of a certain sort? Is there enough of a medical foundation that there will be Thule playing with ideas?
That's the question I'm wondering about.
In recent previous posts on Shamanism, I have emphasized the 'medical' component to magic and mysticism, that a major part of any shamanic or religious or mystical tradition involved healing. Indeed, this tradition is extremely persistent.
In northern Canada, there is still a lot of currency and confidence placed by aboriginal people in 'Native Healers', up to and including the point where state funded health providers will cover the costs of seeing 'Native Healers.'
Often such 'Native Healing' is psychological or spiritual in nature and content, but it does include prescribing and providing actual medicines and cures for actual physical ailments. I've accompanied a Chief on a trip to a traditional healer, who then purchased a gallon of healing tea for a physical ailment.
I suppose that this opens the discussion in all sorts of ways. But I'll keep the point narrow. The nature of the Thule Shamanic tradition, as in every pre-industrial mystical tradition has a large component of healing.
To this, I'll add a second and third point. That the Thule Shamanic tradition as a result of the emergence of its own infectious cross-species diseases, and cross-species diseases between animals has a better grasp of infectious diseases than any other new world culture.
Third, and this is something I've pointed out recently, Shamanic tradition, like any mystical tradition (including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism), incorporates forcing or inducing altered states of consciousness, which are sometimes associated with enabling or facilitating intuitive leaps.
So its arguable that the pieces are all laying around in the culture.
Finally, I'll note that from my reading, the technology of variolation is well within the boundaries of traditional folk medicine, and in terms of practice, there's nothing in it that's outside the abilities of Thule practitioners.
With regards to variolation, I see several problems:
1) The centers of invention you mention - India, China, possibly the Middle East/North Africa - these are all places of dense population and whose medical skill set was at the very cutting edge of human practice. The Thule have neither high population densities nor thousands of years of bona fide medical science.
West Africa.
In terms of my assessment of cultural transmission, I think that there's a good argument for an east-west transmission between India and the middle east. You had a large volume of trade, goods, ideas and people going back and forth, and you had Arab traders actually travelling back and forth. It's relatively easy to trace the movement of memes from India into the middle east in a number of cases. So, while it's possible that middle eastern variolation was an independent invention, its also very possible that its a cultural transmission.
West Africa, to my thinking, is a much more persuasive case for an independent invention of variolation simply because the pathway of cultural transmission is so attenuated. We don't have anywhere close to the documented volume of travel and trade, of the movement of memes, and cultural exchange. So the technique seems to stand out.
West Africa's medical skill set is not the product of thousands of years of medical science at the cutting edge of medical practice.
In any event, the technique itself is not contingent upon a vast body of accumulated incremental medical knowledge and technique. There are technologies and practices that do have those requirements - forms of surgery, such as removing an appendix as an example - it takes a great deal of accumulated incremental medical knowledge and technique to open a body cavity, manage to avoid cutting or damaging something vital, like an artery or an organ, accomplish anything, and not have the patient die of trauma or opportunistic infections. Or as another example, developing a specific medical instrument like a hypodermic needle.
In contrast, variolation can be accomplished with stone age technology and relatively low levels of skill and training. It can be done by folk medicine.
So the issue is, 'Can they?' 'Will they?'
2) Variolation is risky - particularly early smallpox variolation. It risks infecting the patient for real. In a virgin population, it is going to infect LOTS of patients for real. And kill them.
Indeed. Mortality rates are universally acknowledged, the general number is 1%. Given that the Thule are a naive/virgin population, in my discussion, I chose to increase that number fivefold to 5%. I've also suggested that in the likely circumstances where you would have widespread variolation - ie, with a pandemic and panic close at hand, you'r mortality rate would be even higher - 15%. So this is factored in.
I'm even prepared to acknowledge the likelihood of at least a few local variolation induced epidemics. Of course, variolation would tend to occur under very controlled circumstances which would reduce the likelihood of outbreak.
I think the best thing the Thule could invent for dealing with the plagues is a system of fast and efficient quarantine.
I think that their prior experience with infectious diseases among people and animals gives them that intellectual tool. Having said that, we have a lot of cultural experience with quarantines OTL which exposes the limits of the technique. Quarantines are things that often work better in theory than in practice.
In real terms, there's a large number of factors that evade quarantine - asymptomatic carriers, early infectious and long infectious periods which can precede quarantine, secondary infection - like being downwind from the infection center of an airborne pathogen, or contact with things like blankets or utensils for a touch transmitted pathogen, or spread through such things as fleas.
Quarantines are certainly effective, and they are orders of magnitude better than nothing, but they're also far from perfect.
Factoring in quarantine and effective palliative care to mitigate fatality, I still come up with big numbers.
) Here they also have the ability to move the goalposts by adopting and intensifying cultivation of various kinds, and exploiting the widespread net of general knowledge that a more intense level of trade supported by generally more productive abilities offers them, so that if they abandon or out-emigrate from a marginal territory they have some good idea where they should go.