Scrutable

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 7:38 pm**

jimbob wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 6:20 pm Or indeed as my daughter regards Jared Diamond - at least Guns, Germs, and Steel. Her word was "problematic".

I've heard people say this, but when I read the book nothing really stood out to me as particularly awful. Obviously it focuses on environmental rather than cultural issues, but I don't recall it as arguing that cultural factors are unimportant or irrelevant, but just that they take place within the context of the environment - e.g., Europeans may have been culturally predisposed towards colonialism, and there are plenty of books on the ifs and whys of that, but why were they able so often to win? Diamond's argument that environmental limitations on e.g. domesticatable crops or useful metals seems less problematic to me than the alternative argument (that it's due to inherent factors of the respective people/cultures).

The critiques offered on Wikipedia aren't much help. For instance, the first part of the book talks a lot about the massacre at Cajamarca, where Pizarro's conquistadores were up against an army of 80,000 Incas + allies. Somehow that gets twisted into "Natives succumb passively to their fate," which is odd as Diamond concerns himself with the question of why their resistance to the far smaller force was unsuccessful (he thinks horses and guns played a part). Or we have, "Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia." The book makes it very clear that loads of technology used in Europe originated in East Asia or the Middle East, and proposes that ease of trade across the Eurasian landmass was one of the reasons for European successes (e.g. gunpowder originating from China playing a key role in the Spanish conquest of South America). Apparently Blaut thinks readers would be too stupid to notice all the facts in the book, and would just get confused by the first three letters of a word.

Obviously it's broad-brush big-picture stuff from a geographer, and I expect people who focus on individual conflicts probably get very excited about small details and are miffed when they're not all included. But I'd be interested in hearing sensible reasons for why it's problematic.

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 8:54 pm**

Bird on a Fire wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 7:38 pm
jimbob wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 6:20 pm
Stranger Mouse wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 5:31 pm

You’re not wrong. He’s an entertaining read and he stimulates some thought but he isn’t quite the genius some people seem to think he is. I found the Tipping Point good though even if it wasn’t very scientific. Nowadays I think about him in much the same way as Stephen Pinker - read and enjoy but exercise caution.
Or indeed as my daughter regards Jared Diamond - at least Guns, Germs, and Steel. Her word was "problematic".
I've heard people say this, but when I read the book nothing really stood out to me as particularly awful. Obviously it focuses on environmental rather than cultural issues, but I don't recall it as arguing that cultural factors are unimportant or irrelevant, but just that they take place within the context of the environment - e.g., Europeans may have been culturally predisposed towards colonialism, and there are plenty of books on the ifs and whys of that, but why were they able so often to win? Diamond's argument that environmental limitations on e.g. domesticatable crops or useful metals seems less problematic to me than the alternative argument (that it's due to inherent factors of the respective people/cultures).

The critiques offered on Wikipedia aren't much help. For instance, the first part of the book talks a lot about the massacre at Cajamarca, where Pizarro's conquistadores were up against an army of 80,000 Incas + allies. Somehow that gets twisted into "Natives succumb passively to their fate," which is odd as Diamond concerns himself with the question of why their resistance to the far smaller force was unsuccessful (he thinks horses and guns played a part). Or we have, "Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia." The book makes it very clear that loads of technology used in Europe originated in East Asia or the Middle East, and proposes that ease of trade across the Eurasian landmass was one of the reasons for European successes (e.g. gunpowder originating from China playing a key role in the Spanish conquest of South America). Apparently Blaut thinks readers would be too stupid to notice all the facts in the book, and would just get confused by the first three letters of a word.

Obviously it's broad-brush big-picture stuff from a geographer, and I expect people who focus on individual conflicts probably get very excited about small details and are miffed when they're not all included. But I'd be interested in hearing sensible reasons for why it's problematic.

The criticisms I've seen focus on his interpretations of history and anthropology. This Inside Higher Ed piece from 2005 gives a good summary of the early criticisms, which can be summarised as:
1) the book ignores inequalities within countries, even though it may be just as important if not more important than inequality between countries for explaining technological differences
2) by saying that global inequalities are merely a fluke of geography, it lets countries off the hook for their role in exacerbating those inequalities
3) he ignores the importance of chance, societal frameworks and personal choice - for example, Spanish colonialism in the New World differed from British and French colonialism which impacted the subsequent histories of those countries.

A piece published in The Geographical Review in 1999 (reproduced here) provides another good critique. One major complaint made by the author, Jim Blaut, is that Diamond underestimates the importance of the north-south axis - crops can and have been grown across a great many latitudes, giving examples of maize being grown by Native Americans from Canada to Peru, and wheat grown as far south as Ethiopia. The piece also picks apart the arguments made by Diamond about why Australia did not have cultivated crops and makes some good counters, though I would also recommend reading Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu which provides compelling evidence that Aboriginal Australians did have agriculture, just in a form not easily identifiable to Europeans (in a similar way to them completely missing the agriculture of the Native Americans). The piece also deconstructs Diamond's reasoning for why Europe dominated but China did not, despite being on the same east-west axis.

A 2010 piece in the Journal of Social Archaeology looks at both Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse and how they misconstrues pre-colonial North American history to fit their narratives.

The TL:DR is that Diamond ignores inconvenient facts which don't fit his narrative. Ultimately, the criticism could be reduced to, I think you'll find iabmctt.

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:01 pm**

I think some of it is https://xkcd.com/904/ looking back at the track of history and building a narrative and a theory to fit it.

But generally the geographical determinism - "Of *course* the natural boundaries in Europe meant that Christendom (SWIDT) would coalesce into a handful of fairly large polities in competition with each other, driving military innovation in a way that couldn't happen so effectively elsewhere."

If I remember correctly.

I'll see if she can give me a fuller critique. I gather it was the view amongst her geography department in general.

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:04 pm**

jimbob wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:01 pm I think some of it is https://xkcd.com/904/ looking back at the track of history and building a narrative and a theory to fit it.

But generally the geographical determinism - "Of *course* the natural boundaries in Europe meant that Christendom (SWIDT) would coalesce into a handful of fairly large polities in competition with each other, driving military innovation in a way that couldn't happen so effectively elsewhere."

<Edit - after seeing Fishnut's post - China being the obvious counter example, and both China and India have historically been both wealthy (for the elites) and powerful with possibly a minor blip for a few centuries for about 350 years from the seventeenth century

If I remember correctly.

I'll see if she can give me a fuller critique. I gather it was the view amongst her geography department in general.

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 11:13 pm**

Thanks folks.

I think the Inside Higher Ed piece gives quite a balanced explanation of objections. It's true that Diamond is more concerned with inequalities between rather than within different reasons (though it's not clear to me why the former is "the wrong question" rather than one of many interesting ones and perhaps worthy of a book in its own right). And I suppose it's true that Diamond doesn't dwell on the moral implications of what happened - he'll say that some invasion took place without emphasising that it was a Bad Thing. I expect he thought that was obvious, rather than sneakiky trying to justify colonialism.

The Blaut piece seems disingenuous. I read GGaS 7 years ago, but even without a copy to have I remember Diamond discussed grains' nutrition in terms of protein content, for instance. And I didn't get the impression that he thinks everything is 100% due to environment, just that it's a powerful causative factor. I don't think a book about one thing has to cover absolutely everything else too, but I can see why you'd get cross if you confused having a focused remit with denying all other aspects of reality.

I don't think anyone would balk at the idea that a small isolated island would tend to be less technologically advanced than a large continent due to its various environmental limitations, and nor would they interpret that idea as some kind of diss of its indigenous culture or an apologetic for colonialism. So I don't see why the idea should be any more offensive when used to compare continents.

I also find it interesting that so many Western commentators focus on what the book says about Europe's role in history, when he also applies his ideas to the Bantu-speaking and Masai people in Africa, the Han Chinese, various indigenous American cultures, etc. Seems a bit rich for them to accuse him of Euro-centricity

As a caveat to the above, we've definitely learned a lot more about pre-Columbian societies in tropical Latin America in the 25 years since the book came out, and they were far more extensive than previously realised, with a lot of agriculture. So some parts are probably wrong due to the "unknown unknowns" - areas that have prevailed into recent decades also have a more complete archaeological record due to greater research activity, and I don't think he gave that much acknowledgement.

Posted: **Sun Mar 20, 2022 11:26 pm**

I suppose what I found interesting was that he talks about interesting large-scale patterns and trends in history that are often not really emphasised, and much (not all) of the criticism is basically that he should have stuck to talking about the things that every other book on history talks about - culture, serendipity, ethics - rather than topology and plants and animals. Probably depends whether you read it as "And also this" or "Exclusively this and not what the rest of you are talking about."

This quote from Inside Higher Ed touches on something important:

The problem isn't just in what Diamond has written, but how it is used and understood, Friedman says. "People think that when we say these things we are either (a) calling Diamond a racist, or (b) calling them racists for liking Diamond. We are doing no such thing. We are saying that the kinds of environmental arguments Diamond uses are a problematic way of addressing racism."

In fact, Friedman says that Diamond should be praised for doing work that relates to so many fields. "By crossing disciplinary boundaries, scholars like Diamond can help shake us out of disciplinary assumptions that might themselves be problematic."

Posted: **Mon Mar 21, 2022 9:23 am**

I'm just going from memory here, but as far as I remember some of the criticism is that Diamond tends to write a simplistic and so more persuasive narrative.

For example, in Collapse he argues in the chapter on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that the population caused an ecological collapse by cutting down all the trees, and the ecological collapse led to a societal collapse. In the conclusion to the chapter on Rapa Nui he wonders what the person who cut down the last tree was thinking. However, it appears that firstly the causes of deforestation on Rapa Nui were complex, and also involved invasive species and drought caused by global climate change. Secondly, its also argued that the societal collapse wasn't caused by deforestation as agriculture remained productive, but instead the societal collapse was a consequence of contact with Europeans (who enslaved people, introduced new diseases and all the other things associated with imperialism). Also, suggesting that population Rapa Nui cut down all the trees and caused the collapse of their own society is a bit condescending to them.

Posted: **Mon Mar 21, 2022 9:28 am**

Bird on a Fire wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 11:26 pm I suppose what I found interesting was that he talks about interesting large-scale patterns and trends in history that are often not really emphasised, and much (not all) of the criticism is basically that he should have stuck to talking about the things that every other book on history talks about - culture, serendipity, ethics - rather than topology and plants and animals. Probably depends whether you read it as "And also this" or "Exclusively this and not what the rest of you are talking about."

Yes, there is an essential tension between writing a large scale narrative and being accurate with all the details. I have a friend who is an historian who argues at length that all grand narratives that span the world and centuries of time are works of fiction, as no author is capable of understanding that much material and presenting it as a coherent narrative.

Posted: **Mon Mar 21, 2022 10:19 am**

One of the most important texts in development economics is Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. It focuses entirely on institutional reasons for the development of nations, or, as the title implies, the failure of some nations to develop as much as others. And tries to give evidence that institutional reasons are among the most important reasons. They do not claim they are the only reasons, just some of the most important.

A common criticism of that book is, but there are also geographical factors. And A&R would agree with that, and doubtless other things too. But, like most academic studies, they isolate one thing and seek to show its influence. Because when you try to investigate the influence of everything at once, often you just can't distinguish what is going on, as it is all too complicated and mixed up. A physicist writes on gravity, for example, we don't criticise them for failing to present a complete theory of all physics. So we first come to a separate understanding of each influence, and their relative importance. Later we can understand, perhaps, how they combine. I think A&R do a good job of showing how important institutional factors are. It is the reader's error, not the authors', to think that is all that matters.

Along the same lines, I don't think it is irrelevant or problematic to write a book about the geographical factors which might have influenced the development of nations. I don't think Diamond would claim to be writing a book which sought to identify every factor which influenced the development of nations. I do think he over-estimated the importance of the factors he identified in the overall picture of things. He is aware of A&R, I think (going from my very fallible memory) he even footnoted it in one of his later books, though in a way that suggested to me that he didn't properly understand it. Though I can't check that as my copies have been borrowed and never came back. I also think the evidence of more recent books is that he is past his "best before" date.

There are many lovely points in Diamond books. I often cite his observation on the general intelligence of people from New Guinea, where he did a lot of fieldwork. You have to be very intelligent to survive in such harsh circumstances as living in New Guinea.

Posted: **Mon Mar 21, 2022 6:36 pm**

Bird on a Fire wrote: Sun Mar 20, 2022 11:26 pm

This quote from Inside Higher Ed touches on something important:
. We are saying that the kinds of environmental arguments Diamond uses are a problematic way of addressing racism."

But why is it problematic? Not apologetic enough?

Posted: **Tue Mar 22, 2022 7:44 am**

The Problem With “That’s Problematic”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/0 ... -harm.html

...calling something problematic seems to miss the point of argument. Instead of convincing someone a particular idea is a bad one, the arguments that follow “that’s problematic” tend to merely point out that the text contains an idea thought to be bad.

Scrutable

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Re: Jared Diamond: Problematic? - split from Ebook Bargain Thread

Re: Jared Diamond: Problematic? - split from Ebook Bargain Thread

Re: Jared Diamond: Problematic? - split from Ebook Bargain Thread