Is Jared Diamon a racist?

September 10, 2005 3:25 AM

Jared Diamond, Racist? The anthropologists at savage minds have issues with Jared Diamond, some might say they think he is a “sham anti-racist.” Brad Delong is not impressed, neither are the folks at crooked timber. The discussion gets into cargo cults and lots of other good stuff. Here is the latest from Savage Minds, and the response from Delong and Crooked Timber. Nice compilation of links here.
posted by afu (63 comments total)

I will be following this thread.
posted by Termite at 3:40 AM on September 10, 2005

Excellent post. Unfortunate that Karim/Savage Minds could not finish reading the book; still, the discussion in that link is infinitely better and more informed than Karim's critique.
posted by Rothko at 3:54 AM on September 10, 2005

“Both Savage Minds pieces seem to exhibit one of the worst tics of the academic left — a tendency to evaluate arguments exclusively with reference to whether or not they might, in some distorted form, serve the rhetorical purposes of one’s political opponents."

Yeah. Diamond's not perfect, but calling him a sham anti-racist (a racist, therefore) simply for not advocating social change as forcefully as you want him to is over the top.
posted by Tlogmer at 3:55 AM on September 10, 2005

Disclaimer: I haven't finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel either.
posted by Tlogmer at 3:56 AM on September 10, 2005

And I suppose there's a difference between that one of someone's arguments is "a sham sort of anti-racism" and calling them a racist; I overstepped; sorry.
posted by Tlogmer at 4:12 AM on September 10, 2005

For its time (eight years ago) Diamond's book was progressive and powerfully anti-racist - and everyone apparently agreed on that.

Yet now, we can see a few flaws in subtle points in his reasoning. It doesn't look so strongly anti-racist as many of us would like.

This suggests, not that there's anything wrong with Jared Diamond, but that there's something good about our culture - about academic culture, at least. Our understanding of race and racism is growing, and as our self-knowledge becomes more penetrating, we are becoming less and less racist, and setting the standards of academic discourse higher and higher.

Calling Diamond's work "sham anti-racism" is a bit pointless, though. Especially considering there are still many billions of less educated people of all races who are overtly, violently racist, and whose racism we are not doing much to address.
posted by cleardawn at 4:47 AM on September 10, 2005

Does everyone know who Diamond is? Good someone mentioned Guns, Germs, and Steel.
posted by j-urb at 5:47 AM on September 10, 2005

Isn't he the Subway guy? Lost a lot of weight?
posted by Eideteker at 6:31 AM on September 10, 2005

>It doesn't look so strongly anti-racist as many of us would like.

How strongly anti-racist is anti-racist enough?
posted by jfuller at 6:41 AM on September 10, 2005

This is a very natural academic reaction:

"Someone else in my field is more prominent than I am. Therefore I resent them. Because obviously I am the best. Also, their work is accessible to the general public and this is bad."
posted by Mayor Curley at 6:43 AM on September 10, 2005

jfuller: How kind is kind enough? How honest is honest enough? How accurate is accurate enough? How repetitive is repetitive enough?
posted by cleardawn at 6:53 AM on September 10, 2005

The argument seems to me to be that Diamond has come up with a theory that puts access to materials first, and holds the view that whoever could conquer the world would have done.

This challenges the other anthropomologists fluffy ideas about culture.

Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think”

I'm not saying that the SA culture ideas aren't valid but I'm cynical enough to agree that the material situation came first and culture adapted to it.
posted by lunkfish at 6:57 AM on September 10, 2005

SA cultural
posted by lunkfish at 6:57 AM on September 10, 2005

From "Ozma" posting on 7/24/05 at Savage Minds (FPP's "sham anti-racist" link):

Furthermore, in the lowland South American context at least, there is considerable evidence that human-animal relationships are in important respects conceptualized and experienced as relations between social equals, such that a pastoral, dominating, domesticating relationship is rendered “no good to think” (apologies to Stanley Tambiah).

Except when eating one another, of course. Sorry if I find this quote unintentionally hilarious, but it shows how clearly the "savage minds" are gagging on the ineluctable idea at the heart of G,G, and S: that human cultures expand when they have a surplus of food that allows the culture to divide its labor between food acquisition and the achievement of other ends, including technological ends. This can only be done if there are sufficient food resources--plant and animal--and the question of sufficiency vel non is geographically determined. No matter how much one wants to interact socially with the local kinkajou or sooty mangabey, it will not be possible to do so unless you and your children have enough to eat.

As to the "sham anti-racist" canard, I find this argument analogous to the creationist claim that God put fossils in the earth and made them look old to fool us. Watching Jared D. break down in the African hospital at the plight of the malarial children did not lead me to think of him as a crypto-HImmler. Watching him trek with the Papuan woodsmen did not lead me to conclude that he had affected to conceal disdain for his companions. However bright Yali may have been, his ancestors did not have the benefit of the food crops and domestic animals of the Fertile Crescent. Considering this to be an important factor in answering "Yali's question" is not "sham anti-racism."
posted by rdone at 7:11 AM on September 10, 2005

I've found the anti-Diamond essays very disappointing so far. The one referring to him as a "sham anti-racist" [posted by Ozma] seemed entirely inadequate. Part of that, of course, was the fact that s/he approached it as an opinion-based blog piece rather an a science-based response to Diamond's book. The paragraphs dealing with animal domestication are good examples - they mostly consist of her vaguely summarizing Diamond's points and then saying "but no! that's a lot of hand-waving." I find that utterly unconvincing. Tell me that Diamond was wrong and animal X is easily trained today, if you want to discredit him. The critic's other note - that locals may not have tried to domesticate nearby animals due to their culture - seems lacking as well. Diamond's arguments about the domesticatability of animals didn't rely on the assumption that any currently undomesticated animals are are undomesticatable; unless my memory fails me he dealt with actual research, more modern attempts to domesticate animals like zebras, etc. Furthermore, the fact that some groups of people chose not to domesticate many animals {which in itself seems doubtful, since almost every half-large civilization had at least a few sorts of domesticated animals, and it is unclear why they'd be fine domesticating dogs but not, say, vicunas} does not change the fact that large domesticated animals would have been a huge help to any culture that possessed them.

The "Diamond is racist!!!" spiel isn't much more convincing. To say that GG&S was written as primarily an anti-racist book is to put the cart before the horse. It's a book that makes the argument that geographic location and resources had a heavy impact on the nature and success of civilizations; this argument has some anti-racist implications, yes, but I didn't read those implications as the main point of the book. The argument that this is "no-nothing anti-racism" simply doesn't make sense to me - I don't recall Diamond's book dealing extensively with imperialism, slavery, wars, etc. The point of the book wasn't value-judgements on the cultures mentioned, it was an attempt to explain why the world looks like it does today, and not some other way. Its particular focus was as its title implied - on resources, geography, and diseases that helped or hindered the growth of civilization. A polemic on the evils of slavery would have been beside the point, when Diamond was more interested in studying, say, the diseases exchanged between slaves and their European captors. The book says nothing about whose fault imperialism, slavery, etc. are, because that's not what it's about. If the critic came away from the book with the impression that Diamond was saying "slavery was inevitable, no worries", I think that speaks a little more about her obsessions than Diamond's. It sounds to me like the critic would only be happy if every book treating with human civilization included a little anti-imperialism anti-slavery anti-Western-culture polemic, no matter how off-topic it was.
posted by ubersturm at 7:23 AM on September 10, 2005

I think that the core of Ozma's criticism (as excerpted in the Inside Higher Ed article) is that she has mistaken a statement about the way the world is for a justification of the situation.

She reads Diamond's hypothesis, an attempt to explain the power disparity between cultures, and interprets that explanation as "so because it's not our fault, nothing needs to be done about it" - which seems like pretty sloppy thinking. It's essentially a descriptive theory. Deciding how to react to the situation is where moral/ethical reasoning should come into it, but that's not the primary thrust of the book.

(I think. I didn't finish it either.)
posted by wilberforce at 7:34 AM on September 10, 2005

Also, what ubersturm said.
posted by wilberforce at 7:35 AM on September 10, 2005

As a layman, I thought the points of GG&S were:

• It's easier to spread agricultural innovations east to west than it is north to south,
• having access to agricultural innovation allows you to build civilizations bigger and more rapidly,
• the more land and resources you have available to exploit, the better off you are,
• it don't matter what you look like.

Those anthropologists types sure have me confused.
posted by moonbiter at 7:40 AM on September 10, 2005

Ubersturm, thank you for teaching me a beautiful new word, and leading me to see this extremely cute picture, which, just to add nuance, is not a vicuna.
posted by cleardawn at 7:56 AM on September 10, 2005

I think GGS is threatening to some professionals. Turf wars so to speak. Diamond didnt spend 10+ years of his life getting a PhD in Anthropology or Archaeology and that he would blow away some of their core theories, obviously there is somthing wrong.

The beauty of GGS is that he asked the right question. Now that we have a satisfactory answer, I think we need to ask new questions, that move beyond a Euro-centric view of "us" being better than "them". Diamond did that by asking "Why do some societies fail?" -- I have not read it yet but wonder if he really came up with the right answer or not. It's really one of the great questions of history (ie. Why did the Roman Empire "Fall" etc..)
posted by stbalbach at 8:15 AM on September 10, 2005

One of the better points brought up in the comments on one of the sites above - Ozma and her [his?] cohorts seem to think that Diamond's argument that geography and resources affect civilizations really means that geography and resources affect civilizations in a deterministic manner, leaving no room for social and cultural effects. To me, this seems like it's flat-out wrong. First off, one of the reasons that Diamond didn't go into more modern areas in GG&S is that by the 16th century, the most powerful states were so large, centralized, and technologically advanced that social and cultural motivations had, to some extent, replaced geographic and resource-based pressures as the things that shaped civilization. Secondly, I see no reason why the admission that geography and resources shaped civilizations [particularly early on] would require that there were no social or cultural influences. Indeed, it seems self-evident to me that both have played roles [sometimes more important, sometimes less] in the formation of human societies. Arguing either extreme viewpoint - natural influences or social influences only - seems ridiculous. Could the West have so thoroughly conquered the large empires of South America and Mexico without the help of epidemics? Would the West have been so expansionist without various social influences [particularly the profusion of small, competing states packed together?]

[Another note on the animal domestication bit: as someone brought up on another forum, even if most groups in, say, South America had a primarily egalitarian relationship with animals, it would only have taken one successful group interested in domestication to eventually spread the practice throughout the area. That is, after all, how we assume domestication and agriculture spread - many groups didn't discover those things for themselves, but rather acquired the practice from other, nearby groups. Given that agriculture existed on both Americas, and that the llama {unfortunately too small for riding and hauling huge loads}, pig, dog, and turkey {as well as a few other animals} were all domesticated in South America and Mexico, Ozma's argument that South Americans were not culturally interest in domesticating animals {and so left domesticatable animals wild} really falls flat for me. If there had been larger and stronger animals like cattle, horses, or elephans, I suspect they would have been domesticated as well.]

Unfortunately, Ozma repeatedly failed to respond to either of those challenges in discussion on Crooked Timbers. Again, I'm pretty disappointed, because I would have been interested to see a detailed academic crtique of what I thought was a thought-provodking book. Instead, the conversation was started by someone who didn't even bother to finish the book and seems equally uninterested in engaging in much of an academic discussion on the topic, opting rather to repeatedly restate claims about "no-nothing anti-racism" and point people back to the original article.
posted by ubersturm at 8:21 AM on September 10, 2005

It's that time of year when bright young Ph.D's begin to feed on their elders in an attempt to jumpstart their careers. Joy.
posted by mecran01 at 8:32 AM on September 10, 2005

Maybe one day, critical statements regarding a society or culture will not be seen as racist.

But yeah, Chinese and Jewish people are totally smarter than everyone else.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 9:30 AM on September 10, 2005

Not quite mecran.. more like:

Wah! Someone from outside my field wrote an extremely popular book without even bothering to get a PhD in anthropology. Where is all the in-bred jargon and name-dropping of arcane sources I'm not used to? What the heck is a physiologist anyway? Must be a racist. No wait... That's not jargon enough. SHAM ANTI-RACIST!
posted by drpynchon at 9:32 AM on September 10, 2005

The Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everybody else, but I'm sure this has been debated to death in other threads.

Peace, my brothers.
posted by mrhappy at 9:36 AM on September 10, 2005

This stuff is dope.

I so can't wait to boost my astrophysics career by attacking Stephen Hawking. Name dropping without the ass-kissing connotation, baby!
posted by dreamsign at 9:53 AM on September 10, 2005

...so tired of the racism witch hunts. We are all, at least slightly, racist.
posted by 517 at 9:54 AM on September 10, 2005

Omza didn't say that Jared Diamond is a racist. afu said that. Omza says that the presentation of human culture and history as heavily influenced by environment lets humans off the hook for injustices which they have created and perpetuated.

cleardawn, I seriously doubt that his book appeared powerfully anti-racist to social-cultural anthropologists 8 years ago (except, perhaps, in comparison to books like The Bell Curve). Since the 70s and 80s, a lot of focus has been on historicized accounts of how people construct inequality through social institutions, through trade, and though choice (see Europe and the People Without History by Wolf, and Between History and Tomorrow by Sider for a few examples... to be fair, I believe E. Wilmsen offers some critiques of Wolf). Diamond seems naive and counter-productive from this perspective (which is pretty much what Omza seems to be saying).

GG&S is frustrating to anyone who has spent time learning about the systematic creation of inequality through things like trade and then talks to a person who cites Diamond to claim that inequality is an inevitable result of geography. There simply isn't evidence to support such a claim, and Diamond's role (through GG&S) in helping perpetuate such claims is worth examining.

it would only have taken one successful group interested in domestication to eventually spread the practice throughout the area

The point that Omza is making is that you can't assume that because it wasn't done it couldn't be done. What you say maybe true, but there is no guarantee that there would have been such a group. Put it this way: there are two basic cases that would result in the lack of domesticated animals. 1-there weren't animals to domesticate. 2-people didn't domesticate the animals that were there for reasons unknown. We can't look at a society without domesticated animals and know which of the two reasons led to the current situation.

Note that anthropologists have found that foraging peoples are often quite aware of domestication and which plants they could easily domesticated. When pressed for a reason why they didn't at least replant some to increase future gathering, they pretty much said "why bother?" It's worth considering that domestication may not have been an obviously "better" choice for many people in many environments.

And for the record, yes, I am a PhD student in anthropology, and no, criticizing Jared Diamond on a blog (or in pretty much any other format except, perhaps, a peer reviewed journal or book... and even then it's unlikely) is not going to do anything for my career.
posted by carmen at 9:58 AM on September 10, 2005

carmen,
We can't look at a society without domesticated animals and know which of the two reasons led to the current situation.

Well if you look at Diamond's book he addresses this by showing how native animals were only available in certain places. You cant domesticate what you dont have.
posted by stbalbach at 10:14 AM on September 10, 2005

Stalbach: Diamond did that by asking "Why do some societies fail?" -- I have not read it yet but wonder if he really came up with the right answer or not.

I have read it, and has analysis can be summarized thusly: when societies develop economic relationships which are intrisically dependent on long supply chains, the supply chain always fails, and the society collapses completely within a generation of that failure, in blood and flame.

Viz oil, and sleep well.
posted by mwhybark at 10:20 AM on September 10, 2005

Note that anthropologists have found that foraging peoples are often quite aware of domestication and which plants they could easily domesticated. When pressed for a reason why they didn't at least replant some to increase future gathering, they pretty much said "why bother?" It's worth considering that domestication may not have been an obviously "better" choice for many people in many environments.

Odd that I find this a much easier concept to consider from my airconditioned living room, than I might if I were struggling to stay alive and find food and shelter.

And if there's no evidence to support Diamond's claims in favor of geography and animal life, I'm still waiting for someone to present a more convincing refutation of his analysis of wildlife distribution and domesticatability.
posted by drpynchon at 10:28 AM on September 10, 2005

i remember something about how geertz dislikes guns, germs, and steel...i may have even found out via mefi. my experience with historians' and anthropologists' response to the book (from my own college period, and my sibling's, and my friends') is that they tend to dislike it and get annoyed because diamond's lack of actual formalized anthro training shows through.
posted by ifjuly at 10:32 AM on September 10, 2005

the llama {unfortunately too small for riding and hauling huge loads}

That would be unfortunate from whose perspective? Certainly not the vicuna's!

Uberstorm, perhaps you didn't notice one of the main anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery points that Diamond dryly brings out, which is that the domestication of animals provides a template for the enslavement of other peoples - that is, for racism and imperialism, whether white, brown, yellow, or black in tooth and claw... though since the serendipitous invention of the gun by Christian white folks, it's mostly been white in tooth and claw, with Christian baggage.

Once a group begins to "breed" animals for use as beasts of burden, it doesn't take long before some bright spark decides to try doing the same thing with those funny-looking people from the neighboring tribe.

Incidentally, how could a book possibly address the history of civilization without mentioning slavery, imperialism, and racism? How could those subjects possibly be "off-topic" in such a book?

517: I agree with you, we are all racists. Some of us admit that, and try to do something about it - such as exploring the causes and consequences of racism, and working out techniques for compensating for it in our behavior. Others deny being racist, and hence do nothing at all about it. That's the crux of the argument, I think. Nobody's burning anybody at the stake for being a racist, so it isn't really a witch-hunt.

(Obviously, extreme racists do sometimes burn people at the stake for being the wrong race. But that's another debate).
posted by cleardawn at 10:36 AM on September 10, 2005

carmen, I'm still not sure why systematic inequality induced by trade and geography can't be the case. In reading the materials above [and your comment], it seems that a fair number of people read Diamond's book as a reductionist "nothing but geography shaped civilizations and introduced inequality." I've lent out my copy, unfortunately, so I can't dig up direct quotes, but the message I got from GG&S is that geography heavily influenced the growth of civilization, especially early on. As time went on [and civilizations grew larger, more centralized, and better-organized], social and technological factors began to play a larger and larger role. [Again, that was one of the reasons that the book pretty much stopped with the 16th century.] I don't read that as a reductionist geography-only stance. I do read the "but it was trade/imperialism/etc that shaped inequalities, with no input from geography" as reductionist in the opposite direction... and that strikes me as equally foolish.

I thought I already addressed your point regarding domestication: Diamond did not simply state "these animals are obviously undomesticatable because, well, they weren't domesticated." It's been found by our contemporaries that vicunas, for example, are very hard to tame and deal with. Same for zebras, and other large animals that one might otherwise think of as obvious large animals that would be domesticated. What large species would you put forth as candidates? Llamas were domesticated, but they're too small for riding or carrying heavy loads. Alpacas and vicunas are smaller yet, and the latter are very hard to tame, by all accounts. American settlers in the 19th century did try to domesticate bison, but few had any sort of success [although some modern efforts have been a little more productive.] Animals like deer and antelope are generally solitary and territorial, and somewhat easily panicked, which are not considered good traits in domesticated animals. What domestication candidates were local peoples ignoring?

Regarding foragers: again, I think they're a bit of a red herring. There were several large civilizations in South America, and as you know, they did domesticate animals and crops - yet they didn't find any large animals suitable for hauling loads or riding. They obviously weren't avoiding domestication because they saw it as unnecessary or as an inferior choice. Up north, Native Americans on the Plains were quick to adopt the horse when it came to the continent, and they already had a few other domesticated animals [mostly the same ones seen in South America - dogs, turkeys, perhaps pigs], so again, saying that "they didn't want to domesticate because of lack of interest or cultural restrictions" doesn't ring true. If there had been more domesticatable animals within their regions, it seems very unlikely in the context of their other agricultural efforts that early American civilizations would have chosen not to domesticate them.
posted by ubersturm at 10:52 AM on September 10, 2005

cleardawn - I didn't mean that all mention of imperialism, slavery, etc would be off-topic. However, Diamond's intent wasn't to write "a history of the world," as such. Nor was it to make moral judgements and comparisons of various civilizations - he was investigating a certain set of natural and geograhpic factors which he thought were very important in shaping civilizations. A speech regarding the morality of slavery and imperialism would be a little out of place in a book that's focused simply on "why things may have happened." An investigation into the way resource scarcity or whatever made certain groups more or less likely to sell slaves [or buy them] would be a more reasonable inclusion, although I still suspect that things like slavery and imperialism are also so heavily influenced by social factors that sections on them would be too speculative and yes, a little out of place, at least if discussed extensively. It's not that it's wrong - very much the opposite - I'm just not sure it ties in well enough with the main thrust of Diamond's argument, and yeah, if that's the case, it should be in another book.

Also, I just don't agree with Ozma's implication that agreeing with Diamond [or with many of his points] makes me a no-nothing anti-racist. I found that Diamond had a lot of little touches like the comment about slavery and domestication. It just didn't seem to me that a rant about how of course racism is bad and imperialism is bad and the west should still feel guilty was needed to balance out the book - it felt balanced to me already.

But I'll shut up now.
posted by ubersturm at 11:20 AM on September 10, 2005

Maybe the controversy can be resolved by going back to Montesquieu's climate theory?
posted by funambulist at 11:25 AM on September 10, 2005

Carmen, you said: I seriously doubt that his book appeared powerfully anti-racist to social-cultural anthropologists 8 years ago

I'm sure it didn't. But it DID appear powerfully anti-racist to many of its readers. It was a popular book, not an academic work. Academia generally is at least a few years ahead of the, er, bell curve on these things. I think I agree with everything else you say, so, good...

Is it my imagination, or did we arrive at consensus? :-)
posted by cleardawn at 11:34 AM on September 10, 2005

ubersturm writes "no-nothing anti-racist"

Does she mean to be writing "know-nothing"? And if so, what is her meaning? The know-nothings were pretty explicitly pro-racist. If she does mean "no-nothing", what's the meaning of that term? I'm not finding it anywhere, even though, according to Ozma, "To anthropologists...no-nothing anti-racism [is] a social phenomenon with which we are wearily familiar."

I'm not trying to be snarky, here; I'm legitimately confused.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:39 AM on September 10, 2005

I'd like to read Delong's detractors in his comments section, but, you know...
posted by Kwantsar at 11:56 AM on September 10, 2005

mr_roboto: you can find a good explanation of what is meant here:

What distresses anthropologists most about JD’s book & its enormous popularity has to do with a more general problem confronting anthro (and sociology, from what I gather talking with colleagues) (this is the tie-in to Alexandre’s point).

It has to do with varieties of anti-racism. JD’s falls squarely in the camp of “no nothing” anti-racism, which drives us bananas. “no nothing” anti-racism insistently locates racism at a convenient scale. What we mostly face in the classroom are students who vociferously insist that while there might still be some scary tribes of racists out there (they usually point south, fabled homeland of the last living groups of uncontacted cretins who might hold such retrograde views), they think racism isn’t such a big deal because they look into their own hearts and see none, and into the hearts of their near and dear ones and see none there, either (oh, except grampa joe. and aunt ellen. golly, maybe their brother-in-law, too, and, well, anyway, definitely not MOST of the hearts in question).

That racism might be a social-stuctural problem as much as an individual one is a point they Stubbornly. Refuse. To. Concede. And they embrace any and all evidence to the contrary.

... Okay, so a book like GG&S really hits our buttons. Is is another variety of no-nothing anti-racism, here writ REALLY REALLY LARGE (into geography) rather than really really small (into individual hearts and minds). It helps make impossible the kinds of thinking about race, power, and history that sociological/anthropological scholarship indicate are necessary to bring about (1) genuine causal understanding and (2) change. It obviates what we take to be the all-important “middle part” between human origins and human psyches.
posted by funambulist at 12:02 PM on September 10, 2005

funambulist writes "you can find a good explanation of what is meant here"

Yeah, I guess my question is more fundamental. Why the term "no-nothing"? It's a strange term. It sounds like the name of a (racist) 19th century American political movement, and it seems to have little relationship to it's meaning. Where does it come from? Did someone at some point say something along the lines of "No, nothing in the structure of society is racist", and this quote caught on and the first two words of it became a label? Or does she really mean that these anti-racists pretend to know nothing about social-structural racism, and she meant to type "know-nothing" because she remembered that term for a history class, and "no-nothing" is a (much repeated) typo?

Typically, I would just assume it's a typo and move on, but the rest of the writing seems quite practiced and edited, so it kind of sticks out.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:11 PM on September 10, 2005

Thanks for that link, mr_roboto, I hadn't heard of the Know-Nothings before! It seems their platform has changed little over the years, other than trading Osama Bin Laden for Pope Pius.

It's highly relevant to a discussion of racism, too. "Racism? What racism? I can't see any racism! I know nothing!"

Or even more convincing, "I voted for Condoleeza Rice, so that proves I'm not racist!"

Fascinating to note, then, that the terms "no nothing" and "know nothing" have become, through a deviously serendipitous route, both synonyms and homonyms.
posted by cleardawn at 12:16 PM on September 10, 2005

I don't think we're less racist then we were 8 years ago. Honestly I get the feeling we're backsliding. Crap like "Mind of Mencia" on the air where every reference to black people includes a reference to gang violence or something. The 'Bell Curve', Lou Dobbs and his anti-Mexican crusade, etc.

I haven't read the book, but while it seems interesting, I definitely get the feeling he seriously ignores cultural effects. By the 1500's when ubersturm says that he thinks Diamond says cultural effects the Chinese were way ahead of the Europeans in most respects, yet when the Ming Dynasty took over they fucked everything up. It didn't have anything to do with china's resources or whatever (hell, they already had hundreds of millions of citizens) but their culture and leadership.

That's also the time that the international slave trade and African colonization started to take off, something that would last for centuries. It's silly to discount that effect on African growth.

Finally, it's hardly like people living in Europe didn't get sick, look at the plague.

I'm sure geography played an important part in the pre-history of humanity, but I think cultural effects have taken greater and greater dominance as the primary motivator in the chance of the human condition.
posted by delmoi at 12:28 PM on September 10, 2005

Ubersturm, just a small addition, particularly about the domestication of animals argument in regards to bison.

Today, bison have been successfully domesticated. They probably could have been much earlier. I do think that historical European attempts to domesticate bison failed mainly because the risk/reward wasn't there. Meaning, it was simply much more economical to just import cattle than to bother domesticating bison as a large scale effort.

However, I do believe that the end analysis in GG&S was ultimately right. It's just not as obvious with bison as it is with just about every other animal. I think that native americans failed to domesticate bison because of the lack of large seeded grasses (one of the other key points in GG&S).

Without the ability to create large argricultural communities on the prairies, the people had to move around to find foragable foodstuffs. It just so happened that the bison moved around too. They didn't bother domesticating the bison because they didn't have to; the bison moved with them and/or they moved with the bison. I would've considered them herdsmen as much as I would hunters. It's just that because they didn't have any agricultural work to do, they never need the help of the bison to plow fields, etc...

/ didn't read the articles, just likes to comment on GG&S stuff. Great book, for those who have yet to read it.
posted by C.Batt at 12:30 PM on September 10, 2005

Odd that I find this a much easier concept to consider from my airconditioned living room, than I might if I were struggling to stay alive and find food and shelter.

There are examples of people who had good and secure lives within the context of their environmental and social situations based on foraging (First Nations on the West Coast come to mind). While foraging might not have prepared them for major environmental changes or encounters with people with "better" weapons, etc., there is no reason to believe that a comfortable, secure people would actively seek to prepare themselves for every possible imaginable and unimaginable disaster (really, do we need to look any farther than our own general attitude towards oil?). It's quite possible that from the perspective of a secure forager, the work and social change involved in domestication does not seem to solve any current problem nor provide very much gain.

ubersturm, I know very little about South America ecology and domestication. I did notice that Omza gave a source that explores the scientific objections to Diamond's claims about domestication, but, perhaps obviously, I haven't had the opportunity to take a look at that. I was trying to point out that Omza was making a point about logical structures of argument, not about an objection based on science. Both are valid in critiquing a scientific argument. There are a lot of pitfalls, which have been treated in depth by evolutionary scientists, when basing assumptions about evolutionary conditions on modern observations.

What large species would you put forth as candidates?

Caribou? Also know, when domesticated, as reindeer? Domesticated in the northern Scandinavian countries and wild in northern North America (quite available to the Plains Indians, as well as Inuit and, I believe, Northern Woodland tribes).

There is more to science and social science arguments than "balance:" there are (at least) also rigour, accuracy, and validity. Omza is challenging Diamond's rigour by pointing out problems with how he has constructed his argument. She has also provided a source for a challenge to some of the accuracy of his argument. I'm not trying to argue strongly against Diamond: I haven't read the book and ecology is not my area. The thread seems to have gotten a bit of a skewed idea of what Omza was trying to say. I was just trying (probably not very well) to shift it more towards the actual argument.
posted by carmen at 12:32 PM on September 10, 2005

the domestication of animals provides a template for the enslavement of other peoples - that is, for racism and imperialism

An interesting hypothesis would be whether it actually went the other way. (Personally, I think the dog came first, I'm just asking a question.) It's certainly possible that early humans (or even hominids) found it easier to "enslave" other humans than animals, and we've certainly observed social intimidation and other behaviors among modern primates, who have fully developed societies without the benefit of agriculture, tools (mostly), or weapons (mostly).

Which brings us to the next point, which I believe may follow directly from certain points of Diamonds. Is society itself a form of enslavement?

That is, any specialization may come about because of social effects irrespective of individual benefit. I don't think we can rule this out. The social template used by many peoples includes rigid structures of professional and class interaction.

So, in a larger sense, imperialism is simply one extreme expression of society itself. Enforced specialization of whole nations.
posted by dhartung at 12:46 PM on September 10, 2005

At some point, these arguments about racism inevitably grow silly: "Everyone is a racist, and if you say you aren't that proves 1) you are, and 2) I'm smarter than you."

Is society itself a form of enslavement?

No without stretching the concept of slavery beyond recognition. And a good argument can be made that societies offer more freedom to their members the more advanced they become. Noble savage mystique aside, few things are more conservative that hunter-gatherer societies.
posted by LarryC at 1:33 PM on September 10, 2005

the message I got from GG&S is that geography heavily influenced the growth of civilization, especially early on.

Everything I need to know about geographical shaping I learned from Civilization. The video game. I mean come on, get plunked down on the edge of a desert, and enjoy looking forward to seeing those riflemen and tanks bursting through the brush several hundred years hence, while you attempt to fend them off with your spear throwers. I think it's been pretty much established that Jared Diamond is Sid Meier's pen name.

(I look forward to the next thread on space colonization where I can apply my vast knowledge of Alpha Centauri.)
posted by dreamsign at 1:39 PM on September 10, 2005

I think it's been pretty much established that Jared Diamond is Sid Meier's pen name.
That's classic.
posted by mecran01 at 1:48 PM on September 10, 2005

By the 1500's when ubersturm says that he thinks Diamond says cultural effects the Chinese were way ahead of the Europeans in most respects, yet when the Ming Dynasty took over they fucked everything up. It didn't have anything to do with china's resources or whatever (hell, they already had hundreds of millions of citizens) but their culture and leadership.

Here's a book for your reading list delmoi:The Great Divergance

Ken Pomeranz has got ya covered, and guess what...Chinese culture had very little to do with it.
posted by GalaxieFiveHundred at 3:47 PM on September 10, 2005

A couple of points:

1. This has nothing to do with jealousy or attacking elders, but is a long standing debate between those who attempt to explain inequality through biological and environmental explanations and those who look at political/social/cultural explanations. (JD is not an anthropologist.) The success of GG&S (and the recent TV show), make it a suitable starting point for a discussion of these topics.

2. There are a wide range of views about GG&S expressed on Savage Minds, our critics collapse them all into "JD is a racist" which is a great way to dismiss our criticisms, but doesn't really do much to understand the various points that have been made.

3. It was Ozma who said she never finished the book (see #2 above). Not me. I can't say I blame her, nor do I think it has any impact on the nature of her criticism.

My latest post is here. And I think anyone seriously interested in this debate should read this post, and the discussion in the comments to that post.
posted by Kerim at 8:30 PM on September 10, 2005

GG&S is frustrating to anyone who has spent time learning about the systematic creation of inequality through things like trade and then talks to a person who cites Diamond to claim that inequality is an inevitable result of geography. There simply isn't evidence to support such a claim, and Diamond's role (through GG&S) in helping perpetuate such claims is worth examining.

Diamond's point is not to explain current inequality so much as to explain why Eurasian societies were strong enough to conquer other societies (particularly in the Americas, Africa and the Antipodes) to then subject them to unequal trade and colonialism and all of those other forces.

The explanatory power of his model really does end in 1492 - he can explain the power of Spanish guns, germs and sheep (Elinor Melville's A Plague of Sheep is a good read on conflicts between native and Spanish agriculture in 16th century Mexico).

But if you are really interested in why Western Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was more powerful than China, Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence is much more satisfying. Like Diamond, he looks at the environmental differences between regions, but specifically at the environmental advantages Europe gained through its imperialism of the Americas and other regions, especially England.

From the summary:

Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.

As a British historian of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (who just passed orals on environmental history and British history - whew! so glad to be done!), I cannot stress how important those coal seams and overseas trade was to the development of England. And not just the presence of the coal, but exactly where it was - it upland deposits that could be drained by gravity, and near navigable rivers to be shipped to markets. You can see it by how the Northumberland and Durham coal fields were heavily developed long before Welsh areas. England didn't see the fuel bottleneck China did.

And the sheer amount of not only calories and fiber but also capitol (from the re-export of sugar, tobacco, fish to the Continent) is staggering. Western Europe ceased to be just western Europe after 1492. England didn't industrialise on its own - it did so on the bones of dinosaurs and with workers fueled by sugar farmed by slaves.
posted by jb at 12:16 AM on September 11, 2005 [1 favorite]

For more on trade and inequality, Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts is also an important, though "harrowing read".

But as to whether Diamond directs attention away from issues of power and inequality, I think that's a total red herring. Diamond isn't talking about what had happened in the last 500 years, he's talking about what happened up to about 1500 to allow the rest to happened. And the fact is that before his book, the only people talking about it were people trying to say "Well, Europeans are just more adventurous" (which totally explains why Chinese are sailing to the coast of East Africa long before) "Europeans are more innovative" (which is why most early modern chemistry was based on Middle-eastern science) and stupid ass cultural explanations like that.

As for what happened after 1500, there is a plethera of history to explain that - it's a different story in each place.
posted by jb at 12:26 AM on September 11, 2005

I heartily endorse everything jb said above. If you don't feel like reading 'The Great Divergance' at least check out this website.
posted by GalaxieFiveHundred at 1:50 AM on September 11, 2005

A final post by Brad DeLong criticizing Fred Errington and Deborah Gewertz for misreading Diamond. There's a brief response by Errington and Gewertz in the comments, with DeLong's further comments in brackets.

I thought Matt Austern had the best response, again in the comments:

One kind way of describing most of Diamond's attackers is that they are committing a classic book reviewer's mistake: instead of reviewing the book under discussion, wishing that the author had instead written a different book about a different subject.

Most of Diamond's attackers aren't identifying any mistakes or omissions in Diamond's analysis of how geography has affected material culture over the last 10,000 years. Instead they are saying that he shouldn't have written a book on that subject, and instead should have written a book about the villainy of European expansionists from the early modern period to the present.

I don't think there's anything wrong with writing books about the villainy of modern European expansionists. Plenty of good books have been written on that subject. But it displays a tremendous blind spot to think that that's the only subject a decent person can write books about.
posted by russilwvong at 1:42 PM on September 12, 2005 [1 favorite]

carmen, part of my problem is that that was the only full citation she had. Challenging Diamond's arguments on their construction is one thing, but s/he tried to challenge the arguments on facts as well... without backing up his/her argument. Like I said early on, that's a big part of what I object to. Additionally, I got a chance to skim the article the was referring to, and although anthropology and archaeology are admittedly not my areas of expertise, I fail to see any rear-end kicking or thorough-going critiques of Diamond's thesis. That article seems to focus on two things. First is the fact that there wasn't necessarily a huge dichotomy between farmers and foragers - there's plenty of evidence that for a long time after the introduction of agriculture, there was still some foraging. [This seems eminently reasonable to me, but I'm not sure how it contradicts Diamond at all.] The second part of their argument involves a redefinition of domestication - the suggest that humans, by interacting with and harvesting animals and plants either in the wild or on the farm, 'domesticate' them. This seems like a somewhat dubious redifinition to me, if only because there are some species which obviously have had a special sort of interaction with man [cows or horses live primarily with man, and their very genetics are heavily controlled by man as well], and that kind of relationship is not present between, say, tapirs and members of Yanomamo tribes [given that the interaction between Yanomamo hunters and tapirs is no different than the interaction between predator and prey or any sort.] Even radically redefining 'domestication', I fail to see anything that refutes Diamond's argument - a lack of large trainable animals for carrying heavy things and riding would, I'd think, affect a civilization, whether or not one calls those animals 'domesticated' or something else.

Like you say, there are a lot of pitfalls in trying to extrapolate from modern conditions to the past; Diamonds arguments, however, are pretty compelling, and if they're to be disproven, I'd like to see arguments more concrete than Ozma's, and less absolutist on the "culture and only culture affected historical inequalities between civilizations" argument. I really don't even see where Ozma challenges his argument's construction - she starts off with what I see as a mischaracterization of Diamond's argument [the "part the first: white people..." bit], says that she doesn't remember the landmass arguments but suspects Diamond's wrong there too because she disagrees with other things he says, complains about possible plant hybridization and mentions the article above, claiming that it demolishes Diamond's thesis [which I don't see], ignores a bunch of Diamond's arguments with regards to candidates for animal domestication and seems to claim that he assumes that any animals not currently domesticated are undomesticatable [not accurate], says that Amazonian cultures view animals as equals and not in need of domestication and thus avoided domesticating potentially useful animals [which is, in my opinion, a red herring since other nearby civilizations were very definitely interested in domestication], says she didn't read the rest of the book but makes some claims about its contents anyways [very sloppy], makes some reports on the PBS series which she didn't see [sloppy also], and claims that because Diamond argues that geography, resources, and luck influenced civilizations [and because the TV producers added an emotional 'feel-good' scene], people who agree with Diamond will believe themselves and their culture to be cleansed of blame or guilt for various Bad Things perpetuated by Western society [the no-nothing anti-racism bit, which I don't think is upheld either in GG&S or in the responses of people I know who read it.]

None of that looks like a concerted and unbiased attempt to critique the structure of Diamond's arguments, and there are so few facts in there that no one could pretend it's an attempt to address the scientific issues raised by his book. I'd be psyched to read a real scientific critique of GG&S, but this ain't it.
posted by ubersturm at 5:13 PM on September 12, 2005

The Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everybody else

Using my superior Ashkenazi intelligence, I deduce that you're full of shit.
posted by Tlogmer at 5:59 PM on September 12, 2005

[Nothing like coming back to a discussion after everyone's already left. Sigh.]

On preview, or rather after a much-delayed pressing of the post button:

Jb and russilwvong say things [or find better quotes] than I can. Also, perhaps C.Batt's point about the bison might apply to caribou/reindeer as well? I've read that experiments in reindeer-herding up in Alaska have generally involved imported Siberian reindeer rather than native caribou, perhaps for similar reasons. [That, and I'm of the impression that caribou didn't really make it to the great plains - in North America, their habitat is close enough to the Arctic circle that perhaps other domestication efforts weren't worth it or weren't plausible, and a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easier.]
posted by ubersturm at 7:10 PM on September 12, 2005

I fail to see anything that refutes Diamond's argument - a lack of large trainable animals for carrying heavy things and riding would, I'd think, affect a civilization, whether or not one calls those animals 'domesticated' or something else.

The most important part about domestication in Diamond's book (as in Crosby's Ecological Imperialism and I believe McNeill's Plagues and Peoples as well, but I haven't read that one) is not the advantage of domestication itself. It's about disease - animals that live with humans (literally in the same buildings, even the same rooms) spread diseases to humans. In 1491, Eurasia had many, many more endemic diseases than the Americas or the Antipodes, but not more than Africa. (Which is also a reason why settler colonies in Africa were only ever minority white, as opposed to what Crosby calls the "Neo-Europes" of places like Canada, Australia, Argentina.)

In the Americas, and in Australia and elsewhere, there was a great deal of management of animals as well as plants - burning in New England, for instance, created more meadows and increased the deer and grazing animals population. But the people didn't live with the animals and their manure.

Interesting, Guangdong province in China (where SARS emerged from) is one of the places in the world with the densest concentration of people living with animals. I seem to remember some other new diseases also from that region - can anyone else remember?
posted by jb at 10:54 PM on September 12, 2005

Actually, the book that these scholars should really be criticising is Crosby's Ecological Imperialism - Diamond is always concious of power and cultural sources of inequality, but Crosby's is much less so. If any account could be described as "morally neutral" it would actually be his. One reviewer even described it as "neo-Darwinist", which is a vibe I did pick up as well from Crosby, but never from Darwin.
posted by jb at 11:02 PM on September 12, 2005

Actually, the book that these scholars should really be criticising is Crosby's Ecological Imperialism - Diamond is always concious of power and cultural sources of inequality, but Crosby's is much less so. If any account could be described as "morally neutral" it would actually be his. One reviewer even described it as "neo-Darwinist", which is a vibe I did pick up as well from Crosby, but never from Darwin.
posted by jb at 11:37 PM on September 12, 2005

Sorry - definite slip of the fingers - I meant Diamond, not Darwin. I have never read Darwin (but I have read Diamond, as well as several scholarly reviews. While some have criticised details of GGS, and pointed out the limitations of Diamond's thesis, none suggested he ignores cultural factors.)
posted by jb at 11:39 PM on September 12, 2005

Update: Energy & Environment attacks Diamond's latest book, Collapse. (E&E is the same journal that published McIntyre and McKitrick's attack on the "hockey stick"; they appear to have an interest in downplaying environmental concerns.)

On Savage Minds, Kerim cites one of the attacks, Benny Peiser's "From Genocide to Ecocide." Kerim appears to be unfamiliar with E&E's political agenda.
posted by russilwvong at 3:29 PM on September 14, 2005