Re: [Pen-l] complexity of society [was: Excellent article on Jared Diamond and the New Yorker

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From the introduction to “Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History” 
by Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz:

In outline, this is the answer, the history, that Diamond sets out in 
response to Yali's question: Human beings evolved and eventually 
dispersed themselves throughout the earth. There were some who lived in 
geographical areas conducive to the development of agriculture and the 
domestication of animals, complex processes that were in no way beyond 
the intellectual capacities of any human group. All people everywhere 
were equally intelligent, and members of any group, living in 
appropriate areas, would have developed agriculture and domesticated 
animals. However, once certain people did develop agriculture and 
domesticate animals, they had distinct evolutionary advantages deriving 
from the population expansion these new forms of food production 
allowed: the more food available, the more people who could be 
supported, and the greater the number of specialists (including 
soldiers) who could be maintained. And significantly, the more people 
there were, the more necessary arable land became and the more likely 
people were to go to war to get it. Warfare, in turn, brought about the 
need for effective weaponry. Therefore, over time, those with certain 
mineral resources and with skilled craft specialists fashioned and 
employed superior weapons (eventually made of steel) to vanquish their 
neighbors. Moreover, those who could utilize metal and support craft 
specialists had other advantages as well. First, as agriculturalists 
with high population densities, they had developed hierarchically 
organized social organizations. Second, as people living around others 
and around animals, they had developed immunities to certain germs. 
Superior weapons and organizational skills (technologies and 
techniques), along with immunological resistances, enabled such groups, 
or apparently impelled them, to em-hark on ambitious programs of 
expansion, leading, repeatedly, to the conquest anc[ exploitation of 
others. Especially vulnerable were those geographically cut off from 
such centers of innovation. Thus, eventually and inevitably, the native 
peoples of the New World (and elsewhere) were easily subjugated by a 
combination of guns, germs, and steel.

As Diamond brings this argument back to Yali and Yali's question, he 
stresses—and, of course, we agree—that Yali's circumstances did not 
reflect any lack either in his intelligence or in that of other Papua 
New Guineans. Rather, we learn that Yali was poor and relatively 
powerless in his own domain because his ancestors lacked access to the 
mineral resources, domesticable animals, and the other advantages that 
allowed some to conquer others. He was born, in terms of the 
luck-of-the-environmental draw, on the wrong side of the great 
geographical divide. Yet neither Yali nor most of the other Papua New 
Guineans we have known over our years at RSL and elsewhere in the 
country would be satisfied with the inexorability of Diamond's 
luck-of-the-draw answer, with the implications of his 
that's-just-the-way-things-were-and-hence-must-be response. Such an 
answer would strike them as a perverse justification of colonial forms 
of inequality, part of a narrative that denied them moral worth in the 
past, to say nothing of the future. Indeed, as we shall soon see, the 
founding and development of RSL became part of a pressing narrative for 
reclaiming rightful worth in Papua New Guinea.

However, it is just Diamond's sort of answer, just this sort of 
invocation of historical inevitability, that tends to satisfy those who 
are already the haves. In this regard, the ideology inherent in 
Diamond's reasoning goes well beyond the particulars of the history he 
presents. This ideology supports the status quo, the interests of the 
already powerful. In fact, as we shall see in chapter 9, it is just this 
ideology that RSL [Ramu Sugar Limited] has to confront in dealing with 
the interests of such haves as the World Trade Organization, the World 
Bank, and Coca-Cola Amatil in Papua New Guinea: organizations, it so 
happens, that express imperatives concerning free trade and comparative 
advantage in language remarkably akin to Diamond's. For all of them, in 
other words, the inevitable and the inexorable are handily synonymous 
with the interests of the haves over the have-nots.

More broadly, the ideology inherent in Diamond's reasoning is one we 
confront as teachers and scholars dealing primarily with the haves. 
Students tell us that their parents encourage them to read Diamond's 
book, finding it invigorating. The former president of Fred's college 
urged his faculty to read it. In fact, he sent copies of Guns, Germs, 
and Steel to members of the faculty as a model of the kind of book he 
admired. All over the United States, we learned, deans and presidents of 
other pricey institutions applaud the book. At Cornell, it became 
assigned reading for all freshmen. Moreover, many institutions pay 
Diamond generously to summarize his views in person, generally in packed 
lecture halls.

We think educated haves like the book so well because it resonates 
deeply with their own concerns—in effect, because it so readily sustains 
them. They come away from the book or lecture feeling pretty good about 
themselves—both enlightened and open-minded. They come away seeing the 
world without racial prejudice and having learned some important new 
facts and connections. Furthermore, and significantly, they come away 
comfortably convinced that they have their cargo (unlike Yali and his 
people) for inevitable and impersonal geographic reasons. No one is to 
blame for the fact that some people are, and no doubt will continue to 
be, the haves and that others are, and will continue to be, the 
have-nots. Thus, Diamond's history is not only the delineation of an 
inexorable and inevitable trajectory. It is, as well, both retrospective 
and prospective. His depiction of the past provides a far from 
disinterested model for understanding the present and for shaping the 
future. This is to say, he presents the world as one in which the 
have-nots, whether in Papua New Guinea or elsewhere, must (seemingly) 
forever deal with the haves under conditions of fundamental disadvantage.

But what exactly is wrong with this history? Didn't the events Diamond 
relates really happen? Must a history necessarily be disqualified 
because it conveys the perspectives and interests of the victors, of the 
haves? Isn't Diamond's view simply informed by hardheaded realism about 
the way the world works?

We certainly do not deny that certain forms of power had a significant 
role in effecting the kinds of historical events that Diamond 
delineates. Diamond's depiction of the role that guns, germs, and steel 
played is plausible—indeed, as we said, it is compelling and 
sophisticated. What we do challenge is his conflation of the necessary 
with the sufficient. This is to say, just because guns, germs, and steel 
were necessary to make certain historical outcomes possible, including 
those so upsetting to Yali, we do not have to assume that their 
possession was sufficient to explain these outcomes, lust because 
sources of power are available, we cannot conclude that the power will 
be used for certain ends, or even that it will be used at all. And 
simply because European colonists had the power to pursue their 
interests at the expense of Yali and other Papua New Guineans, we cannot 
automatically understand the nature and consequences of their varied 
encounters in terms of inevitable universal patterns.

This conflation of the necessary and the sufficient grows out of the 
link between Diamond's interest in "history's broadest pattern" and his 
determination to develop "human history as a science, on a par with 
acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and 
evolutionary biology" (1997: 420, 408). As he says, his book "attempts 
to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years" and 
searches for "ultimate explanations" that push back "the chain of 
historical causation as far as possible" (9). Crucial to this search for 
lawlike explanations that will generate long chains of causation back to 
first causes (chains of causation that even link mountain range 
formation to Yali's quandary) is Diamond's distinction between ultimate 
and proximate causes. Ultimate causes are those broadly applicable and 
pervasive forces, which led to the possession of such advantages as 
guns, germs, and steel. Diamond is interested in these causes because he 
thinks they are the ones that really drive history. These ultimate 
causes shape derivative and more immediate occurrences, such as 
particular battles, conquests, economic systems. The effects of these 
more immediate occurrences, in turn, become proximate causes of yet 
other events.

Diamond's view of the relentless course of human history, driven by the 
operation of ultimate causes over its thirteen-thousand-year span, seems 
to rest on an implicit view of human nature as aggressive, acquisitive, 
and selfish. It is this nature that, in Diamond's vision, keeps ultimate 
causes consequential throughout history. In short, human beings 
necessarily lead their lives so as to extract maximum advantage over 
others: give a guy—any guy—half a chance and he will conquer the world; 
give a guy a piece of appropriate metal and he will inevitably fashion a 
sword to cut you down or a chain to enslave you within the hold of a 
ship bound for a New World sugar plantation. In a way that we in the 
contemporary West appear to find self-evident—once again, in a way that 
does not problematize our understanding of how the world works— Diamond 
suggests that people everywhere and at all times, if they had sufficient 
power, would use it to maximize their own advantage through the 
domination of others. This implicit view of a transhistorical and 
trans-cultural human nature is consistent with Diamond's explicit 
rendering of both historical context and cultural perspective as 
irrelevant. In fact, Diamond works hard to exclude such perspective and 
context from his scientific history.
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