Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics
blog.daviskedrosky.com
blog.daviskedrosky.com
Now that I'm older, I understand that this is what pretty much every popular treatment of anything must do, and Diamond was just more successful at it than almost anyone else. Is that to his credit? As a writer, maybe. It's ultimately a complaint about the danger of arguments which are so simple, elegant, and easily understandable that they suck all the air out of the debate, not against him or his book per se.
I think it's worth quoting Friedman from his essay on positive economics[1]
"In so far as a theory can be said to have "assumptions" at all, and in so far as their "realism" can be judged independently of the validity of predictions, the relation between the significance of a theory and the "realism" of its "assumptions" is almost the opposite of that suggested by the view under criticism. Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense).12 The reason is simple. A hypothesis is important if it "explains" much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions. it takes account of, and accounts for, none of the many other attendant circumstances, since its very success shows them to be irrelevant for the phenomena to be explained"
Diamond is often criticized for the simplicity, or geographic determinism of his argument but from the standpoint of an empirical science this is a strength. What matters is only the predictive power of a theory, not whether it is nuanced, realistic or representative. People sometimes seem to take almost offense to reductive theories in the social sciences.
Btw one recent development to really test Diamond's theory is I think the development of tropical wheat developed in Brazil. If this works and drastically uplifts the global south I'd count that as a big piece of evidence in his favor.
[1]https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/bwl/pruefungs-st...
Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures.
For example, "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
If you have a large empire, chances are there was large scale conquest involved. Likely all "civilizations" involved small scale conquest of tribes.
So the academics are all in arms about Diamond writing a pretty engaging nonfiction book that accessibly integrated a half-dozen historical / political theories into an interesting integrated theory. Was it perfect? Hell no, no way it was. Is there roots of truth in it? There has to be. More than anything, reading the book was thought provoking, because all history taught in schools is basically a bunch of personalities/leaders and battles, and almost no investigation of other factors outside of the human events.
What's also bizarre is reading various modern historical analyses of the Mongol invasions as "eh, they weren't that bad". Like... what?
I'm fully willing to admit European empire building was flagrantly unacceptable from the lens of the modern conception of universal human rights. But that Euros were some especially brutal oppressors/conquerors compared to the whole of human history? Come on. I mean... the Mongols. AND they almost conquered Europe.
Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wiped out the Georgian army which had been preparing for war for years and so was probably the best prepared army in Europe at the time. The rest of Europe was totally unprepared even for that small 10k force.
Luckily for us, soon after, Genghis Khan died and the entire army turned back. Otherwise Europe would for sure have been conquered with no challenge. Luck of the dice.
that presumes that human culture would have developed the ideas regarding colonialism which we have and which after all are a late developed critique that would probably not have been possible without the ideas of humanism and similar intellectual branches, and the exposure of those ideas to people who were being oppressed by forces that claimed to espouse the same.
Their episodes on Aztec and Inca civilizations, that were brought down to large extent by the spanish, they make you notice that what Aztecs and Inca had in common was that they were the regional powers. The podcast mentions the active local conflicts going on while this went down. They were dominating their neighbors, warrning and at this particular time they were the leading powers in their regions.
Kind of. It's like when historians delineate historic genocides with Nazi genocides. Or slavery vs chattel slavery. Functionally they're mostly the same, but the latter was also something new, and possibly worse. Historically, non-european expansionism/colonialism due to large power asymmetries were regional neighbourhood affairs that ended in mass assimilation within a few generations. European, post age-of-sail conquest/oppression was uniquely brutal in suppressing/eliminating indigenous peoples globally, for hundreds of years without any real effort at integration. Generally Mongols worked with traditional administration systems of territories they conquered, if only because it's easier for nomadic culture to embrace settled people's cultures. Post Mongol conquest, Chinese, Central Asian or Persian empires were basically the same "empires" but administered by Mongol Dynasties - they typically levied tax and drafted troops but didn't intervene much in domestic affairs or customs. European colonies expansion was built on proselytize/imposing continental culture, and deliberately avoided integration in their colonies, stretching out a few decades of bloodshed into a few centuries. IMO that makes Euros "especially brutal oppressors/conquerors", not because Euros are inherently more savage but the logic of certain forms of conquest (made possible by confluence of factors) is sometimes bloodier than others.
These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten.
I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker.
A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed.
In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.
So is his book Collapse forcing an environmental theory, or are you so against any theory of 'human caused environmental problems', that you can't see past your own bias. It is hard to tell online. I mean, his book was totally about environmental problems, so to criticize it for outlining environmental problems is bit much.
It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing. And, don't think slave raids negates there were other variables, why can't slave trade and environment both have contributed. So he didn't highlight what you wanted to hear about enough, isn't an argument that slave raids contributed more.
This was categorically refuted by bone analysis showing that Vikings did eat seaborne food[0]. The current hypothesis is that the fish bones were used to feed animals or burnt.
The more important point that the thesis was absurd in the first place. The Vikings were seafarers, and we have no record of any such taboos. You can't invent a food taboo completely against their way of life and with absolutely no written evidence out of thin air. At the very least, there was an extremely high level of proof needed, and Diamond doesn't even try to get near.
Moreover, We have a 5000 years history of human food taboos, and as a rule when people face starvation or just illness, the taboos get shunted aside. Even the fanatically devoted Ghandi compromised and drunk milk. The one exception I can think of in all of human history is Nongqawuse, and even that was: not a food taboo but based on existing faith, encouraged by a foreign power and disobeyed by a non-trivial faction. You didn't get complete extinction even there.
[0] https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn...
As for Easter Islands, there are serious arguments that there wasn't any environmental problem and the population survived well enough (e.g. [1]). More importantly, the Europe slave raids are documented to have carried off a third-to-half of the population, the more educated part. In other contexts of similar casualty levels, downplaying that would be called way worse.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/w...
The settlements did fail though, right? So something happened. Doesn't he also outline poor soil and over-grazing, and the climate change when warm period ended. It is possible that there were enough negative variables that fishing alone couldn't save it. And it is a 26 year old book, so maybe he was speculating on what was known at the time. Like if it did fail, and they were great fishers, what could explain why fishing didn't save them. But, I don't have a citation.
Sorry also, since you have citations and I'm being lazy. But pretty sure there was a counter-counter addendum to the book on Easter Island. He published on his web site a new chapter re-discussing the latest theories on Easter Island. But I read it years ago, so not adding anything of value here. But to defend him, old history books do get revised.
The area was already very marginally habitable for humans. In the same general area, the Dorset Eskimos also died off (in their case, we aren't entirely sure which century that happened), so even specially adapted cultures had serious trouble. Maybe it always had little slack.
If I had to take a very wild guess: What changed was the Little Ice Age making conditions even worse. Maybe plague played a part too (though I can't substantiate that). Eventually enough people died to make the society not work (you need a certain number to maintain a complex society). Perhaps the reminder decided to leave, but with no food stocks the sea journey failed... Or perhaps they died in place, having nowhere to go. Grim either way.
> pretty sure there was a counter-counter addendum to the book on Easter Island. He published on his web site a new chapter re-discussing the latest theories on Easter Island.
Can't find anything on his current website. I'll try more thoroughly later.
From web site, just overview of the updates.
But while searching for this. Found another popular book that had theory that it was rats, and the rats had no natural predator's and ate all the palm tree roots.
EXTENSIONS
Since my book’s initial publication in 2005, information has continued to accumulate about collapses, and about avoidances of collapses. I shall mention here three of these recent extensions, to our understanding of Easter Island, the Maya, and Angkor.
First, I summarize below the striking new evidence that Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork have published concerning the widespread Polynesian felling and burning of trees on Easter Island long before European arrival.
Second, measurements of markers that reflect paleoclimate have provided increasing evidence for severe droughts that contributed to the decline of Classic Maya cities in the Southern Maya lowlands.
Finally, the biggest recent advance (summarized in a new chapter included in my book’s 2011 edition) has been in our understanding of the decline of the Khmer Empire based at Angkor
[EDIT: Note the title is "Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics". While the substance of the post is about GGS, the title is about Diamond. I think his other 'work' is fit for discussion under this title.]
Good thing we don’t do that, because calculus, gravity, and optics are extremely valuable.
That said, some of Jared Diamond's arguments are really lame.. just poorly thought out. For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... of course he has and mentions them much later in his book, but dismissing the point as a "puzzling non-invention". This realization doesn't seem to have him question his earlier assertion that wheels for transportation would only be invented where pack animals are available.
I think it's got nothing to do with pack animals, and the truth is that wheelbarrows, and wheels for transportation generally, are one of those inventions that are obvious only in retrospect. Even after you've invented wheels on toys, it isn't necessarily immediately obvious that wheels could have practical applications as well. A very small handful of people in the history of humanity had this idea and most people never did (and just copied it from other people). It's not because of geography or ecology, just shear dumb luck.
I pulled up a PDF of GG&S to search through and I can't see this argument in the book. What I can see is him making the observation that the wheels invented in mesoamerica didn't make their way north or south to be paired up with pack animals, and that this showed how hard it was for technological discoveries to travel vertically through climates.
The relevant passage:
> While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters.
It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.
Very few wooden artifacts from prehistory or ancient times survive, and we know about ancient chariots and carts from depictions in art rather than from surviving examples. Lacking animals to pull wheeled carts leaves people to carry stuff, and then you have to ask if people using wheelbarrows or pulling wheeled carts makes transporting goods more efficient than having more people carry stuff. And you have to ask if the civilizations who didn't use wheels had access to the materials (hard wood) to make wheels and axles and carts. Any number of factors might have affected the adoption of wheeled vehicles, or failure to go that direction, but positing that the wheel idea only came up a handful of times in a couple of places seems an unlikely explanation.
The precursor to wheels is fairly obvious and doesn't require one brilliant mind out of millions. Logs used to roll heavy loads were used by probably every neolithic culture that built monuments, including those that never developed wheeled vehicles pulled by animals. Going from there to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight.
> You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument.
I think Jared Diamond could be correct, but I would still say that his argument is lame because he failed to establish a high likelihood of prompt invention once prerequisite conditions are met before concluding what those supposedly missing prerequisites were. I'm not addressing his argument because he failed to convince me that his argument addresses a real question in the first place. Supposing hypothetically that ancient Mexico had pack animals, it still might have been thousands of years before pack animals and wheels were put together.
> Going from [rollers] to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight.
I really think it was. There's a big conceptual gap between rolling something on logs, and making the rollers captive through the use of an axle. The roller goes from being a tool used to move a thing to being an integral part of the thing. Wheels may have been invented more than twice, but there's not much evidence for that. And in any case, it certainly did take a very long time for some seemingly simple applications of wheels to be considered after wheels were popularized for more sophisticated and demanding purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Why do you think ancient farmers cleared fields of rocks to plant or graze? They didn't have machinery that would break. Farms were small. They could just avoid or work around large rocks, and throw the smaller ones to the side to make walls or rock piles. The plow was invented long after agriculture began, and a plow pushed or pulled at human or ox speed wouldn't break on a rock. I agree that moving lots of heavy rocks off of fields would be back-breaking labor, but why would ancient farmers choose such sites to plant? Just because modern farmers clear fields to open up more land to farm doesn't mean ancient farmers had to do that -- they could plant and harvest where the wild grasses already grew.
I don't know why the wheelbarrow turns up so late in history. Perhaps they were made entirely of wood, left no artifacts to find, and were common and unremarkable so don't show up in art or monuments. We don't find many spears for the same reason, only the spear tips. Wood gets recycled, burnt, and decays.
It's an interesting question but since people invented spoked wheels and chariots quite a long time ago I don't think no one ever thought of making carts or wheelbarrows.
Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things.
The oldest wheelbarrow that we know of is from ~200 BCE, and the oldest chariots from ~2000 BCE. This tracks with animals pulling your stuff either being more obvious or to there being a higher ratio between payoff and cost of development.
You're right that it often comes down to dumb luck, but I think those lucky moments are usually facilitated by other factors. That's why there are often simultaneous and independent inventions (multiple discovery), and why tech startups aren't geographically uniformly distributed.
So the thousands of years gap between heavy carts and chariots vs wheelbarrows, isn't something you can explain by citing insufficient technology or unsuitable environmental conditions. I think it all comes down to nobody had that idea yet.
The key to heavy horse drawn carts was the horse collar. A horse collar fits over the shoulders of a horse allowing it to push a load with its back legs rather than pull a load with essentially just its front legs.
Before the horse collar (invented about the 5th century CE) horses were harnessed either with a yoke or breast strap. Because of how these fit on a horse they could only use about half their available power at best and breast straps could impact their windpipe. For heavy loads oxen were used since you'd need twice as many horses for the same load.
Horses were far superior to oxen for many types of work once the horse collar was widely available because they're faster than oxen and have better endurance. With a horse collar they could pull the same load as an equivalent number of oxen but faster and longer durations. It not only made heavy horse drawn vehicles practical but increased the cost effectiveness of those vehicles since they could have longer duty cycles.
Animal drawn vehicles involve much more than just wheels. Their use is very much about the technology available and suitability for the environment.
History shows us the wheelbarrow is not obvious (things which are obvious get done quickly), the chariot provides an intermediate step and thus makes crossing the gap far easier.
I read it.
It is deeply racist as none of the argument makes sense unless you look from a European POV from the end of the twentieth-century
It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now
Jarrad has some interest ideas but his euro centric POV is so deeply ingrained he cannot see it.
He is utterly racist. He does not know it, but it drips from all his writings
That doesn’t make something racist if you’re European writing during that period. Should all books by euros from 1950-2000 be discarded? I’m not sure I understand your argument.
Not all writers do that
That’s the argument is that geography contributed heavily to what we have today. Not that we’ll have this forever.
I remember reading about the East/West spread vs North/South spread of technology and it seems clever to me.
My point is that it is post hoc a theory to fit the facts.
Your quote > "It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now"
This is exactly what happened. The book agrees with this.
That is not being argued against.
What he is discussing is 'why did the industrial revolution happen in England?'. What lead up to that. Not that they didn't do bad things once they had the technology.
GGS was a good book. Independently, 2 MDs at my gym also came up and mentioned they thought it was a fascinating work. And my dept chair also thought it was a insightful work. In fairness, the last 1/3 of it kind of falls flat. Collapse isn't all that engaging.
It may be satisfying and entertaining to read, but human history is much more complex than just a few rules.
The charge of reductivism can be made against anyone who attempts to explain big patterns in comprehensible ways.
In fact, isn't it reductionist to claim that a historian's entire view on a topic can be reduced to theories they developed in a single book?
There is a video on the internet of him trying to shoot an old style gun... pretty funny... needless to say it's not his greatest skill.
Jared Diamond Funny video: https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN...
Universities and academics have shifted so far left that they are increasingly eating their own, the entire point of the book was to try and say that race and Western culture wasn't a factor. It's a pretty obvious argument against most right wing talking points, but apparently that isn't enough anymore in academia
Meanwhile, Asia's geography lent itself to unifying monopolization, which begat immense totalitarian states which were more complacent.
Both geographies fostered dense cities with draft animals, creating plagues and immunity to those plagues, which let the Old World dominate the New in numbers, technology, and immunology (nevermind that they had a few thousand years' head start in technology since they didn't have to switch continents).
Is there any evidence that any actual 'eating' is happening here? I can't find any instances of it being banned or removed from curriculum. Jared Diamond continues to teach at UCLA.
Is the 'eating' the fact that people critiqued a pop anthropology? The author of the article is creating strawmen and then defeating them.
I was left with, who actually is the author of the article referencing and what is their actual argument.
that argument only holds up if the group with the "proper background" is NOT a giant echo chamber where non-conformity is ruthlessly punished.
we're already talking about a specific field.
It's a wonderful mental trick to convince yourself you're right without fact-checking yourself, not to mention dismiss any field of expertise that you disagree with, but it doesn't actually prove anything.
Which is, as you said, "a wonderful mental trick to convince yourself you're right without fact-checking yourself." They're not in our club, so they don't count.
While some of the pop culture criticism of Diamond could be assigned to so-called cancel culture or “racism,” that characterization really does not summarize much of the academic critique of Diamond.
The best critique I’ve read and certainly the most fun is the Davids Wengrow and Graeber’s big tome “Dawn of Everything.”
Part of critique is simply Diamond making some broad strokes and it’s always the nature of synthesis that they decay quickly as new research comes available.
I’ll link to their more broad editorial, but the David’s’ biggest critique of Diamond and other neo-Raussians is that much of the foundation of those assertions are based on broad and bad preconceptions about so-called pre-history from the Enlightment. Once stated more plainly, very few of us in 2023 or even 20-40 years earlier, would agree with anything stated about other cultures in the Enlightment. And yet somehow, entire world histories - Diamond’s included - never question these basic foundational assumptions. This is a mistake that is increasingly disputed by not only pre-existing 20th century anthropology, but most certainly by 21st century anthropology included LiDAR and satellite imaging.
This author addresses some of that critique but to frame it as some kind of racist critique or cancel culture is frankly absurd. I’m surprised because as a historian surely Kedrosky has read the same books and articles I have, and certainly must know how historiography works - likely better than I do! - and yet this framing is so disengenious it’s a bit surprising.
In any case I recommend Dawn of Everything. It’s not a retort to Diamond/neo-Raussian as it is a kind of “huh!” with a lot of fun framing of preexisting research - some of which Diamond himself pulls from.
An op-Ed to whet the appetite: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-d...
Since this thread seems so opposed to the 'environmental' causes of collapse that Diamond proposes, the Turchin theories on how societies naturally go through stages that lead to collapse is interesting second train of thought.
Fixed.
I don't have a bone to pick with Diamond, but this widely disseminated narrative lacks nuance. When people say that a few Spaniards conquered the largest Mesoamerican empires, at least when it comes to Mexico and the Aztecs, they are forgetting an important detail. When the ragtag band of mercenaries and adventurers following Hernán Cortés arrived at Mexico, they landed smack in the middle of a long-running regional war between the "Aztecs", i.e. the people of Tenochtitlan, and, basically, everyone else in the area. And of course, in the typical fashion of foreign invaders, the Spaniards immediately became fast allies with the enemies of Tehnochtitlan as the dominant power [1].
Thus, every time the Conquistadores fought the armies of Tenochtitlan, besides their guns, germs, and steel, and horses [3], they had with them thousands of allied local warriors, mainly from Tlaxcala, if I remember correctly, at least enough to stand up to the numbers of the Aztecs' armies [2].
Note that towards the end of the campaign, Tlaxcalla and the other kingdoms were indeed devastated by smallpox. But the same disaster was suffered by the people of Tenochtitlan, also. The Spaniards really were the plague [4].
_________________
[1] This is a story that has played out many times in history. For instance, when the Crusaders landed in the Holy Land, they immediately found themselves enmeshed in the constant churn of alliances and wars in the Middle East. Half of the time, half of the locals tried to kill them and the other half they tried to get them to help them kill the other half. The same thing happened in Iraq, when the US invaded. It is a story as old as invasion.
[2] In much the same way, when the Spartans held Thermopylae, until that dog Efialtes, gave them to the Persians, the 300 were not, well, 300; more like 7000, at least at the start of the battle. Even in their famous last stand the 300 Spartans were accompanied by 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. The rest of the 7000 left to fight another day. Not that it would have made any difference anyway, not against the fully might of the Persian empire. Remember Leonida's apocryphal quip: when he was told that the Persians' arrows would be so many that they would darken the sun, Leonidas said "good, we'll be fighting in the shade".
[3] And La Malinche, a formidable woman who acted as their interpreter and go-between, and was probably a main reason the Spaniards managed to ally themselves to the locals in the first place.
[4] My source in all this is the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo who was there and saw it all with his own eyes, so god be his witness. My source for the Crusades is "Les croisades vue par les Arabes" by Amin Maalouf.
The fact of rebellious locals allying with the Spaniards, possibly because they saw the significant advantages of the Conquistador technology and how it could help their cause, doesn't change Diamond's thesis. Nor does the fact that introduced diseases killed allies and enemies alike.
>> What "people" say or write the one-dimensional stories you repeat?
Lots and lots of people throughout my life. Sorry I don't have any references and so on. I've heard people say variously that it was gunpowder, horses, or steel. I've heard this from teachers at school, from friends at casual conversations, from fellow wargamers when discussing history, by people in the TV, read comics and watched movies where that was the theme, and so on.
As to Thermopylae, it definitely wasn't 300 that made people think that was the number of soldiers on the Greek side. 300 was made because that was the number people knew, as a bit of folklore. And btw, I'm Greek myself which should, I hope, suffice as evidence for my claim. Everybody always forgets the Thespians.
If you are aware that those are misconceptions, why do you mind a comment that doesn't suffer from them?
I thought you meant to refer to historians or scholars, who should know better.
'Diamond does not discount the fact that native allies assisted the Spaniards in seizing the Americas. He is more concerned that Spanish victories should not be "written off as due merely [emphasis mine] to the help of Native American allies"'
...
'Diamond's suggestion is that Native peoples would have found it irrational to help tiny bands of Spaniards if they did not possess some military advantages.'
...
'When the Spaniards escaped Tenochtitlan, they numbered at most 1,300, many sick or wounded, along with just 96 horses. They were aided by 5,000-6,000 Tlaxcalans, who were unlikely to have many martial advantages over trained Aztec warriors. The city's population was estimated at the time to have been over 200,000. If just ten percent were fighting-age males, the Spanish faced difficult odds. A week later, at the battle of Otumba, 425 Spaniards and 3,000-3,500 Tlaxcalans defeated an Aztec force of 200,000—a feat that would still be impressive if the Spanish exaggerated their enemies' numbers by ten times.'
Victory against overwhelmingly superior forces is not unheard of in history. As a classic example, see the Battle of Agincourt (~7000 Englishmen vs many tens of thousands of French, and it was a rout... for the French).
This quote[0] sums up things well for me:
> Look through any r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can't be right, no matter how much it "makes sense."
> For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation.
The "Diamond is a racist" argument is not one that historians care about. What they take issue with is:
* not questioning primary source bias (e.g. he takes Pizarro, Cortez, etc. at face value),
* exaggerating the role that disease alone played, as opposed to how disease amplified vicious cycles[2][3]
* made-up facts[0]:
> In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comme...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/
[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/
(Disclaimer: I haven't read GGS, nor am I familiar with the underlying theses. I just find myself fascinated by the controversy around the book.)
Roberts' "The Triumph of the West"
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Triumph-West-Press/dp/1842124...
has a quite different take on this. He says the difference comes from a different cultural perspective. It's been a long time since I read it, but I'll try to summarize it with the Chinese perspective was that phenomena could not be modeled. Everything was a unique creation. I.e. the behavior of a model could not be extrapolated to explain other behaviors, while the European perspective was always trying to explain things with models.
Another cultural difference was the European notion (intentional or otherwise) of free markets. This is expounded upon by another book, "The Victory of Reason" by Stark
https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-C...
My own observation of history is that the key factor is recognition of and protection of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness produce massive technological progress and the uplifting of society.
Societies that recognize these rights thrive, those that do not, fall by the wayside as they are unable to compete.
It's like he knows nothing about China. There's lots of different dialects, Mandarin wasn't the main language used by Government until around the time that the Americas were being colonized by the Europeans.
There's also the fact that the European ships at the time were more robust than the Chinese ships -- because robust ships had been really useful for sailing along the Atlantic coast for trade/fishing.
The Yellow River and the Yangtze River systems are so close that it isn't realistic to have long-term control over one and not the other. And controlling both gives you a fantastic base from which to conquer your surroundings.
Come 'n try to snatch my crops. - James Scott, on Zomian political anthropology.
This right here more than suggests that China speaks one language, also suggests that it's never split apart, which it has multiple multiple times.
Oh yes.
And East Asia is much more than, much bigger than, China.
It is a ludicrous infantile argument from a Western POV Jarrad never notices.
He is a fish, swim g in a racist sea that does not know what water is
I lean really far left, and know I am, so have to guard against bias being on the left. But this entire thread has really lost track of what racism is. So many people are arguing against Jared for being racist, while making racist arguments to justify it. Its getting bit crazy.
More fragmentation meant more competition. This helped ensure that states which, like China, might have sub-optimal belief systems (like "it's not worth trying to explain things") were outcompeted and conquered by states that did. Similarly, states with markets that were more free outcompeted those that were less free, and so the innovation spread. The Dutch invented the modern stock market and the public company, and ruled the world for 100 years with that, but soon enough that spread to the UK, and then rest of the western world, and gave them all a huge competitive advantage compared to countries that didn't have that.
And all that comes from the fragmentation. No need to postulate cultural differences - the cultural advantages come out of the fragmentation.
Jarrad had to make North Africans "honary europeans" to make,e his theories work
It has a huge east west extent
https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Eq...
It has North South as well
North Africa is included in Diamond's Mediterranean exchange zone. And that zone extends out of Europe to the Fertile Crescent, at the very least, and arguably to India and China as well. Africa's two zones are separated by the largest and most inhospitable desert on earth. There is no advantage in having two.
That is in fact the core idea Diamond is expressing.
Domesticatable flora and fauna from a huge and ecologically diverse geographic region were easily diffused around the entire zone. The difficulty of migrating horses or sheep across the Sahara, or turkeys and llamas across the Darien Gap, is much much higher. Sub-Saharan Africa started with few large animals suitable for domestication, and importing new ones was comparably difficult.
Not having cows and pigs and horses is a huge disadvantage.
They did have moose and deer and llamas and bears and goats and bison. I don't know if there's any proof they can't be domesticated given enough generations, time and patience. Wolves and foxes can be domesticated.
The Finns domesticated reindeer.
Lack of plough animals doesn't extinguish the human creative spirit, it just slows it down a lot.
It is curious why bison were not domesticated. I did a bit of research and could not find a clear reason (some suggestions that maybe Aurochs lived in forests and smaller herds, and that may have made them easier to domesticate... but that seems weak).
I'm wondering how much is due to what I'd call the Harari perspective, in Homo Deus - that Eurasians also invented the "god-centric worldview package" that shifted the view of the world from a more animistic perspective (where all beings share the world and so treating animals in the absolutely horrific ways that domestication and agriculture requires is just unthinkable, since they are seen as other beings sharing the world with us) to the "gods and humans" perspective (where god created humanity, and then every other being is just subservient and lacks a soul and therefore can be exploited, murdered, treated like goods, etc).
Mesoamerican religions, despite all the human sacrifice, did see animals and plants as intrinsically valuable and spiritually significant. Native Americans in the North definitely did that too (and they had more exposure to bisons). That would perhaps have led them not to seek to domesticate animals.
It is curious (to me) that no culture emerged that even tried, though (that culture would likely have outcompeted everyone else).
This makes me believe Diamond over Roberts even more. I don't think cultural philosophical beliefs matter that much. They can be arbitrary and stick around for long if they don't make much of a difference in daily lives - but anything that does make a difference will get more accurate with time rather quickly. This is to say, humans aren't dumb - and because of that, economics is stronger than faith or custom.
> My own observation of history is that the key factor is recognition of and protection of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness produce massive technological progress and the uplifting of society.
I'm a much less experienced observer, but my current view is that... it's mostly the other way around. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is the kind of stuff that mostly flows from people's emotions and social intuitions. People try to pursue those naturally. How far they go is determined by their economic situation - Ancient Rome afforded for different levels of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" than early agrarian settlements did; different still than what was possible in Feudal Europe, and different from what was possible after the Industrial Revolution.
Technological progress reshapes the economical landscape, allowing people to achieve more "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". Specialization of labor, agriculture optimization, the printing press, industrialization, engines, washing machines, electricity - all created conditions that allowed people having more rights, liberty and happiness than they could've before.
Sorry, but this is exactly backwards :-) In the US, the rights came first. Note that the states that still practiced slavery failed at industrialization, specialization, etc.
The states in the north had slavery too, just not an economy heavily based on slavery. By the time of the American Revolution slavery was already on the way out in Europe, practiced in plantations in the New World but not at home. The ancient Athenians and Romans believed in inherent rights of life, liberty, happiness, freedom too, just not for everyone.
You're right, those rights are inalienable characteristics of humans. However, the US was the first to codify them into the founding document of a nation.
The states in the North had all ended slavery by 1804. Prosperity followed.
And so did the Industrial Revolution. What's the causal mechanism that puts codifying the rights you mention, and quest for happiness, before prosperity? With industrialization, the possible mechanism is much more clear for it being the source of both prosperity and the ability for US to keep those rights codified over longer periods of time.
Yes, I know about the forced industrialization in the USSR, but that failed to really deliver much to the civilians. It was mostly focused on military production. The US industrialization was so far ahead it provided not only the highest standard of living in the world, but enabled the US to fight simultaneous wars in both hemispheres, while supplying its allies (including the Soviet Union) with vast quantities of industrial products.
> is much more clear
Again, the industrialization of America happened after the rights were guaranteed, and only in the parts of America that were free.
Impossible, given that the first three items on my list predate Europeans settling on the American continent :). But in the other sense, desire for those rights was present with people throughout history - you can see echoes of those in any ancient empire that reached some degree of stability.
My point is that it seems you need to reach a certain level of economic and technological advancement to create a "fertile ground" for "social advancements", otherwise they won't hold. After all, many of those are no-brainers and would be trivial to achieve if there wasn't some opposing force preventing it. Those forces, I think, are always economical in nature. Things like, "survival of typical household requires so much labor there isn't time for anything else", or "there is a strong demand that's best fulfilled by ${something abhorrent} and there are no viable alternatives". While they're it play, advance is impossible. Once they weaken, advance becomes inevitable.
Compare: it's not the ecologists that stopped whaling before whales were hunted to extinction. It's the petroleum industry coming up with synthetic oils and crashing the market for whale oil pretty much overnight.
Compare: it's pretty clear in sciences that progress happened incrementally, and wasn't dependent on rare geniuses - once theory and tooling advanced to certain point, the next step was pretty much inevitable, which is why many (most?) breakthroughs in history have been made independently and simultaneously by many people around the world.
Reminds me of: "I'm not racist, but...."
It also has laughable, extremely racist tidbits such as Jared Diamonds unironic opinion that, on a genetic basis, people of Papua New Guinea are "superior" to Europeans, where he cited industrialization as dysgenic.
Absurd.
The book opens with a sequence of Jarrad discussing with a New Guineaian, why it was Europeans that went to New Guinea, and not the other way around
He goes on to discuss this, as if Europeans were the first outsiders there (we are not talking about the Highlands, that is more complex)
Where he was having the conversation there had been at least four thousand years of international trade and commerce. Which he ignored
At one point in time Europeans are dominant. He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever.
Europeans (we) had our experience of world domination. It is not the natural order, as Jarrad suggested, but an historical blip.
If the Industrial Revolution had gotten under way in India and it was the West Euro company from Bengal conquering Britain, then some India Jarrad would be telling a different story
That is what is wrong with it. Post Hoc analysis and story tel.ing dressed up as scholarship
Or racist drivel, to call a spade a spade
Whatever you think about him, he really needed a more dominant editor.
He never claims the dominance will last forever. He just presents theories as to why Europeans are dominant now (or were 40 years ago when the book as published at least).
It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. It’s racist to say that’s a good thing or destined or will last forever, but Diamond never argues that. I think you have some headcanon there.
What is racist is to say it happened for a reason, not blind luck
If all humans are equal, and one group wins, then it was either external factors or luck.
But if it is not luck or external reasons, then isn't that racist, because now you are saying Europeans are somehow genetically different (better), or have a better culture, and that is what caused their success?
I think you are mixing possible reasons. There are non-racist reasons.
There’s lots of random chance involved (New Guineans could have started in England) but because of those chance positions there are reasons things happened.
How is that racist?
Whether you believe his claims are correct or not, how do you manage to read them as racist?
He is not saying Europeans are 'dominant for ever'. He is saying that because of geography, etc... that Europeans developed technology faster, which gave them a head start, and that head start has perpetuated, exactly because that is what a head start does. Not that it can't even out in time, like a ripple.
I think his thesis is totally compatible with saying "if New Guinea" had developed technology sooner, they would have dominated and killed everyone. It isn't like there isn't evidence of wars and slaughters in Polynesia, they just didn't get the technology.
What I took away from the book is not that "Europeans" are evil (which would mean they are genetically pre-disposed doesn't it?), it is that all humans equally dominant whenever and however they can, and technology heavily tips the scales. And Europeans just lucked into it.
That is your interpretation, and mine
Not his
His was that the geography of Europe is special
But it is not. Even in his speciality, geography, he gets it wrong
Because he cannot bear that "...Europeans just lucked into it. "
But given that humans are equal, with a equal history of violence and conquest. If geography was not a factor. Then what was? We can't just blame Europeans for being successful. If we can't find any external factors, then we are left with internal, and then we'd have to do some logic around what makes them specifically different. Culture? Genes? Those also don't seem correct.
His thesis is precisely that, so he can definitely bear it.
Ultra-summarising:
- The Americas fell behind because they eliminated large mammals before inventing domestication, and not having horses and cows is a huge setback.
- Sub-Saharan Africa fell behind because it is oriented north-south and there are a lot of different climates you have to travel through, and therefore technology exchange is harder.
- Eurasia had the east-west orientation that enabled tech exchange, so it was going to happen there.
- Of the Eurasian regions, China could have been first but being too unified meant that they were less competitive and less likely to repeat high-risk ventures until they worked. Europe was fragmented and competitive which led to faster innovation, including more focus on turning anything into a weapon (e.g. gunpowder, invented in China but turned into war devices in Europe) or a disruptor (paper & printing press).
All seems pretty logical, and does not ascribe Europe any superior moral character. It's just luck.
Unless, of course, you believe that being born in the right place at the right time is related to moral character rather than luck. But I don't think Diamond does that in his book.
Sorry to be pedantic, but this really grates. At the very least it makes me wonder about the precision of your recollection of the content of the book.