> Guns, Germs and Steel is basically a modern eugenicist theory, racist and dumb.
Um, run that by me again? It’s been a while since I read it but doesn’t the book specifically argue that the Europeans conquered the Americas because of geographic factors rather than because of race? Do I have the main thrust of the book completely backwards?
I’m not sure what their claim is based on as your memory is broadly correct. The two criticisms I’ve read basically come down to it being oversimplified (e.g. ignoring the degree to which European successes depended on local allies) and that it ends to being too passive about the decisions made at key points which weren’t accidents of geography even if some of the capability to conquer arguably was.
You're correct and the grandparent is wrong. I'm seeing a lot weird hate for this book by people who haven't read it. I'm guessing there is someone with a ideological bone to pick that spread a mind virus about the book.
Like any book of its scope, there are obviously things that can be criticized ... but at least read it, and state those objections clearly.
Yes I have read the book. I can't seem to access the rest of the parent tree (did our comments get shadow-banned?) but I think I was just trying to provide support for the abundant criticism that book has gotten
However, I don't think there's anything in the book that suggests Graeber and Wengrow DON'T think Diamond is a racist. The few professional anthropologists I'm friends with hold such a view (obvy with more nuance) and I get the impression this type of criticism for Diamond is the norm not the exception in the field
Anyways now that I am explicitly supporting the accusation here's meat to add to the bone:
> Timothy Burke, who teaches African history at Swarthmore College, writing in Cliopatria, says that Diamond's problem is "that a term like 'race' can still serve some useful purpose in describing variations between human populations: I’m not going to make a definitive statement on that subject here. But just to give the example of the Africa chapter, Diamond clings to the term 'blacks' as racial category within which to place most pre-1500 sub-Saharan Africans except for Khoisan-speakers and “pygmies,” even as he explicitly acknowledges that it is an extremely poor categorical descriptor of the human groups he is placing in that category."
> Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel.
> This approach distances Diamond’s analysis from much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history - indeed, his suggestions for further reading omit almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years. Thus the large debate that is currently going on over historical explanations of the wealth and poverty of nations in a global context is here reduced to a sub-set of the ultimate question about bronze tools and geographic connectedness - ‘technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]’ [p. 416].
Yeah the original comment is (rightly) flagged dead
"Racist" is an extremely lazy label; it shuts down any interesting or well-motivated conversation.
It's especially silly in this case because the "traditional racist" explanation to Lali's question is genes, and Diamond's whole point is to provide a different answer to the question. Many people think he has gone too far in the direction of geographical determinism, but that's hardly a racist POV -- it's more like the opposite.
To be clear, what I was saying is NOT that anyone who disagrees with Diamond has an "ideological bone to pick". There are plenty of people who disagree with him honestly -- it's inevitable because it's a work of synthesis that "stomps on" many academic subfields. He makes leaps to the "big picture" that don't meet the standard of evidence for many (although I don't think there is any false advertising of rigor)
What I was saying that the "racist" label applied to Diamond is evidence of someone who wants to shut down conversation, probably because he doesn't conform to that person's ideology. If they understand what he wrote, they wouldn't make such a claim (especially not as a one line Internet comment)
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These critiques linked by a sibling are better, and show evidence of having read the book!
It's weird that you say there's a lack of evidence that Graeber and Wengrow don't think Diamond is racist. If that's what you take away, it seems like a pretty big misunderstanding.
The problem that Graeber and Wengrow have with Diamond (and "big history" authors like Harari) is that they assume that inequality is inevitable and we have little agency as human societies to do otherwise.
I actually love this point and 100% agree -- we should be consciously shaping our society to be more egalitarian, and not just let evolution and capitalism play out.
However it's also true that Dawn of Everything doesn't propose solutions. It's an amazing critique, including accurate claims of Eurocentrism and male bias, but it doesn't lay out a path forward. It gives evidence for many egalitarian societies, but falls short on how we apply those lessons to our own.
i.e. people read things and don't pick up on nuance -- all information (e.g. a book on the entirety of human history) is eventually reduced to a single bit of "racist" or "not racist"
Um, run that by me again? It’s been a while since I read it but doesn’t the book specifically argue that the Europeans conquered the Americas because of geographic factors rather than because of race? Do I have the main thrust of the book completely backwards?