I read some of Diamond’s books as a teenager, and not much else on the topic. It’s unclear to me if those critiques are saying “It would have been better if you hadn’t read anything at all” or if they’re saying “Diamond oversimplified things a lot.”
The rhetoric in the critiques seems to imply the former, but then the specific arguments are more about details of case studies rather than something that necessarily refutes the general thrust of Diamond’s thesis?
I mean, I think it’s a common view that if you tell a just-so-story and get empirical claims importantly wrong, your entire view is now refuted. However, I think there are occasions where the point of just-so-stories is more like “Something along those lines has to be true” rather than “This is how it must have happened.” And it seems possible to me to know enough about a topic to make a claim like “Geographical determinism is mostly right” even while being mistaken about some of the specifics. It’s kind of similar to evolutionary psychology and claims like “Women are more likely to cheat with high-testosterone men” and then later it turns out that this finding doesn’t replicate. Does that now mean that evolutionary psychology is wrong? Not really.
Of course, it’s obviously important to have good scholarship skills and get the details right! I’m just wondering about how far-reaching the update should be from learning of these critiques.
I’ve taken some anthropology classes at uni before social justice culture went more mainstream and already found the field (or at least the corners of it that I had access to) to be very “ideological” with respect to anything related to power/conquest, etc., and I got the same impressions more recently from broader observations. From what I remember, Diamond made it clear in his books that he thinks geographical determinism is an antidote to racist or colonialist thinking. The first person you quote seems to acknowledge that with the phrase “though I do not believe this was his intent.” Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that. For instance, there’s this part of the passage:
[..] too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms.
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region? If your continent only has useless marsupials you’re not gonna be able to domesticate a mammal, no matter how clever you are.
This example reinforces my expectation that books like GG&S are generally poorly received in fields that react allergically to any investigation into the underlying causes of conquests or of inequality, whether that research is ill-motivated or not. That doesn’t automatically say that the critiques are overstated, but it contributes to my uncertainty about how to update.
tl;dr I’ve read those quotes but feel unsure how much to update, partly because it’s common for people to have probably-misguided methodological objections to the type of thing Diamond was trying to do (ambitious theorizing about underlying drivers of history) and partly because of ideological currents in the fields of anthropology and sociology.
[..] too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms.
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region?
Yes. This is what Jared Diamond was arguing against. He is very clear and explicit about it.
The main point of Diamond books seemed to me to be that European dominated the world because of sheer geographic luck and emphatically NOT because they were more intelligent than Asian, American or African. Accusing him of latent racism seems really disingenuous to me.
Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that.
In fact, he explicitly said this, just not in the direction that critic thinks. Diamond thought Europeans were inferior.
From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners.
… Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults.
… This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. … The same two genetic and childhood developmental factors are likely to distinguish not only New Guineans from Westerners, but also hunter-gatherers and other members of technologically primitive societies from members of technologically advanced societies in general.
Thus, the usual racist assumption has to be turned on its head. Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo? Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?
(Editing note: paragraph breaks got lost when I copied from kindle, I’ve added some back in but probably not the original ones.)
A lot of this is about modern Europeans and Americans versus modern New Guineans, but I’ve bolded a couple of passages where he says he thinks it was true historically too.
I read some of Diamond’s books as a teenager, and not much else on the topic. It’s unclear to me if those critiques are saying “It would have been better if you hadn’t read anything at all” or if they’re saying “Diamond oversimplified things a lot.”
The rhetoric in the critiques seems to imply the former, but then the specific arguments are more about details of case studies rather than something that necessarily refutes the general thrust of Diamond’s thesis?
I mean, I think it’s a common view that if you tell a just-so-story and get empirical claims importantly wrong, your entire view is now refuted. However, I think there are occasions where the point of just-so-stories is more like “Something along those lines has to be true” rather than “This is how it must have happened.” And it seems possible to me to know enough about a topic to make a claim like “Geographical determinism is mostly right” even while being mistaken about some of the specifics. It’s kind of similar to evolutionary psychology and claims like “Women are more likely to cheat with high-testosterone men” and then later it turns out that this finding doesn’t replicate. Does that now mean that evolutionary psychology is wrong? Not really.
Of course, it’s obviously important to have good scholarship skills and get the details right! I’m just wondering about how far-reaching the update should be from learning of these critiques.
I’ve taken some anthropology classes at uni before social justice culture went more mainstream and already found the field (or at least the corners of it that I had access to) to be very “ideological” with respect to anything related to power/conquest, etc., and I got the same impressions more recently from broader observations. From what I remember, Diamond made it clear in his books that he thinks geographical determinism is an antidote to racist or colonialist thinking. The first person you quote seems to acknowledge that with the phrase “though I do not believe this was his intent.” Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that. For instance, there’s this part of the passage:
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region? If your continent only has useless marsupials you’re not gonna be able to domesticate a mammal, no matter how clever you are.
This example reinforces my expectation that books like GG&S are generally poorly received in fields that react allergically to any investigation into the underlying causes of conquests or of inequality, whether that research is ill-motivated or not. That doesn’t automatically say that the critiques are overstated, but it contributes to my uncertainty about how to update.
tl;dr I’ve read those quotes but feel unsure how much to update, partly because it’s common for people to have probably-misguided methodological objections to the type of thing Diamond was trying to do (ambitious theorizing about underlying drivers of history) and partly because of ideological currents in the fields of anthropology and sociology.
Yes. This is what Jared Diamond was arguing against. He is very clear and explicit about it.
The main point of Diamond books seemed to me to be that European dominated the world because of sheer geographic luck and emphatically NOT because they were more intelligent than Asian, American or African. Accusing him of latent racism seems really disingenuous to me.
In fact, he explicitly said this, just not in the direction that critic thinks. Diamond thought Europeans were inferior.
(Editing note: paragraph breaks got lost when I copied from kindle, I’ve added some back in but probably not the original ones.)
A lot of this is about modern Europeans and Americans versus modern New Guineans, but I’ve bolded a couple of passages where he says he thinks it was true historically too.