Lion and I discussed a week or so ago my disdain for Jared Diamond, which happens to be shared by most anthropologists and archaeologists. The main reason for not liking him is, as I explained to Lion, his unabashed, if slightly modified, unilineal evolutionism. This is the theory that held Western civilization to be the pinnacle of human achievement, with all "lesser" civilizations working toward that level of civilization. It don't take an anthropologist to see what's wrong with that.*
Now I don't think that Jared Diamond is either a) stupid, or b) racist. His reason for writing the New York Times best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel was to dispute the idea that there was something biologically, intellectually, or spiritually different between the Europeans and their descendants who influence the course of global history so much today and those other people who do not. In doing so, Diamond chose the environment to be his whipping boy - the underlying implication of that book was that any person in a given environment will respond exactly the same. If sub-Saharan Africans had had access to the same metals, fertile fields, and domesticable animals as Europeans did, they'd have been the ones to decimate the rest of the world's population and culture for four hundred and fifty years. Essentially, Diamond sees the world the same way as a game of Civ: every civilization is capable of the exact same things, but unfortunately they're also limited to the exact same line of development as one another, the only difference between them being whether or not they have access to the iron and horses they need to murder everyone who doesn't look like them (unique units and leader traits notwithstanding).
Anyway, my real reason for writing this post is to bring this to everyone's attention. A year or two ago Diamond wrote a short piece for the New Yorker in which he described his field work in Papua New Guinea (originally as an ornithologist, mind you) and claimed that the tribal feuds that go on their can teach us something about the universal human need for revenge. Now, those tribal feuds probably can teach us something - that's not the problem. The problem is that Daniel Wemp, Diamond's interviewee, is now taking offense to what was written about him and attempting to sue. It's a pretty fun read, if you don't like the guy, and the original piece is a good intro to what's wrong with his way of thinking.
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* Most anthropologists today subscribe to so-called "multilineal evolutionism," whereby individual cultures are considered to follow their own trajectories, and may or may not go through the phases identified by the earlier unilineal evolutionists. The legacy of the latter lingers, though, in anthropologists who try to isolate "stages" that are generally common between cultures, though the specifics will differ.
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I'll ask that you forgive my ignorance about such matters, but I think everyone here understands that I'm an enormous racist. But I'm a little confused about this particular point:
ReplyDelete"Diamond chose the environment to be his whipping boy - the underlying implication of that book was that any person in a given environment will respond exactly the same. If sub-Saharan Africans had had access to the same metals, fertile fields, and domesticable animals as Europeans did, they'd have been the ones to decimate the rest of the world's population and culture for four hundred and fifty years"
But if don't whip the hell out of the environment, what other factors can we consider? I understand that, were we to swap Africans with Europeans and hit history's "re-do" button, we wouldn't expect exactly the same results (i.e. no black Martin Luther posting his 95 thesis, no black Inquisition in the 15th century, no black Hitler in a black Third Reich). But other than the random variation expected from any hypothetical population hypothetically reliving a hypothetical counter-factual history, aside from the resources and climate endowed to any group living in Europe, what accounts for Europe's particular historical trajectory (or that of any other area)? What accounts for the differences if not the environment? Because the only other factor I can think of is some ill-defined notion of culture, somehow entirely independent of those same environmental factors, and therefore somehow innate to the group of people. Which sounds like biological determinism to me. Which sounds pretty uncomfortable and not at all what you were getting at, I assume.
What am I missing?
I think you're oversimplifying quite a bit there. Diamond earns the scorn of so many academics because he takes a very general conclusion (that humans behaviour is limited by its environmental context) and stretches it way beyond its feasible limits (that environment therefore determines the whole of history). For one thing, were this true human behaviour would not be particularly interesting to study. For another, it makes no goddamn sense. There's no causal value to this theory - why did Europeans decide to ride horses, for example? Why do horses translate into empire? Why did some European cultures do better than others imperially? How did technologically "inferior" cultures like the Mongols run train on the whole world for a century or two? Why did the Mongols do all the train running, while other arguably similar steppe cultures around the same time did not? Diamond's high-level determinism is intellectually satisfying only until you think of all the things it can't explain, and then it just gets infuriating.
ReplyDeleteAn additional point to note is that you shouldn't conflate cultural causality with biological determinism. Culture is a difficult concept to pin down, to be sure, but that doesn't mean that it has a weak effect on the course of human history. I don't think it's something I can flesh out within the confines of a comment, but culture is both a product of its environmental constraints AND a producer of new constraints itself. Culture isn't independent of environment, but it's not a passive thing. (Also, I should note that environmental determinism has been used throughout history as a justification for reprehensible policies and actions, as much as biological determinism has. What Diamond is trying to say creeps me out as much as what 19th century unilinealists did.)
If we follow Diamond's argument to its logical conclusion, it is that were we to put humans in the same environments, they would behave precisely the same. The problem is, this is the exact opposite conclusion that anthropology and archaeology have reached over the last eighty years - if nothing else, both disciplines have demonstrated pretty clearly that even within very similar contexts humans will still act all kinds of strange ways. You should think of the environment, like genetics, as a constraint upon the expression of human behavior, but not one we understand all that well and definitely not the only one.
That mostly makes sense to me. I guess though I'm still a little bit confused about the idea of culture. If you have time, maybe you could write a post talking about the various debates/ideas anthropologists and archeologists are having/promoting about its origins. I know you've talked about cultural evolution before, but as I recall, you didn't think too highly of it. What other explanations are there for where/how culture develops?
ReplyDeleteNo one will ever, ever, in a million years, even when our every thought is automatically linked up to the Hypoerspace Interdimensional Metablog, have time to write a blog post talking about the various debates/ideas anthropologists and archaeologists have/promote about culture's origins.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Ben, the reason that Diamond's environmental determinism, along with all the myriad other forms of determinism out there, is wrong is that people are not robots. We do not go through life merely responding to stimuli, or at least not in a simple enough way for anyone to as of yet understand. Instead, we go through life making decisions based on both external and internal stimuli. These decisions are based on way more things than we probably know about yet. Take this thought experiment; you have two identical twin babies (aaawwwwww!). They have identical DNA. Put them in an identical room, wearing identical diapers, and having eaten identical meals that day. For all intents and purposes, they're the same person, genetically, environmentally, cognitively, everythingly. give them both an identical ball. What are they going to do with it? Well, we don't know for sure, but most likely they're not going to do exactly the same thing: one might throw his, the other might kick his around; one might put his in his mouth, the other might poop all over his; one might try to find its nipple to suckle, the other might completely ignore it to go eat the drywall.
But Sol, you say, how can we know that!? If they are indeed identical in every way, it is entirely possible that they will interact the exact same way - there's no way to duplicate the experiment in real life! This is true. While the conclusion I came to makes sense to me, it's not enough to satisfy everyone. But luckily, it doesn't have to, for the very reason that these two babies can never, ever exist! In practice, then, that means that if you take any two people that actually exist and can therefore be the subject of this study, even someone who thinks that given 100% identicality decisions will be identical must concede that there is a chance our two real people will behave differently. And to relate this back to our original discussion, if you take two couples and put them in a forest with gun trees, germ plants, and steel bushes, they're still not necessarily in a race to see who can kill the other ones first. Maybe one of them shoots themself in the foot with a gun tree fruit and decides that the gun trees are bad; maybe the other just doesn't like it in the forest and leaves (as in departs, not the green things).
The point I'm trying to get to here is that human history is ultimately driven by human choices. These choices are themselves ultimately driven by external forces that may or may not be out of our control, but there's nonetheless an element, and I would say a large one, of human decision-making in what actually occurs. To say that the same environment will result in the same decisions is just another form of -centrism, and in Diamond's case his understanding of human culture is horribly Euro-centric, because everyone should, with the same environmental capabilities, end up like modern Europeans.
I'm reminded of a story from third-year, in my Ancient Warfare class. We learned that Julius Caesar had taken with him all the legions that were supposed to be stationed in Rome to go fight the Gauls. This was a strange thing to do, because while the Gauls lived all the way up in France, the people who lived in Switzerland and thereabouts were not really yet under Roman authority; Caesar went up to save these people who the Romans had no real responsibility for. A dumb person in my class put up his hand and asked something along the lines of "why didn't the Swiss just go take over Rome when there were no legions to defend it?" It made me want to punch him in the face. Just because you are enough of an asshole to want to take over Rome doesn't mean the Swiss, who were probably just tending to their sheep and enjoying their watches and chocolate and Ricola-horns, would want to pack up and go take Rome. Not everyone reacts to an opportunity the same way.
"...people are not robots. We do not go through life merely responding to stimuli, or at least not in a simple enough way for anyone to as of yet understand." Clearly, Sol, you haven't taken enough econ courses.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, folks: I really wasn't saying that people are like batches of chemicals that are going to always react exactly the same under the same conditions. I suppose it doesn't help that I haven't read any of Diamond's books, so I don't know exactly how far or how crazy his arguments get. But from my perspective, as someone who has not ever studied anthropology or archeology or sociology or anything else that might make any of my comments informed, the initial claim that the environment can explain a lot doesn't seem so outrageous. That isn't to say that this baby will ditch his ball and sail around the world to commit genocide because and only because of land scarcity or whatever. Just that as far general trends go, environment seems like it might have something to do with it.
And that's why economics is fake, and why that archaeology firm who said they'd have me in for an interview hasn't called me back.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, yes, environment has a heck of a lot to do with it. So, however, do many, many other things. Diamond oversimplifies all that and says that the prime mover is, in all cases, in the environment, when in fact the prime mover is and always has been people's reaction to the environment (among other things). It's that oversimplification (without resorting to racism) that made his book a best-seller.
Oh, and also, all this is on damn flimsy evidence. I like to cite the Incan Empire as a counter-example. They lived in the Andes, a giant mountain range, had one of the most advanced road system of any pre-modern society, and yet they never figured out the wheel. You can't tell me that the Inca lacked materials to make wheels - they're not very hard to make - nor , for example, that they didn't have animals to lash to their wagons - alpacas were the lifeblood of the Incan economy. By Diamond's analysis, they should have, just like everyone else, figured out the wheel right away, because they could and it would "help" them. But they didn't.
ReplyDeleteAlright, Sol. You've tied my hands. I always felt this in my heart of hearts, but I didn't want to say it for fear of pissing off the PC-Nazis. But you've left me no choice.
ReplyDeleteThe Incans were genetically inferior. Wouldn't know a wheel from an onion seed. There, I've said it. There goes my political career. Are you happy?
No.
ReplyDelete