January 13, 2005 October is Koufax Pledge Drive month
Woodpecker and Petrified Forest
|
Jared Diamond's prior work attempts to observe correctly the workings of that Natural Law in human affairs, in particular, European expansion since the European Renaisance. But to find Natural Law, the foundation of objectivism, it is necessary to look back to the European Middle Ages, to the exchange of letters in 1246 between Sinibaldo and Guyak. But I will simply take the position of Guyak as the co-equal to the position of Sinibaldo, and therefore that there is no "Natural Law" to be observed, correctly or otherwise, in the workings of human affairs, and that objectity is a construct of human agency.
I suppose it might help to point out that in his letter to Guyak, Khan of the Golden Horde, grandson of Gengis Khan and ruler of most of Asia and a significant part of Europe, Sinibaldo, as Pope Innocent IV and in 1246, ruler of what was left of Catholic Europe, wrote from exile in Lyons and dependency under Louis IX as follows (paraphrased, original in latin):
Before rising from the dead and ascending into Heaven the Creator had selected a vicar on earth, to whom the Creator had committed the care of all souls. From this, reason that (a) there is a natural law, (b) it is contrary to natural law for heathens to bedevil Christians.Guyak's reply to Sinibaldo is a landmark in the history of epistalary humor.
Come at once to serve and wait upon us. At that time, I shall recognize your submission.For the next two hundred and fifty years Christian jurists would construct the edifice of "Natural Law", and incorporate the encounter with pre-Holocene isolates in Inter Caetera of 1493, and continue into the European Renaisance, producing a Universlism, with Christian Europe at the defining center of an observable ordered natural universe.
That's where Jared Diamond is. At the center of a hermetic sectarianism called Western Modernity.
Diamond starts from the position that the explanation for the extension of control over non-European states by European states arises from environmental, rather than heriditary factors. The literary tradition that Diamond's work partakes of dates back several hundred years, and the causative factors argued for the "rise of the Europeans" has changed over the historical trajectory of the European Triumphalist literary tradition. Prior theories of causative factors are religion and race restated in a wide varity of forms.
But this European literary tradition of creating descriptive taxonomies of difference between European and non-European is not the only one that describes difference. There is another human literature that attempts to describe the reality of the partition of human populations into isolates since the Late Pleistocene.
In 1978 Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation) published a small book consisting of several essays written by an unnamed collective the previous year. Here is what I think is the key passage:
Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."
Diamond is able to accept the thesis of Dubins and others, that dual-host pathogens, arising from the truely revolutionary domestications of animals in Eurasia, the "germs" in his trypich of "guns, germs and steel", was co-causitive in European expansion in the Americas. However, he places the locus of action between Europeans and non-Europeans in the near present, not the remote past, simultanious to the adaptation of non-human hosts pathogens to human hosts.
Before embarking on the works of woodpecker, hammering beaks to get the termites, wood ants and boring beattles that thrive on, or are themselves trapped in, this stone forest of dead ideas, this core truth about humanity since the Plestocene divisions exists. Before guns, steel, Protestantism, Europe, monotheism and cities, even pottery, the uniqueness of Old World human isolates is their domestication.
Diamond is unaware of this division, unaware of the cultural difference between Old World and New World and Pacific human populations, that before every accretion to the cultural toolkit, and never discarded, is the sheep herd. Humans who reach into nature for the reproductive powers of the human animal. Humans who assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the human animals.
When moderns formed from Europe hold up the fruits of two worlds and compare them, as Diamond does, more is ignored than attended to. There is a reason for this too, as the Akwesasne authors noted:
It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited.
Now woodpecker is ready to look for stone bugs closed in the stony bark of the petrified forest of the European Triumphalist myth. lôbatahigas meskanagwôd mosagwak -- the pounder hungers for woodworms [1].
[1] mosagwa :: carpenter ant larva, also the name for the snail, hence a sheltered, closed in, ignorant person, a know-nothing. Day Abenaki dictionary.
Sheet Eric, That was swell. No acronyms too. I've even got that AN book somewhere around here, it was always impressive. There's an extensive critique of Diamond and others of the same ilk [Landes] in the NYRB in the last few years, but suffice it to say that not even his cohorts fall for the story.
Posted by: VJ at January 13, 2005 05:24 AMI only wish I had half the erudition of this passage rather than simply telling JD he is full of bullfeathers. This attempt. constantly recurring in the history of history, to show that those on top today were ordained to be on top by the immutible laws of [pick one: God, Allah, nature, fate, genetics, geography, intelligence] is neither new nor unique. Taken to its logical ends, this argument means that communitarian values are more noblese oblige rather than good planning. Its not that the powerful needed any further stroking, but I suspect the pay is good. Someday, someone is going to get very rich and powerful by finding a way to show people that in providing a social safety net, the one you catch may be yourself (or your son/grandson with autism).
Posted by: DeJeep at January 13, 2005 02:59 PMBook had its problems and more, but Diamond and you sound remarkably similar on domestication. Why not say the old division caused new things on contact?
Posted by: david at January 13, 2005 03:38 PMThanks for sharing that post, but I have to say that I had a very different take of Diamond's view of white culture.
When I read Diamond's book, it didn't sound to me like much of an apologia for white people, in fact it sounded at times like he both admired and envied the indigenous cultures he studied more than his own. I mean, evidently some confluence of forces came together allowing people from a small region of the world whose physical and mental capacities were no better than anyone else's (as Diamond himself emphasizes) to muster the force to wreak mayhem and impose their rule at various times on the farthest corners of the world. Isn't it a legitimate question to ask how the **** that happened? Is it possible to look at Bush and not wonder how the heck that guy's people managed to get the upper hand?
It wasn't god's blessing, it wasn't an unusual abundance of mineral wealth, it wasn't any particular genetic trait or extreme cleverness, and it wasn't because whites have got some kind of ideal or superior culture. (He did note that domesticated animals were common all over the world, but that Europeans had a wider variety of domesticable animals available, particularly animals large enough to pull wheeled vehicles.) So wtf? Why did white people show up in other people's lands and take them over, and not the other way around?
My impression of a shorter Jared Diamond would be that white people a) got lucky, and b) lived in unusually filthy conditions with a larger variety of domestic animals for a very long time. We're talking the sort of disease incubation environment that encouraged raging plagues to flourish in a non-tropical environment without steamy swamps and jungles or regular flood seasons, and with the added bonus of a winter that kept the insects down. If someone had planned it on purpose, that continent couldn't have been a better germ warfare lab given the climate.
Diamond isn't saying that whites deserve to be at the top of the heap, or are uniquely suited or chosen to be there. He seems to be saying that they're the Typhoid Marys of the human race, people whose ancestral home happened to be a fairly cramped corner of the world. In some ways, it's the equivalent of telling white people that if our forbears had just bathed more often and kept the dung out of the streets during the Dark Ages, we wouldn't have been able to slaughter our way to where the power of incumbency can work its magic. Europeans wouldn't have been able to get so rich, so quick, if there had been more people around to resist their milking of the Americas. It's likely, in fact, that they wouldn't have made nearly as much headway colonizing other parts of the world without being able to plunder two continents at will.
Even today North America doesn't face as much threat from homegrown disease epidemics as other parts of the world do, and still tends to be most at risk from imports and foolish use of antibiotics. When was the last time that some kind of global disease epidemic came from here? As far as incubation of diseases go, this is a pretty clean continent. If the Americas had been exposed earlier on to more sources of disease vectors, following Diamond's general frame leads to the conclusion that on just that one score, there would be a lot more Native Americans around today.
The plagues that wiped out +/-90% of a North American population hovering around 100 million in 1492 are probably common knowledge in concerned circles, and took place many years before jackass military officers started handing out smallpox infected blankets like candy. That starting population was larger than the population of Europe at the time, and there's no way that small expeditionary forces and poorly equipped settlers could have overcome that multitude of people. Logistically impossible, and unlikely that such a large population wouldn't have been able to come up with better defenses once their visitors' intentions became obvious. Even assuming more effective weaponry on the side of the invaders, North America would probably today look more like Asia, Africa, or South America, with a majority indigenous population.
So I hope you'll pardon me, but I just don't see filthiness and the geographical luck of the draw as an argument for any kind of inherent white superiority. The truly bizarre thing is that the Chinese didn't beat the Europeans to exploring the Americas, because they were actually ahead of Europe in all the relevant technologies used. And they didn't seem to be into colonization, so that might have been a very different world. But as was suggested in a study featured in Discover a few years ago, which had nothing to do with Diamond, China's geographic isolation via mountain range and the development of a more or less stable and uniform government may have reduced the kind of outside pressure and population squeezes that forced European societies into their particular brand of competition with each other.
That line of reasoning regarding China works by the same premise as Diamond's argument: that people are pretty much the same everywhere, they just happened to wind up in different environments.
Posted by: natasha at January 16, 2005 05:24 AMI think Natasha'a reading of Diamond's is much more accurate, and much closer to Diamond's clearly stated intentions, than yours, EBW.
Posted by: Mark at January 16, 2005 09:40 PMMark,
More accurate and closer than don't actually convey an explicit statement of error. Could you attempt an example please?
Posted by: Eric at January 16, 2005 09:56 PM