Jared Diamond is a "historian" Jared Diamond has a new book out (and a NYTimes
OpEd). We haven't read it, nor do we plan to. We read his "Guns, Germs, and Steel" book several years ago and had lots of problems with it. Before we go into that, let's start out with a short story:
The Foster brothers broke into the unoccupied house and set to work immediately. They first went to the bedroom and ransacked it, looking for jewelry. Then they went into an adjacent room, found a safe hidden behind a bookcase, opened it, and snatched several bundles of hundred dollar bills. They got what they had come for, and left as quickly as possible. But somebody had tipped the police and the chase was on. The brothers drove to the nearby mountains, ditched the car, and ran uphill through heavily wooded forest. They were headed for a tiny shack where they could hide until the heat was off. But the police were determined as ever, and in less than a couple of days, they discovered the hide-out.
Question: Did the police discover the hide-out? Not according to Diamond. You see, according to Diamond, if somebody is already someplace, nobody can discover it. What they do is "discover" it. From his book, GG&S:
- ... for practical purposes the collision of advanced Old World and New World societies began abruptly in A.D. 1492, with Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of Caribbean islands densely populated by Native Americans. [pg 67]
- ... a comparison of Eurasian and Native American societies as of A.D. 1492, the year of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas. [pg 354]
A small point, but it irritates.
Now to more substantive problems with Diamond. He writes:
... the Americas had only one species of big domestic mammal, the lama/alpaca, confined to a small area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian coast. [pg 355]
That is incorrect. There was another large domestic mammal in the Americas -
homo sapiens (they had slaves in the Americas - e.g. the
Aztecs).
Why didn't the Americas develop a substantial agricultural economy? According to Diamond:
... domestic mammals interacted with domestic plants to increase food production by pulling plows ... [pg 88]
Hey! No large domestic animals, so there's your excuse for a failure in the Americas. But there
was a domestic mammal throughout the two continents: man.
Then there's Diamond's excuse for the failure to develop the wheel in the Americas:
The wheels invented in Mesoamerica as parts of toys never met the llamas domesticated in the Andes, to generate wheeled transport for the New World. [pg 367]
See
homo sapiens above.
There are more instances where we could complain, but we'll stop here.
Diamond sums up his outlook in GG&S in this passage:
... the striking difference between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environment.
What does Diamond mean by "the peoples themselves"? Nobody is seriously claiming that there are genetic differences. If that's what Diamond is attacking, then he's attacking a straw man. Our view is that geography does matter, but not nearly as much as Diamond claims. It's the culture that makes the difference. Diamond, in GG&S, is minimizing the contributions of "dead white males" and "Western Civilization", which is another way of attacking the Renaissance/Enlightenment. Count us as supporters of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Those were cultural developments that really made a difference.
In an attempt to play to the Post-modernist crowd (he even cites Levi-Strauss!) he engages in Just-So stories to make his case. For example, he says that Europe benefits from a rugged coastline, which helped spur trade, as opposed to China which suffered as a result. But what about the fact that Europe is a cold place, and it was only the development of technology (e.g. chimney, iron plow) that made it possible to progress? Throughout GG&S, one reads something that sounds plausible, but when you think about it some more, you realize it's not as convincing as you first thought. (Sort of like evolutionary psychology in that regard.)
Jared Diamond presents his readers with lots of facts, is correct in a number of instances, but cannot get himself to admit that science and technology - cultural elements found most prominently in Western Civilization - are responsible for much of the differences between societies.
In our opinion, one of the problems with the left is their affinity for the Rousseau / Margaret Mead infatuation with the Noble Savage and a concomitant devaluation of science and engineering. Diamond is treading in their footsteps.
We hate to sound like George Will here, but there you have it.
posted by Quiddity at 1/02/2005 03:28:00 PM
Uh, every culture had access to slaves.
His point was *relative* advantages necessary to build successful societies, and large swaths of arable land combined with irrigation and draft animals (which could subsist on weeds essentially). Slaves are expensive to maintain as capital.
Plus I found his point about the topology of Eurasia important. Both Africa and S. America were essentially 1 dimensional with vastly different horizontal climate bands and nasty tropical forests, while Asia's broad temperate belts facilitated cultural transfer and competition, while post ice-age Europe incorporated a wonderful variety of climes, including the Mediterranean Sea, again encouraging trade and cultural advancement. Indian mathematicians invented the zero, which finally filtered through a dynamic Islamic culture to the west. The poor Mayans were essentially isolated from other cultural centers in N America and S America.
N America was dominated by the prarie, rockies, and high deserts; cultural advancement could only get a little past hunter-gatherer, in the river valleys.
I'm gonna have to go with Anonymous[0] here, I'm afraid. Diamond's thesis seems quite reasonable, and serves to explain -- at least in part -- why it was that these cultural differences emerged and became successful. I.e., we wouldn't have had the Rennaissance (which wasn't a total win, by the way) and the Enlightenment had it not been for the geographical and other conditions that allowed those societies to fluorish and to develop the technologies they did.
No, there is no noble savage, but we're a lot more at the mercy of our environment than Ayn Rand would like us to think.
"Diamond, in GG&S, is minimizing the contributions of "dead white males" and "Western Civilization", which is another way of attacking the Renaissance/Enlightenment."
No, he wasn't, not when I read the book. He was offering an explanation *why* those DWMs were able to come up with Western Civilization in the first place - and by extension, why Western Civilization became dominant.
And contrary to your assertion, there certainly *are* people who will argue that innate differences between "races" led to the inequalities we see today. Or didn't you hear about _The Bell Curve_?
Finally, your claim that humans can be "domestic mammal[s]" is ridiculous. Human slaves are terrible substitutes for any domestic mammal you can name - that's why we domesticated animals to begin with.
-jackd
GGS made a convincing argument about why Eurasia came to dominate the world, instead of Africa or the Americas. He didn't focus on the reasons why Western Europe in particular played such a massive role.
Geography answers the first question, while cultural developments such as the Englightenment and technology explain the second. After all, as Paul Kennedy explains in his excellent book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in 1500 it wasn't apparent that Western Europe would become so significant.
Um, is this post some sort of parody of Glenn Reynolds? It must be. Yes, now it all makes sense. Took me a while to get it. Yep, you almost had me.
