Guns, Germs and Steel

I enjoyed the book & I think his theory has some strengths.

In particular:

1) I like inter-disciplinary approaches to history.
2) I enjoy and value big histories. Most professional historians these days don't take on the grand sweep of history with a grand theory, it's a very valuable genre.
3)It is a "popular" science/history book that challenges very widely held assumptions about why there have been "winners" and "losers" in the great march of "progress".
4) I enjoy his style, he is very readable.
5) He is a liberal reformist who nevertheless manages to throw up interesting material and ideas worth discussing.

What more can you ask of a book? It's better that such books should be written than that writers should be afraid of making mistakes or incorporating errors in their work.

As I recall his theory I think some elements of it seem pretty unarguable:

1) The role of domestication of animals in giving rise to viruses that would later prove devastating to populations which had not been previously exposed.
2)The effects of populations not having access to plants as readily domesticated into highly productive cultivars.
3) The ease of access to the resources for industrial development in Europe.

I suppose that his description of the rise of government and religion from kleptocracy might be controversial, especially around here, but it's a fairly plausible narrative iirc, quite to the point for a liberal commentator even if he doesn't draw libertarian conclusions.

Reliance on inevitability is the downfall of many a reasonable sounding argument.

It was one of the best books I have read, ever.
Not that I read a lot of books or anything.

I have a tendency to be too terse. I'll try to remedy that by elaborating on what I meant. The "rule" I see is that primitive communal structures, as they existed in prehistory, were unstable, and (d)evolved into hierarchical societies. This means that there is work to be done to make the communal state a stable one, and we can't just go all primmo in an urban setting.

Social revolution has come about very organically and very thoroughly in the case of absolutism being overthrown by capitalism. If communism is to triumph, it must form in a way that is even more contagious than capitalism, and primitive hunter-gatherer societies were definitely not of this type.

I haven't read "Guns, Germs and Steel" but I have read most of "Collapse" which is an excellent book. I really should write a review of "Collapse" but I read it a year ago.

My issues with "Collapse" include:

* The cases he uses are very atypical, such as Easter Island and the Pacific Islands. These societies had to make do with limited resources and couldn't migrate easily to "greener pastures."
* Diamond is too much of a cheerleader for multinational corporations and their environmental programs. He is trying to be fair and it is good that he goes over their work, but his analysis lacks much of a critique of capitalism.

Chuck
Infoshop.org

Well, I know why he chose those cases. They are isolates. That is, they are less effected by external pressures from other societies. Noone invaded Easter Island, for example.

Easter Island, I think, is an interesting counter to the common claim that the defining quality of "cities/civilization" is "imperialism", as in the importation of resources. The Eastern Islanders clearly developed a ranked and stratified society, used much of their resources in creating monolithic structures as part of the elite maintaining their power through symbology. Population density was high, 238 per square mile; so more than double many agricultural societies. You've also got a good 900-1500+ CE period of agricultural population. That could have been more sustainable than it was.

I thought the contrasts between Scandanavia, Iceland and Greenland were very helpful in explaining how some methods of production are more sustainable in certain environments than other. It's not so much the technique as the technique within it's ecological context.

When Diamond goes with a civilizations that are not geographically isolated... the Cahokia or the Maya, then there are so many factors contributing to collapse, it's hard to point to a primary cause. Did Cahokia break down from a lack of wood, political disintegration, what?

I came across the rats-did-for-the-trees theory. Given the remarkable innovations that Polynesia produced in terms of horticulture I find it hard to believe that tree nurseries and arboriculture would have been impossible without other negative factors.

JoeBlack2 reminds me of one of my main criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel (I've not read Collapse): he attempts to cover so much ground that he periodically is bound to get some things very wrong. If I recall correctly, there are spots in GG&S where he even quotes the opposing experts on a particular topic, but then dismisses them out of hand several pages later, without any real analysis.

When I was reading GG&S two years ago I was in Venezuela, and one of the (gasp!) Venezuelan anarchists we met there was a professor of geography. He laughed when I gave him the outline of Diamond's theory about latitudinal vs longitudinal breadth of societies (ie. part of the reason the Meditteranean was more conducive to civilizational resiliance and development than was Meso-America), and said that theory is at best controversial among geographers, with many (most?) radical geographers rejecting it. I'm not a geographer, and we didn't discuss the specifics, but it made me feel a little more secure in my distrust of much of Diamond's narrative.

I also liked Flint's point (borrowed from Natoway Brian Rice) that Diamond often asks the wrong questions. His analysis of the Spanish conquest of the Incas, for instance, is built around the question "why didn't the Incas conquer Spain?" This is simply another example of his conviction that kleptocracy and expansion (imperialism) are inevitable. Again, nothing really to latch on to as a useful grand theory of history.

I've known lots of anarchists and other radicals who've loved GG&S, but having read it, I just don't get what people like about it, other than his ambitious scope and his skill as a writer. And I guess I thought the stuff about the limitations of animal domesticability was interesting, but then I wonder if he got that stuff wrong too...

JoeBlack2, mounting a mono-causal explanation for any event or series of events is always problematic.

My point about the potential for human management of the trees on Easter Island was that it wasn't done for social and economic reasons. The deforestation was certainly a symptom of the ills of an isolated hierarchical society whether the rats had anything to do with it or not. People found a wooded island rich in resources and destroyed it when there is no reason to suppose that they could not have developed perfectly good technical solutions to their environmental impact. In fact that is one of the strengths of Diamond's argument in Collpase: he adduces examples of societies, including Polynesian, which did develop such solutions. From this one plausible conclusion might be that Easter Island society was peculiarly fucked up.

I must add that his examples of societies that have avoided collapse is weakened by the fact that he ignores or underplays at vital points the phenomenon of exporting environmental destruction. Japan is heavily forested because of the depredations of its logging industry elsewhere.

Look, I have no doubt that Diamond has folded a lot of controversial and in some cases plain wrong stuff into his books, but they remain, for their type, very good starting points for discussion. In order to develop a good theory, a working model of reality if you like, you have to develop and knock down others along the way; unless you're a Creationist or a Marxist that's called science.

Finally, the implication that putting forward theories about ecological destruction is necessarily akin to 9/11 conspiracy theories is just so much horseshit. Understanding, or trying to understand ecology and ecological destruction does not make you a liberal or a hippy you know.

They like him for several reasons
1) He is sympathetic to egalitarian and communal societies.
2) He is anti-racist, in that he sees race having little to do with intelligence or ability. He even goes so far to argue that europeans are less intelligence since european survival after agriculture was more dependent on genetic differences in blood, than any need for intelligence.
3) He is concerned with inequality between sexes, which he traces to agriculture.
4) He is concerned about ecological issues.

"Kleptocracy" is hardly a neutral term the state.

However, since he regards the Kleptocracy as an inevitable by product of agriculture and larger populations; then he just has to throw up his hands about it and accept the exploitive and hierarchal status quo. Once he's established that he can't change that, he looks to other solutions... liberal, corporate, dictatorial (see his argument in Collapase about Hati vs. Dominican Republic, or the Japanese emperor's restriction on logging having saved the Japanese forests). Or comes up with such ideas completely lacking a class analysis that the Hindu caste system is somehow ecologically balanced!

His position becomes that the best we can do is put Kleptocrats into power that perhaps will enrich themselves personally a little less, so as to implement some ecological policies that save civilization from ecological collapse.

That is, his argument is liberal. He might look fondly back on to the Rosseauian noble savage of hunting and gathering, but he ignores any society that does match up with his stages of unilinear cultural development; so stateless communal agrarians like the Iroquois aren't an option, and stateless urbanism of ancient and middle Niger is impossible. Since he regards horizontal and communal relationships as impossible to maintain in any society with agriculture (and he's not proposing that we give up agriculture, despite calling it the "worst mistake in the history of the human race").

His actual position is that we can't give up the state or capitalism, we can only mitigate it's effects by empowering a better gang of kleptocrats.

He's a liberal.

Oh, I regard Diamond's work as interesting and useful. It's a good starting point for a lot of discussions. I just think that it's obvious that sometimes his writing is overly influenced by "publishing, marketing and mainstream acceptability". He is obviously quite aware of stateless communal societies. His lack of any analysis of class struggle within a stratified society, and his materialist determination of history leads to acquiescence with the current structures of government. I've been reading over my partner's shoulder as she is flipping through the Third Chimpanzee now and it's clear that is science gets a little weak on justifying certain social forms; that said his positions are acceptable by the main stream marketing and publishing.

The Worst Mistake in Jared Diamond's History of the Human Race: The State

I didn't have space to do so in my article, but I'd like to expand a bit on how the Iroquois prove to be an exception to many of Diamond's ideas. I'll now use them as an example on his "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"

I am so glad that Diamond brought up the example of Mississippian mound building civilization. Why? Because they are contemporaries and geographic neighbors of the Iroquois. Maize cultivation begins (and potentially the Rotinonshón:ni polity) at nearly the same time as does intensive maize farming begins among the Mississippian mound builders. Both are using similar stone tools and have similar domesticated crops. Unlike much of the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys and much of the entire South East, the Mississippian culture is unable to penetrate into Iroquois territory. Interesting, no? Mississippian culture also directly influences the Cherokee (southern Iroquoian speakers). The contrast between the "paramount chiefdom" society of the Mississippians and the Iroquois provides us something close to an social experiment between neighboring cultures that share a material basis.

Some details of the Mississippian culture are worth explaining in contrasting them with the Iroquois. The Mississippians had:

* Widespread trade (and tribute) networks extending as far west as the Rockies, north to the Great Lakes, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and east to the Atlantic Ocean.
* The development of the chiefdom or complex chiefdom level of social complexity that could be comparable at different points to post-Roman, pre-consolidation tribal England (archaeologists, when unsure of proper prehistoric terminology tend to generalize and avoid loaded terms like 'king' or 'theocrat').
* The development of institutionalized social inequality.
* A centralization of control of combined political and religious power in the hands of few or one.
* The beginnings of a settlement hierarchy, in which one major center (with mounds) has clear influence or control over a number of lesser communities, which may or may not possess a smaller number of mounds. The paramount chieftanship of Cahokia, a large city of somewhere between 8,000 to 40,000 people. Cahokia was larger than any city in the U.S. until about 1800, when Philadelphia surpassed Cahokia's estimated peak population.
* The adoption of the paraphernalia of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), also called the Southern Cult. This is the belief system of the Mississippians as we know it. SECC items occur from Wisconsin (see Aztalan State Park) to the Gulf Coast, and from Florida to Arkansas and Oklahoma.
* The most likely descendents of the Mississippians were also practicing patrilineal and patrilocal customs once encountered by the Europeans. This is in contrast to the matrilineal/matrilocality of the Iroquois, and the bilateral descent practices of many other indigenous nations.

Cahokia collapsed before the arrival of the Europeans. The Mississippian polity in general collapsed with Hernando de Soto "visit" in 1534-1539 and the introduction of horses and disease. It is interesting to note that one of the few cultures that continued to maintain a oral tradition of having been involved with moundbuilding was the Cherokee (southern Iroquois speakers, with some similar cultural traits like matrilineal clans, consensus); who exterminated their priest caste in a revolt just before European contact.

Diamond will blame the collapse of Cahokia on a lack of available wood (caused by building, particular defensive wooden stockades) and political disintegration. The Iroquois, however, continued to thrive. The Iroquois didn't seem to face much risk of collapse until after they started facing epidemic disease introduced by European contact from the mid 16th century on. The largest Mohawk town in 1630 was Tenotoge with a population of 3,300. While falling short of the size of Cahokia, it was definitely a respectable size by Mississippian standards. Further, the politically egalitarian relationship of component nations within the Iroquois and it's communal economy with it's lack of stratification may have very well discouraged the formation of a settlement hierarchy. Also, the periodic village relocation circuit of may have also limited the formation of such centralized city-states. And yet, the Iroquois live in sedentary communities numbering in the thousands with a high population density typical of farmers.

Mississippian mound building culture was influenced by two earlier moundbuilding cultures that were also active along the Ohio river... the Adena and Hopewell. The Hopewell had extended as far as into western New York... which would later become Shotinontowane'á:ka (Seneca Iroquois) territory.

Then the Owasco culture developed at 900 AD. The Owasco are regared as the proto-Iroquoian culture. Notice the difference between Mississippian mound building culture, and the Owasco:

This is also the first era of palisade villages and according to some (Mann) would have been the war that ended with the establishment of the Kaianere'kó:wa and Rotinonshón:ni. Eventually, the amount of grave offerings would increase, but never to the excess of the Mississippian elites. Further, more grave offerings tended to accompany the burial of children.

Let's compare this to the most prestigious burial of Cahokia:

Let's not mince words here. This has got to be the divine rite of a warlord king of Cahokia.

While the Mississippian moundbuilders were able to expand through out the Ohio, Mississippi river valleys, and all the way to the southeastern coast, that culture was not able to penetrate into Iroquoia.

It is also worth nothing that the only formal standing military officer positions described in the Kaianere'kó:wa is that of Ratihnhohanónhnha, the doorkeepers, two Rotiiá:ner of the Shotinontowane'á:ka. It is clear that the Rotinonshón:ni saw the largest military threat coming from the west. The Ratihnhohanónhnha were not war captains, but were primarily concerned with logistics of defense and were tasked--leaders of war parties were elected by their participants.

I'm looking for what was the 16th Century (1500s) Life Expectancy of the Iroquois. I suspect that it's going to be longer than the average life expectancy of a Mississippian commoner.

Jared Diamond also over stresses the connection between an agricultural diet and Porotic hyperostosis. Observe this study of the Oneta, a south-western Wisconsin longhouse-living but Mississippian influenced society.

So, the authors argue that it wasn't a shift to an agricultural diet, but that the increased population that only became possible through agriculture had poor sanitation. That is, a problem that is solvable by agriculturalists.

A Study of the Bool-Rose Ossuary Ulnae: Demography, Defleshing and Degenerative Joint Disease, Natalie Anne Bodin, 2002
Radio carbon dating 1550 AD +/- 50 years; north shore of Lake Ontario--this would have been a northern Iroquois community, likely Huron. Average male height is between 68.8 inches and 72.5 inches (or 5'9"). Have I mentioned that the northern Iroquois (including the Huron) were farmers and got up to 2/3rds of their diet from domesticated plants?

Just because a farming makes a surplus possible, and that a class of social parasites could seize it--does not mean that either that ruling class of social parasites or their ability to seize it is inevitable. If we accept that the Iroquois were agricultural farmers that did generate a surplus, then if they lacked class divisions... the class society is a matter of social form and history--not just the existence of agriculture and a surplus. As I have argued, the Iroquois had a both agriculture and a lack of stratification, that is economic exploitation. The few positions of rank did not result in material economic rewards. Not in diet, nor in possessions or grave goods.

The Iroquois lacked stratification, with no elites among them... diet would have been consistently similar for everyone. I note that they averaged the height of 5'9", that is, the same average height that Diamond gives for hunter-gathers towards the end of the Ice Age. This would be many hundred years after the introduction of maize farming among the Iroquois.

Dean Snow estimates that the entire northern Iroquoian population numbered 95,840 in 1630 CE, with a 31,947 acres of farms. 639 acres in a square mile. So, Dean Snow lists about 50 square miles are farmed. Or one hundred and forty nine individuals per square mile. Now, we might need to offset this with the realization that only 2/3rds of the Iroquois diet came from farms, the other 1/3rd came from gathering wild foods (strawberries, etc...), fishing (the great lakes and fresh water rivers) and hunting. So by population density, Diamond would certainly regard the Iroquois as agricultural farmers.

While farmers, Iroquois women (each one of them a farmer!) tightly controlled their reproduction as well. The watched their monthly cycle closely and also made use of abortificants and spaced their pregnancies out over five years. Low rate of fecundity among Iroquois women is a subject of quite some discussion in historical primary sources; partially because this was a reason to question whether they would have made suitable slaves for European masters.

As far as equality between the sex within a hunter-gather society... that is something of a myth. The anthropological definition of "Egalitarian does not… mean that there is any equality between sexes and between different age groups" and that "true sexual equality is a rarity."(Barclay). There are hunter-gather societies that are not only patrilineal and patrilocal but also patriarchal. The Iroquois were an matrilineal matrilocal agricultural society with more sexual equality than many hunter-gather societies. While the Iroquois had a gendered division of labor, women seem to have as much (if not more) political and economic authority than men.

This entirely depends on whether humanity can collectively shake off the parasitic ruling class, the kleptocracy. Diamond will argue that such is impossible and their existence is a direct inevitable consequence of agriculture. If that is the case, I can not imagine the 6 billion people currently alive who are dependent on agriculture will reject it, and thus kleptocracy reigns. If, however, we can have societies with agriculture without kleptocracy, then that the benefits of agriculture and technology can be commonly shared by the elimination of the kleptocracy.

He laughed when I gave him the outline of Diamond's theory about latitudinal vs longitudinal breadth of societies (ie. part of the reason the Meditteranean was more conducive to civilizational resiliance and development than was Meso-America), and said that theory is at best controversial among geographers, with many (most?) radical geographers rejecting it

I, for one, liked his theory of latidunal development, as I felt that it lent more to the idea that the development of Eurasian society was much more holistic and required much more of a synthesis of mutual aid and culture than most Western Historians give. I don't think that he developed his theory enough, but I think that if we look at cultre meterologically that it makes a lot of sense, and allows for us to understand the material development of history synthesized with Kropotkin's theories of mutual aid.

This is simply another example of his conviction that kleptocracy and expansion (imperialism) are inevitable. Again, nothing really to latch on to as a useful grand theory of history.

Sorry guys, but Diamond is dead on that expansionism and kleptocracy are inevitable. The development of the state is part of the development of capitalism, and history is a process of being and unbeing, the being of the state eventually being its own unbeing through revolution. There may be some VERY VERY few isolated pockets here and there that may have somehow held out with some egalitarian aspects, but to miss the historical tendency of the accumulation and centralization of power is to miss history. Power centralizes, first with women, then men, then castes, then families form, then the tribe, wars of agression against a percieved other, and then eventually a revolution (still in the works) that negates the state and brings power to the powerless.

The Iroquis people would probably have become a nation state in a few hundred years more if they didn't get wiped out by the intervention of the European colonizers in the interest of capital. A brief view of pre-Christian tribal Europe easily illustrates the egalitarian relationships within the tribe. Marx goes into a bit of detail as to how the Scotch nobles ripped off their own people and sent them to the beaches, and then off the beaches and into the factories. Before they could do that, they were those who "shared the gold" to quote Beowulf.

History does move in stages, and the exception proves the rule.

Look, I have no doubt that Diamond has folded a lot of controversial and in some cases plain wrong stuff into his books, but they remain, for their type, very good starting points for discussion. In order to develop a good theory, a working model of reality if you like, you have to develop and knock down others along the way; unless you're a Creationist or a Marxist that's called science.

I agree, though I don't like the slam against Marx. Orthodox Marxism as a belief system and apologetic for Soviet imperialism, okay, but Marx's own writings on history are very profound and prescient. Diamond is a great point of departure for a great many discussions.

2) He is anti-racist, in that he sees race having little to do with intelligence or ability. He even goes so far to argue that europeans are less intelligence since european survival after agriculture was more dependent on genetic differences in blood, than any need for intelligence.

I love how he discusses the fact that the indidinous people of Papua New Guinea are actually more intelligent than Western students due to their ability to make connections, adaptability, and ability to make mental maps. He then uses Piaget to support himself. A wonderful blast against Eurocentric racism.

However, since he regards the Kleptocracy as an inevitable by product of agriculture and larger populations; then he just has to throw up his hands about it and accept the exploitive and hierarchal status quo....His position becomes that the best we can do is put Kleptocrats into power that perhaps will enrich themselves personally a little less, so as to implement some ecological policies that save civilization from ecological collapse

Yeah, he does not put forward any revolutionary politics of his own, though it's easy to use his analysis to deduce revolution is necessary. I agree that he's overly liberal and has outright fascist conclusions sometimes.

With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
(Jared Diamond)

Flint, when he's discussing agriculture here, we have to read this as a slave society. The rise of agriculture is the rise of the slave society and the early form of the state. When we see exclusively rampant agriculture displacing hunter/gatherers, that can only really happen when a steady population can be forced to work the land. The steady population comes from the subjugation of the surrounding hunter/gatherers and has it's own particular development relevent to the rise of a slave society. His comple lack of a class analysis blinds him to the fact that it's not agriculture that's detrimental, but slavery, alienation, specialization in one food source, and warfare that harm humanity. A wider diet is eaten by hunter/gatherers.

[iJust because a farming makes a surplus possible, and that a class of social parasites could seize it--does not mean that either that ruling class of social parasites or their ability to seize it is inevitable. [/i]

It is ineveitabl, it just hadn't happened yet, their own specific development was interrupted by invaders. If the Europeans didn't wipe them out, then it would have been a matter of time before invaders from the south came north and wiped them out, or, more likely, a state would have formed as constant warfare from the south would have created a hierarchy of warriors needed to "protect" the tribe.

Also, a dose of existentialism and respect for human will wouldn't hurt either.

Huh? I'm sorry, when has existentialism ever been a positive factor in any type of revolutionary analysis? blech. You might as well pull a Darwin, go read Malthus and then see his theories all over nature.

Sorry man, but human will is particular to human society. The social organisms that we are determine the society that we create, and there is a clear dialectic between the two.

Flint, I really like what you're doing with your analysis of the Native Americans. Are you working on a book? Or should that question go in a different thread, as this one is about Jared Diamond.

And so comes the counter-argument that the scholars who criticise writers like Diamond are, for reasons of their own, unable to accept that pre-industrial indigenous societies are as capable of highly destructive ecological and social practice as the Europeans who came along and finished them off.

We will never know with absolute certainty what happened on Easter Island, but it would seem sensible to bear all the possible explanations in mind as potential elements in a multi-causal thesis.

Diamond's ideas, like Ponting's before him, do not stand and fall by the Easter Island story. The question isn't whether his book is right in every detail, it is whether there are things worth paying attention to in the work as a whole. Short of all of us becoming scholars of the archeology of Rapa Nui, we have only comparitive studies to help us and choosing one authority over another on the basis of a feeling does not help.

Good points Skraeling. I certainly didn't mean to underestimate the devastating impact of the Europeans in Polynesia or anywhere else.

Skraeling wrote:

On this point however I have a caveat. If you ever visit the moors of the south west of England you will find a landscape once wooded, devastated by people with stone axes; it has never recovered. In fact the deforestation of much of these islands was accomplished by neolithic farmers.

The extinction of megafauna when the first people reached the Americas is also dramatic testimony of how people with a pretty basic toolkit can make some dramatic changes to their environment.

In general however, I think I don't think there's much distance between us on any of this stuff.