About 6th months ago, I came across r/askhistorians writings on him and was quite surprised. As I first read him when I was a teenager, Diamond had a big impact on me, and though as I grew up and read more I did find some of his arguments had flaws, I always found that the basic insight was solid. It was interesting to hear their critiques, but they didn't sit right with me.
On a particular level, it does feel like Diamond's book has the simple disadvantage of being a hugely successful work doing something (big history) controversial around a topics that people are sensitive about. This invites a kind of vitriolic public criticism and 'exposure' of 'wrongness' that, especially on a site like Reddit, is very enjoyable for people to engage in. The issue with Reddit in particular is that it is not a space that is intended for reasoned academic debate, giving space only to controversialists and not to people who would point out that maybe Diamond isn't so bad.
Thank you for posting this essay. I have been sick and tired of the weirdly uneducated and overly emotional misreading and attacks on GSG, which isn't a perfect book but isn't what everyone says it is. It was always a pain to have to produce a fractional collection of rebuts each time so I'm glad you've done the work of putting them all in one place! A valuable reference for sure.
"The complaint from the left seems to be that Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't try to claim that white colonizers and capitalism were uniquely evil forces in history. On this view, his first misstep is asking why it was that, say, New Guineans didn't take over the world -- to which their answer would be, "of course they didn't, they're not evil white people." I wish I was making this up, but this honestly seems to be the beef they have with Guns, Germs, and Steel, despite the fact the whole point of the book is to explain why Europeans kind of just got lucky, and that's why they managed to take over the world (it's not that they're smarter or harder working or whatever)."
When I first came across Guns, Germs, and Steel in an airport bookstore 24 years ago I read it with a kind of intellectual excitement that I don't feel often. But I knew it was just one analysis by someone working out of their own field, so I hoped to read responses that really engaged with its arguments. What do experts on horse domestication think about the notion that it could never work for zebras? Are there ways to be more quantitative about how easily wheat cultivation could spread?
Instead what I found were objections that started from a stance of ideology, and only brought in historical arguments as backup. I would still like to see a serious review of his main arguments on their merits.
In the context of biological evolution, Darwin argued over a century earlier that evolution would be fastest, and effectively most "innovative", in the largest connected areas. Applying that same idea to cultural evolution, you would expect the likelihood of the industrial revolution to happen in Eurasia to out of proportion to its relative area because of the multiplier effect of greater interactions. You could argue most of Diamond's book boils down to multiple examples of how that size advantage plays out, but I would still like to see specific expertise brought to bear on those examples. And that does not seem to be happening.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode "Globalization Unto Death" starts out with the question "Are White People Special?" I think he references Diamond directly as a book that tried to answer this question. He then lays out two schools of thought:
1) Imperialist: White People are Special Good
2) Post-60s: White People are Special Bad
...and more of less offers his perspective that he thinks why people are no better or worse (morally) then anyone else. He kind of feels the same way about the Mongol's, etc. That most people and groups would be about as cruel to one another as their circumstances and times allowed, and that people with high body counts just head more power to do what they wanted. That the "great men" of history are all in a giant tie for cruelty.
I'm more or less in agreement with him.
Diamond doesn't take this view, but people who do think there is differential genetic potential between the races also reference different environments as the cause. So the same things Diamond uses to explain away world differences could also be used to explain them. Most of his critics probably aren't smart enough to make the inference, but its no doubt one reason for the hostility.
All the backlash against Diamond reminds me a lot of the rage from a lot of academic historians directed towards Barbara Tuchman when she became popular with the unwashed masses. Some people really don't like it when outsiders butt in on their special self-declared intellectual playground I guess.
Where's out Enguerrand HBO miniseries, that's what I want to know. The Dance of the Burning Ones scene is going to be so epic. The episode titles alone will be worth the price of admission "Chapter Eight: Hung Be The Heavens With Black" etc
I have read Diamond’s book and the hardest part is he writes his opinion with such certainty it comes across as fact to the reader. When anyone states an opinion as to what took place 10,000 years ago with certainty, I’m generally skeptical.
This was a good read. Personally I never got most of the criticism surrounding GGS, I suspect much of it is due to people disliking the fact that Diamond is not a historian/economist/anthropologist by trade and typically academics don't react kindly to people outside their field suggesting new ideas (this does remind me of the reaction Alfred Wegener got for his ideas about continental drift). Not to say Diamond got it all right, his work, especially some of the recent stuff is ... odd. In my view the East-West axis part of Diamond's work is the weakest. Sure it is easier to travel east to west but that idea ignores local effects that lead to areas of the same latitude having vastly different climates (for instance Lyon is farther north than Vladivostok, a Köppen map shows even more problems). Regardless I still lean heavily towards accepting Diamond's ideas as opposed to rejecting them.
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” was great, but Thomas Sowell made the same case and did it both first and better. Check out his culture trilogy: Race and Culture, Migration and Cultures, and Conquest and Cultures.
Regarding the interactions of diseases causing increased mortality, it’s worth looking at the recent research that shows that measles destroys our existing immunity (by destroying the cells that protect our learned immune response), leading to prolonged immunosuppresion. It’s quite plausible that you could have a small pox epidemic with a 60+% death rate, followed by a measles epidemic with its own deaths, followed by _another_ smallpox epidemic that has another 50% death rate due to the population losing their learned immunity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/7353/
I was given the book as a gift. From a fan who said it was interesting nothing more. It seems to be speculation about the past through the eyes of the present. Which we still do stupid as it is.
The most appropriate response to the critique of "geographic determinism" is: "So what?"
And so it is with any slur of "determinism." Such slurs seem derived from the classic "genetic determinism," which fails for the same reason. Social scientists in particular and ideological activists in general have habitually elevated wishful thinking as though a sound means of reasoning. They don't seem conscious of the reality that the universe is perfectly ambivalent to the highest moral concerns.
Geography may indeed determine human outcomes more than we would prefer. You would prefer to instead deny that Diamond is a geographic determinist? If your empirical explanation does not at-least-roughly "determine" outcomes, then it isn't an explanation.
I really enjoyed this essay.
About 6th months ago, I came across r/askhistorians writings on him and was quite surprised. As I first read him when I was a teenager, Diamond had a big impact on me, and though as I grew up and read more I did find some of his arguments had flaws, I always found that the basic insight was solid. It was interesting to hear their critiques, but they didn't sit right with me.
On a particular level, it does feel like Diamond's book has the simple disadvantage of being a hugely successful work doing something (big history) controversial around a topics that people are sensitive about. This invites a kind of vitriolic public criticism and 'exposure' of 'wrongness' that, especially on a site like Reddit, is very enjoyable for people to engage in. The issue with Reddit in particular is that it is not a space that is intended for reasoned academic debate, giving space only to controversialists and not to people who would point out that maybe Diamond isn't so bad.
Thank you for posting this essay. I have been sick and tired of the weirdly uneducated and overly emotional misreading and attacks on GSG, which isn't a perfect book but isn't what everyone says it is. It was always a pain to have to produce a fractional collection of rebuts each time so I'm glad you've done the work of putting them all in one place! A valuable reference for sure.
Commenter Dan at <a href=https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/friday-assorted-links-421.html#comment-160619944>Marginal Revolution</a> has a cynical explanation:
"The complaint from the left seems to be that Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't try to claim that white colonizers and capitalism were uniquely evil forces in history. On this view, his first misstep is asking why it was that, say, New Guineans didn't take over the world -- to which their answer would be, "of course they didn't, they're not evil white people." I wish I was making this up, but this honestly seems to be the beef they have with Guns, Germs, and Steel, despite the fact the whole point of the book is to explain why Europeans kind of just got lucky, and that's why they managed to take over the world (it's not that they're smarter or harder working or whatever)."
This is exactly the rebuttal a leftist friend of mine has when I tried to explain the overall arch of this book and trying to defend White people lol
When I first came across Guns, Germs, and Steel in an airport bookstore 24 years ago I read it with a kind of intellectual excitement that I don't feel often. But I knew it was just one analysis by someone working out of their own field, so I hoped to read responses that really engaged with its arguments. What do experts on horse domestication think about the notion that it could never work for zebras? Are there ways to be more quantitative about how easily wheat cultivation could spread?
Instead what I found were objections that started from a stance of ideology, and only brought in historical arguments as backup. I would still like to see a serious review of his main arguments on their merits.
In the context of biological evolution, Darwin argued over a century earlier that evolution would be fastest, and effectively most "innovative", in the largest connected areas. Applying that same idea to cultural evolution, you would expect the likelihood of the industrial revolution to happen in Eurasia to out of proportion to its relative area because of the multiplier effect of greater interactions. You could argue most of Diamond's book boils down to multiple examples of how that size advantage plays out, but I would still like to see specific expertise brought to bear on those examples. And that does not seem to be happening.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode "Globalization Unto Death" starts out with the question "Are White People Special?" I think he references Diamond directly as a book that tried to answer this question. He then lays out two schools of thought:
1) Imperialist: White People are Special Good
2) Post-60s: White People are Special Bad
...and more of less offers his perspective that he thinks why people are no better or worse (morally) then anyone else. He kind of feels the same way about the Mongol's, etc. That most people and groups would be about as cruel to one another as their circumstances and times allowed, and that people with high body counts just head more power to do what they wanted. That the "great men" of history are all in a giant tie for cruelty.
I'm more or less in agreement with him.
Diamond doesn't take this view, but people who do think there is differential genetic potential between the races also reference different environments as the cause. So the same things Diamond uses to explain away world differences could also be used to explain them. Most of his critics probably aren't smart enough to make the inference, but its no doubt one reason for the hostility.
All the backlash against Diamond reminds me a lot of the rage from a lot of academic historians directed towards Barbara Tuchman when she became popular with the unwashed masses. Some people really don't like it when outsiders butt in on their special self-declared intellectual playground I guess.
Where's out Enguerrand HBO miniseries, that's what I want to know. The Dance of the Burning Ones scene is going to be so epic. The episode titles alone will be worth the price of admission "Chapter Eight: Hung Be The Heavens With Black" etc
I have read Diamond’s book and the hardest part is he writes his opinion with such certainty it comes across as fact to the reader. When anyone states an opinion as to what took place 10,000 years ago with certainty, I’m generally skeptical.
This was a good read. Personally I never got most of the criticism surrounding GGS, I suspect much of it is due to people disliking the fact that Diamond is not a historian/economist/anthropologist by trade and typically academics don't react kindly to people outside their field suggesting new ideas (this does remind me of the reaction Alfred Wegener got for his ideas about continental drift). Not to say Diamond got it all right, his work, especially some of the recent stuff is ... odd. In my view the East-West axis part of Diamond's work is the weakest. Sure it is easier to travel east to west but that idea ignores local effects that lead to areas of the same latitude having vastly different climates (for instance Lyon is farther north than Vladivostok, a Köppen map shows even more problems). Regardless I still lean heavily towards accepting Diamond's ideas as opposed to rejecting them.
The funny part is that the thesis is the title of the book. The core conceit is antiracist.
I had no idea Diamond had haters. I’m guessing a lot of it is driven by jealousy.
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” was great, but Thomas Sowell made the same case and did it both first and better. Check out his culture trilogy: Race and Culture, Migration and Cultures, and Conquest and Cultures.
Regarding the interactions of diseases causing increased mortality, it’s worth looking at the recent research that shows that measles destroys our existing immunity (by destroying the cells that protect our learned immune response), leading to prolonged immunosuppresion. It’s quite plausible that you could have a small pox epidemic with a 60+% death rate, followed by a measles epidemic with its own deaths, followed by _another_ smallpox epidemic that has another 50% death rate due to the population losing their learned immunity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/7353/
It's a great book, and you make a great defence of it. Some academics are trying to reshape the narrative. Let's keep it real instead!
I was given the book as a gift. From a fan who said it was interesting nothing more. It seems to be speculation about the past through the eyes of the present. Which we still do stupid as it is.
Who could possibly criticise such a masterpiece?
The most appropriate response to the critique of "geographic determinism" is: "So what?"
And so it is with any slur of "determinism." Such slurs seem derived from the classic "genetic determinism," which fails for the same reason. Social scientists in particular and ideological activists in general have habitually elevated wishful thinking as though a sound means of reasoning. They don't seem conscious of the reality that the universe is perfectly ambivalent to the highest moral concerns.
Geography may indeed determine human outcomes more than we would prefer. You would prefer to instead deny that Diamond is a geographic determinist? If your empirical explanation does not at-least-roughly "determine" outcomes, then it isn't an explanation.