Jared Diamond

[Wrymouth3]

Recently there has been some discussion on the legitimacy on the text Guns, Germs, and Steel. As a completely unbiased person who picked up the book and read it from a historian's perspective, it's not good, but it's hardly the worse. I was wondering if we could be reminded about the cons of the text itself?

 

[Lord Baal]

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[sophie]

It's far from the worst, but that's part of the underlying problem. If you don't have a good grounding in historiography, the book seems reasonable. The primary issue with the book is geographic determinism. Diamond's history isn't actually that bad, it's his analysis and subsequent theory as to why things happened as they did that is hogwash.

Mind going into more specifics? I'm sure we've been through the generalities plenty of times.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[Lord_Iggy]

Now here's the bit that I don't get. What's so unclean about geographic determinism? Clearly he's not making the argument that geography is the be all and end all, but I think it's pretty clear that old world cultures possessed advantages in urbanization, due to higher food availability, which is in large part due to the large pool of available domesticates, which were available because of the layout of the Eurasian landmass. In that extent, there's a degree of determinism, though it's not as if he's making an argument that Europe in specific was destined to become a dominant force in the world. He's not denying agency at all. Clearly individuals are able to act and shape their fates. However, it's very clear that new world natives were playing at a disadvantage.

Also, Diamond's hypothesis for Europe's dominance, instead of China's, was quite speculative and given only a little bit of time near the very end of the book. He suggested that the rather fractured nature of European geography made it more difficult for a single power to exert long-lasting and homogenizing power over the whole region, and that the reverse was true for China. The key word here is 'more difficult', not 'impossible'. I could note that China has seen periods of disunity, although it has been its tendency to return to rule by a singular state, and Europe has seen a few periods of significant unity, although with the exception of the Roman Empire these have been exceedingly fleeting, and based in military conquest.

The upshot of this is the hypothesis that medium-sized, competing states exert pressures on one another, which may serve as an intensifier of technological development and the development of new ideas. However, I'll emphasize that this is very much out of the main stream of the book's focus, and I'd agree with you if you said that this was the weakest section of GGS.

However, I think that your implication that Diamond is trying to sneakily avoid accusations of racism is completely misplaced. One of the major points of his whole venture is to argue against narratives which claim that Europeans had some sort of inherent moral, genetic or intellectual superiority. Trying to figure out why certain continents came to dominate the globe isn't trying to justify colonialism, any more than a war historian is trying to justify killing. Europe wasn't destined for greatness, Diamond doesn't claim that. However, he does claim that the temperate band of the old world's northern hemisphere possessed many geography-based features that gave its denizens a head start when it came to the ability to produce lots of food, contract and spread many diseases, and ultimately form technologically advanced states.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[Plotinus]

A good example that I know is from GGS is Diamond's discussion of why Europeans triumphed over the Native Americans. His basic description of what happened is accurate; the Europeans brought diseases with them that devastated the local populace. He's even correct about the reasons for this; most of the large mammal species that humans have domesticated lived in Eurasia, so Eurasians developed immunities to the illnesses notably smallpox, which these animals carried. His claim that these biological advantages destined Eurasians - using the term 'Eurasians' instead of 'Europeans' is one of Diamond's clever ways of evading accusations of racism - is utter crap; it completely denies the existence of agency on the part of both Eurasians and Meso-Americans.

I'm not convinced by this. It sounds to me like "This view has unpleasant ramifications, therefore it's false." If it's true that Europeans had acquired immunities to lots of diseases that the Americans hadn't, and that because of this any large-scale contact between the two groups would result in much worse consequences for the Americans than for the Europeans, other things being equal, then surely that does mean that Europeans were more or less "destined" to wipe out the Americans. It's a poor choice of words (assuming he really does use that word - it's a long time since I read it), I'll grant. But it doesn't involve denying agency to the people involved, because a belief in destiny is perfectly compatible with a belief in agency; and even if it did, why would that make it wrong?

Diamond's book is an apology for European colonialism. Nothing more and nothing less. All his pretensions to the contrary are merely an attempt to disguise the truth behind his actions. Mich like Niall Ferguson's more specific British apologism, Diamond attempts to describe why Europe was destined to become great, not explain why it became great.

I'm not convinced by that either. To say that something was inevitable is not to condone it. Gibbon thought that the decline and fall of Rome was inevitable, partly as a result of its adoption of Christianity, but he certainly didn't intend his history to be an apology for Christianity! Or one might argue that the rise of fascist movements in early twentieth-century Europe, or indeed in contemporary Europe, was/is inevitable given the historical circumstances, but that isn't a justification of fascism. Besides which, even if Diamond's intent is to justify the dominance of Europe, that still doesn't make his explanations for why that dominance happened wrong; it just makes his attitude to it morally questionable. Which isn't the same thing.

 

[Louis XXIV]

However, I think that your implication that Diamond is trying to sneakily avoid accusations of racism is completely misplaced. One of the major points of his whole venture is to argue against narratives which claim that Europeans had some sort of inherent moral, genetic or intellectual superiority. Trying to figure out why certain continents came to dominate the globe isn't trying to justify colonialism, any more than a war historian is trying to justify killing. Europe wasn't destined for greatness, Diamond doesn't claim that. However, he does claim that the temperate band of the old world's northern hemisphere possessed many geography-based features that gave its denizens a head start when it came to the ability to produce lots of food, contract and spread many diseases, and ultimately form technologically advanced states.

Yeah, I agree with this. Some claims against Diamond are completely misplaced. His discussion of Papua New Guinea makes it clear that admiration he has for those people (who were an original inventor of agriculture but struggled due to a lack of protein that he theorizes led to cannibalism as part of their diet).

However, I do agree that insufficient attention is given to agency, chance, etc. in determining outcomes. That being said, there's no doubt that early development of agriculture and domesticated animals gave Eurasians (regardless of whether you agree that Diamond meant that term literally, I mean it literally) more advantages, which helped balance the numbers and overcome random chance. Plenty of colonies in North America failed but, as disease wiped out native populations and more colonists arrived, some were bound to succeed.

His work isn't good on a micro level. And I agree that his appendix proposing a hypothesis on China isn't particularly strong (I read it more as a "more work can be done in this field" than suggesting an answer). However, it's entirely possible for things to be more deterministic in broad outlines while having absolutely no answers for the details (where human choice is more prominent). I don't think it's a fair criticism to say that the book doesn't explain the details of human history when it doesn't really purport to.

 

[Mouthwash]

Lord Baal, you've never actually made a coherent argument against GGS. I can think of several posts you've made in which you gave arguments which were addressed in the book itself. Usually you radically oversimplify everything he says until it becomes easy to dismiss as ridiculous. Like this:

Diamond then goes further in his attempts to justify Europe's success. If biological imperatives gave Eurasians an advantage over Native Americans - which, to be fair to Diamond, is an argument that can be made, though not proven - why did Europeans come to dominate the globe, rather than Asians? Diamond claims that it is because China was so united that a single order from the Emperor was enough to end its age of exploration, which is false; the treasure fleets never actually 'explored' anything, they just visited previously known places. This also assumes that every single trader and fisherman would actually obey the Emperor. India, meanwhile, apparently didn't progress because it was too disunited. This ignored India's periods of relative unity, China's periods of disunity, and Europe's periods of both.

 

[Yeekim]

I'm not convinced by this. It sounds to me like "This view has unpleasant ramifications, therefore it's false." /.../ To say that something was inevitable is not to condone it.

This.

 

[Lord Baal]

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[Masada]

Disclaimer: I don't think Diamond is a racist. I do think he's an apologist for colonialism though. "It wasn't Europe's fault! It was the domesticates that did it, honest!"

Also, Diamond's hypothesis for Europe's dominance, instead of China's, was quite speculative and given only a little bit of time near the very end of the book.

That's my basic objection. Diamond seems chiefly interested in providing a post-hoc justification for European success. In his narrative Europe succeeded because it had access to a broad range of domesticates. The problem being that Asia had access to the same basic range of domesticates and rice which is head and shoulders above anything available in Europe. Rice has better yields, grows in a wider climatic band, works well with variable levels of labor and can be farmed in two distinct methods. The results are sort of obvious as well: China was supporting population densities in the pre-modern period that large parts of Europe still haven't achieved. So if geographic factors were the be all and end all, China should be ruling the world. It isn't which tends to suggest that geographical determinism isn't a strong force.

He suggested that the rather fractured nature of European geography made it more difficult for a single power to exert long-lasting and homogenizing power over the whole region, and that the reverse was true for China.

China spent about as much time broken in fractious states as it did under a single ruler. And the view that China was united under a "homogenizing" power is true to the extent that it created a common elite culture but then so did Europe. The other issue is that this is not a geographical argument at all.

(who were an original inventor of agriculture but struggled due to a lack of protein that he theorizes led to cannibalism as part of their diet)

There is zero evidence for this being a thing.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

Now I want to read Diamond. However, this is starting to deserve its own thread.

I, for one, have read Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galleano, and he makes no such claims or apologies for Euro-colonialism. He explains some causality, but mainly the results of colonial and imperialist pillage.

 

[Flying Pig]

But using that immunity to explain that 'this is the way it had to happen' is garbage. And that is what Diamond claims, albeit in far more words than I just used.

I think you're going to need to quote here. There's a world of difference between 'this made it more likely to happen than anything else/extremely likely to happen' and 'this made it inevitable'. Most historians will say the former, while nobody except Marx really uses the latter.

 

[Lone Wolf]

The problem with this view is that if the situations were reversed, if the Native Americans had discovered Europe, the Native Americans would still have brought back some diseases, yes. But they would not have wiped themselves out.

This, true, but I do think that in 1500 - and even some time before that - the situation with European colonization of Americas would, in all likeness, happen as it did.

All the "European supremacy over China and India" arguments you all cited in this thread do seem extremely dubious to me.

 

[JohannaK]

China spent about as much time broken in fractious states as it did under a single ruler. And the view that China was united under a "homogenizing" power is true to the extent that it created a common elite culture but then so did Europe. The other issue is that this is not a geographical argument at all.

Why am I always late to the party?

 

[Arakhor]

Because you're too shy to go?

 

[cybrxkhan]

Why am I always late to the party?

It's okay, I was to.

But let me add my own thoughts, anyways. Do note it's been years since I've read Diamond, so some of what I say below may be off - feel free to correct me.

While I disagree with a number of Diamond's arguments, as someone who is strongly against Eurocentrism, I personally believe he does have good intentions and is, even perhaps, a bit admirable in his attempt to dispel common Eurocentric beliefs. here are, anyhow, still academics like Niall Ferguson who claim to adhere to these ideas, and in mainstream pop history these ideas still remain well and alive - so in that sense I can admire Diamond for his attempt to dispel these. The problem is that he often unwittingly relies on outdated Eurocentric ideas such as the idea that Europe has a "perfect" temperate climate (disproven by the fact that advanced societies have developed virtually everywhere except the extreme cold climates) or the Orientalist assumptions of Asiatic states being gigantic despotic blobs - both of which have already been mentioned in this thread.

I think Diamond's main issue is that he tackles everything in such broad strokes that he ignores the specifics and peculiarities of each specific situation. In a sense, he is describing history as if it were a game of civilization: a clash between well defined entities rather than a truly messy diffusion and mess that history really was. (Granted he does appear to say (Western) Europe was factitious, but only within itself) In a way I also feel as if he describes technological advancements as if they were as simplistic as Civ tech trees or something. Anyhow, for instance, when it comes to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, if I remember correctly, he completely glosses over (or mentions briefly but doesn't expand on) the fact that Cortes had 200000 native enemies of the Aztecs alongside few hundred or so troops. Or, as mentioned previously, he completely ignores the many disunited regions of the world, politically and geographically - SE Asia, India, Japan, West Africa, the Middle East, etc.

I suppose we can say this is largely due to the fact that he is not trained as a historian. I guess a historian or someone who has some experience dealing with history wouldn't make these sort of generalizations, or not make them without addressing exceptions and specifics. And ultimately the problem, I think, lies with the broad sweeping generalizations, and trying to make specifics into generalities.

Anyhow, I am agnostic as to whether it was inevitable that Europe would come to dominate the world, or whether there was indeed some sort of European or Eurasian "miracle". What I am certain, though, and something I think Diamond also glosses over, is the fact that economically the world was still centered around India and China until the Industrial Revolution.

Or something. I dunno. This is a very complicated topic.

 

[Louis XXIV]

There is zero evidence for this being a thing.

Which? Lack of protein in their diet or cannibalism?

ETA: Many here rightfully criticize him because his emphasis on Eurasia seems to really mean Europe. However, I do think he chose that phrase deliberately to mean both - basically, Eurasia had advantages over the remaining continents (to be more specific, North Africa would fall into this theory as well). I also do think his addendum on China has significant flaws. That being said, the thrust of his book was Eurasia vs. the rest of the world, not the details.

 

[Masada]

Which? Lack of protein in their diet or cannibalism?

There's no evidence that people in Papua engaged in ritual cannibalism because of a lack of protein in their diet. In actual fact, we have no idea how prevalent or widespread ritual cannibalism was in Papua in the 1800s let alone any earlier period.