Jared Diamond

[sophie]

If you read pop history, expect to get pop history.

This should be stickied with a big fat READ BEFORE POSTING title.

 

[Plotinus]

Societies and social processes are not mystical processes controlled by demons and gods and 'objective morality'; they are describable forces that can be analysed in terms of things that actually exist and can be understood with the insights of modern civilization. Heroes and villains are fine for entertaining storytelling, but not as the kind of explanation that will give you any insight.

I agree with you that a judgement such as "What Hitler did was wrong" tells you nothing about why Hitler did what he did. Moral judgements aren't explanations for behaviour. (Although of course, one might explain behaviour in terms of the actors' own moral beliefs - e.g. "St Francis did what he did because he thought it was right" is a legitimate historical explanation, at least supposing we have evidence that he believed that and that it was his motive for acting as he did.)

But in your previous posts you weren't simply rejecting moral judgements as explanations, you were rejecting them altogether as anything other than fantasy narrative spinning and asserting that they're made solely to legitimise current society. My point was that to do that is to make just as many assumptions as the narrative spinners you criticise.

As humans we all need to have an 'ethical framework', sets of rules we advocate and internalize that help us cooperate and live in successful societies. But to go from that and say that such human beliefs are part of the cosmos, were 'created' at the Big Bang along with strong nuclear force and energy (the logic of the position).... well, that's not singing psalms at a church to a paternal God or vowing to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, but it is definitely 'religious' in its broadest sense ... .

This is not correct, and Dachs is absolutely right in his criticism here. There's nothing inherently absurd or even implausible in supposing that there are moral facts and that they "just are", in exactly the same way as there are mathematical facts that "just are". In fact a majority of philosophers of ethics (who are overwhemingly atheists or at least non-religious) hold that there are moral facts, such that a person who says "What Hitler did was right" is as mistaken as a person who says "2+2=5" is mistaken (though perhaps not in the same way). See this survey and look at the "moral realism" question. To say that such a view is "religious" is simply to surrender ground to the religious apologists who insist that if you're not religious, you can't be moral.

 

[Traitorfish]

Nice lawyering, but I'm referring to those historians that go out of their way to write "OMG poor Palestinians got massacred" or "the Jews in the Holocaust died with dignity." It's annoying, and some historians dedicate their entire careers to it. The real historian should never become an advocate or a propagandist such as Chomsky.

Which historians are these?

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Masada]

But indeed you would be right when the Europeans added new sources, suppliers, distributors, and markets. So the trade already existed, but its scope was extremely limited compared to the Atlantic slave trade that grew out of it.

No, the whole trade changed. Scale was part of it. So was the shift towards chattel slavery. But there were numerous other changes. The most obvious is the actors. Whole kingdoms sprang into prominence on the back of the slave trade while older established Kingdoms collapsed. Another obvious factor is the huge economic impact of the trade and the demographic impact on significant parts of Africa. It also had huge implications for perceptions of race and so on. None of these had existed prior to European intervention.

 

[Pangur Bán]

You're making a humongous leap there.

Ethical systems might be objective in the same sense that mathematical ones might. They both have the potential to be closed logical systems that, while they do not reflect a Truth Given From On High, do a reasonably good job of describing situations that arise in practical experience. There is nothing in nature that defines mathematical logic, but we accept it as generally true nonetheless. What prevents morality from falling into the same category? In that sense, moral truths might be 'discovered', much like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was 'discovered', but that does not mean that God created these objective ethical systems any more than God created Andrew Wiles's proof.

Now, this isn't an endorsement of such a view. I don't have a rigorous enough understanding of ethics, let alone philosophy in general, to be able to do that with any confidence. But it is a recognition that a belief in objective moral truths is certainly possible, and without reference to any sort of religion or anything like that. There are plenty of modern moral-realist philosophers, good academic ones. To simply dogmatically state that ethical judgments have no place in history because there are no objective moral truths to use as grounds on which to judge the past is therefore flawed. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that such truths exist.

And furthermore, since history is not simply an exercise in reeling off Objective Facts and constructing Objective Theses with them in order to Determine Truth, I think it would also be reasonable to make ethical judgments of the past even if there were no objective moral truths.

I agree with you that a judgement such as "What Hitler did was wrong" tells you nothing about why Hitler did what he did. Moral judgements aren't explanations for behaviour. (Although of course, one might explain behaviour in terms of the actors' own moral beliefs - e.g. "St Francis did what he did because he thought it was right" is a legitimate historical explanation, at least supposing we have evidence that he believed that and that it was his motive for acting as he did.)

But in your previous posts you weren't simply rejecting moral judgements as explanations, you were rejecting them altogether as anything other than fantasy narrative spinning and asserting that they're made solely to legitimise current society. My point was that to do that is to make just as many assumptions as the narrative spinners you criticise.



This is not correct, and Dachs is absolutely right in his criticism here. There's nothing inherently absurd or even implausible in supposing that there are moral facts and that they "just are", in exactly the same way as there are mathematical facts that "just are". In fact a majority of philosophers of ethics (who are overwhemingly atheists or at least non-religious) hold that there are moral facts, such that a person who says "What Hitler did was right" is as mistaken as a person who says "2+2=5" is mistaken (though perhaps not in the same way). See this survey and look at the "moral realism" question. To say that such a view is "religious" is simply to surrender ground to the religious apologists who insist that if you're not religious, you can't be moral.

All this stuff sounds good, but 'ethics'/'morality' and such stuff are just rules that humans agree to live by, agreements that vary from time to time in terms of levels of internalization, content and adherence. Philosophers arise out of that trying to organize and rationalize many of these rules, but philosophers are part of the system. In reality philosophy won't help you understand how morality works much; for that you need to turn to evolutionary psychology, primatology, game theory, anthropology, sociology and, of course, good history. By default humans think about them the same way they think about 'facts of the universe', it is true. That is abundantly clear if you learn about the 'religion' and cosmology of any historic society, including our own. That is why morality really is part of religion, even if accepting this would go against our own civilization's current popular taxonomy of the matter.

Through scientific method and the accumulated insights of modern civilization we've learned that we cannot understand comet movement and the weather by looking at how 'good' or 'bad' the king was or how effective the rituals of our holy men are. Whatever a person's code is they can use history to spin narratives along the lines of their code (people always will, since history functions as part of any social system), and they can condemn and praise. But the condemnation and praise is not going to be heard by dead people (it's for the present), and morality-driven narrative is not going to accurately describe the dynamics of a past era. It's really that simple.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

The real historian should never become an advocate or a propagandist such as Chomsky.

Chomsky doesn't write history, he writes political science. He's never claimed to be objective.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Pangur's Annales-y approach has its shortcomings, and his insistence that humans are reducible to their biological machinery seems to suggest that he was in the lavvie when the cultural turn came about, but his basic argument that human behaviour follows logics bounded by their material condition, and that certain aspects of that condition are general enough that we can describe them as "laws", can't simply be dismissed out of hand as Crezth wants to do. This a serious, legitimate position taken by some of the most important historians of the 20th century, and it needs to be properly engaged with, at least in its sophisticated form, if not the vulgarised one advanced by Diamond.

You should read Verbal Behavior. You might find a lot to agree with.

The essential problem is that you're acting like there's a body of absolute uncontested evidence which supports an absolute and uncontested assertion vis a vis human behavior's origins in "biological machinery." I want to be absolutely clear I do not deny it is quite possible to reduce all of the human experience to a single equation - at least, in a matter of speaking. But you have all of your work ahead of you when it comes to demonstrating it, and Jared Diamond's work doesn't advance the cause of behaviorism one iota. So defending him, even as a behaviorist, is pointless. It's basically the kind of absurd thing Skinner did, which is why I brought him up.

What's interesting to me is how different the attempts to pigeonhole my arguments and move on. Two accounts here, then another from Dachs and Plotinus.

That aside, I don't think you guys have got Diamond. Diamond the straw man monocausalist in this thread is not the Diamond who writes the books of his that I have read. And many of the insights being attributed to Diamond are those those that are mainstream in modern science and are just being repeated by him, but historians and philosophers reading him are so ignorant of these that they cannot tell the difference.

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Pangur Bán]

JD is not ignorant of history. He is not a historian of course, doesn't have the same skills and methodologies and gets some stuff wrong as would be expected. The methods of historians are taken from theological and classics genres, J Diamond's are taken from the modern biological sciences. Both have the same object of understanding humans in the past. Historians have to adapt to the modern world and learn from guys like J. Diamond. If nothing else those guys have more power and ill-informed and unsensitive opposition will not help historians as a profession.

 

[Plotinus]

All this stuff sounds good, but 'ethics'/'morality' and such stuff are just rules that humans agree to live by, agreements that vary from time to time in terms of levels of internalization, content and adherence.

That's still just an assertion! Of course different people have different beliefs about what is moral, and different societies have different ethical systems. It doesn't follow from this that ethics and morality consists solely of those varying beliefs and systems, or that the attempt to pass moral judgement on historical figures is arbitrary, self-serving, or non-truth-seeking.

Philosophers arise out of that trying to organize and rationalize many of these rules, but philosophers are part of the system.

Well, sure, but so is everyone, including you. What you're saying about the nature of morality is just as culturally conditioned as what any philosopher or theologian says about it. It's very assumption-laden.

In reality philosophy won't help you understand how morality works much; for that you need to turn to evolutionary psychology, primatology, game theory, anthropology, sociology and, of course, good history.

No, those disciplines will tell you about how people think about morality (and why). They won't tell you about morality itself. For that you do need a philosopher. Indeed, the very question "What can we infer about the nature of morality itself from the scientific and historical facts about what people believe about morality and why they believe it?" is a philosophical question, and one to which the answer might not be obvious.

By default humans think about them the same way they think about 'facts of the universe', it is true. That is abundantly clear if you learn about the 'religion' and cosmology of any historic society, including our own. That is why morality really is part of religion, even if accepting this would go against our own civilization's current popular taxonomy of the matter.

But by that argument science is also part of religion. The fact that there are similarities between how we think of X and how we think of Y doesn't entail that X is part of Y (or that Y is part of X). You can think this if you want, of course, but you'll be using a definition of "religion" that's implausibly broad, and which will include pretty much all realist thinking of any kind. (And that's interesting in itself; Don Cupitt famously argued that the essence of religion is actually non-realism.)

What's interesting to me is how different the attempts to pigeonhole my arguments and move on. Two accounts here, then another from Dachs and Plotinus.

I wouldn't say I'm trying to pigeonhole your arguments; it's more that I don't think you're offering any arguments. You're saying that other people are wrong to make the kinds of value judgements and metaphysical assumptions that they do, but in so doing you make your own value judgements and your own metaphysical assumptions.

It's somewhat ironic that historians are being called ignorant for critiquing a history written by an evolutionary biologist who is himself entirely ignorant of history.

Come now, Diamond isn't entirely ignorant of history, and it's caricaturing to say that he is. It seems to me that one of the main take-aways from this discussion is that the criticism levelled at Diamond is to a large extent levelled at a straw-man version of him, and that the real Diamond is arguing for a much more nuanced and reasonable position that is probably broadly true, although some of the details of his argument and his speculations are shakier. In that, at least, I agree with Pangur Bán.

 

[Pangur Bán]

They won't tell you about morality itself. For that you do need a philosopher.

A moral philosopher is the last person you want to listen for that, per my last comment.

But by that argument science is also part of religion.

Indeed.

 

[Pangur Bán]

I wouldn't say I'm trying to pigeonhole your arguments; it's more that I don't think you're offering any arguments. You're saying that other people are wrong to make the kinds of value judgements and metaphysical assumptions that they do, but in so doing you make your own value judgements and your own metaphysical assumptions.

No, I'm saying that incorporating the values of your own system into the explanation of something outside it will provide limited insight. Much in the same way 'bad' behaviour or rituals among rulers or holy men can't really explain bad harvests.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

The historian is not a chronicler. By all means, he should strive to objectively present the facts, but a subjective judgement is a necessity of all but the most limited historiography.

This answer actually answers part of a question I asked Dachs in this thread. I happen to agree, even though I don't know jack about current historical trends, either.

I would also add that what gets published has an obvious effect on the trends, amirite? So WHO decides what gets published?

 

[Gucumatz]

People who write and publish things first? I don't know, is this a trick question?
----
I think Pangurs comment on morality and the modern studies of ethics and philosophy being a subset of religion or religious tradition is an interesting posit and probably what a lot of people perceive of philosophers despite what they like to think. Anyhow...

Diamond does know some history and there is a reason people like his books. Statistical analysis and biological analysis is something I think most people don't really con-notate with history and therefore the way Diamond presents his points really catches on with most people in a logical fashion. And many of his ideas may be valid as general ideas, but by no means iron laws. What seems to infuriate most people I know who read Diamond is that his generalities, often skew, distort, or sometimes outright ignore or even lie about other data, historical records, etc. out there on their specific subjects. This I think is the main problem Diamond has - Diamond ignores too many counterpoints/counterviews and data/history that may sometimes contradict him. This isn't to say Pangur Ban that everyone looks at history from stances of "moral objectivity" are the only ones disagreeing with Diamond.

I feel as a whole Guns Germs and Steel was much better received than his book Collapse, partly because he remained more general with his analysis which he really didn't do in Collapse and tried to present historical accounts while ignoring other accounts and data out there for various specific cases.

 

[Traitorfish]

JD is not ignorant of history. He is not a historian of course, doesn't have the same skills and methodologies and gets some stuff wrong as would be expected. The methods of historians are taken from theological and classics genres, J Diamond's are taken from the modern biological sciences. Both have the same object of understanding humans in the past. Historians have to adapt to the modern world and learn from guys like J. Diamond. If nothing else those guys have more power and ill-informed and unsensitive opposition will not help historians as a profession.

The biological sciences aren't really equipped to provide a sophisticated understanding of the past, nor are they meant to be. It's Diamond's apparent belief that they are which seems to annoy people, not just the fact that he thinks they have something to contribute. (If historians simply objected to the acknowledgement of disciplines outside of history, they probably wouldn't be teaching Braudel and Lefebvre to undergrads.)

 

[Pangur Bán]

The biological sciences aren't really equipped to provide a sophisticated understanding of the past, nor are they meant to be. It's Diamond's apparent belief that they are which seems to annoy people, not just the fact that he thinks they have something to contribute. (If historians simply objected to the acknowledgement of disciplines outside of history, they probably wouldn't be teaching Braudel and Lefebvre to undergrads.)

The biological sciences bring insights that help understand the past, just like the techniques of the traditional historian. Have you read JD btw?

 

[Traitorfish]

The biological sciences bring insights that help understand the past, just like the techniques of the traditional historian.

I don't imagine any would disagree with that, they're just sceptical that you can weave a world history from it. Looking at the mechanics of diseases can tell us why epidemics had such a catastrophic effect in the New World which they generally didn't in the Old World, but it doesn't tell us why that's significant, or why it had the outcomes it did, for the numerous reasons already outlined in this thread.

Have you read JD btw?

Bits. Mostly I'm commenting on the debate (here and more generally); I'm not really invested in this one way or the other. (Mostly, I'm split between a sympathy for his attempt to make popular audiences care about structural aspects of history, rather than the high dramas and boomsticks which seem to make up 90% of the market, and a concern that his way of going about it is part of a larger movement towards apology for European empire, just with a pessimistic inflection.)

 

[ParkCungHee]

Nice lawyering, but I'm referring to those historians that go out of their way to write "OMG poor Palestinians got massacred" or "the Jews in the Holocaust died with dignity." It's annoying, and some historians dedicate their entire careers to it. The real historian should never become an advocate or a propagandist such as Chomsky.

If you're going to refer to something, you should actually refer to it. If I say "historians who think they're not making ethical judgements are terrible" I try not to mean "historians who piss on people's pancakes are terrible."

 

[Gucumatz]

I don't imagine any would disagree with that, they're just sceptical that you can weave a world history from it. Looking at the mechanics of diseases can tell us why epidemics had such a catastrophic effect in the New World which they generally didn't in the Old World, but it doesn't tell us why that's significant, or why it had the outcomes it did, for the numerous reasons already outlined in this thread.


Bits. Mostly I'm commenting on the debate (here and more generally); I'm not really invested in this one way or the other. (Mostly, I'm split between a sympathy for his attempt to make popular audiences care about structural aspects of history, rather than the high dramas and boomsticks which seem to make up 90% of the market, and a concern that his way of going about it is part of a larger movement towards apology for European empire, just with a pessimistic inflection.)

Well I don't think you are being fair to Diamond in this post and although I am no fan of his, I don't think its fair to call him an apologist for European imperialism. He genuinely attempts to look at factors - and although some can use him to act as an apology for imperialism, its certainly not his intent. And to also be fair, he tries (somewhat) to look at why disease had an effect on the new world and why it didn't to Europe.