Re: Jared Diamond

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

The late Jim Blaut wrote:

>"Environment molds history," says Jared Diamond in _Guns, Germs, and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies_ (p. 352). Everything important that has
happened to humans since the Paleolithic is due to environmental
influences. More precisely: all of the important differences between human
societies, all of the differences that led some societies to prosper and
progress and others to fail, are due to the nature of each society's local
environment and to its geographical location. History as a whole reflects
these environmental differences and forces. Culture is largely irrelevant:
the environment explains all of the main tendencies of history; cultural
factors affect the minor details.<

How did Jim get from environment "molding" history to the environment determining history? It's not the same. By the way, there's an old tradition (that some hairy old German chap developed) that sees the "economic base" as molding human history. Similarly, its critics accuse this vision as saying that the "economic base" determines history. It's a very old tradition to accuse a school of thought that one doesn't like of "determinism." 

To my mind,  assuming a certain amount of determinism (e.g., focusing on ecological/environmental structures at the expense of culture) can reveal a tremendous amount of what went on in history, as Diamond's magisterial "Guns, Germs, and Steel" shows. He presents a theoretical model of different tribes and other social groups of people competing over environmental resources and within geographic limits and that model gives us a lot of understanding, much more than empiricist or multi-factorial perspectives usually do. (Of course, any conclusions are only conditional, to be adapted to new facts and theoretical critiques.) Diamond's approach, it should be noted, applies only on the macro-level (in terms of space and time) and cannot help us understand specific events and countries very well. 

Diamond's downplaying of culture plays a good role, too: it suggests that it wasn't any kind of "cultural superiority" (or racial superiority) that led to the European conquest of most of the world or any kind of "cultural inferiority" (or racial inferiority) that led to the American Indians (etc.) being conquered.  Compare this to C. Northcote Parkinson's "East and West," in which the inherent superiority of the "West" plays a major theoretical role. Talk about Eurocentrism!

Also, the environment that Diamond focuses on is part of (or should be part of) the concept of the "economic base."  See, for example, Paul Burkett's or John Bellamy Foster's book on capitalism and the environment. 

JD