Left Center Left

Thanks again to Book Club participants for an interesting and spirited discussion. Next month we’ll tackle Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History.

Part of the enjoyment of a book with the scope as broad as Guns, Germs and Steel is that you end up learning lots of small details that you didn’t know before. And, certainly, knowing nothing about historical anthropology, it was enlightening to reflect on the domestication of plants and animals — or the migration of peoples in pre-historic times.

But it’s the large-scale explanatory power of the book I found most engaging.

Jared Diamond presents a macro-level history of economic development that’s akin to a Marxist structural argument yet that is based less in socially-organized modes of productions (which Diamond seems to treat as themselves superstructural) than in the impact of geography on the comparative livelihood of humans in different areas. His argument in short, for those not having read the book or seen the PBS series: Eurasia had a leg up on parallel land-masses (the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceana) for two major geographic reasons: a greater availability of domesticable plants and animals (allowing the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to horitcultural ones) an East-West axis with few insurmountable geographic barriers (allowing for relatively rapid diffusion of ideas). These lead to increased political complexity and economic specialization that allowed eventually military supremacy over the "discovered’ world.

While Diamond is clearly synthesizing a lot of previous work in anthropology, linguistics and evolutionary history (he really should have provided endnotes), this structural explanation — the distinction he draws between "proximate" and "ultimate" causes of economic and military success — seems original and useful.

So, too, did I enjoy his methodological reflection on the historical sciences:

In physics, the chief method for gaining knowledge is the laboratory experiment, by which one manipulates the parameter whose effect is in question, executes parallel control experiments with that parameter held constant, holds other parameters held constant throughout, replicates both the experimental manipulation and the control experiment, and obtains qualitative data. This strategy, which also works well in chemistry and molecular biology, is so identified with science in the minds of many people that experimentation is often held to be the essence of the scientific method. But laboratory experimentation can obviously play little or no role in many of the historical sciences. One cannot interrupt galaxy formation, start and stop hurricanes and ice ages, experimentally exterminate grizzly bears in a few national parks, or rerun the course of dinosaur evolution. Instead, one must gain knowledge in these historical sciences by other means, such as observation, comparison, and so called natural experiments… In historical sciences, one can provide a posteriori explanations… but a priori predictions are more difficult… (421-22)

I think this is a useful reminder that while social sciences and the humanities do not have much in common with the methods of the experimental sciences, they still have their own rigor. My question for Diamond would be this: given that historians already do much of the observation, comparison and natural experiments that he mentions, how does it fall short currently, and how would he propose to make it more scientific?

It’s not clear to me that his attempt to import a scholarly attitude from the life and physical sciences always makes for better explanation. For instance, I first likes his terms "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" as ways of phrasing a structural analysis, but then read his explanation of what these meant:

An evolutionary biologist studying Arctic hares whose fur color turns from brown in summer to white in winter is not satisfied with identifying the mundane proximate causes of fur color in terms of the fur pigments’ molecular structures and biosynthetic pathways (422).

Interesting. But throughout the book, Diamond has been treating basically all of post-1500 B.C. history as "proximate cause" of Western economic, political and military domination of the globe. The evolution of feudalism, trade mercantilism and capitalism; the political forms of empire and city-state patronage; and the cultures of religious evangelism and racism - I don’t have a problem with Guns presenting a structural argument about the possibilities and constraints of these cultural forms, but its explanations are on a very different order than the proximate/ultimate causes of rabbit fur color. In the evolutionary example, the ultimate cause (genetics, natural selection) has a direct driving influence on the proximate cause (body chemistry). Given the former, one can only expect a given chemical response.

Compare that with a structural argument in human history. I’ll use (again) a favorite example: the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. sprung most immediately from the actions and concerns of Southern blacks facing Jim Crow. But to answer why 1955-1965, we can point to a deeper "structural" cause: the technological revolution in Southern agriculture a half-generation before that curtailed tenant farming and led to both the Great Migration and Deep South urbanization, both of which in turn gave a political base to the movement. It’s structural because it provides a necessary but not sufficient explanation of the event. Given the demographic changes one can imagine a number of historical paths taken, and at the very least the activists involved (and those who opposed them) had self-conscious agency that the fur molecules do not. If "man makes history, just not in the conditions of his own making" (Marx, 18th Brumaire), we have to remember both parts: conditions constrain and overdetermine individual agency, yet individual agency is there.

Guns succeeds where it reveals necessary but not sufficient conditions for economic/political development, but fails where it writes off the importance of other, more proximate conditions. That it doesn’t see it necessary to talk about the development of guns, for instance, struck me as an odd and telling omission. The objection is not a minor one: culture does matter, particularly once you back away from the macro picture to the level that Diamond sometimes wants to extend his argument to. Tim Burke puts it better than I could:

Anthropologists and historians interested in non-Western societies and Western colonialism also get a bit uneasy with a big-picture explanation of world history that seems to cancel out or radically de-emphasize the importance of the many small differences and choices after 1500 whose effects many of us study carefully. For example, it seems to me that if you want to answer Yali’s question with regards to Latin America versus the United States, you’ve got to think about the peculiar, particular kinds of political, legal and religious frameworks that differentiated Spanish colonialism in the New World from British and French colonialism, that a Latin American Yali would have to feel a bit dissatisfied with Diamond’s answer.

I think we need to be dissatisfied with Diamond’s answer as well, but given the bias among historians and social scientists against the very-long-term and against natural and geographic explanations, his book does provide a useful intervention in the debate.