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Graeber/Wengrow's Dawn of Everything is a good critical examination. I don't see anyone in this thread mentioning the kind of points that book covers. But it is another one that rankles institutional beliefs.
Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. Let's not pretend his political screeds are works of dispassionate scholarship.
> Diamond absolves Europeans of blame for the crimes of imperialism through his geographical determinism, since the conquerors couldn’t help but seize the helpless Americas. Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures. For example, "Empire of the Su…
If you have a large empire, chances are there was large scale conquest involved. Likely all "civilizations" involved small scale conquest of tribes.
So the academics are all in arms about Diamond writing a pretty engaging nonfiction book that accessibly integrated a half-dozen historical / political theories into an interesting integrated theory. Was it perfect? Hell no, no way it was. Is there roots of truth in it? There has to be. More than anything, reading the book was thought provoking, because all history taught in schools is basically a bunch of personalities/leaders and battles, and almost no investigation of other factors outside of the human events.
What's also bizarre is reading various modern historical analyses of the Mongol invasions as "eh, they weren't that bad". Like... what?
I'm fully willing to admit European empire building was flagrantly unacceptable from the lens of the modern conception of universal human rights. But that Euros were some especially brutal oppressors/conquerors compared to the whole of human history? Come on. I mean... the Mongols. AND they almost conquered Europe.
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Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. Let's not pretend his political screeds are works of dispassionate scholarship.
Graeber*
Fixed.
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His arguments definitely don't have the same academic rigor as someone in their own field, but I felt like everything was pretty defensible. Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things. The oldes…
It is his field. He's a geographer and a biophysicist, not only an ornithologist. Understanding geographic and environment contributions to evolution is explicitly in his wheelhouse.
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> He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever. He never claims the dominance will last forever. He just presents theories as to why Europeans are dominant now (or were 40 years ago when the book as published at least). It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. It’s racist to say that’s a good thing or destined…
> It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. What is racist is to say it happened for a reason, not blind luck
Whether you believe his claims are correct or not, how do you manage to read them as racist?
I had a hard time interpreting the various criticisms from academics of Diamond in a way other than: This goes against our field's dogma, so I will fight it . Ie, I'm suspicious that, given the conclusions he came to, they would argue against it regardless of methods or the strength of his case. Eg, He underplays the role of culture? He's wrong.
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The Founders of the United States did not invent the rights you refer to. They had thousands of years of western history to cherry-pick ideas from. The states in the north had slavery too, just not an economy heavily based on slavery. By the time of the American Revolution slavery was already on the way out in Europe, practiced in plantations in the New World but not at home. The ancient Athenians and Romans believed…
> The Founders of the United States did not invent the rights you refer to. You're right, those rights are inalienable characteristics of humans. However, the US was the first to codify them into the founding document of a nation. The states in the North had all ended slavery by 1804. Prosperity followed.
And so did the Industrial Revolution. What's the causal mechanism that puts codifying the rights you mention, and quest for happiness, before prosperity? With industrialization, the possible mechanism is much more clear for it being the source of both prosperity and the ability for US to keep those rights codified over longer periods of time.
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> He says the difference comes from a different cultural perspective. It's been a long time since I read it, but I'll try to summarize it with the Chinese perspective was that phenomena could not be modeled. Everything was a unique creation. I.e. the behavior of a model could not be extrapolated to explain other behaviors, while the European perspective was always trying to explain things with models. This makes me b…
> Specialization of labor, agriculture optimization, the printing press, industrialization, engines, washing machines, electricity - all created conditions that allowed people having more rights, liberty and happiness than they could've before. Sorry, but this is exactly backwards :-) In the US, the rights came first. Note that the states that still practiced slavery failed at industrialization, specialization, etc.
Impossible, given that the first three items on my list predate Europeans settling on the American continent :). But in the other sense, desire for those rights was present with people throughout history - you can see echoes of those in any ancient empire that reached some degree of stability.
My point is that it seems you need to reach a certain level of economic and technological advancement to create a "fertile ground" for "social advancements", otherwise they won't hold. After all, many of those are no-brainers and would be trivial to achieve if there wasn't some opposing force preventing it. Those forces, I think, are always economical in nature. Things like, "survival of typical household requires so much labor there isn't time for anything else", or "there is a strong demand that's best fulfilled by ${something abhorrent} and there are no viable alternatives". While they're it play, advance is impossible. Once they weaken, advance becomes inevitable.
Compare: it's not the ecologists that stopped whaling before whales were hunted to extinction. It's the petroleum industry coming up with synthetic oils and crashing the market for whale oil pretty much overnight.
Compare: it's pretty clear in sciences that progress happened incrementally, and wasn't dependent on rare geniuses - once theory and tooling advanced to certain point, the next step was pretty much inevitable, which is why many (most?) breakthroughs in history have been made independently and simultaneously by many people around the world.
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This is true now . But before, most people would have been loyal firstly to their area, speak a (quite possibly non-Chinese or even Sino-Tibetan) language or dialect only understood in their area, and at would at most have heard the names of some far-off places. It was not that different to Europe. And that's the relatively Chinese areas. Don't forget also that up until the 20th century large areas of present-day Chi…
I get where you're coming from. I think what the article should have said was, Europe has geography that favors multiple independent stable nation states, whereas Chinese geography, while it has certainly hosted many competing dynasties over the centuries, does not favor multiple stable nation states. Basically, it's too easy to conquer the whole, so it's been done many times.
The Yellow River and the Yangtze River systems are so close that it isn't realistic to have long-term control over one and not the other. And controlling both gives you a fantastic base from which to conquer your surroundings.
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He argues that because technology transfer was difficult in the Americas, the ancient Mexican wheel never found it's way to the Andes where it may have been combined with suitable pack animals. That much is fairly plausible. But he goes further than this: he also argues that because ancient Mexican wheels weren't combined with pack animals, wheels could offer no practical utility to ancient Mexicans and this explains…
Your claim that perhaps as few as two individuals in all of history thought of the wheel seems far-fetched, and presented without evidence. You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument. Diamond doesn't claim that the wheel only got invented twice or a few times in history. He asks why the ancient Mexicans apparently didn't use wheels for transport, and why the invention of the wheel didn't get transported south or n…
> You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument.
I think Jared Diamond could be correct, but I would still say that his argument is lame because he failed to establish a high likelihood of prompt invention once prerequisite conditions are met before concluding what those supposedly missing prerequisites were. I'm not addressing his argument because he failed to convince me that his argument addresses a real question in the first place. Supposing hypothetically that ancient Mexico had pack animals, it still might have been thousands of years before pack animals and wheels were put together.
> Going from [rollers] to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight.
I really think it was. There's a big conceptual gap between rolling something on logs, and making the rollers captive through the use of an axle. The roller goes from being a tool used to move a thing to being an integral part of the thing. Wheels may have been invented more than twice, but there's not much evidence for that. And in any case, it certainly did take a very long time for some seemingly simple applications of wheels to be considered after wheels were popularized for more sophisticated and demanding purposes.