The “F*ck Jared Diamond” article was circulating again, so rather than read it, Kevin and I got Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies on audiobook to try to see the issues for ourselves . Then, the plan was, we'd read the article and see if we agree.
This would be a re-read. Kevin and I already read GG&S soon after it was published in 1997. I vaguely remember GG&S's archaeological issues from grad school. But, the message Kevin and I both took from Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning book was incredibly important, to our young minds, especially at the time: cultures and societies develop in context, so assuming that cultural variation boils down to human biological variation is foolish.
But the urge to understand why Guns, Germs, and Steel still incites the f-word is strong, so I got to listening. As one does, I started at the beginning, which is the Prologue. But that is as much as I endured this second time around. It was all I needed to understand.
The point of Diamond's Prologue is to convey the origin and importance of the question that sparked him to write the book: Why is there global inequality in wealth and power?
It's a great question and an important question and really seemed like much more of a mystery back in the 90s to two kids like Kevin and me than it does now. It was the first time we'd encountered anyone's attempt to answer it and it earned extra applause for doing so (ostensibly...ugh) while rejecting race as the answer. Diamond's book purported to answer the global inequality question with a new synthesis of biogeographic something or other. Okay. Yes!
I suppose that whoever awards Pulitzers believed that GG&S did answer that question, at least at the time. It's hard to disagree with the fact that biogeographic context matters to how human history unfolds. These were important lessons for white people in the 1990s who (may not have known it and certainly may not have said so, but) were living in the myth of white racial supremacy and still are.
But now, while I'm in GG&S again all these years later, I feel the Internet's relentless irritation with the book in a way that I didn’t feel as a 22 year-old idiot back in 1999. And that's just from dipping a toe! That's just from the itty bitty Prologue!
As the book begins, right away you might notice the casual, frank way that Diamond discusses racist views (which he calls racist and that he disagrees with). The tone is off-putting (or you might say "cringe") if you sympathize and empathize at all with the people on the nasty end of those views and systems. By now, writers have developed styles with far more respect for peoples' dignity.
And then, there's the way he paints some contemporary peoples/cultures as isolated, atomized, and frozen in time, untouched by others. “Still” hunter-gatherers, he says, about people who have had complex histories including complex social hierarchies which he seems to only grant to “modern” civilizations. The wording, the tone, it’s all anthropology’s territory and yet he’s talking more like an anthropologist from the beginning of the 20th century than one from end of it. No wonder my professors were pissed off. And to read it now, his anthropology feels categorically further away from the anthropology of the 21st Century.
But what got me to give up after the Prologue was the racism. Yes. On the pages he says he is against racism. But, also, on the pages he says he believes that different populations are inherently more or less intelligent than others, genetically. So that means that he is racist (and so, to him, "racism" must mean discrimination or hatred). American science had not, by the 1990s, figured out that race is the meaning people make of biological variation. Instead, they frequently (if not typically) equated race to human biological variation. You could be against racism and still be racist without knowing it. You could believe that people could be good and fair and just (that is they could be not racist), but still call skin color variation "race" or still believe that people are born white or born Black. Now, I hope things have improved. I think they have? I think that, now, fewer scientists hold that racist perspective. We know that you aren't born with a race, you're born into race. There's human biological variation and then there's race, which is a human invention with real-life power that, in America, includes the myth that it's not a human invention (high-five, Pirsig)!
So what do I mean that Diamond does racism in GG&S? He first decides that people from Papua New Guinea are smarter than his people. And then he walks us through a little thought exercise that becomes an argument complete with genes for intelligence being more naturally selected for in PNG peoples' ancestors than in his peoples'. This racism, even when it’s to benefit non-white people, is still racism. How jaw-dropping, literally, to read Diamond wield the logic of race/ism even though his book is supposed to be an anti-racist explanation for global inequality and wealth!
Here’s another white guy applying the "scientific logic" of the myth he's enacting to support his feeling that his PNG friends are smarter than his white friends. If Diamond thinks he can just what-if his way around PNG intelligence, without any self-deprecation or humility about his musings, any self-awareness about these habits among scientists that are the same habits of racists, without even a wink to the reader, then we have to take him literally. So, he literally thinks he’s arrived at support for his belief in superior PNG intelligence. But there is no revelation about how these musings are just that. (That doesn't give a reader confidence in any of the arguments of the entire book to follow!) There is no revelation about the storytelling game that scientists, scholars, and writers play as if it’s the way to the truth. Instead, he actually expects us to be persuaded by his story, as if it’s a good, scientific argument. There is no understanding or realization, at least not in print, that what he just did invalidates the entire enterprise that allows for what he just did!
It's the exact same logic that goes into the racist claims that put white people on top. It’s the myth controlling his mind. It’s the same mind-controlling myth that's got a hold of Harari in Sapiens. In it, he reveals the fictions of biological race, sexuality, and gender (yes!), but other evolutionary fictions, that are just as fictitious, are wielded as fact. One of the most egregious is our supposedly evolved tribalism/xenophobia--the myth of which, upholds the myths of evolved race, sexuality, and evolved gender, so he's totally undermining his arguments against them!
Whew. A bazillion copies of both GG&S and Sapiens all over this Earth.
I do believe people change. I sure have changed over my lifetime. Lots. But by the sounds of “F*ck Jared Diamond” he still hadn't by 2013. Life is long, though.
P.S. If you are looking for a different perspective, like an argument for the crucial role of beliefs in peoples' fates, then check out The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow.
