Jared Diamond

[Pangur Bán]

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.)

The description of it given by Lord Baal et al earlier in this thread is not accurate. Diamond is not an apologist for European Empires or any advocate of European superiority. He was accused of the opposite in fact by many in the US for saying stuff like New Guineans are generally smarter than Westerners, and so forth. GGS just raises the profile of geographic/biological factors in shaping the course of world history; he absolutely does not seek to supplant the sort of micro-politics/events driven history done by documentary / political historians (he says so explicitly, but wasted his time as people are more interest in attacking a straw man than dealing with what he actually says).

Anyway, the Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee is a much better book. Read that before you read GGS. It is undoutedly true that Diamond has consented to the depiction of himself as a great thinker undermining traditional narratives of world history, but he is actually quite conservative. Read the books or don't, but don't rely on PR spin or straw man-looking criticism.

 

[Cutlass]

Sometimes disease did have a catastrophic effect on the Old World. But after the Black Death the European population had a breathing space to recover. In the New World it was actually multiple epidemics at the same time, rather than one. And then the Americas were colonized by Europeans and Africans, leaving the New World native population without that opportunity for recovery.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

@Mouthwash: Chomsky is not a historian. He is a linguist at MIT by.profession.

 

[ParkCungHee]

The description of it given by Lord Baal et al earlier in this thread is not accurate...(he says so explicitly, but wasted his time as people are more interest in attacking a straw man than dealing with what he actually says).

What exactly is the problem with misrepresenting Diamond?

 

[Gucumatz]

Well it isn't fair to miscontrue someone that may make some valid points by only looking at his mistakes and exaggerating them.

 

[Traitorfish]

The description of it given by Lord Baal et al earlier in this thread is not accurate. Diamond is not an apologist for European Empires or any advocate of European superiority. He was accused of the opposite in fact by many in the US for saying stuff like New Guineans are generally smarter than Westerners, and so forth. GGS just raises the profile of geographic/biological factors in shaping the course of world history; he absolutely does not seek to supplant the sort of micro-politics/events driven history done by documentary / political historians (he says so explicitly, but wasted his time as people are more interest in attacking a straw man than dealing with what he actually says).

For what it's worth, I came to that conclusion by myself, a long time before this thread. (I'm fairly sure I've actually mentioned it in previous threads.) And while I agree that Diamond certainly isn't a traditional apologetic, certainly not the "white people are the best, deal with it melonfarmers" favoured by Ferguson et al., it can still be taken as apologetics insofar as it presents the path to European domination as essentially beyond human agency. It's a very pessimistic apologetic, suited more to the liberal looking for reassurance than the conservative looking for glory, but an apologetic none the less.

Sometimes disease did have a catastrophic effect on the Old World. But after the Black Death the European population had a breathing space to recover. In the New World it was actually multiple epidemics at the same time, rather than one. And then the Americas were colonized by Europeans and Africans, leaving the New World native population without that opportunity for recovery.

Well, even that depends what you mean by "recovery". Demographically, sure, but it's not as if Native American history just ends in 1492. There are whole societies which emerge in the post-Columbia era and could only do so as a result of those epidemics, as a result of the disruption of pre-Columbian societies. They were and remained historical actors in their own right, even in catastrophe, even under the European thumb, even today.

We have this habit of looking at something like the Ohio Valley River mounds and saying "Ah!, what tragedy this society did not survive!", but that sells them short, because there's as much of a story to be told in how Indians did survive, of the new worlds they made for themselves in the post-Columbian world, and re-made in exchange with European colonisation, but those aren't stories that Diamond appears to have any particular interest in acknowledging.

 

[Gucumatz]

And that I don't think most people disagree with that (that it can be used by apologetics). I am just not sure how you can come to the conclusion that it was his point in writing the book. His attempts to compare New Guinean intellectual capacities is cringe-worthy and trying to hide some biases he does have, but its certainly not his focus.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well it isn't fair to miscontrue someone that may make some valid points by only looking at his mistakes and exaggerating them.

What do you mean by "fair"?

 

[Pangur Bán]

For what it's worth, I came to that conclusion by myself, a long time before this thread. (I'm fairly sure I've actually mentioned it in previous threads.) And while I agree that Diamond certainly isn't a traditional apologetic, certainly not the "white people are the best, deal with it melonfarmers" favoured by Ferguson et al., it can still be taken as apologetics insofar as it presents the path to European domination as essentially beyond human agency. It's a very pessimistic apologetic, suited more to the liberal looking for reassurance than the conservative looking for glory, but an apologetic none the less. He doesn't attempt to excuse empire, yes, but he attempts to justify it as historically inevitable, and that isn't changed by the fact that he does so with a downcast expression.

On the agency point, this is not something you can put to Diamond, it is at the heart of modern scientific thinking about humans. There is tension between such views and earlier ones still well lodged in philosophy, jurisprudence and so on, but they can be reconciled ... and indeed need to be for practical purposes, as the schizophrenic approach won't work for ever (e.g. this thread).

I'd say the pessimistic effect of such thinking is not at its root. At its root is that nature is mighty and that individual humans actually don't have much power over great things, but that that may change one day through the advance of knowledge and technology.

 

[Traitorfish]

On the agency point, this is not something you can put to Diamond, it is at the heart of modern scientific thinking about humans. There is tension between such views and earlier ones still well lodged in philosophy, jurisprudence and so on, but they can be reconciled ... and indeed need to be for practical purposes, as the schizophrenic approach won't work for ever (e.g. this thread). z

I'd say the pessimistic effect of such thinking is not at its root. At its root is that nature is mighty and that individual humans actually don't have much power over great things, but that that may change one day through the advance of knowledge and technology.

Sounds to me like you're just exchanging one metaphysics for another.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Sounds to me like you're just exchanging one metaphysics for another.

If you want to describe it that way, then fine. But that wouldn't make it wrong. Scientific method produces rockets, computers, gene therapy, and so on an so forth, in the modern world. Religious/philosophical metaphysics produced the people and some of the methods that led to us being able to do that stuff, but the world moves on.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Is providing non-moralistic reasons the same as justifying something as inevitable, though? Actions of the "masses" as a whole are more predictable then the actions of a single person, but I don't think that makes "mass" behaviour more excusable or something.

 

[Cutlass]

For what it's worth, I came to that conclusion by myself, a long time before this thread. (I'm fairly sure I've actually mentioned it in previous threads.) And while I agree that Diamond certainly isn't a traditional apologetic, certainly not the "white people are the best, deal with it melonfarmers" favoured by Ferguson et al., it can still be taken as apologetics insofar as it presents the path to European domination as essentially beyond human agency. It's a very pessimistic apologetic, suited more to the liberal looking for reassurance than the conservative looking for glory, but an apologetic none the less.

I don't really see the apoligism in it. There is agency, and people acted. But a great deal that happened did so outside of the deliberate intent to make it happen on anyone's part. And while a great deal of it was deliberate acts by various individuals and groups, the net effect was often a side effect of other things, or a cumulative effect of centuries of things, rather than any form of a 'great man' narrative. And so where you look at the cumulative effect of generations and centuries of human endeavor, the agency of individuals gets lost in the bigger picture.

Well, even that depends what you mean by "recovery". Demographically, sure, but it's not as if Native American history just ends in 1492. There are whole societies which emerge in the post-Columbia era and could only do so as a result of those epidemics, as a result of the disruption of pre-Columbian societies. They were and remained historical actors in their own right, even in catastrophe, even under the European thumb, even today.

We have this habit of looking at something like the Ohio Valley River mounds and saying "Ah!, what tragedy this society did not survive!", but that sells them short, because there's as much of a story to be told in how Indians did survive, of the new worlds they made for themselves in the post-Columbian world, and re-made in exchange with European colonisation, but those aren't stories that Diamond appears to have any particular interest in acknowledging.

The question that Diamond starts with, the question that was his motivation in writing GG&S, was not who survived, but why did some groups end up with so much more than others. He calls it Yali's Question: "Why is that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Now if you read the book and keep that premise in mind as the question he is attempting to answer, I think you come away from it with a much more favorable opinion of the thesis as a whole. Diamond does not say, goes out of his way to not say, that whites or Europeans are in any sense better. But rather that they are the heirs of a legacy that fell out in their favor. A legacy only in small part of their, deliberate, making.

So saying Indians survived, that they created new and prosperous cultures on the wreckage of the old. While that may be true, it's outside the scope of the thesis.

 

[Traitorfish]

If you want to describe it that way, then fine. But that wouldn't make it wrong. Scientific method produces rockets, computers, gene therapy, and so on an so forth, in the modern world. Religious/philosophical metaphysics produced the people and some of the methods that led to us being able to do that stuff, but the world moves on.

I'm not really sure what rockets and gene therapy have to do with history?

Is providing non-moralistic reasons the same as justifying something as inevitable, though? Actions of the "masses" as a whole are more predictable then the actions of a single person, but I don't think that makes "mass" behaviour more excusable or something.

Well, that depends entirely on the explanation, doesn't it? It seems to me that Diamond poses European colonialism as inevitable and thus, perversely, justified, however sorry he may profess about that fact. Other structuralist explanations may not. We can't generalise.

 

[Flying Pig]

Well, that depends entirely on the explanation, doesn't it? It seems to me that Diamond poses European colonialism as inevitable and thus, perversely, justified, however sorry he may profess about that fact. Other structuralist explanations may not. We can't generalise.

I'm not sure that follows. I might say 'Jack leaves his door open every night; it was inevitable that someone would break in' without saying 'I believe that John was justified in breaking into Jack's house'.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well, that depends entirely on the explanation, doesn't it? It seems to me that Diamond poses European colonialism as inevitable and thus, perversely, justified, however sorry he may profess about that fact. Other structuralist explanations may not. We can't generalise.

As I've said, I don't think Diamond's book makes the leap to justified. That's an unfair characterization, and an unnecessary one. I think the problem is that Diamond's book assumes the normalcy of colonization.

The best analogy I could draw would be if someone attempted to explain the Holocaust merely in terms of German Military Superiority. That might not be the same as justifying the holocaust. Indeed, that could come across as an unfair assumption about the Genocidal character of Germans.

However, I think we can all agree it would be very odd and unhelpful if someone wrote a book about the holocaust, explained how the German military forces and allies achieved physical superiority to the Jews, and then just had it assumed once that happened, Holocaust. Maybe with some reference to the fact that the Germans had some clear agency.

 

[Lone Wolf]

It seems to me that Diamond poses European colonialism as inevitable and thus, perversely, justified, however sorry he may profess about that fact. Other structuralist explanations may not. We can't generalise.

Is any structural explanation that ends up insisting that something is inevitable justifies this "something"? I can easily imagine an analysis like "by now, Evil Thing X is inevitable. We made a great error in not opposing it properly earlier". This clearly doesn't say that Evil Thing X, whatever it may have been in the past, is justified now.

The best analogy I could draw would be if someone attempted to explain the Holocaust merely in terms of German Military Superiority.

Well, it would be factually inaccurate as well.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well, it would be factually inaccurate as well.

Could you expand upon your meaning?

 

[Lone Wolf]

The German states had military superiority over their Jewish population since the German states' beginning. Yet, until WWII they didn't start the Holocaust. Therefore, the Holocaust can't be explained sorely by Germans being more powerful then the Jews.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Clearly, which is part of my objection. It would provide a very incomplete explanation. But this is exactly what Diamond has done in his explanation of the colonization of America. Once technological and demographic superiority make it possible, it just happens