Left Flank

I encountered Thomas Homer-Dixon's writing in the initial stages of my research on war and natural resources. He got lost in the bibliography, as it were. Based on what I heard on bhTV, I need to reconsider him. Like his interlocutor, John Horgan, I also associated Homer-Dixon with Jared Diamond, and others on the bhTV have confessed, that Homer-Dixon bummed them out-a feeling Diamond can invoke, too. That is, until one reads in Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond's pro-market approach, or comparing the Dominican Republic's environmental record with Haiti's.

So, that's the new way to change the world? Laziness? Self-indulgence? Check out Jared Diamond!

I wonder how far trademark American frugality lasts when vacation choices include one's lawn and walking. How will American households make ends meet?

Just to be clear, the other typical escape route—to save less—is already closed off. In the fourth quarter of 2007, the personal saving rate was zero percent.

This leaves very few other areas where consumers can make sacrifices to accommodate the pressures from higher prices at the pump. Traditionally, more spending on gasoline was also associated with less spending on cars. People are already buying fewer cars and smaller cars as the cost of driving goes up rapidly. And eventually, families will spend less on gasoline simply because there are fewer jobs to drive to.

With all of these added pressures, many more families will find themselves in an untenable financial situation. This will be especially true for lower-income and moderate-income families who spend disproportionate shares of their income on gasoline and fuel. These also tend to be the same families who feel the brunt of an economic slowdown first.

But, how will those patriotically energy-saving stand up long enough to vote for John McCain?

«What is even more cruel is that all the progress in the human species constantly takes it further away from its primitive state. The more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and, in a sense, it is thanks to the study of man that we are now in a position where we are beyond the stage where he can know him.» (Gourevitch, 1986, p. 129) In 1754, in the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered a version of humanity's natural state still lampooned over two hundred years later. Rousseau was not the first to offer such an account, his own feigned humility and his skepticism about naturalists' limited insights at the time notwithstanding. Humanity's natural condition is all the more a popular literary device for its plasticity. Adam is not the first human to spawn a race, and authors seemingly challenge deities to construct humanity anew in print. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (GGS), Jared Diamond offers his own take on humanity's «progress» from its natural state to modernity. I will argue that Diamond's biogeographical arguments refreshingly eschew a monocausal explanation for humanity's history. I will compare GGS, and relevant arguments from a preceding volume, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (TC), with both Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (WSA) and William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples (PP). GGS and PP, however, together prove the prescience of Rousseau's conundrum, by offering opposing accounts of humanity's natural state to those of GGS's critics.

In GGS, Jared Diamond asks, «Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?» (GGS, p. 16) Diamond answers succinctly a few pages later: «...because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.» (GGS, p. 25) In another rephrasing, Diamond asserts that «...human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between haves and have-nots; between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times.» (GGS, p. 93) In TC, Diamond calls the advent of agricultural production on the Eurasian continent around 8000 B.C. A ?mixed blessing» and «a halfway station between our noble traits (art and language) and our mitigated vices (drug abuse, genocide, and environmental destructiveness.» (TC, p. 180) «Farmer power» brought malnutrition, starvation, epidemic diseases, and class divisions, including bureaucrats and soldiers, to humanity. (TC, p. 187) Agriculture also sparked technological innovations, like implements and storage techniques, as well as military advancements, like horse-riding (GGS, p. 112) Agricultural production could deliver more food per acre than hunting-gathering, but not necessarily more food per person, as the result of a positive feedback cycle, or «autocatalytic» process between food production and population density. (GGS, p. 110) Hunting-gathering cultures either adopted agriculture or agricultural cultures conquered or assimilated them (TC, p. 190). Diamond also argues that hunting-gathering and agriculture were alternative strategies that probably existed in mixed forms, because societies sought the most efficient use of resources and animal and human power (GGS, p. 109). So, the answer to Diamond's question begins with agriculture.

Yet not all land, and not all continents, were equally bountiful to agricultural societies. Not only were not all indigenous plant and animal species domesticable, but not all domesticated species were not equally able to transcend land and water barriers before the advent of sailing technology. Diamond outlines how it is that so few wild plant and animal species are domesticable.1 More importantly, Diamond ascribes the rapid spread of domesticated plant and animal species through Eurasia to the continent's east-west axis. This geographical orientation ensures similar climate and seasonal patterns for plants to flourish without genetic modification, and for animals to adapt without different climates and parasites (GGS, p. 183-5). Diamond's biogeographical arguments are the second step in an answer to his question.

Diamond's treatment of language in TC and GGS is a bit tricky. In TC, Diamond argues why human spoken language is not remarkable as compared with animal proto-languages2 , but in GGS, Diamond discusses the advantages post-agricultural humans obtained from written language. Diamond considers spoken language as part of the «Great Leap Forward» predating the advent of agriculture and as another supposedly human capability with animal precedents (TC, p. 138). But, in GGS, written language joins «...weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.» (GGS, p. 216) Written language, as opposed to the spoken language of hunting-gathering societies, «...served the needs of ...political institutions (such as record-keeping and royal propaganda) and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants.» (GGS, p. 236) Finally, the same axial barriers stunting the spread of domesticated plants and animals also retarded the flow of written language (GGS, p. 238). So. language itself is not a very unique animal ability, but an alphabet is what a powerful human society needs.

The remaining two elements of Eurasian dominance are technology and political centralization, both of which are post-agricultural breaks with hunting-gathering society. Diamond argues technology arises cumulatively, and also for uses realized after its invention (GGS, p. 245). Diamond stresses four conditions for a new technology's adoption: relative economic advantage over existing technology; social value; compatibility with vested interests; and, timeliness-the «a-ha» factor (GGS, p. 247).

The link between agricultural production and political centralization and war is even clearer. «Intensified food production and societal complexity stimulate each other, by autocatalysis. That is, population growth leads to societal complexity...while societal complexity in turn leads to intensified food production and thereby in population growth.» (GGS, p. 285) But, complexity is not inevitable. Diamond gives four reasons why large societies of more than hundreds of thousands of people evolve into centralized organizations: conflict between unrelated strangers; the impossibility of communal decision-making; a redistributive economy; and, population density (GGS, p. 286). Diamond argues that societal complexity leads to two alternative ways that adjacent societies deal with one another: either through merger to avoid conquest, or conquest (GGS, p. 289).

Before I address criticisms of Diamond's biogeographical argument, I think it s useful to compare it with William H. McNeill's ecological arguments.3 Firstly, both Diamond and McNeill are contributing to the debate over evolution, not the social sciences per se, from their respective scientific disciplines. McNeill isolates a single ecological phenomenon, parasitic disease, and uses it to explain human evolution; Diamond's biogeographical argument in GGS is not that far from this assertion:

'But man is basically different from other animals.' So one is often warned when the possible relevance of animal findings to understanding man is suggested. In fact, however, every animal species is basically different from other animal species. Faced with this diversity, biogeography has developed a common framework for understanding such unlike distributions as those of giraffes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, cockroaches and oak trees, by seeking relations among key variables or processes. These variables or processes are ones that are relevant to understanding any species. Like other species, man reproduces, dies, disperses, exploits environments of varying stability and productivity, adapts phenotypically and genetically, is subject to intraspecific competition, and (still like other species) differs from other species in particular characteristics of each of these processes. These are the processes that provide the ingredients for biogeographic analysis. In this spirit let us proceed as biogeographers and inquire in what particular ways man is unique as a colonist.»4

McNeill locates micro-parasites earlier in the evolutionary record, as part of the animal legacy humans inherited, instead of as a result of agriculture production, as Diamond argues. McNeill also labels Diamond's «colonization» as macro-parasitism. McNeill's signature proposition is equilibrium, «At every level of organization-molecular, cellular, organismic, and social-one confronts equilibrium patterns.5 On the other hand, Diamond's account of genocide, including the Tasmanian case, starts with his attempt to locate a proto-genocidal propensity in chimpanzees, and lesser mammals, like lions.6 So, even given their differing disciplinary perspectives, Diamond and McNeill have more in common with each other, than Diamond has with his critics.

It is within the lens of a disciplinary conflict, I understand both the tone and substance of Diamond's critics. On one hand, James M. Blaut argues that Diamond uses environmental determinism to resuscitate Eurocentrism.7 «If there is no appeal to underlying religious or racial causes, can it be argued convincingly that Europe, long ago, somehow acquired cultural qualities that led it to develop faster and farther than every other society? It is conventional to argue this way, but we notice that historians cannot agree among them-selves as to whether the causes of Europe's (supposed) precocity are mental, social, economic, technological, or something else-within culture. Therefore, Eurocentric history needs environmental determinism as much today as ever it did before, and so the doctrine remains influential and popular.» But then, Hal Elliot Wert, reviewing Victor Davis Hanson, criticizes Diamond for not recognizing culture. «These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant pat. So much for Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and other geographic determinists, the weakness of whose reductive mantra, location, location, location, is exposed.»8 Inter-disciplinary studies have a steep mountain to climb.

Finally, Diamond's biogeographical approach compares favorably with Wallerstein's world-systems approach. Both authors operate from an organic totality, whether it is evolution, or capitalism. However, Wallerstein argues that world-systems analysis operates within the limits of «history of the modern world-system» and its «structures of knowledge».9 The capitalist world-system begins with the 16th Century, much later than most of the episodes both Diamond and McNeill discuss. Yet, again there is the disciplinary issue, which Wallerstein also brings to the fore, when he discusses the role of the university in the capitalist world-system. It is doubtful a perspective facing forward to examine the origin and end of humanity's current phase can embrace evolution seeking to characterize humanity as just another animal.

Professionalism tramples humility, by which Rousseau could confound his own critics, like Voltaire. Jared Diamond is a biogeographer, working within the debate unfolding around evolution. The social sciences of which Wallerstein gives an historical account, in a sense have to deal with the debate Rousseau himself helped start; is it possible to know man in nature, now that man is a social being with a history? Between humanity as animal and humanity as social being within history, there is a disciplinary gap. Scholars should choose which future to advocate, by examining humanity's past: either the post-modern man, or the genocidal animal.

1. Jared Diamond, GGS: see Chapters 8 and 9. [↩]
2. Jared Diamond, TC: see Chapter 8. [↩]
3. William H. McNeill, PP, see Introduction. [↩]
4. Jared M. Diamond, «Colonization Cycles in Man and Beast», World Archaeology, Vol. 8, No. 3, Human Biogeography, (Feb., 1977), p. 249. [↩]
5. McNeill, p. 7. [↩]
6. Diamond, TC: see Chapter 16. [↩]
7. James M. Blaut, «Environmentalism and Eurocentrism», Geographical Review, Vol. 89, No. 3, (Jul., 1999), pp. 391. [↩]
8. Hal Elliott Wert, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, by Victor Davis Hanson, The Journal of Military History, Vol. 67, No. 2, (Apr., 2003), pp. 545-546. [↩]
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, WSA, p. 1. [↩]

1. Raise Hand, Now Lie!

"The Chinese authorities are really stepping up their anti-Dalai Lama rhetoric and propaganda," Anne Holmes, acting director of the Free Tibet Campaign, said in an e-mail on Sunday.

During a public meeting in December in Lithang in the Kham area of Gansu province, which is populated largely by Tibetans, residents were asked to raise their hands if they opposed the Dalai Lama's return. No one obliged, the campaign group said.

Residents were then asked to raise their hands if they did not have weapons at home. As it is illegal to possess firearms, everyone raised their hand. A photo was then taken and sent to state media, claiming residents were opposed to the Dalai Lama's return, the Free Tibet Campaign said.

2. No "Smut" in China

3. More Nuclear Secrets between Enemies

4. Just Called to Say "I Need You!"

5. You Can Never Return Home to North Korea

6. Take the Authoritarian Challenge!

7. Paul Krugman's Article about China (Not the One about Obama)

8. The Dark Side of the Rosy China Scenario

9. Baby Steps in Foreign Aid

10. Iowa Aftermath

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up «Guns, Germs, and Steel» and seeing that it had been framed around what was called «Yali's question.»

Yali was a political leader and a member of a «cargo cult» that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, «Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?»

Thus began Dr. Diamond's tale about the combination of geographical factors that led to Europeans' colonizing Papua New Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans' colonizing Europe.

«We think he gets Yali's question wrong,» Dr. Gewertz said. «Yali was not asking about nifty Western stuff.»

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, the islanders would have been able to trade with them as equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the world through others' eyes.

George Johnson recounts how he encountered "a clash of world views", and one foreign to his own: anthropologists in Arizona. His bhTV interlocutor, John Horgan, is dead on, too: the anthropologists' criticisms of Diamonds' two books ARE contradictory. They are not interested in Johnson's simple universal patterns, but in "exceptions". Talk about a weird world!

The first salvo of my response to the anthropologists is on the bhTV forum.