People are uncertain as to whether Baum was pro- or anti-bimetallism. But they're pretty sure that it had something to do with the way he wrote the book, whether or not he wanted people to read it that way.
It's a book about charlatans, and some say that the charlatan was Bryan.
That sentence is fascinating. Not only is every single thing in it wrong, but it betrays a specific worldview so perfectly.
(But that said, the homebrew computer seen was not very hierarchical. I doubt there was a republican in the bunch, though.)
I really don't buy that it was meant as an allegory. It's a complicated children's fantasy, huge chunks of it don't fit into any kind of bimetallism story (the porcelain people?), and there's no indication I've ever heard of that it was read politically at the time by an adult audience. For it to have been intended as an adult political allegory, Baum would have had to have made it completely secret in a weird way.
And the rest of Debt has a whole lot of surprising stories about how different societies manage themselves (the author's an anthropologist). I don't know that any of them are false, but given that the guy is weak on late-20thC California, I worry.
Kansas, gold, silver, charlatans. The wicked witches have interpretations, and the good witches.
It may be that it was just his way of forming the story, but it's a pretty good argument. The change in the way people have interpreted it is to see it as anti-Bryan rather than pro.
Doesn't the Tin Man, comfortable as ruler of his own little domain, have his regal self nickel-plated in one of the later boy-turns-into-girl Oz books?
Political Interpretations of Wizard
Certainly the 1901 musical version of "Oz", written by Baum, was for an adult audience and had numerous explicit references to contemporary politics,[2] though in these references Baum seems just to have been "playing for laughs."[10] The 1902 stage adaptation mentioned, by name, President Theodore Roosevelt and other political celebrities.[11] For example, the Tin Woodman wonders what he would do if he ran out of oil. "You wouldn't be as badly off as John D. Rockefeller," the Scarecrow responds, "He'd lose six thousand dollars a minute if that happened."[2]
I am not seeing a lot of pushback on the political theory either in the article or the few links at the bottom I have followed.
One of the links, 1994, says not bimetallism but populism.
I'm not going to convince anyone here, but what it would take to convince me that the bimetallism-allegory theory isn't nonsense is some indication that anyone noticed it before WW II. The book was a best seller, sold to children, rather than adults, and (AFAIK) there's not a single contemporary reference to anyone interpreting it politically. An allegory that escapes literally everyone in its intended audience and was never mentioned by the author is, as far as I can tell, not there. (But I'll give Graber a pass on that one -- I paused at it, but it's good enough to repeat. The Apple stuff is what really threw me.)
The Apple stuff is so amazingly wrong. (They didn't work for IBM, by the way. Jobs worked for Atari and Wozniak worked for HP. IBM existed, but was based in New York, and in any case didn't make personal computers until 1981. (playing catch-up with Apple))
They founded Apple using their laptops! That's the one that gets me. "Look, I've drawn up a sketch of a new sort of 'personal' computer here on my ThinkPad! It'll be far smaller than today's mainframes!"
I had an Osborne as a kid (in 1989) or so, but Wikipedia tells me it was released in 1981. (Not that it was a "laptop" as you and I know it.)
The bimetallism allegory was invented by Hugh Rockoff in his paper The "Wizard of Oz" as a Monetary Allegory. Read it for yourself--Rockoff's specious arguments and grasping at straws completely convinces me that Baum can have had no such allegory in mind.
I was pretty sure there wasn't an IBM connection, but thought there might have been a summer job or something somewhere. I almost wonder if maybe he just dropped in the wrong company name? Is there some other company that might fit in that sentence?
OT: I was sort of hoping that Rex Ryan would eat Tim Tebow and perish of the ensuing surfeit of godliness.
I was also planning to read that book soon based on all the recommendations. Now... maybe not so much.
15: There's an HP connection, I think.
13: yeah, that was the first.
15: Hewlett-Packard would substitute in reasonably well (Woz worked there, and Jobs was sort of in its orbit). But that doesn't excuse the "mostly Republican" (I suspect nobody was, except maybe the VC-ish guy they brought in, but anyhow) or the laptops thing, or the founded-in-the-80s thing.
16: I know Rex Ryan is kinky, but that's just gross.
I would say that it's fun and interesting. Maybe read it anyway, but read it as pure theorizing, and not rely on any unfamiliar facts as accurate?
19: No, I don't mean substitute for IBM, I mean substitute for Apple. Some later company that was founded by ex-IBMers with laptops.
22: oh. Not sure what it would be. Not Netscape, not Yahoo, not Google. Companies founded by former IBM employees tend to be pretty IBM-like (enterprise-focused, hierarchical, boringly-named).
it's difficult to know how to evaluate a theory when you cannot evaluate any of its proposed interpretations, due to the facts being in question...
Do anthropologists even need to distinguish between fact and myth, in their normal work?
and really, that sentence is 200 kinds of wrong; I'm genuinely impressed he managed to get so much wrong in such a small area. isn't there an area of math that covers these "packing" problems? maybe he should switch to that.
17:Sigh. Rorty. Truth as Useful narrative. Mumble.
Now that you have a lot of free time since you are not reading Graeber, I can recommend the articles by Henry C K Liu on debt, currency, and trade. Each is very long, so they likely add up to something like a book.
Michael Hudson linked to Liu.
25: only after 1987. they had a drum circle at the conference in tuscon, and ritually burned the works of mircea eliade.
Texaco is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Populist) petroleum engineers who broke from Standard Oil in Texas in the 1920s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people using their catalytic converters and vulcanized tires to travel from place to place and exchange ideas more efficiently.
The sentence would be more forgivable if it was written a few hundred years in the future and the timescales for things like "Apple founded" and "laptops available" got flattened out, I guess. "They had large garages to house their zeppelins, and communicated by telegraph on those occasions when the holonet failed."
they had a drum circle at the conference in tuscon
Not Tuscon, but there was a Iannis Xenakis conference at Arizona State last spring that featured a performance of "Persephassa". I want to hear that piece performed SO BAD.
Maybe that's it -- the book fell through a rift in the space-time continuum?
What thet hell happened to the formatting of your penultimate paragraph?
when I was a teenager I read the unabridged golden bough (there wasn't necessarily a lot to do in south carolina except smoke pot we stole from my dad or tan in an inner tube tied to the dock) and plenty of robert graves and mircea eliade. I was annoyed later when something I had put so much effort into turned out to be full of truthiness.
but I also had a persistence then that age or the internet has destroyed. I read hegel when I was a teenager because I was a marxist. I don't think I understood a fucking word, but I damn well kept on reading it. nowadays I would just give up on something that incomprehensible. (I found it 50% more comprehensible in my 20s). it's not like I imagine I'll wish I read more hegel on my deathbed, but I'm certain I won't wish I had read more gawker and what would tyler durden do simultaneously in two open tabs. and yet here we are.
Is it just line spacing? Maybe that's the only change, and it's creating an optical illusion of something more severely weird. But it's giving me a headache.
And 17 gets it exactly right.
The excerpt is fractally wrong.
if you don't use the "p" "/p" paragraph tags for each paragraph ogged will punish you with a random distribution of font sizes and line spacing. it's sort of his version of fire and brimstone, but with less burning. and also less kerning.
The part of the book that I care about so far is his assertion that there's no good evidence that any society ran by the kind of barter system commonly asserted to have preceded money. It seems more likely that he could defend an absence of evidence unless he's blithely ignoring massive amounts of data. Anyone know anything about that piece of his argument?
if you don't use the "p" "/p" paragraph tags for each paragraph
...inside the blockquote.
Crooked Timber is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Tory) SEO specialists who broke from Pajamas Media in the 2010s, forming a rigid organizational structure of twenty to forty bloggers with their Kindle Fires crossposting to each other's LiveJournals.
UNC is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Baptist) basketball specialists who broke from Duke in the 1850s, forming a rigid zone defense of twenty to forty sports marketing majors with their white baseball caps going to each other's frat parties.
The Holy Roman Empire is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Belgian) technocrats who broke from the Byzantine Empire in the 1300s, forming little anarcho-syndicalist communes that supported themselves by mechanized textile production in their huts.
38:What would you like?
This interview posted this morning at Naked Capitalism by Pilkington with Steve Keen starts off discussing barter, and the reasons why it is important to economics.
The Wiki article begins with "no evidence etc"
Yes, that sort of error really damages an author's credibility .
Christianity is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Gaulish) fortune tellers who broke from the Catholic Church in the 3rd century AD, forming large groups of several thousand praying to their icons of the saints in each other's temples.
Playboy magazine is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly lesbian) women who broke from the Knights Templar in the 6th century, forming little fantasy football leagues over Twitter.
Planet Earth is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly silicon-based) lifeforms who broke from the Moon six thousand years ago, forming little accretions of twenty to forty solar masses with their photosynthesis in each other's primordial soups.
There are many contract tablets that describe the state of business in Babylon and Sumer. Sometimes goods for goods, specified by volume or count, sometimes goods for shekels of silver.
I don't know what people know about exchange in societies that did not write about commerce; As far as I know, little is known about how Maya cities did business, for instance.
Oh man, I just realized: he's playing this game in that sentence. Touché, sir!
Okay, what the hell was Graeber writing about? "Apple" has got to be a thinko. According to Wikipedia he was born in 1961. Unless he was doing field work in Papua New Guinea for the last 40 years, I don't see how he could possibly believe that the laptop existed before Apple did.
50: That is indeed the Greatest Game. Back when Star Trek: Enterprise was on, I used to tell people that it was my favorite Star Trek, and that my favorite part of it was the song on the opening credits.
Where are the people who recommended this book? Halford, and others? They have some serious explaining to do. I almost bought this book.
These Tardis-like garages into which a 40 person circle, complete with laptops, could fit: who built them? There appear to have been several.
Forty people is a big payroll. Prior to the deluge of VC money, startups, even in Silicon Valley, couldn't have met it. One would need revenue in the high tens of millions.
The problem with the sentence isn't so much that it's wrong in detail. It's that he wasn't thinking about the physical (or fiscal) reality behind his words.
53:And to think some have said liberals don't have a strong Haidt "purity" value.
Halford, you have polluted Unfogged!
So, here's what I think actually happened:
-- he conflated the Homebrew Computer Club (which did indeed have something in the neighborhood of twenty to forty members) with Apple Computer
-- he thought Apple Computer was called Apple Computers
-- he conflated Hewlett-Packard and IBM
-- he conflated Intel (founded by former Hewlett-Packard employees) and Apple (founded by one former HP employee and one former Atari employee)
-- he conflated Apple (founded 1976, made the Apple I and Apple II) and the Macintosh (released 1984, well after the creation of the laptop)
-- he got confused about how prevalent laptops would likely have been in the mid-1980s.
The NYTimes story about Yale declining to renew his contract is interesting.
Whoops; I was wrong about Intel; the founders had previously worked at Fairchild Semiconductor.
I almost bought this book.
I'm generally sympathetic to authors who get details wrong. I don't know anything about the book that James is talking about in 45, but that error doesn't strike me as fatal (unless the author bases a large chunk of his argument on that fact, or it's a book about big explosions or something.)
But the error LB cites is disqualifying, by my reckoning. You can err on a single factual matter and have it merely be an error, but you can't construct a sentence like this without real disregard for the truth.
This is the reason I can no longer read Chomsky. He makes some good points, but when he's dealing with subject matter I understand, it's easy to see that he's often bullshitting.
And to think some have said liberals don't have a strong Haidt "purity" value.
I can't read Haidt, either.
The Wizard of Oz is not about bimetallism.
I disagree somewhat with 59. (I agree on Chomsky). You can't write a general book about a really big topic, and get all of the details right. This may be an argument against general books, but someone writing a book where they rely on synthesizing all kinds of secondary sources is going to get all kinds of things wrong, either because they repeat somebody else's error, or they introduce errors of their own.
The thing that's too bad about Wrongest Ever The Sentence is that the premise (as I understand it) that a non-hierarchical, informal (okay, democratic I don't buy) organization can emerge from a relatively staid world (computer engineering) when people really want something (personal computers) quickly is pretty well supported by the history of the Homebrew Computer Club.
53:And to think some have said liberals don't have a strong Haidt "purity" value.
Halford, you have polluted Unfogged!
Oh FFS. Purity about facts is not purity of essence you goddamn twit.
If the guy's an anthropologist, I'd be much more interested in what he has to say about exchange among people he studies than a messed up illustrative example. Markets and money allow people to exchange with strangers, which was historically not necessary, so looking at alternative exchanges even with imperfect knowledge seems interesting.
There are lots of books that are worthwhile despite containing mistakes; Gibbon is one example. I haven't read this book, and probably won't, not that interested in the social foundations of money. I'd be more interested in reading one of the recent books about financial speculation than this, myself. Galbraith's book about 1929 was nice.
Halford, you have polluted Unfogged!
Congratulations, Halford. You're a man now.
I disagree somewhat with 59. (I agree on Chomsky). You can't write a general book about a really big topic, and get all of the details right.
Yeah. This was basically the distinction I was trying to make. The trick, of course, is defining what you mean by a disqualifying error.
Guns, Germs and Steel is a great general book, and I'm not aware of anything egregiously wrong with it. In other books, however, Jared Diamond says some stuff about anthropology and evolutionary biology that is stone bullshit.
I'm willing to let Diamond off the hook because his bullshit is interpretational bullshit - he gets the facts right and applies them in ludicrous ways. Also, he has a consistent bias is in favor of determinism, and while that leads him astray sometimes, I think he makes a persuasive deterministic case in GG&S.
You can't write a general book about a really big topic, and get all of the details right. This may be an argument against general books, but someone writing a book where they rely on synthesizing all kinds of secondary sources is going to get all kinds of things wrong, either because they repeat somebody else's error, or they introduce errors of their own.
I really think this is wrong, at least with respect to basic factual matters. And, also, there are categories of error: repeating common lore like the bimetallism thing in WoO is wrong but falls in line with your point and is totally excuseable. He didn't drill down to get the truth on the point, but, as you say, in a big general point book you can't drill down on everything. Wrongest Ever The Sentence is something differently. It suggests he's either transcribing things he's heard completely unthinkingly (and where would he even heave heard this?), or mixing up anecdotes in his head, again completely without thinking through what he's writing on the page (this seems most likely), or he just wholesale making shit up. All three of those make it very hard to read a book I'm trying to read to learn something, because I can't tell which of the things I'm learning are true and which aren't.
I think he read Microserfs (possibly in a dream) as a child and has remembered *that* wrong.. Except it was their dads who had left IBM.
Even 20 people would be a squash in a garage, surely?
I'm actually not sympathetic to authors who make serious errors of fact. Yes, of course it's possible to get the details right in a large book about a general topic. You do it by knowing what you intend to say, and having a reason to say it before you write about it.
Also, you can look shit up! It's allowed! Books don't come into being without someone actually writing those sentences, and they might as well be sentences written about something you know something about. Otherwise, they don't need to be written, right?
repeating common lore like the bimetallism thing in WoO is wrong but falls in line with your point and is totally excuseable
No! It's not! Just don't write that sentence if you can't be bothered to know anything about anything!
The Wrongest Sentence Ever has got to be a weird fuck-up, though. It doesn't make sense as deliberate deceit, because there are millions of people who'll know it's wrong. It's like saying that George Washington was gave the Gettysburg Address -- it's just too transparently wrong to be deliberate.
Halford, you have polluted Unfogged
Halford! You have debauched my blog!
Yes, of course it's possible to get the details right in a large book about a general topic. You do it by knowing what you intend to say, and having a reason to say it before you write about it.
Of course, both these are consistent with repeating mistaken general lore (WoO bimetalism). There's a point you want to make, there's a fact that you believe to be true that supports that point, you use that fact, done. But it doesn't excuse introducing errors of your own, or including things that don't even remotely make sense on their own terms, or that should leave any thinking person who started to repeat them saying "wait, that can't possibly be right".
70: My experience has been very different.
I can't think of a book on a general topic that I was familiar with that didn't have significant errors of fact, unless that book was written by someone else who's an expert on that topic. For example, if a book makes a point that involves Goedel's incompleteness theorem, and that book is not written by a mathematician or something closely related, it will get key facts wrong. Likewise for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and physicists.
Books about economics by non-economists will have errors of fact. Books about mainstream economics that are by non-mainstream economists will have errors of fact. Steve Keen's economic book has a gazillion errors of fact, for example.
72: in a big, ambitious generalist book? I think you may be asking too much. Wouldn't it take a very long time to confirm with reasonable certainty that everything you think you know is true definitely is actually true?
The alternative is to only write about the narrow set of things that you know with reasonable certainty are definitely true. But then you've just written a narrow, academic book instead of an ambitious generalist book.
unless that book was written by someone else who's an expert on that topic
Maybe this is the stick-in-the-mud academic in me, but why can't books be written by experts ?
Wouldn't it take a very long time to confirm with reasonable certainty that everything you think you know is true definitely is actually true?
Not in the age of Wikipedia!
Isn't this why professional authors have professional editors? Shouldn't someone at Melville House have caught this? (Can Graeber sue them for negligence?)
Jacob Weisberg, in his takedown of Ron Suskind, gives an example of how not to evaluate the accuracy of a work of nonfiction:
Once again, his work is strewn with small but telling errors. Here are a few: The Federal Reserve is a board, not a bureau (Page 7); Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was previously president, not "chairman," of the New York Fed (Page 56); he was, however, an undersecretary of the treasury, which Suskind makes a point out of saying he wasn't (Page 172); Horatio Alger was an author, not a character (Page 54); Gene Sperling didn't play tennis for the University of Michigan, because he went to the University of Minnesota (Page 215); the gothic spires of Yale Law School, built in 1931, are not "centuries old" (Page 250); Franklin D. Roosevelt did not say of his opponents, "I welcome their hate" (Page 235). What FDR said at Madison Square Garden in 1936, was "I welcome their hatred." That nuance wouldn't matter if it weren't such a famous line, but getting it wrong is the political equivalent of an English professor misquoting Hamlet's soliloquy.
Sure, an accumulation of incorrect details is worrying, but it doesn't compare to the kind of bullshittery that Weisberg is routinely guilty of.
(I suppose that latter remark is a tu quoque, but fuck it. Weisberg is full of shit.)
Does nobody here even know an anthropologist to consult? I loved the excerpt of the book and still plan to read it.
78: Clearly experts can write books -- I object to the idea that only experts get to write books. Part of the process of becoming an expert is ideological blinkering. Some things become easier to think about, but other things become harder to think about. For example, it's quite hard for a mainstream economist to think outside their traditional analytical categories, like "utility maximization" or "equilibrium".
The WofOz thing is a funny case, because it's not really disprovable. It seems to be clearly nonsense to me, just because the idea of an elaborate political allegory that the author never said anything about and that no contemporary ever mentioned having understood seems self-evidently absurd. But if that doesn't convince you, then there really isn't any way to look into Baum's mind -- he's dead.
The Apple sentence, though, you'd have to be an idiot to believe. It makes no sense on its face: corporations don't get founded by indeterminate numbers of consensus-based groups. And he must know when laptops came into use. Some factual errors can slip into anything, if it's something that you believed you knew with certainty and never thought to check, but not like that. (Now, a massive editing error that somehow slipped past everyone in the process could certainly happen. But that's a big one.)
I'd like to see Timothy Burke review it -- he's African history, right? There are a lot of historical/anthropological claims about African societies I'd like to see fact-checked.
57 The NYTimes story about Yale declining to renew his contract is interesting.
It isn't at all unusual for junior faculty at Yale, is it?
The quote 81 reads like a parody.
Jared Diamond? Dig into James Nicoll's comments threads. Short answer: not just flakier than you thought, flakier than you thought possible. This is an opportunity to recommend Kirsten Seaver's The Frozen Echo, too, about Greenland and what really happened (emigration, basically, that and a lot of stuff about the political economy of fish exports in the 15th C North Atlantic).
85: Oh, not at all. Which is why the fact there is a Times article about it is interesting. He says "I'm more famous than they are anyway," which is top notch. And there is a remarkable zinger delivered by a fellow member of the department who was denied tenure. I am too lazy to link right now!
The Apple thing sounds like he wanted to say "you know, Silicon Valley and stuff" but realised he couldn't actually get away with writing that into his book.
Does anyone else have the nagging feeling Occupy might actually be a massive ad campaign for Debt...? It seemed to go off at the same moment the whole blogosphere was suddenly reading him and he's been the movement's Zelig figure all along. Me, I blame Journolist.
57: A treasure trove. "All in favor of the anarchist say aye."
87: Link something specific? The search you linked has no results.
87: If you can't get a link right, obviously everything you are saying is wrong.
79: Are you serious? if you turn to wikipedia to try and confirm your impression that WoO is an allegory about bimetalism, this is what you will find. You'd see confirmed that this is a popular interpretation, and also that there's some controversy over this point, and maybe see a few good reasons to doubt its truth.
94: I'm actually surprised by how seriously people take the allegorical interpretation -- I wonder if what happened is that the original guy who made it up wasn't thinking of it as something he needed to be serious about, it's a children's book. And everyone else after that went into "Emperor's New Clothes" mode: this may sound self-evidently absurd, but it can't be, because if was self-evidently absurd you wouldn't have a serious person saying it.
I used to have quite a collection of the works of Mircea Eliade, courtesy of a lady. I think I still have her E.M. Cioran books.
OK, here's the NYT Graeber article oudemia is too lazy to link.
97: It is so wrong that I clicked through that and my first thought was "Ooo, cute!"
Ah, I needed a hyphen not an underscore: like so.
This was the quote I liked: ""It says something about Dr. Graeber's sense of politics," she added, "that he seems to take this as an individual, personal thing rather than taking a more anthropological view of the nature of the system that affects all junior scholars at Yale.""
94: Yes, its good for most cases, but wikipedia will also confirm recent Canadian studies in the field of ave-bovid hybridization.
The first couple Nicoll links I looked at are not very impressive. Basically "Diamond thought X which was well supported at the time but new evidence suggests Y. What an idiot."
87 Jared Diamond? Dig into James Nicoll's comments threads. Short answer: not just flakier than you thought, flakier than you thought possible.
Huh. Do the criticisms affect the big picture? I heard a lot of mixed things about Diamond and finally got around to reading Guns, Germs, and Steel about a year go. I kind of felt like it could have been much better as a much shorter book, but I found the general thrust of the argument interesting and fairly compelling. It's also the first place I ever encountered attempts to answer certain obvious questions, like "why did Native Americans get nearly wiped out by European diseases but not vice versa?" In general, the stuff about the importance of domesticable animals and crops being more concentrated in some places than others having a major impact on history seems pretty convincing. So I would be interested to hear if it's all bullshit somehow....
99: Any particularly on-point ones in there? A quick scan of the first half-dozen suggest that he's taken one side over another in a scientific controversy, or that scientific controversies have arisen since his books were published, but I'm not seeing the kind of egregious error that LB cites in the OP.
I kind of felt like it could have been much better as a much shorter book, but I found the general thrust of the argument interesting and fairly compelling.
This is exactly right. It was interesting and seemed solid, but it was so goddamn repetitive that it kind of drove me nuts.
104: That's been my reaction generally to criticisms of Diamond. Not that anything he's written is perfect, but even after reading a bunch of blog-arguments about his stuff even the valid criticisms don't seem to me to render what's left either stupid or pernicious.
So some people are seeing LJ links in that Google search? Like LB, I see no results. I thought Google didn't index LJ well anyway.
Ugh. Lots of 1-sentence posts and links with long threads. I'm curious about whether incisive criticisms exist, but not enough to spend the next week trawling through LJ archives trying to find them.
Diamond did fairly recently (last five years, maybe) write a big article in the New Yorker about a tribal conflict in PNG based on conversations with a local informant, and that seems to have been all wrong to the point where people are suing him about it -- I'm confused about the details, but there's something there, and it's really pissed people off. I think there's a good shot that the article was a problem, but that the anger from it is spilling over onto everything else he's ever written.
111: I think anthropologists already had it in for him, and the New Yorker article was a chance to stick the knife in.
Yeah, I remember that.
If critiques of the central ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel exist, are there also plausible alternative answers for the questions Diamond is asking?
WHERE IS HALFORD AND WHY WON'T HE ANSWER THE CHARGES THAT HAVE BEEN MADE AGAINST HIM?
I suppose I can read Wikipedia on his critics. Some of the people being quoted there are obvious cranks. Others just seem... touchy? None of it makes me really eager to learn more about what the critic is saying. But Wikipedia might not have the best survey...
The critiques didn't seem to have anything to do with what (to me) seemed like the central ideas of the book. The objection was more that somehow the way he put the book together meant he was letting the West off for imperialism and colonialism.
116: Yeah, the category Wikipedia calls "Eurocentric" criticisms just sound like bullshit to me. Trying to explain history isn't the same as morally justifying it.
I don't have the book in front of me, haven't read all the comments, and am on the phone, but IIRC there is a long footnote that discusses the use of the Wizard of Oz as bimetallism example, in anticipation of this kind of thing.
The overall critique in the OP seems kind of needlessly nitpicky -- it's basically a work of synthesis and the apple example is kind of a throwaway. But I don't have the book to take a look.
I kind of get the feeling that the irateness about Diamond is largely part of a near-enemy/far-enemy dynamic. People in anthropology/cultural studies with a political, anti-Western-cultural imperialism (I'm gesturing vaguely at people here, and should be understood to not really know what I'm talking about) aren't going to get het up about someone literally racist or Western-supremacist like whatsisname Rushton or Victor Davis Hanson, because their audiences don't overlap. Diamond, though, is writing for lay audiences who are plausibly going to be politically sympathetic to anthropology/cultural studies types, but is completely outside their idiom, which renders him really really irritating.
119: You have to admit that the Apple thing is at least a surprising error.
Honestly, the Apple example plays almost no role whatsoever in the general argument of the book. It's a total throwaway. On the areas that I know about well, he's totally right, if willing to push interpretations boldly.
The point isn't whether it's central to an argument, the point is that it's a weird thing for an even ordinarily careful person to write.
The broader point, which is that even large corporations are structured internally in ways that require cooperation, sharing, and what he calls "communism," is totally uncontroversial.
One of the reasons I stopped reading The Economist is that they were so frequently wrong or misguided about subject areas I do know about, that I decided the same was likely true about subjects I don't know about, and thus I probably shouldn't be forming a worldview based on their reporting.
The Apple thing is similar. It doesn't really matter if the example itself is or is not relevant to the rest of the book. What matters is that it is so glaringly and hugely wrong as to throw the rest of the book's facts into doubt.
Sure. Lots of his broad points sound right to me, lots of them sound sympathetic even if I'm unsure about their truth.
His factual evidence makes me nervous though. He appeals in a couple of places to Native American modes of organizing societies without specifying who and where he was talking about, which is another red flag for me -- it's a big couple of continents here.
One of the reasons I stopped reading The Economist is that they were so frequently wrong or misguided about subject areas I do know about, that I decided the same was likely true about subjects I don't know about, and thus I probably shouldn't be forming a worldview based on their reporting.
Yes, exactly. That, and becoming acquainted with some of the individuals behind the anonymous omniscient narrator voice.
But the Economist different in that it's completely possible to write a short, accurate article on a subject. It's impossible to write a book on a general subject without inaccuracies -- it's simply beyond human capabilities.
The point isn't whether it's central to an argument, the point is that it's a weird thing for an even ordinarily careful person to write.
Yeah, this kind of lunatic, easily avoidable error really does make me nuts, and I can never understand how they happen. Some factual errors, sure--they are other people's errors that have become widely disseminated, and you are just unlucky enough to have chosen the wrong sources and not realized that they needed to double-check. But how do you even get to a string of assertions that random and wrong?
80 No. Publishers have decided that editors are superfluous since blogs don't have them. They - publishers - now web crawl blog comment sections and use the mistakes noted there to publish a corrected 2nd edition. Isn't this what the wisdom of crowds was all about?
125 & 127 Yes, the omniscent anonyomous voice -- toeing a fairly consistent ideological line -- that is simply factually incorrect regarding stuff you actually know something about.* Which brings us back to Wizard of Oz.
*Fallows' takedown of them in "Colonial Cringe" is still wonderful.
More of 126: Here's the quote I was thinking about:
One could, in practice, pass from here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike [PNG] big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they don't want to (hence North American Indian chiefs' famous skill at oratory and powers of persuasion.) as a result, they tended to give away far more than they received. Observes often remarked that in terms of personal possessions, a village chief was often the poorest man in the village, such was the pressure on him for constant supply of largesse.
Now, this sounds to be like the sort of thing that's very plausible about some Native American society or other; I'm sure it could be rewritten specifically and supported. But what is an anthropologist doing generalizing about 'indigenous North American chiefs' as if their roles were identical continent-wide?
Are you kidding me? The guy is a trained anthropologist and about 25% of the book is discussing things like specific differences between African tribal groups who lived in nearby regions. I think he knows that not all native American cultures were the same.
But, you know, the history of Apple Computers is like the most important thing in the world, so get the details o that wrong in an insignificant way in a throwaway line, and why not toss the whole book out. Fucking geeks.
Like I even qualify as a geek. I don't know shit about the history of the computer business. I do know that I never saw a laptop until I was in college in 1988.
And, you know, I'm not telling people not to read it. It's interesting. It just seems awfully slapdash.
You know what the biggest problem with copyright law is? Any company can buy the rights to an original work without ever compensating the original artist at all, and then they have those rights forever, and anybody who even mentions that work in any context without paying up is subject not only to mandatory fines, but jail time. Not only that, but rights-holders get a tax writeoff if they destroy old works that are in danger of becoming public domain.
I have not read the book yet (did buy it) but I think it's value is more in reimagining the relationship between debt and money then all the specific examples that are used. I mean, obviously there needs to be a lot of truth in the examples to back up the thesis, but this is not a book where the point is the exactness and detail of the history. It's conceptual.
people, THERE ARE SEVERAL FOOTNOTES to the bimetallism stuff--he cites sources!--and there were direct political references in the (1902?) stage version. I think the worst one can accuse Graeber of there is a failure to sufficiently acknowledge that the point is controverted. Yes, crude allegories disappoint people with lit PhDs (I'm one)--no, that does not, sadly, count as a point against the existence of such allegories...
(the Apple claim is unfootnoted, and his source, clearly, is "common knowledge," otherwise known as the collective rectum)
I mean, the guy cites his sources. The book has a breezy pop-big-pictureology prose style, but the bibliog and citations are closer to university press stuff....if other anthropologists start calling him on details, I'm all ears, but til then, Team Halford.
I challenge anyone else to read this book and conclude that it is "slapdash.". It is bold in its conclusions.
136 would be biting in an article about copyright law. The apple thing is totally immaterial to the book. Sure, it should have been caught in the editing, but almost all large works, especially synthetic ones, have errors.
My favorite anecdote about copyright is when the Otis family used the rights they'd acquired in the course of advocating the bricking up of Hetch Hetchy to steal the name "Lakers" from the Minnesota Populist Party.
... which was enough to trick Wilt Chamberlain into signing a contract with them.
142 cont'd: I wouldn't even know the story if Mike Davis hadn't been able to make Chinatown before Firestone dynamited the subway tunnels. A small victory, to be sure.
The whole history of LA and copyright in this country are really intertwined, like when Cesar Chavez fought back against attempts to use the extensive copyrights on grain-based recipes to kill off LA's Mexican population by forcing them onto nutrient-poor all-meat diets.
Okay, the existence of a footnote to a silly claim just means someone has said it before. I know people have said the WoOz is a bimetallism allegory, it just seems clear to me that they're wrong.
(Interestingly, in the footnote he says that even people who question the existence of the allegory concede that there were political jokes in the later stage show. (1) The existence of political jokes in the later stage show doesn't make the book a political allegory, and (2) he cites two articles as questioners of the political allegory who make the noted concession. One doesn't seem to be online, but the other is, and doesn't make the concession Graeber says it does.) This is picayune stuff, but it really makes him look unreliable.)
Yes, crude allegories disappoint people with lit PhDs (I'm one)--no, that does not, sadly, count as a point against the existence of such allegories...
No. What does count as a point against the existence of such allegories is that there's no evidence that anyone on earth understood it as an allegory at the time.
Remember when Inhofe held up Crichton's book on the senate floor and declaimed that it had pages and pages more footnotes than the executive summary of the IPCC's report on climate change? They tried to make a movie out of it but you can't use the term "US Senate" in a feature film without paying out the ass to the Treasury department.
Sifu is cracking me the hell up. Well done.
I thought literary critics had thrown out authorial intent as a valid thing to talk about? I think it's a Cold War allegory, myself.
145: Like many people, I only know about that incident from Hemmingway's fictionalized account of it in The Grapes of Wrath.
I taught WoO in a course on uses of allegorical structures in 19-20c children's fiction, and it seems pretty clear, from many multiples of readings, that part of what is so difficult about WoO is that it takes the form of an allegory but has no referent, which is why it's so tempting to read it as about something. It's a very mysteriously empty book, entirely soulless. It's consumerist shit, basically. There is no real substance to be had or desired, just symbolic goods.
Once again, Michele Bachmann has demonstrated her International-Grandmaster-level skills at playing the Greatest Game.
147--I'd want to spend a couple hours with the sources were I to continue this; but I very much do not want to spend that couple hours; so I guess I don't want to continue this......
Jesus Christ Lopez. You have plenty of evidence on the bimetallism analogy, and Graeber cites his sources, knowing that there's debate on the point, but because it doesn't fit into your (nonscholarly, also uninformed) view of the Wizard of Oz, you're willing to distrust the entire book -- which is deliberately written in a breezy way to make it accessible -- based on totally immaterial references. There's someone who has a reading problem here, and it doesn't look like Graeber.
which is deliberately written in a breezy way to make it accessible -- based on totally immaterial references.
Why should one trust an author to educate the ignorant if he writes (and possibly researches) so carelessly?
"Read and distrust" is a perfectly fine way to take in a book. If there are good explanations that she can use to understand the world, she can decide for herself whether she'll adopt them, even though she finds the source to be pretty lax about details. LB has the capacity to separate those and find good things in the book if they're there.
There is no real substance to be had or desired, just symbolic goods.
What does this mean? I get "no real substance to be had," but I don't understand "no real substance to be desired."
Not breezy in a careless way,* just in a way that's willing to generalize and state theses boldly without a lot of cringing and qualification. Which is what makes the book readable.
*Doesn't make the book mistake free. Lopez caught one, and I'm sure there are others. Maybe there are actually factual mistakes in ways that are significant to the thesis. But I really challenge anyone to actually read the book and conclude that it is written carelessly.
It's a very mysteriously empty book, entirely soulless.
Unusually so, for a children's story? I mean, I basically like the series.
it takes the form of an allegory but has no referent,
But wait, I love stories like that. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is cool because it could be about creeping communism, or consumerism, or anything!
"I cited my sources" isn't a great excuse if they're wrong. LB's not charging him with academic dishonesty, but with being credulous.
I'm still planning to read the book, but I will be a little more on guard than I might have been otherwise about trusting the facts.
157 -- sure, I agree with that. But her point seems to be "hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out." When, you know, neither of these points are remotely significant to anything in the book, and one of them is extensively footnoted (even if LB disagrees with the interpretation in the footnote).
Is it possible to have an allegory with no referent. I'm inclined to say no, but that might be a failure of imagination on my part.
But her point seems to be "hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out."
No, her point is something closer to "obvious mistakes, do we have anyone here with the expertise to tell us whether there are also non-obvious mistakes on matters of more relevance?"
But her point seems to be "hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out."
Well, no, that's not her point, but I'm sure it only differs from her point in irrelevant ways.
"hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out."
Well, if one of the mistakes is so bad that it shows that the author isn't a good critical thinker, it could deepen the distrust. I use the breezy phrase "everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out" to immediately write off an author. That is a person who doesn't see past stereotypes, so they aren't going to bring me anything new.
"everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out"
Oh man, though, that's totally true, at least in LA proper. Once you get to the outer burbs east of La Cienega everybody's toothless and stringy from all the meth, but in the city of LA it's definitely true.
161: actually, either or both could be the referents. I've seen arguments for both, which I think, given the relationship between the Cold War and consumerism, makes good sense.
164: I like the book but think your reading of LB is totally uncharitable. She seems to be saying, "these two things trouble me. One is questionable, one is clearly wrong. Together, they make me wonder about the rest of the book." That doesn't seem unreasonable. That said, she does seem to be digging in her heels about the bimetallism issue, which makes me wonder if anything else she's said can be trusted. The Apple thing is obviously just a howler. Oops. These things happen, even when books are written by experts. Ask me how I know.
164 is so far from LB's point that one would be tempted to say "There's someone who has a reading problem here, and it doesn't look like Graeber," if one were being a jerk.
152: It's been so long since I've read it that I have no opinion on this. But I'm going to save your description so that I can use it the next time someone makes me talk about Harry Potter.
But her point seems to be "hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out."
Has anyone pointed out yet that this is nonsense?
164 was unfair to LB's point. I'll concede that, and I was wrong. To be honest, I was mostly reacting not the OP, but to the "he doesn't seem to get that native american tribes were different" which I honestly 100% guarantee you is not at all supported by any plausible reading of the book.
I get the idea that you get suspicious of everything when, in reading a book, you see a detail you know is wrong. That's fine. In this particular context, though, the details selected here are REALLY immaterial to the book as a whole, and one of them (the bimetallism thing) isn't even wrong and is also clearly addressed in the footnotes. This is in the context of a book that is clearly designed to be a sweeping general interpretation of the role of money and debt in human societies. There are degrees of suspicion and charity you can grant -- indeed, I think it's likely that even some actually significant examples used by Graeber are wrong -- but Lopez's reaction into extreme suspicion based on extremely minor examples strikes me as a somewhat ludicrously nitpicky reading; the digging in on the bimetallism question was also weird.
LB digs in, yo. It's what she does. Between undergrad at Princeton and her post-law school job defending Big Pharma she's gotten pretty good at it, too.
You mean: her post-law school job defending Big Pharma in small groups of 20-40 attorneys who write their briefs using consensus-based authorship, she's gotten pretty good at it, too.
Thing is, this sort of thing happens to me a lot when I'm reading. I think "Wow, this is really big and radical, but it makes sense. I might be convinced." And then the author writes something like, "Also, my contacts at the Martian embassy inform me that the tri-lateral commission is going to order a nuclear strike against Portland Oregon." Even offhand remarks can raise questions about credibility.
Every time I look up the Wizard of Oz thing I come away thinking it would take more thought than it's worth to figure out who's right about the Wizard of Oz thing. This is annoying, because it's basically in the period of history I should most know about.
Even offhand remarks can raise questions about credibility.
Sure. The question here though is to what extent and how. We are really really not in martian embassy territory.
I'm not an expert, really, but I did have a grad school level education in some of the topics that are addressed in the later part of the book (I'm not sure I want to say exactly what). The details were right, and the overall interpretation was bold and interesting. Since I'm not an anthropologist, I don't know that he's completely accurately representing the details he does spend a lot of time on from the anthropological literature (for example, the effect of the slave trade on different African tribes) but he's clearly drawing quite directly upon a developed scholarly literature in his own field.
The work is something of a polemic and has a strong argument, but taken as a whole AFAICT the factual basis for the interpretations given are extremely strong. I've certainly seen nothing to suggest that in any of the actually significant areas of the book --for example, the economic history of Sumeria -- he's anywhere outside of the scholarly consensus, though he's certainly willing to derive strong interpretations from the facts to which he refers.
Obviously the Wizard of Oz wasn't just a single allegory; the two halves of the book each reflect various stages of human life, beginning and ending with a heartbeat, exploring the nature of the human experience, and empathy. The second and third approximate sections of the book together stress the mundane and futile elements of life that accompany the ever-present threat of madness, and the importance of living one's own life. After that, the primary themes shift, and evoke the stress and anxiety of modern travel, in particular fear of flying. The next major theme in the first half of the book is the manner in which time's passage can control one's life; it offers a stark warning to those who remain focussed on mundane aspects; it is followed by a retreat into solitude and withdrawal. The first half of the book ends with a soulful metaphor for death.
The second half of the book opens with images of cash registers and loose change, and mocks greed and consumerism using tongue-in-cheek phrases and cash-related metaphors. The book next addresses the isolation of the depressed with the symbolism of conflict and the use of simple dichotomies to describe personal relationships. Next, the book looks at a mental illness resulting from the elevation of fame and success above the needs of the self; in particular, the line "and if the band you're in starts playing different tunes" reflects mental breakdown. The book ends with an espousal of the concepts of alterity and unity, while forcing the reader to recognise the common traits shared by humanity.
So no, not about bimetallism at all.
To the general point of distrusting a book when the details start getting weird: definitely. I once bought and started to read a kind of weird book just because the author was present and would sign it. I started reading it despite the kooky premise, but quit in disgust when a purported medical expert talked about nerves being electrical conductors and subject to certain kinds of electromagnetic interference as result (kinds that make no sense in the actual world of action-potential propagation in neurons).
I am reading _Debt_, so I'll be watching this carefully. Anthropologists have pissed me off in this regard in the past (I feel like _Sex at Dawn_ was riddled with this kind of problem, in addition to having been written in an infuriatingly breezy tone).
We are really really not in martian embassy territory.
Martian embassy is no more, and possibly slightly less, crazy and credibility disturbing than the sentence quoted. I trust that it's basically a completely unimportant sentence in the context of the book overall, but it makes clear that, at least some of the time in the book, the guy just isn't paying any goddamn attention at all to what he's writing, and is just literally making shit up wholesale (or accepting as fact things that he's heard or thinks he remembers without even minimal efforts to consider their plausbility). That's really not a small problem.
Urple, read 182, and then let me know what you think. When I get home, I'll take a look at the sentence in context, but I'm pretty sure that it was just a totally throwaway example, given in connection with a point that was generally uncontroversial. A howler that an editor should have caught? Sure. But it's frankly ridiculous in the context of a book like this to say it discredits the work as a whole.
181 --The book is just fantastic, that's really what I think.
Graeber, btw, is all the comment threads on his reviewers at Amazon; he hasn't yet commented on the person who independently arrived at LB's Apple point (Nov 14th)......
In 181, Dr. Tweety demonstrates his skill as a Floydian analyst.
I, on the other hand, am too Jung to know about such things.
187: wait, what? He's responding to reviews at Amazon? That's just...insane.
Coming to this thread late I'm surprised that nobody has yet linked to Cecil Adams on bimetalism in The Wizard Of Oz:
The main problem with the preceding interpretation is that taken in aggregate it makes no sense. I mean, why should the forces of nature (the Wicked Witch of the West) be so hot for the free coinage of silver (i.e., Dorothy's footwear)? Baum was given to occasional satirical touches in his work, I admit. But he was primarily a storyteller rather than a political commentator, and the bits of symbolism stuck into his books for the most part don't add up to anything. However, I don't want to be too critical. The article I've just been citing clearly reflects the hellish conditions all journalists face: too little time, too much beer. Been there.
even large corporations are structured internally in ways that require cooperation, sharing, and what he calls "communism," is totally uncontroversial.
Having been doing a bunch of work, these last couple of months, for a large multi-national corporation I am constantly surprised at how many policies they have to prevent people from cooperating in casual or ad hoc ways.
Though, as a contractor, I am seeing them from the outside. I have no doubt that all sorts of informal cooperation happens behind the scenes. But, oh boy, does the stereotype of, "you have to get five people to sign off on this before I can answer a question" seem true more often than I would have expected.
188: so much comes down to Meddling parents.
19/22: Yikes. I'm way too slow to respond here, as usual.
There are lots of companies that could fit that description. Here in Austin, I could name five companies off the top of my head that were started like that* (but I'd rather not, in case that makes me identifiable), including my current company.
Most computer engineers, especially back then, were (fiscally) conservative, so most founders of new companies are probably republican/libertarian. IBM was notorious for having massive bureaucracy, so it's not surprising that a lot of startups from ex-IBMers react to that by having as little structure as possible. The same is true startups by ex-Intel employees in Portland. I'd be surprised if the same wasn't true of ex-IBMers starting a company near any IBM campus, including SV.
But, it strikes me as unlikely that Graeber accidentally substituted the name of a company that's in no way similar. There are so many reasonable substitutes but, instead of slipping in the name of one of the hundreds of startups that could fit that description, he substituted the name of a company which fits the opposite description?
* Sort of. Twenty to forty people is a lot of people to pack into a garage, and splitting an early stage startup into different physical locations within the same city makes no sense. It's probably time to get real office space once you've got more than five or ten people involved.
190: That reminds me of Newt Gingrich and all of his Amazon reviews. A different sort of madness.
187: now that I've clicked over to Amazon, I'm even more confused. I must have misunderstood you, right?
I taught WoO in a course on uses of allegorical structures in 19-20c children's fiction, and it seems pretty clear, from many multiples of readings, that part of what is so difficult about WoO is that it takes the form of an allegory but has no referent, which is why it's so tempting to read it as about something. It's a very mysteriously empty book, entirely soulless.
I liked the Wizard of Oz books as a kid, and read the entire series, but this description sounds plausible.
Is it possible to have an allegory with no referent.
Once there was a blind woman who hated herself and everything except for her two-eyed boyfriend...
Von--you have to actually go into the appended comments to the reviews: that's where he can be found (look to the longest threads).
Why did I do this? Either a hunch, or masochism....
Dang, Graeber is just on fire in those Amazon reviews. It's not like he just comments here and there briefly. He writes quite a lot, challenges reviewers, accuses people (probably correctly) of not having read the book, and has friendly exchanges with other readers that end in trading addresses. It's all, as noted above, insane. But I kinda like it too.
187, 190: He also flamed out rather spectacularly on MetaFilter when somebody posted about the book.
We need to get him to show up in this thread obviously...
200: That is a point in his favor.
Wow, reading that MeFi thread kind of makes me hate the internet. "Why can't you repost your entire bibliography right here?" "I haven't done any reading, and know nothing, but until you demonstrate something in this forum with clear links to other html websites, I cannot believe you."
The part of the book that I care about so far is his assertion that there's no good evidence that any society ran by the kind of barter system commonly asserted to have preceded money. It seems more likely that he could defend an absence of evidence unless he's blithely ignoring massive amounts of data. Anyone know anything about that piece of his argument?
I don't know, but I do know that he's completely correct that economics textbooks will propose a mythology of barter preceding money without bothering to even worry about empirical evidence. I was looking over an intro macro book by Blinder and Baumol recently and it had some line like "we can imagine how money must have developed."
The Apple story sounds ridiculous but not really relevant to his main point. So I still want to read this book.
70: I'm actually not sympathetic to authors who make serious errors of fact. Yes, of course it's possible to get the details right in a large book about a general topic. You do it by knowing what you intend to say, and having a reason to say it before you write about it.
I can only guess that you define "large" as "medium-sized". Neither Diamond nor his mentor William McNeill could have gotten the details right in any of the books they've written. I've assembles files of criticisms on both of them regarding topics I know about, but their books range from valuable to indispensable because some of their big and little theories are right.
It's also true that if you both cover a lot of territory and also are trying to say significant;y new things, your chance of making enormous errors are multiplied. If you're just trying to tweak a huge theory or nudge it over a little, you can probably avoid errors by relying on the work you're criticizing; you won't blamed because the other guy's errors won't be ascribed to you.
Maybe this is the stick-in-the-mud academic in me, but why can't books be written by experts ?
Some topics have no experts, especially the larger topics. The expansion of knowledge depends on going into the expert free zone.
One can't be an "expert" in a "general topic". "I specialize in everything" can be a punchline or a revealingly dumb thing to say, but it can't be a true statement in the way that "I specialize in planned communities of mid-20th C America" can be.
One can be a generalist, rather than a specialist, but a generalist will always know less about any given topic than a specialist in that topic will. This is not necessarily a problem, but it should be borne in mind.
That seems to have been all wrong to the point where people are suing him about it -- I'm confused about the details, but there's something there, and it's really pissed people off.
LB, as a lawyer, is it your opinion that if someone is being sued, that's evidence that they're wrong? Speak into the microphone please.
I checked the Metafilter thread, and his parting shot was quite reasonable, and about the first ten responses were Metafilter people either supporting Graeber, apologizing for other Metafilter people, or explaining the strange local culture.
I've been the bad guy in that sort of context myself, as some of you remember.
Neither Diamond nor his mentor William McNeill
This makes me interested-- Plagues and Peoples was great!
"I specialize in everything" can be a punchline or a revealingly dumb thing to say, but it can't be a true statement in the way that "I specialize in planned communities of mid-20th C America" can be.
I travel specialize in ladies' corsets.
One can be a specialist in a field that spans other fields. A biologist who studies the evolutionary history of mammals has a specialty that spans other specialties, like the history of primates or the history of ungulates. But it is still a specialty, with knowledge that is only had by those who have framed issues in that way and examined them with those tools.
The difference between being a specialist in a broad field and being a generalist is whether there are principles, methods, ideas etc. that span the large area. A biologist who studies a large taxon, like mammals, has all sorts of tools that make the field a unified field. This is different from someone like, say, Oswald Spengler, who took bits and pieces of different fields and put them together in his own, idiosyncratic way.
Environmental historians like Diamond and McNeill are working in a place that is transitioning from the realm of pure generalists to a specialty that happens to span a lot of other specialties.
I think that Diamond is reliable in his specific area, the evolutionary biology of agriculture, human disease, etc. He is pretty speculative when he draws historical lessons from the things he is expert on.
213: Right, you can specialize at varying levels of, uh, specialization, but that's really far from being a generalist.
Stephen Jay Gould (and I know enough about evolutionary bio to know that there are quibbles about his work) was brilliant at writing for the general public about evolution in general, although his particular speciality was (iirc) small mammal evolution. But that's more about being able to see the big picture of your field while also being accomplished at the micro level - it's totally different from being able to also speak knowledgeably about cultural anthropology and literature and architecture (or whatever). Since you don't get to be a specialist without spending a decent amount of time with your field in general terms, it's not that hard to be a good field generalist (although it's certainly beyond some).
But to be a generalist across multiple fields? You're going to get shit wrong. You can decide to sweat the small stuff (and thereby not get much done, in the final tally), you can develop a broad network of people to essentially outsource specialization to*, or you can say, Hey, it's a general work for the public, and so it will be imperfect. None of which is necessarily to defend Graeber so much as to inject some practicality into the discussion. The ideal of a never-wrong generalist is false (as is that of a specialist who can speak broadly and correctly), so let's reconsider the ideal.
* risking, of course, that the people to whom you're outsourcing are cranks whom you happen to know rather than Gould-like generalists-within-their-fields. Whether you happen to be friend-of-a-friend with Dean Baker, Brad DeLong, or Paul Krugman will have a big impact on what your generalist book will say about economics, let alone if your sister's FIL is Marty Feldstein.
He is pretty speculative when he draws historical lessons from the things he is expert on.
And when he makes shit up about false paternity rates.
I would like to propose another theory: Graeber intentionally included the erroneous sentence much in the manner of the "no brown M&Ms" clause previously discussed here. Graeber is fully aware that the brutal dictates of late capitalism do not allow for fully-staffed fact-checking departments, even at such an august publisher as Melville House. Therefore, he included the sentence as a sort of cri de coeur to highlight the degradation of the publishing industry, and by extension, the entire project of the written word in the early 21st century.
Josh, more detail please. As of right now I'll support Diamond, because I at least know who he is.
214.2: I was thinking: some specialities generalize more effectively. Many/most engineers tend towards a wholly analytic/rational approach that applies poorly to human-related phenomena (cf. all the computer geeks who find libertarianism plausible). Certain economists (e.g. DeLong) have approaches that accommodate humanity, while others (Tabarrok? not sure of the best example) can't deal with any humans that aren't spherical and frictionless. To some extent it's personal temper, of course, but it also has to do with what's prized in a discipline. The freshwater economists have been drilled to believe nothing that can't be represented by formulae with certain characteristics, such that observationally obvious things, such as the downward stickiness of prices/wages, are discounted. Even if such an approach were fruitful for economic analysis, it wouldn't nec. be so for a book about how people interact with different economic systems, because it would be unable to handle any data that couldn't be modeled just so.
Gould's main field research was on landsnails from the Bahamas.
I should add that Debt, the First 5000 Years is primarily a work of economic anthropology. It has an extremely wide temporal range, and touches on a ton of issues (so, in that regard, as Emerson says, mistakes are basically inevitable; he literally is covering the world over a 5000 year time frame), but the important arguments are solidly derived from, and grounded in, an area where Graeber is an academic specialist.
I haven't read it yet, but I've read a lot on the topics he covers -- rise of the state, origins of the cash economy, etc. I'm looking forward to the book.
His claims about anarchgism are weaker, but I;m sympathetic.
The Santa Fe Institute is an example of something that started anarchistically.
221: Right, thx. Saw him speak at U. Miami in 1989, which was very cool.
Bye the bye, every one of you mofos who like soccer in America need to watch the MLS cup this Sunday... if you're a Nielsen family. Otherwise I guess you can go to hell.
I take umbrage at the characterization of the Wizard of Oz (especially when considered together with its sequels) as "consumerist shit." They are weird books and I am even down with describing them as soulless, but I don't think that they are empty in a consumerist shit way at all. I think they're much stranger than that. Yes, they are made of hinky cheap tin, but the product is a lot more like some crazed loner's roadside attraction than like some cynical Hasbro production.
I honestly can't fathom why the Oz books (which I loved as a kid) are "soulless" at all. What the hell does that even mean?
Erm. Well, I suppose vowels are a bit thinner on the ground than what I have in 226. Apologies(e)s.
Anyhow, I was grateful for my grandfather's collection of the non-L. Frank Baum Oz books. Frankly, Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz and Kabumpo of Oz were not very good books, but they were pretty fun.
Well, they are kind of emotionally stunted, and pretty much no one in them is a person. Lots of characters are nothing but a deeply disturbing concept (see, for example, Jack Pumpkinhead) brought to life and then just as you are thinking, whoa, that is actually very disturbing, blithely set aside with little concern for the consequences. But I like that about them! They are heartless like childhood things should be.
I'm told by my Russian colleague that the books by Baum were plagiarized wholesale over there. Some random dude republished nearly direct translations.
brought to life and then just as you are thinking, whoa, that is actually very disturbing, blithely set aside with little concern for the consequences
Ah, yes, that is definitely correct and makes sense. But it was kind of great, as well; I remember them feeling sort of like the kinds of "adventures" you really do have as a kid; things seemed adventurous and scary and then mysteriously not scary and reassuring in a very cool, kid like way.
Roadside attraction with soul, but no real body to speak of.
Almost all the Oz books are available free or cheap, in relatively nice formats, on Kindle, which is nice.
Was (or is) anyone else here a fan of the Freddy the Pig books?
I'm told by my Russian colleague that the books by Baum were plagiarized wholesale over there. Some random dude republished nearly direct translations.
Wasn't that not long after the period when US publishers were routinely doing the same to everything popular out of Britain, not even needing to translate?
238: Could well be. But, of course, it seems so much worse.
Josh, more detail please.
Alex in 87 also disputed Diamond with insufficient detail. I, too, would be interested in knowing more.
I have my own gripes with Diamond, as I indicated in 67. I'd be happy to describe them, but they're not very interesting since they don't have any impact on his big influential work.
But if I'm being conned by GG&S, or even Collapse (which has its flaws but which I think is pretty sound overall), I'd like to know about it.
We all agree that the Wizard of Oz movie was brilliant, right?
crazed loner's roadside attraction than like some cynical Hasbro production.
OK, I'm willing to buy it. I never liked them, not as a child or as a scholar. Reading them gives me the heebies, and they seem basically racist and invested only in acquisitiveness. I want that. Gimme that.
"basically racist and invested only in acquisitiveness"
Whuh?
The biggest problem with the Wizard of Oz books is all the factual errors.
Halford, you've been trolling this whole thread by pretending not to know what words mean, haven't you? It's fine to disagree with my reading, but playing dumb is irritating.
Can you suggest a way that the Oz books are more racist and acquisitive than the typical children's book of the era that you do like?
I don't think he's playing dumb; I think he wants examples of how the books are "basically racist and invested only in acquisitiveness". That said, yes, he's been trolling this thread. Why should this night be different from all other nights?
Also, I'm still interested in the question of whether something can be allegorical without a referent.
I mean, if you're taking requests.
Josh, more detail please. As of right now I'll support Diamond, because I at least know who he is.
(The way he described the study in The Third Chimpanzee should have set every reader's alarm bells clanging, even without the post I linked. It's got all the markers of a classic urban legend.)
247 is a more polite version of my "whuh." I honestly don't know what you mean; I'm not just making that up. I mean, I get that you think they're pro-acquisitiveness and racist, I just don't know why. I honestly had no idea whatsoever what you meant by "soulless."
I didn't say it was allegorical. I said it takes the form and structure of an allegory.
I apologize for not getting the book out to cite page numbers for you. I'm having panic attacks all day today and haven't the energy, so I probably should have said nothing.
I'm not asking for page numbers. Honestly, the only reason I asked is that you actually do have interesting things to say about literature and I trust your judgment, but if you want to read this as some kind of passive-aggressive attack on my part, that's fine. Just for the record, though, I try to be careful make all of my attacks aggressive-aggressive though, so I really wasn't attacking you!
253: okay. By the way, I wasn't challenging you. I was genuinely interested. That said, it sounds like you're not up for a discussion. I hope you feel better soon.
251: I basically see nothing in that thread that supports your point. Diamond repeats a widely-quoted figure that most gene counsellors believe in, even though it's thinly-sourced. Later on, someone actually sites a more-recent study that is in the ballpark of the Diamond figure.
248: Horses shit horseshit. Bulls shit bullshit. And any farmer can easily tell the difference.
I honestly don't now what to make of 258, urple, but I'm very intrigued.
257: Are you fucking kidding? This alone should make you skeptical that the figure actually means anything:
When we tried to track down the scientific studies that support using this range of estimates, we could not find them. Every clinician to whom we talked seemed to know somebody who knew the scientific basis for the data, but each query led to a dead end.
Never mind the fact that Diamond doesn't just repeat a widely-quoted figure, he says that he talked to some mysterious Dr. X who actually ran the study. Oh yeah, and even in the one study anybody can actually find that comes close to Dr. X's study, the false paternity rate is closer to 4% than 10%.
Oh, and there's this, too: "For decades many clinical geneticists have suggested figures [for false paternity] ranging from 2% to 5%". Diamond's the one who comes up with "close to 10%".
"...In tests of genetic paternity recently conducted by Robin Baker and Mark Bellis [1], they found that around 10 percent of children had been sired by someone other than their ostensible fathers -- although the fathers consciously believed these children to be their own."
Sounds like what 257 says...
261: there's a really great article -- by Phil Curtin, I'm pretty sure -- that runs down all of the estimates of the number of slaves imported from Africa to the New World and finds that they're all based on guesses. This seemed relevant while I was typing it, I assure you.
More on Curtin, though the original article is far more dramatic than the obit suggests.
Was (or is) anyone else here a fan of the Freddy the Pig books?
Me! Me! The Flip-Pater read them all to me and my brother. Also read: the original, racist Dr. Doolittle books, the original, racist Penrod books,* the assumedly non-racist but what do I know Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books and a bunch of old WWI-era fighter pilot books.
* We are not intentionally racist. The original versions were the ones that the Flip-Pater had read as a child and, I think, inherited from his parents.
So Diamond repeats a figure that literally everybody in the field believes, and you regard this him lying? How does that work exactly?
89: Does anyone else have the nagging feeling Occupy might actually be a massive ad campaign for Debt...?
I've barely skimmed this thread, and perhaps this has been commented on, but: yeah. Or rather, Graeber's involvement with OWS makes me wonder what his deal is. He can be quite inspiring (see this post, for example); he's affiliated with Adbusters in some way that I haven't bothered to dig into; Adbusters apparently initially called for the occupation of Wall Street; and this profile opens with this statement:
David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.
Eh, I didn't read the entire profile, which appears to be lengthy, and ultimately I'm not much bothered by Graeber's involvement. I suppose my radar is up just a bit because of sometime commenter Frowner's negative remarks here from time to time about Adbusters.
None of this adds up to anything strongly negative or suspicious, just a nagging feeling, as you say.
Also, I'm still interested in the question of whether something can be allegorical without a referent.
The discussion of "diffuse cinema" at
Also, I'm still interested in the question of whether something can be allegorical without a referent.
">this cranky Jim Emerson article is an interesting walk down that path, leading not surprisingly to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Wow. Try again...
The discussion of "diffuse cinema" at this Jim Emerson article is an interesting walk down that path, leading not surprisingly to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
270: oh, thank god. After 258, 269 left me reeling.
266: the original, racist Penrod books
Oh, that's just great, Flip! Thanks a lot. Now I have to re-read them to see what I missed twigging to back in 1950 or so.
Next you're probably going to tell me Sax Rohmer didn't like Asians.
Next you're probably going to tell me Sax Rohmer didn't like Asians.
It may not surprise you to read that we had quite a few of those classics in the attic as well.
I haven't looked to see if this has been resolved, and I haven't even read the summary I'm about to link to which I just pulled up on google, but there was a bit of a controversy over an article Diamond wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago.
Anyway, Diamond seems like he's basically a synthesizer on science/environment/social science/history topics. It's not clear he really has a home discipline anymore, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
So Diamond repeats a figure that literally everybody in the field believes, and you regard this him lying? How does that work exactly?
At best he's carelessly repeating an urban legend (although even that doesn't explain the discrepancy between 2-5% and "close to 10%"). It's the mysterious Dr. X stuff that pushes it over the edge for me.
The very thread you linked to cites a paper that claims to have found 10%.
OT: I cannot believe how badly the movie adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader handles the dragon-to-Eustace restoration. Mumble "Larry! Why is the lion there again? Does the lion symbolize something?" mumble.
That paper came out two years after The Third Chimpanzee. (And a pre-publication version of it can't possibly have been the source for Diamond's figure, unless he's lying about where the figure came from.)
Here's the abstract from a 2006 paper that finds that the median nonpaternity rate is 3.3%, BTW. Still not "close to 10%".
But there's basically no reason to think that Diamond is lying. Some guy told him he did a study that found 10% but didn't publish it. There's an actual published study that did find 10% so it's certainly possible that a study can produce that number. Maybe that number is an overestimate, but the lower numbers come from better-designed studies, but there's nothing here that suggests anything untoward.
I'm surprised there isn't more recent news about the Diamond/New Yorker - New Guinea lawsuit. Maybe it's still ongoing. Maybe it was settled. Maybe I'm not searching with enough seriousness.
281: When the variance between all the other estimates is maybe 3 percentage points? And 5% is the high end of the range? No, not really.
Well, Josh, as I understand it you really, really don't like Diamond for some reason. He cited something based on others' research about false paternity that you didn't like, so you said "he makes shit up about false paternity rates." My conclusion is that you fear, probably correctly, that you are a bastard.
MY point is not that Diamond is always right, but that his writing is valuable even though it is often wrong on points of detail. I am not concerned with the personal insecurities of bastards.
As far as I can tell, two studies in medicine on the same subject have statistically different outcomes approximately all the time. We can probably conclude that one of the studies must be wrong, and it may even be the high one. But there's just no evidence that Diamond did something egregious here.
Personally, I dislike Diamond for his basically racist writings on Easter Island, but is clearly just nit-picking concern about points of detail.
It's funny, Diamond is pretty widely regarded as terrible by people in my field, but I can't for the life of me find anything that specifies why. Maybe just because he's very famous? Or maybe because he's sort of racist? Hmm, if I find something useful, I'll link to it.
Josh started off referencing a meaningless MeFi link. Than he was astonished that anyone might not accept MeFi as an authority. Then he made a serious but ungrounded accusation. Then he linked a link that seemed inconclusive to most readers, though of course we should have read to the very end. Finally, after a bit of toothpulling, he started to come up with actual argument.
Diamond seems to have exaggerated and may well have been wrong.
My favorite story about a generalist/popular writer faking information is about Mike Davis. Apparently one of the conversations with an expert in one of his books is entirely fictional. But the weird thing is that it turns out Davis actually had an interview scheduled with this expert, but showed up for the interview with the account of the interview he wanted already written. He then simply asked the expert to sign off on the account. He was just like, "this is what I need you to say, will you say it?" And the guy said "sure."
I'd look up details, but I'm lazy, and I'm typing awkwardly because there is a child asleep in my lap, and I'm not sure if there is a 5 or a 10% chance that she is not actually mine.
The most self-defeating error I recall seeing in a book was in a stupid little tome titled Games for the Superintelligent by James Fixx*. He posed the problem of why can't you lose weight by drinking a cold drink of Y calories that requires X calories to warm to body temperature where X>Y and claimed it was an unexplained mystery.
*Running zealot whom God killed during a run** because he could.
**The memorial stone in the picture was a gift from "admirers in N.E. Scotland" because of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
It used to be 10% but I turned middle aged and now women don't fall for my charms as often.
288: I thought it was a mix of him not really crediting some people with work he built on (or depending on how you look at it, imitated) and his near determinism in GG&S. Also, he spends the end of that book telling historians what to do to make their field into a science worth following. But on the substantive points, not a whole lot of explicit disagreement/agreement.
Outside of GG&S I've read only a few of his op-eds and they seemed like overgeneralized stuff, but not out of the ordinary for crappy op-eds. The only really damning stuff I've seen, if true, is the libel suit.
Have any of these people researching nonpaternity rates ever even heard of an error bar?
And on the not really crediting I don't mean not citing at all, more like they're in the further reading, but you wouldn't really know how similar their prior work was if you hadn't read it. Mainly I mean Cro/sby.
295: Because the existence of error bars significantly contribute to the nonpaternity rate.
Have any of these people researching nonpaternity rates ever even heard of an error bar?
I mean, the condom dispenser in the bathroom was broken, the lighting was just terrible, they had this special on body shots which didn't even taste good, and well.
294: I think that's right, but I can't find anything in print. I mean, I've certinaly heard plenty of people calling Diamond a determinist and plenty of others saying that he didn't cite this or that deserving scholar, but I'm surprised that I can't find any coherent attack on or debunking of his work.
298: Your narrative successes upthread led you to get carried away with embellishments. Hitler had the same problem.
Essear 7:48: 5% isn't close to 10%?
Essear 8:42: Have any of these people researching nonpaternity rates ever even heard of an error bar?
My point is that whether 5% is close to 10% or not depends on the error bars.
302: I can't either. I can think of an article commenting on the lack of response, though.
I've certinaly[sic] heard plenty of people calling Diamond a determinist
I knew they'd say that.
Essear 8:9: At once the royal secretaries were summoned--on the twenty-third day of the third month, the month of Sivan. They wrote out all Mordecai's orders to the Jews, and to the satraps, governors and nobles of the 127 provinces stretching from India to Cush. These orders were written in the script of each province and the language of each people and also to the Jews in their own script and language.
The real Jared Diamond would say that he left enough room for individual contingency. I think he even uses "what if Hitler died in a car crash?" hypothetical at one point.
Mike Davis was also guilty of being guilty by an order of magnitude or two about how many tons per acre of concrete there were in LA, or maybe some part of LA.
guilty of being guilty = innocent of not being guilty
289: What, I don't rate a personalized insult on the level of "Brahmin fratboy"? I'm hurt.
311: come on, the bastard thing was pretty good.
309: Ecology of Fear has some pretty scandalous errors in it, ranging from screwing around with weather statistics to make it sound like greater LA has the same incidence of twisters as tornado alley to, um, some other really bad stuff that I can't recall. That said, I think the overarching point of the book holds, and I used to teach it pretty frequently in a class on disasters. It's not as good as City of Quartz, though, which is a real masterpiece.
come on, the bastard thing was pretty good.
±3%
314: I met you at the bar! Did I meet you? You're hot.
312: True! But still not quite as pithy. I expect more, Emerson!
Your performance has been pretty crappy, Josh. It took four or five posts before you delivered something intelligible. Why should anyone have taken any of your first four posts at all seriously? Eventually, by teeth-pulling methods, we succeeded in at least saying what you meant. But you seemed to resent that.
313: Know anything about Late Victorian Holocausts?
Why should anyone have taken any of your first four posts at all seriously?
Hi, this is Unfogged. Are you familiar with the place?
" in at least getting to say what you meant. But you seemed to resent our doing that".
And still not pithy, dammit! C'mon, I know you've got it in you.
Yes, actually I'm familiar enough to have mostly avoided it until recently.
320: are you kidding? Emerson has been commenting here for two years, since his son was in diapers, when the site was still run by Glen Reynolds and Jason Kottke and people called it a MUD.
318: I know where it is on my shelf and that I've never read it. But I don't know why.
Also, it seems that the chancellor of my university called in the police, who used pepper spray and arrested a bunch of people, on the campus Occupy protesters today. Remember when, a couple of years ago, Apo said there was going to be a significant uptick in political violence? That was pretty prescient, wasn't it?
324: Way to bring the thread full circle!
Speaking of apo and political violence. Obama, Anti-christ*.
*Probably pwned somewhere in a thread I did not read because I've been busy the last few days having the last shreds of my self-dignity flushed down toilet working.
I know where it is on my shelf and that I've never read it. But I don't know why.
That sounds like a question for your therapist. Or maybe your rabbi.
It's a thread about charlatans, and some say that the charlatan was Diamond.
325: Have you seen the chart that compares youth unemployment in the U.S. with youth unemployment in MENA?
I've certinaly heard plenty of people calling Diamond a determinist
I called him that in 67, because he is. The question is not whether he's a determinist, but whether his determinism is appropriate to his subject matter - whether or not he's right.
In GG&S he made a persuasive deterministic case.
Hell. Wafer.
Here is a whole page of posts, for what they are worth. I never much bothered with them.
Louis">http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/jared-diamond/">Louis Proyect pretty much hates Jared Diamond.
I gotta get back to Miyamoto Musashi.
That's what Sasaki Kojiro said, and look how things worked out for him.
333: yeah, well, the thing is, in my field at least, no determinists are ever right. Put another way, mono-causal explanations are never going to win an argument among historians, maybe especially among environmental historians, and that's who I was talking about upthread
I should probably add that I've read GG&S several times and taught it to grad students at least twice that I can think of. On the one hand, I think it's a boring book that flirts with determinism. But it never really crosses the line, in my view. I think that Diamond is actually pretty good about making allowances for (largely unexplored) individual agency and also for the shaping power of culture. Mostly, though, I'm awed by a book that can cover so much ground so authoritatively. Anyway, I wasn't attacking him upthread and I'm not doing so here. Except for being boring, which he is.
Also, his determinism gets him to the early modern period pretty well, and then when it comes to China and Europe it's all about peninsulas more or less. He explains the overwhelming expansions pretty well, but when history is required, he heads for the conclusion.
yeah, well, the thing is, in my field at least, no determinists are ever right.
I'd say that a little less strongly, but I take your point. Anyway, I don't think Diamond is really in your field.
In GG&S, the history Diamond recounts isn't monocausal - hell, he's got three causes right in the book title, and a lot of others in the book. It is, however, very deterministic.
Have you read it?
297, 298, etc: Is it really possible that there isn't a bar near a university or national lab or something called The Error Bar? If not, it seems necessary to invent it.
340: it would, to be fair, be impossible to google.
I don't think Diamond is really in your field.
He does. And the people in my field agree. But I think you're right. Mostly because I don't think I'm in my field any more. Actually, I'm not really sure I ever was.
You're outstanding in your field.
||
Video from UC Davis of cops calmly pepper-spraying the shit out some people for, you know, sitting.
What the fuck is wrong with cops, though, seriously? gswift, any thoughts?
|>
What's racist about Diamond's writings on Easter Island? I only know what he wrote about it in Collapse, but I don't see what's racist about "people on Easter Island and on Iceland both ruined their islands by doing the exact same thing and stupidly cutting down all the trees."
345: Holy shit! That's awful. And I think of Davis as such a tranquil little place.
345: Were you here when the cops up in Humboldt put pepper spray in the Headwaters protestors' eyes with Q-Tips?
"Police," he suggested confidently.
"The police aren't for that," observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on her way.
Stevie's face lengthened considerably. He was thinking. The more intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.
And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his intellectual enterprise.
"Not for that?" he mumbled, resigned but surprised. "Not for that?" He had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil. The notion of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of the power of the men in blue. He had liked all police constables tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness. And he was pained. He was irritated, too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force. For Stevie was frank and as open as the day himself. What did they mean by pretending then? Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values, he wished to go to the bottom of the matter. He carried on his inquiry by means of an angry challenge.
"What for are they then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me."
Winnie disliked controversy. But fearing most a fit of black depression consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at first, she did not altogether decline the discussion. Guiltless of all irony, she answered yet in a form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc, Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.
"Don't you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have."
348: I was, yeah. That was terrible, too. Something about the wide-angle spray in this case seems like it makes it worse, though.
348: To be fair, the Q-tips box only says not to put them in ears.
It's the casualness that gets me. Like, eh, why not take a stroll with some pepper spray, no big deal. I guess cops are no longer capable of exercising force against people who they have not first debilitated, whether or not those people are doing anything violent.
345: yeah, I just blogged that. It's a great day to be a Gunrock an Aggie!
352: either violence by cops no longer counts as violence, or non-compliance by civilians counts presumptively as violence. I can't figure out which it is. Maybe both?
flippanter and biohazard and I had the same childhood library. but you should also have read pippi longstocking. and lots of enid blyton "adventure" books, the ones she spent time on, unlike the famous five or [shudder] the secret seven.
59
I'm generally sympathetic to authors who get details wrong. I don't know anything about the book that James is talking about in 45, but that error doesn't strike me as fatal (unless the author bases a large chunk of his argument on that fact, or it's a book about big explosions or something.)
The error in question was
... On page 179 in connection with the 1983 Beirut marine barracks bombing the book states "... The resulting explosion was massive, the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT detonating, giving it the sorrowful distinction of being the largest nonnuclear explosion in history. ...". ...
I think this error is in fact pretty damaging. Not because it is important in itself but because it suggests that the author is unable to recognize BS. When you see something like that a little alarm should go off in your head and you should ask yourself whether it can possibly be correct. Then a little thought should conclude that it is totally implausible as in fact is easily confirmed.
Having a defective BS detector is a serious flaw if you are writing a book about an US intelligence organization as you are bound to encounter loads BS in your research and you need the ability to filter it out.
|| I just went and looked: windchill -17F right now. My son is out at a dance -- I told him if he steps outside with a girl, he should hold her close. He replied: "Safety first." |>
Maybe I should go re-read the part of Collapse about the Bitterroot.
What's racist about Diamond's writings on Easter Island? I only know what he wrote about it in Collapse, but I don't see what's racist about "people on Easter Island and on Iceland both ruined their islands by doing the exact same thing and stupidly cutting down all the trees."
Cause of the dying race trope & cause he ignores the impact of non-easter-islanders on them.
Scott Hamilton has a good summary.
358: That may be the most fair assessment of Greens and their unmitigated evil that I've ever seen.
If you want to see an even better denunciation of the Labour Party, the recent-most post, where he posts a conversation he had at a cafe with a local MP is hilarious. (A week to go till the election, and grah I want it all to be over.)
Wait, I'm not sure I understand this Easter Island thing. The chapter in Collapse is about why Rapa Nui was so poor in 1722, right? (I haven't read it.) That's the "mystery" of Easter Island, that the natives seemed to have lost technology before 1722. If that's what it's about, then the argument Keir linked to makes zero sense, because it's about events that happened in the 19th century.
Ok, I finally read the first couple hundred comments. I think I can now be reasonably sure that the Wizard of Oz was not taken as an outright parable of Populism until the 1960s, and that it is apparently not knowable what Baum intended. On that last point, did Baum not keep papers/archives of what he did? Interviews with family members on what they remember aren't great as evidence. But on the principle that you need some positive evidence, there doesn't seem to be any on the intended allegory side.
However: it does seem like the book - which I guess I should read - does make political references. Whether these add up to a full allegory is another matter. Lots of things can refer to the contemporary world without adding up to an overall interpretation. This article - I love that it's at usagold.com - appears to be the second one that Graeber footnotes. It's much more supportive of Graeber's view than the other one that LB linked above but it still lacks the positive evidence for an intentional allegory. It's more like a biscuit allegory - it's there if you want to see it.
By the way, it also seems clear enough that Baum was a Republican. Of course, just because Baum was not a Populist does not mean he couldn't have referred to them. You don't have to be sympathetic to a movement to write about it. The Taylor article I link to above makes this point pretty well.
Incidentally, there's an article locked away in JSTOR (sorry) about some later series that Baum wrote where he did put explicit politics into one of the novels: the Democrats seem to have been the bad guys. The article doesn't say anything about Populism, although it footnotes what seems to have been the first article to make the allegory claim.
I think this comment is enough to move my tasks into the more urgent categories.
353: For what little it's worth, I emailed the chancellor and told her that there is no way I would ever allow my children to attend UC-Davis after witnessing the way they treat their students.
Hmmm:
There's this marxist guys called Mouffe, I can't quite remember, who had a student who went off and did research on the origins of Apple computers. Apparently they're all people who had dropped out of IBM, and are all sort of weird Republican-Libertarian-pot-smoking type people. But they ended up creating these democratic circles which operated exactly like anarchist affinity groups where they sit around and make decisions by consensus and get really stoned, just like affinity groups, and they did it because they were trying to be maximumly innovative and they found that was the only thing that worked.
Searching turned up a political theorist named Mouffe - a woman, not a guy, but possibly a Marxist - who could be the person Graeber's referring to, but I didn't get as far as finding the source. I suspect Sifu is right that he might have meant Homebrew, but he was apparently thinking of something more particular than common knowledge here as a source.
On the OP: One fact that seems relevant to me is that Graeber was born in 1961. If Louis Menand had a throwaway line in one of his books stating that the Beatles were a guitar-driven quintet known for their Muddy Waters covers, I'd think something had gone badly wrong, because he was totally off about facts that were common knowledge for people his age. If Susan Sontag did the same, I'd think it was sloppy but not that huge a deal. I think Graeber may be closer to hypothetical Sontag than hypothetical Menad on this one.
On top of which, he most likely spent big chunks of the 80s and 90s in Madagascar doing his fieldwork, so background knowledge those of us coming in age during those years take for granted may have completely passed him by.
237: Freddy the Detective is my favorite, but I did not like Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars.
And I've lost the comment number, but what the hell happens to Eustace the Dragon? Nothing about it being like when you pull off a scab and it hurts like billy-o? That was my favorite part. When I was 14 or so, long after I'd stopped being Christian, I used to wear a bracelet high on my arm where it would be hidden under the sleeves of my uniform blouse and remind me not to be so mean, an explicitly Eustacelike mortification of the flesh. I forget, though, whether that was the year I made a tiny pouch and wore it around my neck with a plastic fly inside and would write my friends notes in the voice of the fly. Pretty amazing I even had friends.
you and I would have totes been friends, thorn.
Video from UC Davis of cops calmly pepper-spraying the shit out some people for, you know, sitting.
Well, it's good to get more clarity on what is and isn't non-violent protest.
Not non-violent protest:
- linking arms
- sitting
Non-violent protest:
???
Non-violent protest:
White upper middle-class people sitting in their homes watching television.
I'm late as usual ... in part because I've been reading Graeber's books. I had the same WTF reaction to the Apple sentence. I particularly hate coming across that sort of thing in books I am (a) predisposed to like but (b) need to be able to believe the author when it comes to his account of Life Among The Xwatiutl and so on. I've also been reading his earlier book--"Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value"--and again parts of it are very good, and very thought-provoking. A lot of the Debt book is a recycling of that material. In both books he has a tendency to hop around from theme to theme or digression to digression--sustained bits of argument float around in a general suspension of material. Some of this is a consequence of the problem of arguing from the specifics, e.g. that it matters that society x did it this way, society y did it that way, etc. But of course a consequence of this is that you have to be able to believe the guy on the details.
Coincidentally I had a similar experience the other day reading an interesting-looking book about copyright, where there was a crazy factual howler on the second page. Not encouraging.
There's this marxist guys called Mouffe, I can't quite remember, who had a student who went off and did research on the origins of Apple computers.
Christ. It's hard to think of anyone I'd rely less on for knowledge of the history of silicon valley than some student of Laclau & Mouffe's.
Nothing about it being like when you pull off a scab and it hurts like billy-o? That was my favorite part.
Aslan sort of claws the sand of the beach and then roars the dragon back into Eustace. It's really weak. The scene in the book is part and parcel of the books' surprising physicality -- from the loving descriptions of the food at Mr. and Mrs. Beaver's house to Aslan clawing Aravis' back to, of course, all the descriptions of Aslan's fur, mane, paws and breath. And one would have expected the being-born-again scene in Dawn Treader to get some attention to accuracy, given the producers' ill-concealed Walmart Jesus marketing.
Non-violent protest:
Whatever Teapartiers say it is.
I agree with 361.
Also, even if he's wrong about Easter Island (and again, as 361 says, what Diamond actually says doesn't seem to be what that post thinks he says), I don't see what's *racist* about it. After all his main example is Greenland where it was white people who made themselves poor by mishandling the environment and then got killed in the end by technologically superior brown people.
but you should also have read pippi longstocking. and lots of enid blyton "adventure" books, the ones she spent time on, unlike the famous five or [shudder] the secret seven.
Of course I read the Pippi Longstocking books. I'm not an animal. A friend who grew up in India is the only person I know who regularly refers to Enid Blyton in conversation.
Non-violent protest....
The question is not the limits of non-violent protest (passive resistance? chaining oneself to things? sitting in trees for months on end?) but the utter failure of authorities in many places to manage non-violent, but superficially annoying and disruptive, protests non-violently. Mayors and cops, like a lot of us, burn too many calories over immaterial challenges to their authority and dignity.
"Authority" and "dignity" are my names for my testicles.
like a lot of us
Right. Who among us hasn't maced someone who was in there way?
378, 379: I hate you both.
(I'm referring to Moby's testicles.)
I once maced a man in Reno just to see him cry. And to make it easier to steal his wallet.
376
... I don't see what's *racist* about it. ...
It's racist to attribute the problems of nonwhite people to anything other than white people. Didn't you get the memo?
the utter failure of authorities in many places to manage non-violent, but superficially annoying and disruptive, protests non-violently.
The threat of violence (power, potens, potential) is the health of the state and the health of the non-state, because (Arendt) violence is the end (pun?) of politics/power.
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance....Arendt
Bah. Power and violence are in dialectical relation, about as opposite as capital and labour. The demonstration must always contain or signify violence, and never actualize it. Always "This, before the violence"
...
Y'all have totally turned me off Graeber. Anthropology? There are names and numbers in/of European capitals to examine. Go read Hudson and Henry Liu.
Reading Carchedi Behind the Crisis instead.
Heard of him? Doubt it.
376, 361: Yeah, wow. Hamilton is an exact example of what we're talking about: Someone who has zero credibility because of an inability to grasp basic factual matters.
Laclau & Mouffe
I looked at agonism. Death to Post-Marxism!
But Belgium appears to be, have been, a very fecund ground of political theory. We can only hope for such stimulating interesting times in the US, like a Presidential election deadlocked in the E-college and then deadlocked in Congress. No President for a couple years sounds terrific.
I have to retract 385, which was written before reading 383.
Damn, I forgot about the memo! It's so hard to keep those directives from the Central Committee straight.
I don't see what's racist about "people on Easter Island and on Iceland both ruined their islands by doing the exact same thing and stupidly cutting down all the trees."
I don't get it at all, either. I'm really tempted to do enough reading to do a full-on defense of Diamond. It would be pointless, because it would take a lot of time, and the only real audience I would find is random internet people. But shit. It really seems like his critics go out of their way to misinterpret and nitpick.
I'm especially bothered by the way the argument seems to rely on the idea that his narrative has the same form as classic racist narratives. We're arguing about causation here, not literature. Did chopping down all the trees on Easter Island contribute to the collapse of the society, and if so, how much?
I think Diamond's basic narratives are strikingly anti-racist. That is, Diamond's writing makes it clear that non-Eurasian peoples have their own *interesting history*. My favorite part of Collapse was the discussion of the Inuit expansion. The pre-Eurasian history of the rest of the world isn't a static boring thing where people never had any new ideas and lived in perfect tranquil harmony with nature. The Inuit had some very clever very important technologies and then proceeded to do what humans tend to do when they can: expand and kill their neighbors. The Polynesians, the Bantus, the Inuit, all have histories just as interesting as Europe's where they were just as smart and just as evil. It's a deeply anti-racist story.
363: look, it was bad, but it's not like we make the students wear powder blue. Kidding aside, thanks for doing that. I certainly hope tens of thousands of other people do the same thing, particularly as the chancellor's secret plan to end the war strategy for dealing with the ongoing funding shortfall is to grow the number of out-of-state and/or foreign students by approximately 5,000 over the next decade.
strategy for dealing with the ongoing funding shortfall is to grow the number of out-of-state and/or foreign students by approximately 5,000 over the next decade.
Good luck with that. Many British universities followed the same strategy over the last 10 years. So the anti-immigration lobby got nervous and persuaded the government to stop letting the students into the country.
390: strategy for dealing with the ongoing funding shortfall is to grow the number of out-of-state and/or foreign students by approximately 5,000 over the next decade.
Don't forget big-time football!
Reflecting on Violence as Potential (power), quoting Carchedi
"First, realised phenomena contain poten-
tial phenomena within themselves, but not the other way around.
Second, potentials, being formless, can never be observed because observation implies realisation.
Third...what is potential within a certain sphere of reality (at a certain level of abstraction) can be realised in another sphere (at another level of abstraction)."
Violence, e.g. between protesters and authorities, is a relation containing a process (and vice versa), a phenomenon.
391: the shortcomings in her plan: let me show you them.
392: don't tase pepper spray troll me, bro.
(530) 752-2065 is the number of the Chancellor's office at UC Davis, currently you get a message that says the mailbox is full.
530-752-6202 is the number of the professional standards office for the UC Davis police. You can leave a message for Captain Joyce Souza.
It's funny about getting into arguments. I started the thread thinking that the book was thought-provoking and worth reading, the Wizard of Oz bit gave me pause, but wasn't a real worry given that plenty of reasonable people (misguided in this respect as they clearly are) have believed it, and the Apple thing made me not want to rely on it for any facts I couldn't, or hadn't checked. But I did still find the argument that credit preceded coinage convincing.
After arguing about it, I was starting to feel as if Halford was right about what I really meant, and the book was completely worthless. I had to go cool down before I remembered that I actually did want to finish it.
The chancellor's public e-mail is: officeofthechancellor@ucdavis.edu
And this is an interesting open letter from the professor who organized the demonstration.
And I've lost the comment number, but what the hell happens to Eustace the Dragon? Nothing about it being like when you pull off a scab and it hurts like billy-o? That was my favorite part. When I was 14 or so, long after I'd stopped being Christian, I used to wear a bracelet high on my arm where it would be hidden under the sleeves of my uniform blouse and remind me not to be so mean, an explicitly Eustacelike mortification of the flesh.
I love you.
396.last: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Trolling in Internet Dialogue.
There's this marxist guys called Mouffe, I can't quite remember, who had a student who went off and did research on the origins of Apple computers.
Christ. It's hard to think of anyone I'd rely less on for knowledge of the history of silicon valley than some student of Laclau & Mouffe's.
Alright, I think he must be talking about the work of Thierry Bardini link, who writes about the origins of the personal computer as a whole, rather than just Apple.
I haven't read his book, but I have read What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which cover a lot of the same territory.
Anyway, you could amend Graeber's statement to something like:
The personal computer was developed by a distributed network of disaffected engineers, tinkering and collaborating outside the scope of what they were officially supposed to be doing for money at various research centers and big businesses.
Oh, I forgot about the internal italics tag problem: s/b second paragraph.
Chancellor Katehi has a blog. Her most recent post is about promoting civil discourse on campus. My comment is pending moderation.
"Moderation in defense of justice is no virtue."
345: This is what we mean when we say "non-violence protects the state".
405 was me. Because I am a freeway.
Tom Cochrane wants to ride you all night long.
I don't think 405 is particularly apt. Watch the second half of the video, where the students surround the cops and drive them back, shouting "You can go." I'm not sure how any display or outcome of street fighting would be more inspiring.
Yeah, but so what? The cops did what they came to do, the students were tortured and arrested, and I'm supposed to be happy with the non-violence scam because a 200-person crowd was able to shout the cops away afterwards? The reason the cops left was because they were severely outnumbered and the crowd started acting like it might get violent. They certainly didn't leave because it suddenly occurred to them that violence was wrong or counter-productive. Quite the contrary, they were worried that they would become the subjects of violent reprisals themselves.
Well, Natilo, this is America, where Mao's power is, in most states, available to any obsessed loner with the rudiments of state-sponsored identification. Get out there and make bob proud.
The short version of Carchedi?
Before you can have a mob you need a lot of people.
409: The bus to the gun shop is running 14 minutes late, and I should take a shower at some point anyhow.
408:The reason the cops left was because they were severely outnumbered
The cops had a lot of friends in their holsters and belts.
"Counter-productive" is the most likely.
At some point soon, when the kids finally realize they have no futures to lose or jeopardize, we may start arguing about which side of the mob is acting most counter productively.
Do I want to see body counts on the Internet? Doesn't matter what I want.
I read about the casualties every single day already.
410:You know, you could give a spoiler alert.
They certainly didn't leave because it suddenly occurred to them that violence was wrong or counter-productive.
I don't know how you can be certain about this. I think if you're a cop in that situation, your question is less "can I win?" than it is about whether continued violence is counterproductive.
Louis Proyect ...starts a history of the Black Bloc. Bad bad Antonio Negri.
You know, part of me believes the Old Commies just want to retain their personal necessity as the Vanguard.
But I am told trusting material conditions and spontaneity is bad theory.
408: I'd bet on them leaving 'cause a politician decided the whole thing was going to look bad on the evening news and on YouTube rather than on the police suddenly getting scared.
And Flip, someone shooting a cop or setting off bombs is inevitable if the economy and employment don't pick up. Once enough of the middle class is disillusioned people with armament or technical knowledge will think of putting it to use. Just the possibility of getting drafted was enough to prompt that in the Sixties.
The cops left because they did the job they were sent to do. It's that simple. They were sent to the Quad to disperse the protestors who wanted to camp on university property over the weekend. The cops accomplished their goal first by escalating the situation and then by using pepper spray. Then they left.
They didn't leave because violence was counterproductive in the abstract. They left because they didn't want to push things out of the abstract and into the concrete.
417: There were still a big crowd of protestors there when the cops left. They made some arrests, and brutalized some people, but they didn't disperse "the crowd". If there'd been 200 cops instead of 20, then they would have dispersed the crowd.
No one said that a nonviolent action would be free of casualties. Protesters in nonviolent conflict will get hurt, and sometimes even killed. The UC Davis students were incredibly brave to stand their ground, precisely because they knew the danger was real when then signed on to nonviolent protest.
When people are hurt in a violent action, no one acts surprised or thinks it represents the failure of violence as a tactic. The fact that nonviolent resisters also suffer casualties doesn't make nonviolence different or worse than violence.
One goal of this sort of nonviolent action is to either force the state to give in to your demands or to reveal their barbarity. The second possible outcome is tragic, but it still represents progress for the cause of the resistance. The University Chancellor may have to step down in the wake of this event. And if she doesn't, we need to press harder.
What would have been accomplished if the UC Davis students had opened fire on the police? Would America rally behind the Occupy Wall Street movement? Would fewer people be hurt, or more?
Katehi and Pike are casting themselves in the roles of George Wallace and Bull Connor. This is also progress.
They dispersed/arrested the people who planned to camp, Nat. That was their task. You can trust me on this. Or not.
It is truly mystifying to me what the fuck UC administrators think they are doing. "I know! This will surely make me come out looking really good!"
What would have been accomplished if the UC Davis students had opened fire on the police? Would America rally behind the Occupy Wall Street movement? Would fewer people be hurt, or more?
I don't know, but it seems to me we remember those occasions with a particular fondness. Bastille, Paris 1871, Homestead, Winter Palace, Munich. Did Madison WI 1970 (71?) really have snipers?
Revolution is not a public relations campaign. Nor a mob. Nor a carefully calibrated campaign.
The going gets tough and the tough get crazy.
Homestead is now an big box retail center.
The disciplined courageous nonviolent resistance in face of the dictators' brutalities may induce unease, disaffection, unreliability, and in extreme situations even mutiny among the dictators' own soldiers and population. This resistance may also result in increased international condemnation of the dictatorship. In addition, skillful, disciplined, and persistent use of political defiance may result in more and more participation in the resistance by people who normally would give their tacit support to the dictators or generally remain neutral in the conflict.
..
Mass noncooperation and defiance can so change social and political situations, especially power relationships, that the dictators' ability to control the economic, social, and political processes of government and the society is in fact taken away. The opponents' military forces may become so unreliable that they no longer simply obey orders to repress resisters. Although the opponents' leaders remain in their positions, and adhere to their original goals, their ability to act effectively has been taken away from them. That is called nonviolent coercion.
8 years ago I was in college and I didn't want to risk getting arrested because I was sure I'd have a job if I didn't get arrested. Now the calculus is different.
And Flip, someone shooting a cop or setting off bombs is inevitable if the economy and employment don't pick up.
Why? Haven't people been predicting this in the U.S. since roughly 1917? How long can leftists sustain the axiom of inevitability?
You do realize that such things have happened since 1917, right? It generally hasn't been a good thing either.
Also, even if he's wrong about Easter Island (and again, as 361 says, what Diamond actually says doesn't seem to be what that post thinks he says), I don't see what's *racist* about it. After all his main example is Greenland where it was white people who made themselves poor by mishandling the environment and then got killed in the end by technologically superior brown people.
Because there's this racist narrative of `first, all the brown people ruined their land, and started dying off, then white people turned up to a basically empty (waste) land and then why shouldn't they take it?'
So it is very problematic to (a) repeat that narrative without any acknowledgement of the inherent racism, and (b) totally erase the impact of the colonial experience.
And so it then becomes problematic to use sources in a way that isn't aware of that narrative, and doesn't account for the possibilities of self-interestedness etc.
The argument is that Diamond is incorrect to place the collapse in 1722, that that is a rewriting of history to fit the dying race narrative.
376, 361: Yeah, wow. Hamilton is an exact example of what we're talking about: Someone who has zero credibility because of an inability to grasp basic factual matters.
Er, what? Example? Hamilton is a professional historian, with research interests in the Pacific Islands. While I'm sure he's capable of fucking up, I would like to see specific evidence.
Further to 428: it hasn't always been the left, either. Hasn't always been people with coherent ideologies, really.
But yes, no leftist revolution, none likely.
430: But yes, no leftist revolution, none likely.
Okay, just off the top of my head, some times when the people have picked up the gun:
Bleeding Kansas
Haymarket
Harlan County War
Molly Maguires
Homestead
1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Truck Strike
Weatherman
SLA
MOVE
Wall Street Bombing
Black Panthers
Now, of course, many of these did not end well for working people, but some of them did. And I don't necessarily agree with the ideologies of all the parties involved either. But it seems to me that the main difference between 1876, 1892, 1934, 1968 and now, is that armed struggle has been, to a great extent, delegitimized on the left. No such failure of resolve on the right. Will there be a revolution here, in our lifetime? I'm pretty agnostic on that question. It sure seems like we might be closer to that eventuality than we were in say, 1996. Who knows what changes another 15 years may have wrought?
430: Yeah, I wasn't predicting a leftist revolution, just some escalation of violence from where it is now. That escalation could be enough to cause some major changes though, even bankers get scared sometimes.
The argument is that Diamond is incorrect to place the collapse in 1722
We're talking about Jared Diamond, here right? Maybe some guy named Diamond said something like that, but it wasn't Jared. Never happened.
I would like to see specific evidence.
Read the book. Diamond simply doesn't say the things you attribute to him. Never happened.
I have read the book, and while of course I haven't got it right next to me to argue from the text, I am pretty sure that Diamond does in fact attribute the collapse to ecological mismanagement prior to the arrival of Europeans.
The counter-arguments to that are laid out above.
(b) totally erase the impact of the colonial experience.
By the way, since Diamond's subject matter is what took place on Easter Island before the colonial experience, he wouldn't have any particular reason to discuss what happened after 1722. But he did.
Seriously. Read the book.
And of course, given that the discussion was over Hamilton's credibility, I would like to see an example of his mistakes.
As I say, I have read the fucking book. Do us the courtesy of assuming I am not arguing from a position of extreme idiocy.
If I get some of this I'm prepared no matter which way it goes.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/wacky-edibles/c399/
I'm with politicalfootball here, Keir isn't making sense.
437: (b) totally erase the impact of the colonial experience.
At the bottom of page 111, Diamond says: "The sad story of European impacts on Easter Islanders may be quickly summarized." He then spends a page-and-a-half doing that. As I said, it's not the subject of his book, since he's interested in the society that Europeans found, but it's there.
So here's Hamilton talking about researchers on Easter Island:
They found that population decline on the island was caused by the slave trade and European diseases, and that deforestation was caused by rats rather than islanders.
Hamilton is trying to make people think that Diamond didn't address the population decline, European diseases and the slave trade. This is false. Page 112.
The subject matter of the book is the deforestation, something that Diamond contends - and Hamilton doesn't dispute - took place before the arrival of Europeans.
and Hamilton doesn't dispute
I say that Hamilton doesn't dispute this, but you have to read him very closely to appreciate that. He's totally bullshitting on that point - you can see that he wants to give the appearance of rebutting Diamond's argument about timing.
(I'm on hiatus from Unfogged for a while, but glimpsing the name of Diamond in this discussion I felt I should refer to this thread wherein his merits and demerits were discussed extensively.)
I'm with politicalfootball here, Keir isn't making sense.
I think Keir's priority here is convincing himself that he's surrounded by people more stupid and immoral than himself. He uses this strident and insulting tone to ensure that no one will ever change their mind to agree with him, so he won't have to share the moral high ground.
[C]onvincing himself that he's surrounded by people more stupid and immoral than himself.... [H]e won't have to share the moral high ground.
Not to point fingers at mirrors, but this doesn't constitute a novelty around the ol' cracker barrel of Unfogged.
Not to point fingers at mirrors
Yeah, I was going to say that isn't a standard I'm particularly comfortable being judged by.
I daresay I have no idea what you're talking about.
I think Keir's priority here is convincing himself that he's surrounded by people more stupid and immoral than himself. He uses this strident and insulting tone to ensure that no one will ever change their mind to agree with him, so he won't have to share the moral high ground.
The other day you made a slightly more muted accusation of this sort about me. I have to say that I found it surprisingly dickish then, and I find it even more surprisingly dickish now. Keir is generally pretty levelheaded, isn't he? (I think the same of you, by the way, which is why I was and am surprised to see you being such a dick.) So why not give him the benefit of the doubt and let him explain himself? Why assume bad faith on his part? And why, even if you do think he's arguing in bad faith, fan those flames?
And why, even if you do think he's arguing in bad faith, fan those flames?
444 to 448.
It's like you people have never even heard of the Internet.
Von, you mentioned you'd taught GG&S. Have you read Collapse? What do you think of Keir's argument?
I haven't taught it. But I have read it and have heard others make arguments similar to Keir's. For what it's worth (not much, as you'll see below), I don't find those arguments all that compelling. That said, I'm really far afield when reading a book like Collapse, so I don't have strong opinions one way or the other.
Reposting from k-sky's FB:
LAT reporter Jessica Garrison is looking for a UC Davis student who was at the occupy protest Fri. "Anyone know anyone who is reachable in the next 15 minutse? If so, please call 213-237-7847."
Whoa. The video of the chancellor exiting the press conference through a walkway of completely silent, stone-faced protestors is something to behold. What a powerful shaming.
I would have gone with pie-throwing and I would have been wrong. They did it better.
She says she won't step down. I'm sure she means it. She should reconsider. She's a disgrace. And if the investigation into the brutality is going to be at all meaningful, she needs to at least be placed on administrative leave for the duration.
Very effective. I would have wrongly gone for the pie too.
Whoa. The video of the chancellor exiting the press conference through a walkway of completely silent, stone-faced protestors is something to behold. What a powerful shaming.
Wow.
There are probably a bunch of administrators at Penn State that are happy to see a potential distraction.
Huh, a Jared Diamond thread. Here are my thoughts on him (with the caveat that I haven't read any of his books), and here is a rousing defense of him from an archaeologist.
I don't know, it might have been even better if someone had pepper sprayed her.
It is a good post. I'm partial to the the cannibalism ones also.
Hey, teo, I think we're offering reduced tuition at the moment for anyone who wants to get a PhD in history at UC Davis. Act now!
Sure, they lure you in with the reduced tuition, but then BAM! comes the mace.
I'm partial to the the cannibalism ones also.
Don't worry, Christmas is only about a month away.
458: To my everlasting shame that was my first thought about the reopening of the Natalie Wood case.
Because Hamilton's whole point is that the deforestation wasn't caused by the actions of the Easter Islanders, that the narrative of the mismanaged or `waste' land is a fundamentally racist one that arises from European settlers wishing to portray the people they are dispossessing as either unworthy of the land, or dying off anyway. This means that when we look at accounts of Easter Island we have to be aware of the biases.
He's arguing that to stop history at contact is fundamentally flawed because the contact altered the history that existed before it.
And for Diamond to just quickly mutter o yes colonialism bad isn't good enough.
399: get in line. it would violate the sanctity of off-blog communication to reveal the male commenters who have a "man-crush" on flippanter. nonetheless, the lurkers support me in emails.
What the fuck is wrong with cops, though, seriously? gswift, any thoughts?
I'd sure like to know what led up to all that. If their goal is to get arrested often it can be kept pretty low key by just having that conversation with them up front. Now if the response to that is "if you touch me it's going to be a fight", well, here comes the spray. Because OC is pretty good for taking the fight out of someone you'd rather not hit. But if they're just refusing to stand when you tell them then the spray is fucked up. Yeah, sometimes people go limp and you use two guys to carry/drag them off. Not uncommon and certainly not a big deal.
Hamilton is basically trying to bullshit us. According to the first European visitors to Easter Island was substantially deforested by 1722. This is the only reason why Easter Island is famous. Europeans showed up, found an impoverished isolated island with giant stone statues, and bam!, you have a mystery that can only be unravaled by Erich von Daniken. Easter Island was a heavily forested island before human arrival, and it was settled by the greatest seafarers of their time. By the time of European arrival, the island was considerably degraded, and the islanders had lost much of their technology. This really happened, and no amount of changing the subject to later events will change that.
Really, this kind of shit makes people look bad. It's like the drug of racism is so potent that, and that we're so weak-willed that we must be kept from it from all costs, even at the cost of misleading us. The islanders managed to fuck up the island to a considerable extent before Europeans arrived. European arrival fucked things up further, and to the extent that people misattribute further environmental degradation to the islanders, there should be push-back. But I can handle the truth -- sometimes bad things happen and not because of the Europeans -- without immediately succumbing to racism.
LB made a good point up-thread about arguments. In a vacuum, I don't have a particularly strong opinion about Diamond. I thought Guns, Germs, and Steel was pretty good, but I wasn't inspired to go out of my way and read Collapse or anything else he's written. It's just that the anti-Diamond arguments are such transparent bullshit that I get sucked into defending him. That CT thread that Lord C linked to is what pushed me over the edge.
I don't really know anything about Easter Island, so I can't weigh on in the specific facts there, but what Keir is saying does point to a general issue in these discussions. There's a longstanding dispute among anthropologists about whether it's more racist to say that pre-contact indigenous people were just like white people or to say that they weren't, and it becomes particularly intense when it comes to the concept of "collapse" and the lessons that the past may hold for the present. Because the facts and how well they're understood vary significantly from case to case it's impossible to come up with a general solution (unless you take an extremely dogmatic line one way or the other), but in general people like Diamond don't pay as much attention as they should to the importance of both getting the facts right and acknowledging the political implications of the different ways to interpret them.
Here's the sequence that led to the spraying. The cops are told to take down the tents and clear out the encampment (protestors were warned in advance this was coming, they could be arrested if they didn't disperse, etc.). A few resist the tents getting taken down and get arrested (AFAICT from accounts this part went fairly peacefully). A bunch of people then surround the cops and form a barrier essentially preventing the cops from leaving with the people who've been arrested. The commander talks with these people and warns them that they need to clear a path or they might get sprayed. The refuse to move and that's where the video comes in.
Without endorsing any side here, FYI, if you surround a bunch of cops who just a arrested a few people and try to physically prevent them from leaving, that action will be met with force.
I don't think anyone's disputing that the police would act with force - although it's not at all clear that anyone was barring them from leaving - but the force of dragging people out of the way is different than the force of pepper spray. And it looks like the police went in the other direction from where the people pepper-sprayed were sitting, so it's really hard to believe that those were the people blocking them, if anyone was blocking them. Subsequent actions from the protesters in letting the police leave and then the shaming of the chancellor are pretty strong evidence that the protesters are not interested in blocking anyone from anything. Occupation is not the same thing.
474
That's Annette Spicuzza's reinterpretation with directing credits to James Cameron.
The crowd doesn't encircle the officers, the pathway behind is clear the whole time, the people sprayed are making a symbolic barrier in front of the cops, not preventing them from leaving.
The cops stupidly escalate the situation by spraying and arresting a few of them and the crowd, displaying a great deal of restraint lets them leave unscathed - 'You can go' is one of the most inspired de-escalating chants I've ever seen, assertive but offering a way out.
I would have wrongly gone for the pie too.
It's like the list of demands that the original OWS failed to present. I'm awfully pleased at how much smarter these people are than I am.
And yeah, that video is something.
This is good on the "wtf, cops" thing.
There's a longstanding dispute among anthropologists about whether it's more racist to say that pre-contact indigenous people were just like white people or to say that they weren't
I think this captures my problem. Some anthropologists would like this to be a debate about whether Diamond is racist. I'd like to be talking about whether Diamond is right. But even if you set aside the facts, there's still a legitimate question about which view is more racist.
Diamond's overall point - as I see you recognize - is a universalizing one. He thinks that various peoples - most especially modern people, quite specifically including white people - are prone to making bad environmental decisions.
Hamilton, meanwhile, softpedals the fact that he knows that Easter Island was deforested before the arrival of Europeans, because if he admits that, it's somewhat tougher to call Diamond a racist. Since he's silent on the subject of a pre-European population crash, I assume he agrees with Diamond on that, too, but finds it inconvenient to acknowledge. It would also have been nice if he mentioned that the "rats" research he cites followed Diamond's book, and therefore couldn't have been included in it.
Bonus points if he'd mentioned the obvious problems with the "rats" research.
These are all merely "factual" issues, it's true. And certainly science has to be viewed in a political context. But Diamond entirely acknowledges Hamilton's point about colonialism. He's totally upfront on the fact that colonialism was a (further) disaster for Easter Island, even though that's not the subject of his book. It's hard to see what more you could ask of him here.
the force of dragging people out of the way is different than the force of pepper spray
This, times a thousand.
I didn't know this: pepper spray is banned for use in war under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
479 is interesting and correct in its thrust, but I'd like to push back a little on this:
If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.
While I can, on some level, sympathize with the John Pikes (and the McQuearys) of the world, making some behaviors socially unacceptable for individuals is one way to push back against oppressive institutions.
The impact of cameras on protest is interesting.
483.1: yeah, I don't disagree. And, in fact, the earlier part of the piece seems to fairly well contradict the idea that he is not also a villain.
Yesterday when I looked at ucdavis.edu I saw a big photo splashed across the page advertising "a campus embracing civility," or something close to that. Now they're just advertising world-class arts, so I guess they've realized that whole civility thing isn't looking so convincing right now.
the narrative of the mismanaged or `waste' land is a fundamentally racist one that arises from European settlers wishing to portray the people they are dispossessing as either unworthy of the land, or dying off anyway
But this is another ad hominem circumstantial. We're trying to investigate causes and effects here. It doesn't matter why a hypothesis is created. To determine if it is true, we have to see whether it fits the data.
OTOH, the New Yorker piece he is being sued over does sound bad, and damages his credibility.
468: Because Hamilton's whole point is that the deforestation wasn't caused by the actions of the Easter Islanders,
This claim seems to me to be the whole argument. I've literally never heard that Easter Island wasn't deforested at the time of first contact with Europeans -- if it's true, that the deforestation was a result of contact with Europeans rather than preceding that contact, I'd completely agree that an argument relying on assigning an explanation other than contact with Europeans was racist (maybe innocently, in the case of someone also mistaken about the facts, but certainly needing correction.)
But is there any support for the claim that deforestation was a result of European contact rather than the status quo when Europeans arrived?
487: Apparently "the contact altered the history that existed before it," if we believe 468, so one presumes time-traveling European settlers were involved.
If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.
I will find give every liberal blogger and Salon columnist in the universe $5 if he or she can go a week without deploying this rhetorical move.
As for UC Davis, one would have expected people to have learned by now that pepper-spraying and tear-gassing looks particularly bad on the news and in the papers: certainly worse than two or three cops carrying recalcitrant hippies from peace yurt to paddy wagon.
Also, I am sort of surprised that Jared Diamond hasn't started casting his own bread upon the waters charges of racism at his accusers. It's like he's never seen one of these little contretemps play out before.
490: I believe the traditional counter here is "political correctness." James in 383 demonstrates how it's done.
491: People can't still be using that one. It was threadbare when Bill Clinton was in charge.
Some anthropologists would like this to be a debate about whether Diamond is racist. I'd like to be talking about whether Diamond is right.
Exactly. And this is important; its not just some random historical conjecture. You see libertarians arguing all the time that deforestation never caused the downfall of a civilization. Conversely, the collapse of civilizations like Iceland and Easter Island serve as strong parables for wise resource management.
469: I'd like to take the compliment, but I have to admit that the language quoted in 399 was Thorn's.
The rats hypothesis that Hamilton mentions is actually kind of interesting, since it would mean that the deforestation wasn't caused by conscious choices made by the islanders but still was indirectly caused by their arrival. There's an interesting short overview of the state of archaeological knowledge about Easter Island by Diamond in Science, which addresses some of the alternative views. I'll quote the relevant paragraphs since it's behind a paywall:
One view is a version of Rousseau's noble savage myth: the claim that bad things began happening on Easter only after European arrival (13-15). Undoubtedly, Europeans on Easter, as elsewhere in the Pacific, did serious harm through slave raids, worsened erosion, and introduced diseases, grazing animals, and plants. But this view ignores or dismisses the abundant evidence, summarized above, for pre-European impacts.
Another view recognizes pre-European deforestation but blames it on hypothesized droughts (2). However, there is no direct information about climate change on Easter between A.D. 1000 and 1700. Easter's forests had already survived tens of thousands of years of climate fluctuations (1), and it seems unlikely that a drought in the 1600s (if there was one) destroyed the forests just coincidently soon after human arrival.
According to a third view, deforestation was caused by introduced rats, as suggested by rat gnaw marks on many nuts of the extinct palm (15). This hypothesis does not account for all those palm stumps cut off at the ground and burned, nor for the larger number of palm nuts burned rather than gnawed, nor for the disappearance of the long-lived palm trees themselves (with an estimated life span of up to 2000 years) (16). If rats were responsible, they were unusual ones, equipped with fire and hatchets. Thousands of other Pacific islands overrun by introduced rats were not deforested, and many other tree species that survived on other rat-infested islands disappeared on Easter (16).
Instead, Easter's deforestation can be understood in terms of its environmental fragility. Throughout the Pacific, islanders brought rats and felled and burned trees. The resulting pre-European deforestation ranged from negligible on some islands to complete on Easter. Among 81 islands analyzed, this variation in deforestation parallels measured variation in nine environmental parameters that determine tree growth rates: The more slowly trees grow back, the more extensive was deforestation (17). All parameters were stacked against Easter: It is relatively cold, dry, low, small, and isolated, with negligible nutrient inputs from atmospheric dust and volcanic ash, relatively old leached soils, and no uplifted-reef terrain. Thus, Easter became deforested not because its inhabitants were uniquely improvident, nor because its European visitors were uniquely evil, but because Easter Islanders had the misfortune to inhabit one of the Pacific's most fragile environments.
(Ref 13 is this, 14 is this, 15 is T. Hunt, Am. Sci. 94, 412 (2006), 16 is J. Flenley, P. Bahn, Rapa Nui J. 21, 12 (2007), and 17 is this.
Bitchy scientific writing is one of my favorite genres. I wish people put together compilations; "Year's Best Academic Putdowns", or whatever.
On the anti-Diamond side, he did write a rather stupid pro-Huntington op-ed. Running across that definitely made me think less of Diamond.
I'm trying to read the Rainbird paper (the link for Ref 13 in my comment above) but I get put off by how discussion of actual facts and evidence is intermixed with blather like "All landscape is cultural, otherwise it cannot be landscape."
As far as I can tell the Rainbird paper has no interesting new content. The whole point of the paper is in the middle paragraph of page 446, and consists entirely of citations to "Bahn, P.and Flenley, J. 1992. EasterIsland, EarthIsland." So I think you'd be better off going directly to Bahn and Flenley.
The only passage in the Rainbird paper that actually confronts the issue of whether deforestation happened before European arrival says:
More important, however, are the two major causes for the loss of the palm forest as envis- aged in the scenario provided by Bahn and Flenley: the use of logs for transporting the moai and the role of rats in destroying the reproductive capabilities of the palms through eating the fruits. Hunter-Anderson regards the idea of the destruction of the forest to provide material to transport the moai as ludicrous. For a start she argues that logs are easily stored for multiple transportation events. Second, she questions the frequency of such events and finds that in regard to the statistics of chronology and number of moai transported, it is likely to be less than two per annum. Such a figure she concludes is unlikely to provide a threat to the ecological balance of the palms.
Most of his paper is philosophical maundering interspersed with lengthy quotes of other people's work; I don't think Diamond was being very unfair in characterizing this as a "noble savage myth."
Anyway, I guess to really chase down the criticism of the idea that deforestation happened early, one would have to follow the reference to Hunter-Anderson. A PDF of it is here.
The Hunt paper, on the other hand, looks very interesting.
Hunt and Lipo claim that deforestation happened quickly after Polynesian colonization (Polynesians arriving roughly in 1200 and deforestation happening mostly around 1300), but claim that this did not result in a collapse in population or culture. Instead they claim the latter was a result of European contact.
Hunter-Anderson says that in modern, commercial societies we exploit resources in an unsustainable way, but that subsistence farmers never do this, and calls it a "psycho-anthropological fantasy" to imagine that they could. Subsistence farmers, she tells us, use fire only with great caution and care, and often improve the environment rather than depleting it. She gives evidence from practices in other parts of the Pacific.
Then, as Rainbird discussed, she argues that neither building canoes nor building rollers or levers to transport moai is a plausible use of enough wood to account for the deforestation. The next step seems much sketchier: she claims palms would not have been used for firewood, based on observations that elsewhere in the Pacific people don't use palms for firewood. She claims that building houses out of wood also doesn't explain deforestation, because the rate of home-building is low enough that trees can regrow. I might, somewhat unfairly, summarize her arguments in this section as "but I know these people and they wouldn't do that!"
A lot of discussion of technical details of radiocarbon dating and whatnot begins, which I've only skimmed. The upshot is that she thinks there were few trees already when the first people arrived at the island, the Little Ice Age made the numbers decline, and European arrival led to the death of the last trees. It's hard to say much about this without learning a lot more details, but it doesn't seem to accord very well with the general consensus of everything else I've read.
Hunt's work seems to be very interesting, and it's clear that Diamond was working with a timeline that's been completely replaced by new work. However, I've been having a hard time finding any really compelling evidence of when the population collapse occurred. Hunt seems confident that the population collapse didn't occur until European arrival, but I've been pretty stumped at finding where there's real compelling evidence on this point. My guess is that we're still missing the really good research on this point and we may have to wait a few years before we know for sure whether population collapse began in 1722 or 1400. But I have no real reason to doubt Hunt on this point, and he does seem to be a well-informed expert.
The impact of cameras on protest is interesting.
I'm surprised that the cops didn't try to stop people from taking pictures and video. They seem aware that they're being recorded, like they're trying not to appear too aggressive. (Which, in the case of the guy who did the spraying, ends up looking pretty bad. You can't be calm and nonviolent, and then suddenly start spraying people.)
Here's Hunt in 2006. Definitely much more interesting than the other critics.
I'm surprised that the cops didn't try to stop people from taking pictures and video
Several hundred people, all with camera phones in their hands. Lost cause.
For example, in this article Hunt claims that the population of Rapa Nui probably stabilized around 3000 people and didn't change much from that between 1350 and 1722. But he really doesn't give any evidence towards this. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of good evidence for larger population numbers, and given the upheaval in chronology there's really no reason to expect that these issues would be settled yet.
Yeah, so I think at this point it's pretty clear that Diamond is unfair to Hunt. The claim is not that deforestation is caused entirely by rats. It's that a combination of human activity and rats cause a fairly rapid decline in the tree population starting with human arrival on the island in about 1200. This doesn't really exempt the islanders from the charge of bringing about an ecological catastrophe, in the sense that they caused a massive change in the fauna of the island and depleted some of the resources they initially used. But it seems to be an open question whether they would have kept going as a stable farming population in the long term in the absence of European arrival.
It also seems pretty clear that Diamond was basically reporting the academic consensus in Collapse. He may be playing a somewhat reactionary role in the light of new evidence, but that's not really a moral failing; his snarkiness may be, but it's also entertaining.
Of course rat deforestation together with an early date for population collapse would be entirely consistent with the point of Collapse (see the discussion of cattle in Greenland and Sheep(?) in Iceland). However, a late date for population collapse would completely change the game.
507: The rental cops on the Batman set managed but there were only a few dozen spectators.
511: This. Diamond's a popularizer -- if he was (reasonably) accurately reporting scholarly consensus at the time, that's all one can expect. He may easily have been wrong in retrospect (although looking at the references linked, it doesn't seem to have gotten past 'everything's doubtful' at this point), but that's not really a knock on his work at the time he wrote it.
497: On the anti-Diamond side, he did write a rather stupid pro-Huntington op-ed. Running across that definitely made me think less of Diamond.
Having just read this (and not being knowledgeable on the Huntington issue to have an opinion--I'd like to read the subsequent Simon/Koblitz discussion but a cursory search did not find it) I find your characterization to Diamond's piece to quite mystifying, especially that it definitely made you think less of him.
And speaking of sheep in Iceland, let me repeat that just about everyone should find the time to read Laxness's Independent People sometime in their life.
506, 508, 512: The Hunt piece was indeed very interesting.
There's one bit, in critiquing Diamond, that I found imprecise. Hunt suggests that Diamond mis-timed the collapse on Rapa Nui. It would have been more precise for Hunt to say that Diamond's collapse didn't occur. Diamond and Hunt are, as best as I can reckon, in agreement about what took place post-1722.
Lang's critique of Huntington is not just that Huntington tries to make quantifiable statements in political science, but rather that Huntington disguised his wrong opinions by making up quantifiable notions that had very little to do with the words that he used to describe them. This slight-of-hand, using bogus mathematics to justify incorrect political points of view, was the problem not some animus towards "soft science." In my opinion, Diamond completely misunderstood the issue, and he did so by coming down on the racist side (a big point of contention was Huntington's characterization of apartheid South Africa as a "satisfied" society).
I read through GG&S very quickly and found it irritatingly deterministic. Or maybe presentism is a better word for that kind of tendency? The causes he lists in the second part of the book sounded ludicrous--India just had too many geographical barriers! Whereas China had way too few! etc.
I passed on Collapse just because I hated the subtitle. Could premodern peoples have had any notion of themselves as a collective venture, as a "society" at all, such that they could "decide" whether to take this course or that? Probably not a fair judgment on my part, but then I only have so much time to read this stuff.
The stuff in GG&S on differences within Eurasia are transparent bullshit. It'd be a far better book if he just left that out entirely, and it does seem to be included mostly because of his philosophical bias. But it's mostly irrelevant to the rest of the book.
I love the image of "transparent bullshit."
519: As I remember it, the within-Eurasia stuff was silly, but both brief and heavily caveated -- maybe I discounted it more heavily than Diamond did because it read silly to me, but I thought it was explicitly marked off with the equivalent of "this is just bullshitting".
519: Basically, most of what he adduces for his big "axial" determinism idea is suspect at best. (The cases he makes for the superior development virtues of "east-west axes" and Mediterranean climates are a great example of papering over considerable inconsistencies of detail with confident presentation.)
It's simply not true that the climate stays the same if you move along an east-west axis in Europe. Travel from the Atlantic shore a couple of hundred miles inland and you'll find the winters a lot rougher thanks to the maritime/continental climate boundary. As a rule, it keeps going - Russia is a lot chillier than Germany which is colder than the UK.
523: You've said this a couple of times, and I'm not quite sure I follow you. Certainly, it's not true that any two locations at the same latitude have the same climate. But isn't it true that climate changes more slowly, generally, over an east-west distance than over a north-south distance, and so if you've got a crop that's sensitive to changes in climate, that's it's going to spread more easily roughly east-west than north-south?
If your answer is "No, it's not true," I don't understand why it isn't without some explanation.
OT: One aspect of aging that I don't recall having been previously informed of is the proliferation of apparently celebrated people of whom one has not, or has barely, heard and whom one despises without reflection. E.g., the "stars" of pretty much every current sitcom.
OT: One aspect of aging that I don't recall having been previously informed of is the proliferation of apparently celebrated people of whom one has not, or has barely, heard and whom one despises without reflection. E.g., the "stars" of pretty much every current sitcom.
What's worse is that they all hate you too.
525: It's not the case that climate changes "more slowly" from east to west, but at any rate I don't think that's the basis of the "east-west axis" concept. The power of the "east-west axis" is supposed to be that clusters of reasonably similar climates in widely-dispersed regions can share agricultural packages and get a developmental boost therefrom, which widely-dispersed regions along north-south axes cannot do as efficiently due to the absence of clusters of common climates. Unfortunately he severely oversells the supposed barriers to the north-south diffusion of crops (two of the major staples of modern civilization, rice and maize, are products of south-north diffusion), uses comparisons to illustrate the supposed advantages of the Fertile Crescent agricultural package that in fact tell us relatively little (because he compares single crops, not diets), and does not address the possibility that sheer scale, and not any unique power of "east-west" diffusion, might account for Eurasia's advantages in the rise of civilization.
There are other problems, too. Diamond's discussion of "Mediterranean climates" is based on the notion that the Fertile Crescent was a Mediterranean climate, which AFAICT is oversimplistic to the point of being just false (the Fertile Crescent has typically featured a carpet of micro-climates, which arguably is a pretty key feature in the unusual diversity of grasses and cereals found there); it's a rather large problem because the Fertile Crescent is in fact the only example of the supposed advantages of "Mediterranean" climates that he can provide, the others being categorized by rather ad hoc reasoning as too small.
The crowd doesn't encircle the officers, the pathway behind is clear the whole time, the people sprayed are making a symbolic barrier in front of the cops, not preventing them from leaving.
I am not a geometrist but that looks like encirclement.(I am a free spirit who will not be constrained by your stifling notions of "real" words)
the force of dragging people out of the way is different than the force of pepper spray
Not necessarily. If it's going to be a lot of struggle and your prying people apart with batons and stuff there's a decent chance you're actually avoiding some injuries on both sides with the pepper spray. Shoulders, backs, ankles, etc. getting thrown out/sprained isn't uncommon when you're wrestling someone into cuffs. I've been sprayed and it really sucks but it wears off.
I don't know if that's the case here or not. Around here we would have just tried dragging them out of the way first. But if a situation like that is going to turn into a scrum then spraying people might actually be the lesser force option.
The cops are in the encircled tents?
That's the area they went into to take the tents down. A few people got arrested in there and the subsequent human barrier was supposedly to keep them leaving with the arrested protesters.
528 Unfortunately he severely oversells the supposed barriers to the north-south diffusion of crops (two of the major staples of modern civilization, rice and maize, are products of south-north diffusion)
But in fact he discusses this in quite a lot of detail, arguing that maize took much longer to domesticate and spread than wheat and that this partially accounts for the relatively late flourishing of Mesoamerican civilizations relative to Eurasian civilizations.
As for rice, it seems to me to involve at least as much east-west diffusion as north-south...
That's the area they went into to take the tents down.
Really? Everything I've been reading says the students took the tents down before the confrontations started.
531: But that's the part that's disputed by witnesses. There still doesn't seem to be any evidence that the cops were blocked from leaving at all points. And no evidence the people pepper sprayed were doing the blocking, if there was any.
And yes, there might be cases where violent resistance makes pepper spray justifiable. No evidence that this was one of those cases either.
Some of the tents were taken down by the students, some were taken down by police. The background of this pic to me looks like they did a full ring on the human barrier thing.
532: But in fact he discusses this in quite a lot of detail, arguing that maize took much longer to domesticate and spread than wheat
Yes, he argues many things in quite a lot of detail, but that doesn't mean the details are correct or convincing. For example, if the east-west axis concept is as powerful as he contends, it should have taken wheat far less time to reach Iberia from the Fertile Crescent than it took maize to reach the Great Lakes from Mesoamerica. But in fact that's not the case.
As for rice, it seems to me to involve at least as much east-west diffusion as north-south...
*As much as*, yes. But east-west diffusion is supposed to be easier than north-south diffusion. The proportion of one to the other should be skewed considerably in favour of east-west diffusion if Diamond's axial notion is worth anything, but again, that isn't the case.
(I know I'm redefining "hiatus" with every post on this, but I'm really just recapping things that are talked about on the linked thread in 442. So these posts don't count. That's the ticket.)
Google turns up these two very interesting posts about the history of maize cultivation, suggesting Diamond was wrong (but, again, was accurately reporting what was believed at the time of his writing) and that maize was domesticated earlier, but that vitamin deficiencies in the diet were not remedied until much later.
The background of this pic to me looks like they did a full ring on the human barrier thing.
This is the problem with all of the photography I've seen. It does look like that, but it's taken so close that you don't get a full perspective to see if the line is really closed all the way around.
On the Diamond thread. I think the east-west axis argument goes back to the 80s. It's mentioned in this book, originally published in the mid-80s which includes almost all of the arguments that are important to GG&S.
you don't get a full perspective to see if the line is really closed all the way around.
Yeah, if that line wasn't closed and they sprayed people to avoid walking around them or something then that's just stupid.
537: Shanghai to Bangalore, say, is roughly three times as large an east-west difference as a north-south difference.
Maize wasn't grown around the Great Lakes until about 1000 years ago, if I can believe the sorts of things that come up on Google.
I'm not saying Diamond is right about all these things, but he at least doesn't seem to be wrong in really obvious ways, as you seem to imply.
I haven't read the whole of the old CT thread yet, though.
It's not the case that climate changes "more slowly" from east to west, but at any rate I don't think that's the basis of the "east-west axis" concept. The power of the "east-west axis" is supposed to be that clusters of reasonably similar climates in widely-dispersed regions can share agricultural packages and get a developmental boost therefrom, which widely-dispersed regions along north-south axes cannot do as efficiently due to the absence of clusters of common climates.
You seem to be drawing a distinction here that I'm too slow to grasp. Another way to say 'changes more slowly' is "if you travel a given distance from any point east-west, you're more likely to be in a similar climate than if you travel the same distance from the same point north-south." Which seems to me to be the same thing as 'clusters of reasonably similar climates'. And I still don't understand what makes it false --here's a Burpee company plant-hardiness zones map, showing roughly east-west bands. They're strongly affected by proximity to large bodies of water, but roughly east-west.
I also don't understand your point about the Fertile Crescent. If what you need for crop dispersion is contiguous areas with roughly similar climates extending for a long distance, an area having many differing microclimates wouldn't necessarily be any kind of a barrier -- so long as there were chains of similar microclimates covering fairly long distances, crops would travel.
537.last: I for one am glad that your fake hiatus is so rigorous and upstanding.
(And I'm not being disingenuous with the 'I don't understand'. I'm not sure that your arguments that Diamond is obviously wrong on these points are incorrect, I'm really simply not following what you're saying. If you don't have the energy for the argument, obviously you're not obliged to rehearse it more slowly for me -- it's just that what you've said here isn't enough for me to figure out how your arguments work.)
Seriously, gswift? Have you watched the video? What relevance does a totally other picture, with a ring of standing students and zero cops in evidence anywhere, have to the situation depicted in the video? In the video the students are *sitting* and the cop actually steps over them in order to hose them down with pepper spray. They offer no resistance to his literally stepping over the line of sitting bodies.
Good commentary by Ta-Nehisi Coates on police justifications for casual brutality. Nice quote:
An abusive [cop] could be driving a tank and facing off with a baby stroller, and yet somehow he/she would be the one outgunned.
Teo's post, linked above, is very interesting and very good.
This isn't really a defense (or comment) on anything above, or taking sides, but it's worth remembering that Keir is in a place where conflicting accounts of the rights of white settlers vs. Polynesian natives is very very much an ideologically live and active issue, in a way that it's not for most Americans (except on Not Prince Hamlet's islands, of course).
I thought it was totally uncontroversial that maize was domesticated much later, and was much more difficult to domesticate (in addition to being more difficult to use as a nutritional staple) than wheat or rice. Is that wrong?
542.1: The traditional, pre-modern range of paddy agriculture is pretty much the same north-south as it is east-west (about three thousand miles each way). To most of the history of rice cultivation, neither "axial" distinction holds recognizably larger importance.
Maize wasn't grown around the Great Lakes until about 1000 years ago
The length of time it took to reach there from first cultivation in Mesoamerica is not dissimilar to the timescale of wheat's journey to the Atlantic from the Fertile Crescent.
543: Another way to say 'changes more slowly' is "if you travel a given distance from any point east-west, you're more likely to be in a similar climate than if you travel the same distance from the same point north-south."
But, that's not the case. It's the topography that tells you whether you're "more likely" to be in a similar climate as much as the latitude. If you're crossing a mountain barrier like the Rockies, you're running into climate changes at least as dramatic as anything you'll encounter going the same distance down the Eastern Seaboard. (Although "hardiness zones" are an imperfect measure, you'll note nevertheless that the plant-hardiness map shows curved zones that follow the topography, with some zones traversing considerable distances of longitude as well as latitude. And of course most "crops," including wheat, are actually comprised of more than one subspecies of plant which collectively can cross a wide range of zones.)
544: I also don't understand your point about the Fertile Crescent.
My point is that attributing the Fertile Crescent's characteristics to its status as a Mediterranean climate is misleading when its climate(s) are far and away more complicated than that, and that it may precisely be this complexity that's the source of characteristics which Diamond admits no other Mediterranean climate actually demonstrates.
This on Boing Boing shows cops being (nearly?) encircled by seated people (some with backs to the cops). The interviewee says that they decided to form a circle around the cops and the prisoners. The besieged cops have in turn formed a defensive circle. It also seems to show Pike outside of the circle bravely trying to rescue the besieged police officers. I guess he stepped over this dangerous barrier as other pictures show him inside it.
At the risk of being boring, I want to step back and ruminate a little more on what's interesting about Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because while I'm not committed to defending Diamond's correctness, I do think I want to defend the general project.
We don't have the luxury of being able to re-run history as a controlled experiment, but I think it's very reasonable to think that certain macrohistorical facts about our world are explicable in terms of underlying data. Starting from some initial conditions: the physical geography of the continents, their flora and fauna, and a large enough population of humans, I think it's not hard to believe that over certain scales of time and space things are roughly predictable. People, being people, are going to spread out and try lots of things, and whereas the first person to ever figure out that it can be useful to eat a yam might depend on lots of contingent details, given that yams exist and people are curious and inventive, it's inevitable that eventually you'll have some populations of people eating yams. Pretty much any edible plant is going to be tried at some point over thousands of years, and pretty much anything useful you can do with an animal is going to be tried, and eventually people moving reasonable distances and interacting quasi-locally and locally optimizing their lives are going to end up in somewhat predictable configurations. So I don't think it's hard to imagine that you should be able to make a case for which areas are most conducive to the development of civilization on the basis of local flora, fauna, and geography, even if in doing so you run the risk of getting details wrong and telling just-so stories.
I think Diamond is interesting because he tries to make this case, in an accessible way, and (call me ignorant if you like, but) he's the first person to do this in a way that penetrated into the general awareness of moderately well-read people. There's probably a wealth of very interesting specialist literature on this, but even just propagating the idea that this kind of thing is possible to study is something that deserves some sort of credit, I think. At the level of details, it's less clear to me which elements of what he says are crucial; I think a plausible case can be made that wheat and rice are better staple crops for developing complex civilizations than maize or taro, for instance, without necessarily committing to the claim that east-west transmission is vital. (If wheat were native to Mesoamerica and maize to the Fertile Crescent, for instance, should we believe that Eurasia would remain technologically dominant? It seems unlikely to me.)
It's obvious that this kind of macrohistorical determinism breaks down at some point; there are any number of times in the last century when an individual person's decision could have led to nuclear war and drastically changed what the world would look like in the future. But I don't think it's crazy to think that this sort of determinism at least extends to the point where, say, you can explain on general principles why several thousand years ago you had wheat-based agriculture in large parts of Eurasia, a somewhat less developed maize agriculture in Mesoamerica and correspondingly smaller population densities, and so on. Once you hit a point in technology development where people are routinely traveling large distances and interactions among different civilizations start becoming stronger, I think it's harder to argue that you can really predict what the outcome will be (you could imagine, for instance, decisive battles that eventually change the diet and technology of a whole region, which could have gone multiple ways). But up to a point, I think there's a plausible project to tackle.
Also I find the example I mentioned earlier--why did Native Americans get wiped out by European diseases, and not vice versa?--very interesting. It would be surprising to me if such a gross asymmetry depended on very subtle happenstances of history, and Diamond's preferred explanation (that the relative prevalences of diseases and immunity relate to the proximity of domesticated animals) seems plausible. I don't know if it's correct, but I think there's a question there worth answering, and even getting some proposed answer out into the general awareness of nonspecialists is a worthwhile thing to do.
We don't have the luxury of being able to re-run history as a controlled experiment
Not yet.
551: that link makes it if anything even more obvious how unjustified Officer Pike's sadistic outburst was. A few little examples of more minor bits of casual sadism by other officers as well.
The orange pepper spray is a bad idea. It's dramatically visible, even after it's sprayed. If I were giving advice to police departments, I'd tell them to use to clear stuff.
(The rest of you probably would offer advice like, "Don't use pepper spray," but I'm very practical-minded.)
I think Diamond is interesting because he tries to make this case, in an accessible way, and (call me ignorant if you like, but) he's the first person to do this in a way that penetrated into the general awareness of moderately well-read people.
I think this is pretty much right, which is why I don't hold it too much against him* that he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about many of the people whose work he's popularizing.** As I said above, many of the main points - but especially the argument about disease and domesticated animals - in the broader argument had been made before, even in accessible but not really popular works, but he really does seem to have been the first to bring it to a wider audience. Also, he takes the earlier work I'm familiar with - namely the Crosby book I linked to above - and generalizes it to more cases. So Crosby is very specifically talking about European expansion in particular places and Diamond shows similar processes at work in other comparable expansions in other places.
The end of the book is unconvincing and the lecture on how historians should do their work shows he's not really familiar with the full range of work done in history, but that's another matter.
*Not that my opinion of this counts.
**Although, IIRC, he credits the scientists more explicitly than the social scientists or humanists.
Not long ago someone was telling me a possibly dubious story about a region in India where very spicy peppers are grown and for generations people have been rubbing pepper in their eyes in contests of bravery, so that now they can withstand amounts of capsaicin in their eyes that would blind anyone else. Surely with a little effort this can somehow be made to bridge the two discussions going on in this thread.
When my dad was reading GG&S I tried to get him to read Crosby for comparison purposes and he couldn't do it. He also never finished GG&S. He really seems to like science writing and not history; his comment on why he didn't finish GG&S was that he lost interest when it got to societies and politics.
It's been many years since I read GGS, so I probably should just sit quietly. I all say that I don't recall the eastwest thing being so much about climate directly. But about sunshine. There are altitude issues too, when you are diffusing plants.
The Crosby book is Ecological Imperialism? If so, given that it's $74 on Amazon, I can see why it would be less widely read.
I thought it was totally uncontroversial that maize was domesticated much later, and was much more difficult to domesticate (in addition to being more difficult to use as a nutritional staple) than wheat or rice. Is that wrong?
It was certainly more difficult, and the consensus at the time Diamond was writing was that domestication came much later, but more recent research has shown solid evidence that maize was initially domesticated quite a bit earlier than previously thought, and almost as early as the major Old World crops. I discussed that research here, and the first link in 538 also discusses it.
Yes, that's the book. There's a paperback for the still expensive $25. Academic publishing has gotten so expensive since I started using libraries as much as I can - I generally bought books earlier on in grad school, from 2001-2005 or so. I'm pretty sure it cost me less than $12 used in about 1999.
Odd: the paperback didn't come up in my search, although I do it see it listed as an alternative version when I click on the hardcover. Anyway, I can always find a library copy. I'll add it to my semi-infinite reading list.
552: Diamond indeed did manage to penetrate general consciousness more than many other historians had done. A big part of what makes him so frustrating is that he did so -- in the case of GG&S -- with arguments that are often annoyingly wrong or bizarre or outdated (even at the time of writing) to people who'd studied the disciplines he ventured into as an amateur. [A similar phenomenon attended Martin Bernal's adventures into describing the history of archaeology in Black Athena; the work (especially the first volume in Bernal's case) was plausible and seemingly novel enough to create an army of non-specialist fans who in turn proved an endless headache to people in the field.] Legions of people now seem to imagine Diamond more or less invented thinking about geographical effects on history, when his "axial" theory is actually far less interesting or well-supported than many other geographical theories of history. The problem is not with thinking of history through a geographical lens, it's not even that haters gonna hate; it's that so many people imagine Diamond more or less invented doing so with the very dubious material that comprises much of GG&S.
561 is very interesting, as are the two links in 538.
Though, taken together, if I'm reading the links correctly, the two links in 538 do sort of support Diamond's theory that an important point of the story is that Eurasia had a several-thousand-year head start over the New World in the staple crops necessary for large scale civilization. While maize may have been domesticated by 7000 BC, the technology necessary to use it as a base crop for civilization on a mass scale didn't exist until about 1500 BC. So while Diamond (and the science that supported him) may have been wrong about the date of initial maize cultivation, the bottom line remains roughly the same. Or am I missing something?
565: That Eurasia had a head start over the New World is not "Diamond's theory." Diamond's theory is that the head start derived from something like his axial hypothesis. It's not the same thing.
it's that so many people imagine Diamond more or less invented doing so
Why is this important? If he popularized an idea that had been mainly familiar to specialists, that's something valuable in itself, even if nothing he wrote was new to experts. I can see that it might be annoying to people who'd known it all before, but not in any important way.
565: That's a plausible way to think of it. One of the interesting things about the recent work pushing back the domestication and spread of maize is that it shows that it often took a very long time after initial introduction for it to become an important part of the subsistence system that led to intensive cultivation, sedentism, increased population density, and so forth. The idiosyncratic characteristics of maize compared to other grain crops that make it more difficult to use as a staple, especially on its own, could well be the reason for this lag. It may have taken subsequent developments (such as the invention of nixtamalization and/or the domestication of beans) to put maize on an equal footing with wheat for societal purposes.
567: Why is this important?
Because he popularized erroneous arguments; I thought it was pretty clear that this is my point?
Actually, if the dates in the post linked from 538 are right, then corn did move much more slowly from Mesoamerica to the Great Lakes than wheat moved from the Fertile Crescent to Spain.
If he popularized an idea that had been mainly familiar to specialists, that's something valuable in itself, even if nothing he wrote was new to experts. I can see that it might be annoying to people who'd known it all before, but not in any important way.
Well, if the specific ideas he presented were actually wrong that would be a problem.
No, I thought that Diamond pointed out that maize was both domesticated later, and took longer to diffuse, because of the "axial" theory. Both points were part of his story, which combined as reasons why civilization started later in the Americas. The maize was domesticated later point seems to have been both wrong and right: wrong about the date of domestication, right about the kind of domestication that could serve as a meaningful basis for mass civilization.
Also, it's been forever since I've read the book, but I don't recall the "axial" theory being made in a vacuum [i.e., east-west always trumps north-south]. Rather, I thought that the point was specific features of the geography of both Africa and the Americas (mostly, the Sahara, the Northern Deserts, and the Andes/Amazon) made diffusion more difficult there than across the Eurasian landmass. That's certainly intuitively plausible but it's not like I'm an expert here.
Actually, if the dates in the post linked from 538 are right, then corn did move much more slowly from Mesoamerica to the Great Lakes than wheat moved from the Fertile Crescent to Spain.
True, but there's also been work pushing back the appearance of maize on the other end.
569: None of the major 'errors' you've pointed out convince me that Diamond's book is worthless. It seems that, e.g., corn did move more slowly north-south than wheat did east-west, and if we're looking at a plant-hardiness-zones map it's clear that while topography is very important to climate, latitude is the dominant influence on climate over long distances.
My memory of the book was that the difficulty of going from wild teosinte to cultivable maize, and consequent late starting point of Mesoamerican civilization, played as large a part in his argument as the orientation of the continents. Could be my memory isn't aligned with what he wrote, though, since my memory of the book is more representative of which details seemed interesting to me than how many pages they took up.
I thought that the point was specific features of the geography of both Africa and the Americas (mostly, the Sahara, the Northern Deserts, and the Andes/Amazon) made diffusion more difficult there than across the Eurasian landmass.
It may be important to note in this connection that much of the contact between Mesoamerica and the Andes, involving influence and diffusion in both directions, was by boat.
Mostly, I'm not hearing much that strikes me as clear error in terms of what was known when he wrote the book. Doesn't make it the revealed truth, doesn't make it an important advance in science, but I still don't see what makes it contemptible.
575: None of the major 'errors' you've pointed out convince me that Diamond's book is worthless.
In fairness I did not say the book is entirely worthless. Just that it is worth much less than many much better books.
It seems that, e.g., corn did move more slowly north-south than wheat did east-west,
Why does it "seem" this way?
I'm not hearing much that strikes me as clear error in terms of what was known when he wrote the book
It's been known that the Fertile Crescent is climatically complex for decades.
I'm relying on blog posts and Wikipedia here, so if you've got different dates tell me what yours are, but the post linked in 538 says initial domestication of teosinte BC 6700, Mississippi Valley AD 1000, whereas wheat moved from the Fertile Crescent in 9600 BC to Spain in 5000 BC. But if you're looking at different dates, I'm all ears.
580: But what does the climactic complexity of the Fertile Crescent have to do with anything? If similar microclimates were common and contiguous enough , the presence of different microclimates wouldn't, as far as I can tell, act as any kind of a barrier to the spread of crops. What follows from 'climactic complexity'?
A lot of the points you're complaining about, Castock, seem almost inevitable in a popularization. At least when reading it, I didn't have the impression that it was presenting itself as a totally original work. And in any popularization on any subject I'm an expert in, I'm sure I can make a detailed list of mistakes ranging from minor to things that seem major to me but might seem harmless to a non-expert.
582: Climatic complexity, although I'm sure climactic complexity is very fun.
581: IIRC I was using Fagan's People of the Earth world prehistory text. It'll have to wait until I get home and can check the reference.
But what does the climactic complexity of the Fertile Crescent have to do with anything? If similar microclimates were common and contiguous enough , the presence of different microclimates wouldn't, as far as I can tell, act as any kind of a barrier to the spread of crops.
I did not say that they would act as a barrier. I said the micro-climates are a more plausible explanation of the phenomena that Diamond says are caused by the region's being "a Mediterranean climate," which it is not. I don't see what's so difficult about this.
I had no idea those were different words.
583: We disagree. I think getting major details of what climate a region has -- which are foundational to a larger argument one is making about what climates are better for the start of agriculture -- is not just a minor quirk that comes with the territory of popularization.
I think getting major details of what climate a region has wrong...
Largely, I'm having trouble because I thought we were talking about the east-west axial hypothesis for the spread of crops. I don't have GGS here, but I don't think you've said; what part of Diamond's argument depends on the Fertile Crescent having a Mediterranean climate, and how does the presence of non-Mediterranean microclimates in the Fertile Crescent make the argument not work?
I'm relying on blog posts and Wikipedia here, so if you've got different dates tell me what yours are, but the post linked in 538 says initial domestication of teosinte BC 6700, Mississippi Valley AD 1000, whereas wheat moved from the Fertile Crescent in 9600 BC to Spain in 5000 BC. But if you're looking at different dates, I'm all ears.
There are direct dates on maize from the Mississippi Valley at least as far back as 170 BC, and from Ontario from AD 540. (There may be earlier ones by now; the articles reporting these are from the mid-90s.) There are also more recent dates on maize from northern Argentina from about 2000 years ago. That still may not be quite as fast as the wheat dates, about which I have no particular knowledge, but they're getting into the same ballpark.
I don't think you really mean "microclimates," do you? All sorts of regions have significant microclimates. Maybe there's some other argument about climatic diversity within the fertile crescent that would be different than Diamond's.
593: I mean that a major feature of Fertile Crescent geography is an unusually wide range of local climates owing to the complicated topography of the region.
All of those early dates come from much earlier than any evidence of maize being a significant part of the diet, however. But if we're just talking about physical geography and its effect on the spread of crops, they're important to consider.
I mean, microclimates depend mainly on shifts in elevation and proximity to bodies of water. I suppose that the fertile crescent area does have significant range in elevation in that sense, but so do a lot of other places, including many places that also have mediterranean climates (e.g. coastal California and North Africa.
594: But given that a big chunk of the FC is literally on the coast of the Mediterranean, it seems weird to think of attributing a Mediterranean climate to it as a clear error.
597: Attributing a Mediterranean climate to the whole of the Fertile Crescent is a very clear error, yes. That parts of it are on the Mediterranean does not change this.
(While I'm at it, to go back to an earlier point -- Diamond does not in fact, in any way, "mark off" the silliness about Chinese topography in the second part of the book as explicit bullshitting. This may seem like a more minor part of the book, but in fact it's of a piece with the carelessness exhibited elsewhere and moreover tends to be one of the things that casual readers remember and cite the most.)
598: Sure. A sentence saying "The Fertile Crescent is characterized by a uniformly Mediterranean climate, without significant variation," would be a clear error. Unless he made an argument that depended on the lack of variation, I'm not seeing it.
599: On this, I'll have to reread it -- it's been a while.
Still waiting for this to turn into a dating or food thread.
Exactly. And this is important; its not just some random historical conjecture. You see libertarians arguing all the time that deforestation never caused the downfall of a civilization. Conversely, the collapse of civilizations like Iceland and Easter Island serve as strong parables for wise resource management.
Conversely, the so-called collapse of civilizations like Easter Island serve as strong parables for the ongoing dispossesion of colonised peoples. So I think that yes I am going to be very concerned about Diamond's work.
(And when we say, o look, it turns out Diamond followed a wrong scholarly consensus, it is worth asking why was the scholarly consensus wrong?)
So I don't think it's hard to imagine that you should be able to make a case for which areas are most conducive to the development of civilization on the basis of local flora, fauna, and geography, even if in doing so you run the risk of getting details wrong and telling just-so stories.
I think Diamond is interesting because he tries to make this case, in an accessible way, and (call me ignorant if you like, but) he's the first person to do this in a way that penetrated into the general awareness of moderately well-read people
Erm, this is not true. The first theories of climactic determinism go back to at least the turn of the century, and, handily, functioned to justify colonialism, imperialism, and racism, on the basis that the natives of wherever land where lazy and didn't know how to manage the land --- instead, they just lived off the natural bounty and did no work.
This idea, that non-whites don't have the same ability to effectively manage their resources, functions as a justification for expropriation. It's interesting to compare to the emerging right wing argument about third world carbon emmissions.
FWIW (not much at all), my overall sense after reading the book years ago was that he was excellent on the "germs" part but that the "guns" and "steel" parts [i.e., why Europe and not China] were completely unpersuasive.
This idea, that non-whites don't have the same ability to effectively manage their resources,
Same as whom? I mean, there's not much of an argument that whites, or industrialized peoples generally, have an ability to effectively manage their resources.
600: Seventh chapter of GG&S argues that it's the world's largest Mediterranean climate and its characteristics are explicable because of this. It isn't, and they aren't.
Same as whom? I mean, there's not much of an argument that whites, or industrialized peoples generally, have an ability to effectively manage their resources.
As Europeans, who, you see, have been fortuitously blessed with a climate that is just-so: it is tough enough to make them hardy, but it is still nice enough to allow them to advance technologically. This means that when they arrive in America, or Pacific Islands, they are able to more succesfully handle things than the natives, who are labouring under the weight of an inappropriate climate.
What is the world's largest Mediterranean climate then?
609: Spain and North Africa both have far larger contiguous swathes of Mediterannean climate than the Fertile Crescent does. Which of them is technically larger I'm not sure.
The first theories of climactic determinism go back to at least the turn of the century, and, handily, functioned to justify colonialism, imperialism, and racism
Or used to resist, as in Japan. Anybody else? Anybody know any turn of the century Arabic scholarship? Feels likely.
Also, IIRC (and I may not RC) the "Mediterranean climate" wasn't central to Diamond's point. I thought the argument was that the fertile crescent had hot dry summers and rainy winters, and that it was particularly suited to a large variety of the kinds of grasses and annuals, as opposed to perrenials, that turned out to be easily domesticable. Is there any dispute that the fertile crescent looks like this? Whether or not that's properly termed a "Mediterranean" climate or something else seems a little besides the point.
I'm not particularly interested in defending Diamond, btw, but the general area of early agriculture is obviously super important and interesting.
the general area of early agriculture
Just to be clear, in the Halford household we refer to this as "The Great Weakening."
but the general area of early agriculture is obviously super important and interesting.
Why?
I start with Braudel and the Annales.
613: I am now picturing your previously-mentioned small child (of bacon-wrapped-banana snacking) as Pebbles from the Flintstones.
The first theories of climactic determinism go back to at least the turn of the century, and, handily, functioned to justify colonialism, imperialism, and racism, on the basis that the natives of wherever land where lazy and didn't know how to manage the land --- instead, they just lived off the natural bounty and did no work.
And Diamond is complicit in this how? Diamond's theories compare with this in what fashion? I mean, you've read the book, so you know this is a wildly different thing than what Diamond is saying. What's your point?
601 Still waiting for this to turn into a dating or food thread.
All this talk about maize and rice and wheat, and the dates when they first appeared in various places? Totally a food and dating thread.
I kind of want to ask what "the emerging right wing argument about third world carbon emmissions" is but I'm also kind of afraid to.
612 and that it was particularly suited to a large variety of the kinds of grasses and annuals, as opposed to perrenials, that turned out to be easily domesticable
Yeah, the discussion of the domesticability of annuals versus perennials in GGS was interesting, in that it's one of those things that seemed like a pretty obvious point once stated but that I had never thought about.
607: I'm searching on Amazon here, and there may be a wronger sentence I haven't seen. But page 138 of the paperback edition says:
However, the Mediterranean climate zone of the Fertile Crescent extends westward throughout much of southern Europe and northwestern Africa.... What advantage did that particular Mediterranean zone of western Eurasia enjoy?
It turns out that it, and especially its Fertile Crescent portion, possessed at least five advantages over other Mediterranean zones. First, western Eurasia has by far the largest zone of Mediterranean climate.... Second, among Mediterranean zones, western Eurasia's experiences the greatest climactic variation from season to season and from one year to the next.
This doesn't seem to me to be confused about the Fertile Crescent in the way you suggest -- the 'largest in the world' clearly applies to the whole western Eurasian Mediterranean climate region, not just that part of it which lies within the Fertile Crescent.
618: I know this one, because I've said things that have come too close to it for comfort. The rightwing narrative is "We have to keep people in developing nations from breeding because they're just going to want cars and air conditioning and then the world is environmentally fucked."
What I've thought, and said, and I think is distinguishable but has nonetheless made people uncomfortable is "Fuck -- there's some minimal level of carbon emissions/environmental burden I think is necessary to live a humane life (easy access to potable water/modern medicine/sufficient nutrition/reasonable education). If you multiply that amount of environmental damage per person by the number of people we've got already, it's unsustainable -- either not everyone is going to live a lifestyle I think of as humane, we need fewer people somehow, or we're headed for some kind of environmental catastrophe."
I kind of want to ask what "the emerging right wing argument about third world carbon emmissions" is but I'm also kind of afraid to.
Ah, right. So, you see, India and China put out a lot of CO2, what with the whole emerging-into-industrialism thing. However, neither China nor India are that keen on cutting emissions, 'cause after all they are still poor countries and don't really like the idea of throttling back economic growth. The right wing argument is that until China and India and other similar nations act, the rich nations shouldn't either, because it is really important that China and India cut emissions.
And Diamond is complicit in this how? Diamond's theories compare with this in what fashion? I mean, you've read the book, so you know this is a wildly different thing than what Diamond is saying. What's your point?
This was in response to the idea that Diamond was the first to put forward climatic determinism, not directly accuing Diamond of complicity in that. But it is very interesting how similar Diamond's arguments are to ones that these days we find laughably offensive.
But it is very interesting how similar Diamond's arguments are to ones that these days we find laughably offensive.
Right. My question is, how are they similar?
Conversely, the so-called collapse of civilizations like Easter Island serve as strong parables for the ongoing dispossesion of colonised peoples.
Fair enough. But if the question "Is Jared Diamond racist" is in play, I think the question "Are Diamond's critics apologists for environmental destruction" should also be in play.
Consider: the claim that Europeans are solely responsible for the destruction of the Easter Island civilization follows the old, anti-environment narrative: the only thing that matters is the power dynamics between humans. Resources are unlimited, because they are really just human constructs. When societies fail, it is because of other societies. The environment is never important
The right wing argument is that until China and India and other similar nations act, the rich nations shouldn't either, because it is really important that China and India cut emissions.
Ah. Yeah, that's not even so much "the right wing argument" as "the official position of the US government," right? It's what has derailed all the major climate negotiations.
LB, your position sounds unambiguously true to me, even if it is uncomfortably close to something awful.
Influenced by Heidegger, Watsuji's Climate and Culture is both an appreciation of, and a critique of Heidegger. In particular, Watsuji argues that Heidegger under-emphasizes spatiality, and over-emphasizes temporality. Watsuji contends that had Heidegger equally emphasized spatiality, it would have tied him more firmly to the human world where we interact, both fruitfully and negatively. We are inextricably social, connected in so many ways, and ethics is the study of these social connections and positive ways of interacting.Human beings have a dual-nature, as individuals, and as member of various social groupings. We face each other in the betweenness between us, where we can either maintain a safe distance, or enter into intimate relationships of worth. Fundamental to positive, intimate relationships is trust, and trustworthiness.
And of course, the over emphasis on empiricism is in itself racist, colonialist, and imperialist.
Right. My question is, how are they similar?
That European civilization, by virtue of the geographic conditions it arose in, is inherently superior to other civilizations.
Ah. Yeah, that's not even so much "the right wing argument" as "the official position of the US government," right? It's what has derailed all the major climate negotiations.
Yeah; here, as in so many places, the position of the US government is a right wing consensus.
Fair enough. But if the question "Is Jared Diamond racist" is in play, I think the question "Are Diamond's critics apologists for environmental destruction" should also be in play.
However, the number of genocides attributable to environmental destruction is quite low; the number attributable to racism is quite high. This suggests that we ought weigh the two in the balance quite differently.
That European civilization, by virtue of the geographic conditions it arose in, is inherently superior to other civilizations.
Well, if this unsigned post is Keir, you read the book. I don't know what to say except that this is something very close to the exact opposite of what he was actually saying.
I mean, literally. The opposite. He actually argues in GG&S that he believes that New Guineans are intellectually superior to Europeans, and this argument - however dubious it is - is entirely consistent with the rest of the book.
That European civilization, by virtue of the geographic conditions it arose in, is inherently superior to other civilizations.
If you disagree with this, you probably have to abandon the metrics by which Euro Civ is considered superior:empiricism, individualism, progress and linear time, etc.
You certainly shouldn't say the other civilizations/culture are equal to ours to the extent/because they also have/had our values and methods. "China invented gunpowder! Good as us" is racist. What is it that is different about the Chinese that we should admire and possibly emulate?
And so to say Zimbabwe was as big a city or other cultures had democracy is also racist, colonialist and imperialist, using our virtues to judge the other.
Watsuji was on the edge of the Kyoto School, which was like everything else co-opted by the Empire.
Watsuji and most of the KS never said Japanese had a superior culture, just a different one that should be preserved and protected from the vicious imperialistic onslaught of the Western racists.
He lost, and Japan was conquered.
I mean, literally. The opposite. He actually argues in GG&S that he believes that New Guineans are intellectually superior to Europeans, and this argument - however dubious it is - is entirely consistent with the rest of the book.
Intellectually superior =/= civilisationally superior. This is one of the points someone makes somewhere; most authors will happily let the Other be smarter, or stronger, or whatever, but there is always a compensating flaw. Europeans, on the other hand, are all rounders.
Europeans, on the other hand, are all rounders.
Then they ought to be winning more decathlons.
If by "superior" you mean "wipes out other people when they collide" then you're getting dangerously close to saying that reality is racist.
O alameida, because of your mentioning it, I bought Mara a copy of Pippi Longstocking to give her as an adoption present. She adores the ridiculous 80s movie version (though not as much as Ponyo) and I think she deserves the story of an incredibly strong, incredibly brave, incredibly loving girl as a tribute to those qualities in herself. Thanks for the inspiration.
If by "superior" you mean "wipes out other people when they collide" then you're getting dangerously close to saying that reality is racist.
The `inherent' bit is quite important there too. And honestly, dangerously close to saying reality is racist? There's a reason that line is an old staple of the racist right.
624:If by "superior" we mean "not killing" Japan can plead its case among large nations.
2 halfhearted attempts at Korea and maybe 200 years of internal strife in 1300 years of civilization.
And then Perry attacked Edo.
Followed by probably the most gentle yet most comprehensive political and social revolution in history to that point, with 5-10k dead out of a population of tens of millions.
Followed by paranoid (not that Russia wasn't looking at Hokkaido) craziness.
I'm going to go back and read some Marvin Harris. I have no idea what his flaws are as an anthropologist, but at least his conclusions (food taboos) are sufficiently narrow as to not be schismatic, even if he is completely wrong.
So, Keir, why do you think Europe was able to conquer the world?
Why would it being contingent on luck rather than contingent on distribution of plant species make any difference in terms of "racism?"
The `inherent' bit is quite important there too.
It's important, but I don't know what it means. If you're talking about biological racism, I understand it to mean 'genetically based'. I don't know what the difference is between an argument that "Because of these geographic and resulting historical contingencies, Eurasian civilizations are generally successful in wiping out non-Eurasian civilizations where they come into conflict" (which is what I understand Diamond to be doing, probably with some significant errors) and "Eurasian civilizations are inherently superior to non-Eurasian civilizations."
It has to be possible to make the first of those arguments in a non-racist way, doesn't it? If it is possible, how would a non-racist do it that differed from how Diamond did it?
I'm guessing the idea here is that talking about why Europeans conquered the world is itself racist. We should instead be talking about other true things.
I think various Asians would have conquering as much of the world but they had shitty boats.
It has to be possible to make the first of those arguments in a non-racist way, doesn't it? If it is possible, how would a non-racist do it that differed from how Diamond did it?
Erm, possibly. I don't know how important it is to try to do so, because explanations of this thing tend to be suspiciously prone to turning out racist, which makes me suspect the framing.
But is it really correct to say `Eurasian'? We don't really mean that (India & China). And we don't really mean to say `generally succesful'. We mean to say `because of these geographic and historical contingencies between 1500 and 2000 in certain places and certain times these certain European civilizations managed to have a superiority over non-European civilizations'. And that's a perfectly possible question to answer.
The European conquest didn't really get going strong until the late 18th. It is far from over.
Capitalism kills and destroys everything it touches.
The main argument of GGS does include India & China. The argument of why Europe and not India or China is tacked on, widely agreed to be the stupidest part of the book, and totally irrelevant to the main thrust. The argument really does mean Eurasia.
Also in GGS the things that are inherently superior in Eurasia are not the people, rather it's the plants and most importantly the smallpox that's inherently superior to the plants and germs in the americas.
"Generally" seems like a fair word to use, given that I can't think of a contact between a European and a non-European civilization in which the former was more badly damaged than the latter. "Superiority" is a word I have trouble with, unless it's specifically "military superiority", which is fairly easy to determine -- you look at who wins in a conflict. But unspecified "superiority", I don't know how you'd assign it.
But I'm still trying to figure out how a non-racist would approach the question of why the outcome of conflicts has generally been so one-sided in a way that differs from Diamond's.
But that suggests that the question Diamond is asking (why did Eurasia conquer the world?) has a flawed premise. Which leads to: why ask that question, if it is flawed? Why not ask the more historically specific and detailed question?
649.last: If my ninth grade history text is a guide, they'd have a small box at the bottom of the page noting the accomplishments of someone you never heard of because their whole people got killed in the stuff being described on the main part of the page.
651 shows exactly what I loved so much about Collapse. The history of the Inuit really brought home that there's equally interesting stories about non-Eurasian history that aren't just "well these people you just read about being killed made cool beads." It strikes me as way less racist than the typical "PC" history text.
"Generally" seems like a fair word to use, given that I can't think of a contact between a European and a non-European civilization in which the former was more badly damaged than the latter. "Superiority" is a word I have trouble with, unless it's specifically "military superiority", which is fairly easy to determine -- you look at who wins in a conflict. But unspecified "superiority", I don't know how you'd assign it.
Really? Russia/Japan? The East Indies between 1300 & about 1600? There are lots of examples of reasonably non-awful contacts.
typical "PC" history text
Triggering!
Sorry, by "text" I meant "textbook." And by textbook I meant high school textbook. Sorry thought that was clear from context.
653: Contacts where neither side was badly damaged aren't contacts where the Europeans were more badly damaged than the non-Europeans.
(And 'Eurasia' really does make sense in this context -- China, India, and Japan made contact with Europe on a much more equal basis, and took less fundamental damage, than most non-European peoples.)
Being an academic, I don't blame actual practicers of discipline X with the dreck that ends up in high school texts on X. I know that's someone else's fault.
I blame Josh Weldon as he seems to get yelled at by people enough that he probably won't mind a bit of extra blame.
It's funny in my lexicon text means textbook, whereas of course to humanities people it's used much more broadly. For example, I'd never call an article a "text."
620: Now that I have the book in front of me, here is Diamond's argument as it relates to the Fertile Crescent:
"One advantage of the Fertile Crescent is that it lies within a zone of so-called Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet winters and long, hot dry summers. That climate selects for plant species able to survive long dry season and to resume growth rapidly upon the return of the rains." (GG&S p. 136)
The Fertile Crescent zone does in deed incorporate small areas of Mediterranean climate. It simply does not "lie within" such a zone. He comes back to this in p. 138:
"There are also zones of similar Mediterranean climate in four other parts of the wild... [but] they never gave rise to indigeneous agriculture at all. What advantage did that particular zone of western Eurasia enjoy?
"It turns out that it, and especially its Fertile Crescent portion, possessed at least five advantages..." (GG&S p. 138)
This the context of discussing "western Eurasia's" advantage in Mediterranean climate. He also talks, less objectionably, about other factors like the strengths of annuals and of "selfers," although this discussion nevertheless contains some of the aforementioned (and rather eyebrow-raising) flaws of comparing crops instead of diets with Mesoamerica and Asia. But it's the climate point that he emphasizes:
"The significance of that botanical wealth for humans is illustrated by the geographer Mark Blumler's studies of wild grass distributions... Blumler tabulated [the 56 wild grass species] with the largest seeds, the cream of nature's crop... they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Fertile Crescent or other parts of western Eurasia's Mediterranean zone..." (GG&S, p. 139)
I think he is confused about the Fertile Crescent in precisely the sense that I said he is.
657: Ooo, off-topic horror: Newt's fifth-grade teacher taught them a formula for the sum of the interior angles of an n-sided polygon (her formula was a little strange, but after a minute I figured out that it was equivalent to 180°(n-2), so that was all good.) Then she told them "But it doesn't work for pentagons. I measured the interior angles of a regular pentagon with a protractor and they're 110°, which isn't what the formula says."
I told him not to be rude in class, but if she said anything about math that didn't immediately make sense to him, to bring it home to me and I'd clear it up for him. But honestly, how does that happen?
"other parts of the wild" s/b "other parts of the world"
661: I checked and it came to 543 degrees. I think the formula should be 181(n-2).
Now I got 538 degrees. Obviously, the formula needs an error bar.
660: Well, he clearly understands that he's talking about the largest area of Mediterranean climate in the world, which extends well beyond the 'Fertile Crescent'. He says so explicitly.
If the first sentence you quote had said "One advantage of the Fertile Crescent is that [a large part of it] lies within a zone of so-called Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet winters and long, hot dry summers," it would have been perfectly accurate, and the rest of what you quote seems accurate as it stands. The first sentence is arguably sloppy, but not in a way that affects the argument, which is that the area where agriculture got started most successfully was in the largest contiguous area of Mediterranean climate on the planet.
529:I've been sprayed and it really sucks but it wears off.
You've had high-grade OC sprayed straight into your face, from at most a yard away, not once, but three times, with a large amount of it going down your throat? I find that exceedingly hard to believe. Here are some accounts of how the students were treated:
They handcuffed the students so tightly. One kid, later on they were unable to cut off his ties, they'd been tied so tight. One of the other students couldn't feel his hands they were so purple, his circulation was cut off so badly for so long. He took himself to the hospital after he was released from the zip-tie restraints. They told him he had nerve damage and not to expect to be able to feel his hands for the next week. He has to come back next week to see if there was permanent nerve damage in his wrists.
I was on the end of the line getting direct spray. When the second pass came, I got up crawling. I crawled away and vomited on a tree. I was yelling. It burned. Within a few minutes I was dry heaving, I couldn't breathe. Then, over the course of the next hour, I was dry heaving and vomiting.
One other person told me he was pepper sprayed while he was on the ground subdued. They tried to go up his shirt, because he'd pulled his shirt over his face to protect himself. So they aimed it up his shirt to spray him, to make sure he got it.
645: Capitalism kills and destroys everything it touches.
Clearly then, our project must be to encourage capitalism to touch itself.
667: Rule 34 suggests we'll win at some point.
665: "If the first sentence you quote had said "One advantage of the Fertile Crescent is that [a large part of it] lies within a zone of so-called Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet winters and long, hot dry summers," it would have been perfectly accurate"
No. A "large part of it" does not lie within any such zone Most of it is not a Mediterranean climate. It would not have been perfectly accurate, but it is very clearly what he wants to imply and does, in fact, imply.
Why? I suspect because this dovetails with a more standard-at-one-time (but since discredited) narrative that superior environments are "temperate" ones, characterized in the main by their abundance in Europe. This is historiography of the "European Miracle," designed to explain Europe's inherent virtues as an environment. In this sense, Keir's remarks are relevant; if Diamond acknowledged the bulk of the Fertile Crescent's dissimilarity to a "temperate" environment (and its greater similarity with climates not traditionally regarded as such, from Central Asia to north India to the Sahel) it would undercut this characterization.
There is, in fact, an aspect of geographical determinism which ties into racism in at the very least a fossilized sense, and it is precisely this kind of dubiously gerrymandered argument about "Mediterranean climates," which canonical "European Miracle" history indulged in order to tie the Fertile Crescent in an essentialist fashion to the dominance of Western Europe, which inherited much of its agricultural package. And Keir -- though I don't agree with him -- is at the least correct that it's very, very problematic.
Clearly then, our project must be to encourage capitalism to touch itself.
"Capitalism, I have a song by the Divinyls that I think you should hear. Listen carefully."
Further to 669: there are other forms of this kind of dubiously-weighted argument which Diamond, to his credit, does not indulge. Prior to Diamond's relatively ascendancy in the popular mind, it was the "common wisdom" about West Asia that its dissimilarity to European climate created "Oriental despotism" by way of "hydraulic empires" in the Middle East, as opposed to the freedom-loving "rainfall agriculture" of, say, Greece. I'll say this for Diamond, his mistake is less egregious than that model. But that doesn't make it correct or even very interesting.
No. A "large part of it" does not lie within any such zone
About a third isn't a large part? When I look at a map of the Fertile Crescent on Wikipedia, it goes from Egypt up the east coast of the Mediterranean to Turkey before heading inland and east.
674: A map of "the Fertile Crescent" is not a map of the Mediterannean climates in the Fertile Crescent, right? I'm sure you know this.
(Egypt, for instance, is a desert climate ameliorated by the presence of the Nile. Not a Mediterranean climate.)
The east coast of the Mediterranean is both part of the Fertile Crescent -- maybe around a third of it? -- and has a Mediterranean climate.
The portion of the Fertile Crescent that contains Mediterranean climates is basically Syria and Lebanon.
I was also under the impression that prior to human overuse the fertile crescent had larger regions of Mediterranean climate and less desert. But I don't really know.
And Diamond could be completely wrong about the large contiguous area of Mediterranean climate which overlaps the Fertile Crescent being an explanation for why so many domesticable plants were found there. But it's just not wrong to identify the Fertile Crescent as having a Mediterranean climate. It has other climates as well, but a big part of it is the coast of the Mediterranean and has a Mediterranean climate.
679: In other words, a very tiny percentage of it. The big show is of course Egypt and especially Mesopotamia.
680: What about the (likely not-completely anthropogenic) dessication that, over the last however many millennia has pushed the southern boundary of the Sahara further and further into the Sahel? Does he talk about that? There is too much of this argument to follow effectively, and I tried to make a cock joke, but only a couple of people listened and LC & LB are going to keep arguing this forever and I get scared when the adults are fighting.
I'm going to stick with 612. Maybe he wasn't using "Mediterranean Climate" super precisely. But all of the climatic features of the fertile crescent that he does identify do, in fact, appear to be features of the fertile crescent, and he does, in fact, appear to be reasonably precise and accurate about what the particular climatic features of the fertile crescent were that gave rise to agriculture, and why they weren't present in places with broadly similar climates.
I mean, based on the excerpts you cite, maybe it's a minor correction, and one that seems worth making, but going all ZOMG MEDITERRANEAN CLIMATE THIS BOOK SUCKS seems a little extreme.
681: But it's just not wrong to identify the Fertile Crescent as having a Mediterranean climate.
No, it really is. Syria and Lebanon are a tiny part of the Fertile Crescent. Describing the whole entity as having a Mediterranean climate is very, very obviously wrong.
Eh. At this part I'm arguing to argue. I will go spend time with real people in the same room as I am now.
going all ZOMG MEDITERRANEAN CLIMATE THIS BOOK SUCKS seems a little extreme.
I've been plain, I hope, that that's not remotely all I find wrong with the book. If someone had chosen to argue about the virtues of comparing crops instead of diets and how it's not so bad that he wasn't all super precise and stuff, the discussion would have a similar contour. (I also strongly suspect, given the existence of mistakes this bald in the book, that there are a billion others that I simply don't have the specialized knowledge to detect... so I'm more willing to invest my time in books that don't arouse this kind of doubt right off the bat. The trouble with making big mistakes is that it calls general credibility into question.)
We have rooms in ways that the ancient residents of the Fertile Crescent couldn't understand.
683: So, a guy walks into a bar and pulls a twelve-inch-tall pianist out of his pocket...
I tried to make a cock joke, but only a couple of people listened
I would like it to be on the record that I rose to the challenge... Er, played ball... Actually, scratch that...No, not that...
"Oriental despotism" by way of "hydraulic empires" in the Middle East
Okay, obviously all this is much too reductionist, but I have found very interesting the analyses of water politics in the middle east. The Iranian qanats (those carefully maintained underground rivers connecting mountain aqueducts with plains agriculture) fell apart entirely when the Shah attempted land reform that parceled out small parcels to individual farmers. Obviously there are a lot of reason why this might be so, but such complicated, large-scale irrigation projects do seem to privilege large-scale landholders--or, in the modern era, centralized planning.
I have read similar analyses of controlled flooding in Iraq. (Granted, the one that is leaping to mind is Braudel--not exactly the cutting edge.)
The cock joke is a hard taskmaster. But not nearly as long or as satisfying as your [Significant Other/Sibling/Parental Unit] wishes it was.
Wow, that was some bad comment timing.
691: Superficial plausibility is what impels even many now-disreputable historical narratives. But the "hydraulic empire" business is full of holes large enough to make Jared Diamond look like Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.
aqueducts should be "aquifers".
Basically, all the rain in Iran happens in the mountains. There are awesome flash floods for a number of months, and then nothing. However, centuries ago, they figured out that there were giant cisterns way up in the mountains and created this crazy, beautiful, and complicated system for getting it down to the cities and plains. It took a lot of upkeep and cooperation (at the very least).
(The latter of whom I obviously hold to be a much more reliable popularizing scholar.)
Superficial plausibility
Fair enough. I wouldn't account myself--or any of the generalists I've read--any sort of expert.
Actually, I quite like Fernand Braudel.
Jackmo, we have got to work on our pacing.
Actually, I quite like Fernand Braudel.
Oh, I do too. But I read him a little like I read Walter Benjamin: as a really smart, deeply read poet.
I have probably offended all of the historians in the house with that.
One more for Braudel. Reading those really changed how I read anything else for the middle ages.
There was a biography of pioneering medievalists a few years back. Most of them were whackjobs, no better than mathematicians or musicians.
If one refers to an actual Köppen-Geiger climate classification system map of the region and looks for the Csa (yellow) areas, it is easy to see that by that widely-accepted measure* the extent of the climate region in the "Fertile Crescent" is much greater (includes most of Palestine and a band extending though SW Turkey and northern Iraq to NW Iran**). In particular the parts of the Fertile Crescent which are relevant to the discussion*** are generally in that zone. (Egypt and Southern Mesopotamia tend to now be included in the "Fertile" Crescent because the presence of the big rivers for irrigation allowed them to take part in the later (but still early) agrarian culture of the region. See for instance this map of zone of early domestication (from here, which is germane to the discussion and definitely worth a read).
*There is of course generally nothing magic about the boundaries--everything is gradational. The "Mediterranean" climate is not always considered to correspond precisely with Csa, sometimes being only used in areas with a nearby large body of water, but the eastern "extension" shares its relevant climatic characteristics.
**If you look at the Wikipedia article on Mediterranean climate, the combined Csa and Csb (which is questionably Mediterranean) does not show the eastern extension, but the Csa-only one further down does.
***On could argue that Diamond is sloppy in using the term "Fertile Crescent for processes that were not that important in its SW and SE extensions as it is generally understood, However, The term Fertile Crescent was coined by James Henry Breasted who characterized the region by both ecological and cultural features present at the time of earliest civilization. In his conception, the Fertile Crescent extends from the Mesopotamian plains, through the Taurus mountains and along the Mediterranean coast to the Levant, and does not include Egypt.
691: Superficial plausibility is what impels even many now-disreputable historical narratives.
Personally I find the idea that irrigation needs would affect political structures to be deeply plausible, not just superficially so.
704: It explains why the Nebraska unicameral is 1/8th of a mile long and rotates about a centrally located water source.
If one refers to an actual Köppen-Geiger climate classification system map of the region and looks for the Csa (yellow) areas, it is easy to see that by that widely-accepted measure* the extent of the climate region in the "Fertile Crescent" is much greater (includes most of Palestine and a band extending though SW Turkey and northern Iraq to NW Iran)
Most of which is not in the "Fertile Crescent," wherein the bulk of Mesopotamia is shown (on that map) exhibiting variations of Bsh or BWh climates. Of course understanding of the Fertile Crescent has evolved since Breasted wrote in 1906, including understanding of its climate diversity being antique and in terms of the inclusion of Egypt in the theoretical region, both of which considerably antedate GG&S. But you're right: we should add Palestine as a small weight to the equally tiny drams of Syria and Lebanon.
704: Everything "affects" political structures. This has little to do with the "hydraulic empire" theory.
706: Yes, I agree that the use of the term Fertile Crescent* is not the best by Diamond and other current authors. However, in terms of the actual locations within that region which were germane to the discussion at hand fall primarily in a climate zone that is the same as or very similar to the Mediterrnean climate. For instance per this map linked above.
Of course understanding of the Fertile Crescent has evolved since Breasted wrote in 1906, including understanding of its climate diversity being antique and in terms of the inclusion of Egypt in the theoretical region, both of which considerably antedate GG&S
The later "understanding" and inclusion of Egypt having precisely zero to do with the subject under discussion, but rather the suitability of the Nile Valley and Delta area for early agriculture techniques so that new agrarian practices could be adopted there.
708: in terms of the actual locations within that region which were germane to the discussion at hand
"The actual locations within that region which were germane to the discussion at hand" are "the Fertile Crescent."
The later "understanding" and inclusion of Egypt having precisely zero to do with the subject under discussion
The subject under discussion is Diamond's contention that the region, as commonly defined when he was writing, "falls within a zone" of Mediterranean climate. The increasingly desperate contortions to avoid admitting the plain and outright wrongness of this claim are, if anything, proof positive of my contention that Diamond's influence is intellectually deleterious.
There was a biography of pioneering medievalists a few years back. Most of them were whackjobs, no better than mathematicians or musicians.
This one? It's quite good.
(I should add that I'm simply not buying a narrative in which understanding of the "Fertile Crescent" as an analytical unit has deteriorated from Breasted's enligtened standard, because that would be ridiculous. I'm simply saying I don't buy analyzing it as a "zone of Mediterranean climate," which is what Diamond attempted to pass off.)
I haven't read and can't point you to any specific critiques, but I have the impression that Cantor's book isn't really well-regarded by many medievalists. The critique seems to be that it's engaging and a good read, but kind of short on actual history.
To go back to the problem of Eurasian contact with non-Eurasian, it is deeply problematic in that it writes out all the history where Eurasian* cultures have contact with non-Eurasian which didn't result in catastrophe for the non-Eurasian, or even catastrophe for the Eurasian. So it doesn't explain things like Spain prior to the Reconquista, or long periods of time in Asia and the Near East (unless Diamond somehow shoe-horns that period of Islam into Eurasia, which...)
I dislike it because it places as the central problem of all history the temporary predominance of certain Western European nations. This then forces Diamond to discover reasons that are too broad to explain the times when those certain Western Europe nations were not predominant, and fails to explain why other so-called Eurasian nations ended up being treated more akin to non-Eurasian nations than anything else.
(It is suspicious to say that India `did better' than non-Eurasian cultures. Many Polynesian nations `did better' than India. Why?)
* which is a particularly dumb term & at particular risk of post-hoccery.
The critique seems to be that it's engaging and a good read, but kind of short on actual history.
That doesn't surprise me at all. A lot of it is his personal reminiscences of some of the people he describes, along with his opinions about their work.
To go back to the problem of Eurasian contact with non-Eurasian, it is deeply problematic in that it writes out all the history where Eurasian* cultures have contact with non-Eurasian which didn't result in catastrophe for the non-Eurasian, or even catastrophe for the Eurasian.
You're talking specifically about GGS, right? Because my understanding is that the failure of the Norse in Greenland is one of Diamond's main case studies in Collapse.
Mostly about GGS; I don't think that GGS and Collapse are entirely compatible in terms of their logics. Collapse does talk about the failure of the Norse in Greenland, and it's pretty interesting stuff --- it is too long since I read it to remember my precise thoughts on Collapse's treatment of that, but I think it is interesting that it is hard to use the GGS to explain the failure of Greenland and the success of Inuit and other non-Eurasian cultures there.
So, the problem was using the shorthand "Fertile Crescent," since "Mediterranean Climate" actually fairly accurately describes the region (southern Turkey, Syria around Damascus, part of but not all of the fertile crescent) where we have the earliest evidence of agriculture. I'm not really seeing this as a major failing on Diamond's part.
I don't think that GGS and Collapse are entirely compatible in terms of their logics.
I've wondered about this. Certainly the determinism of the GGS idea doesn't really seem to leave much room for societies to "decide whether to fail or succeed."
I was really unsure about that: to what extent is Diamond advocating one idea one book, and another the next? Which, you know, fair enough, he doesn't have to be consistent. But I think in general he'd take the line that the superstructure and the base etc etc.
602.2 is an example of the "racism is a potent drug that we must be kept from at all costs" argument. Maybe I overestimate my strength of will, but I think I can handle the truth in the case of Easter Island without succumbing.
Basically unrelated: in New Zealand, are there right-wingers who argue we need to control Chinese and Indian emissions? In the US, the function of the argument is to say we should do nothing, except buy an extra SUV.
Nope, in NZ the end result of the argument is the same.
The versions of the argument I've heard are more venal than "we're superior stewards of the environment". It's basically "Why should we have less so that they can have more?"
You've had high-grade OC sprayed straight into your face, from at most a yard away, not once, but three times, with a large amount of it going down your throat? I find that exceedingly hard to believe. Here are some accounts of how the students were treated:
We get issued a stream version of this brand and that's what I was sprayed with. I wasn't allowed to look away, cover up, or even close my eyes.
Those accounts you pasted in, is there video of that anywhere? Because watching the video Tweety linked or ones from other angles like this one I don't see people getting held down to get sprayed in the mouth or anything. They try tugging a couple of them out of the line, decide it's not going to happen without a lot of physical struggle and spray them first. I see the section of people getting sprayed and then they move in and move them aside, holding down and cuffing a couple of them. Once they get a path cleared they move out along with their arrested persons.
622
... The right wing argument is that until China and India and other similar nations act, the rich nations shouldn't either, because it is really important that China and India cut emissions.
More that it is pointless to cut emissions if the result is just that they are displaced elsewhere in the world.
the cuts in the u.s. wouldn't cause a corresponding rise in emissions in other nations; there's no remotely plausible causation there. thus "displaced" is false and disingenuous.
494: obviously I was overcome with emotion.
635: yay! pippi is the greatest.
But honestly, how does that happen?
She bought a really cheap protractor?
The "Oriental despotism/hydraulic empires" model was largely brought into common currency because it was adopted by one Karl Heinrich Marx. I'm not sure it was widely accepted in other discourses, though I may be wrong. It was generally regarded as rubbish - well, so inadequate as not to be useful - even in (thoughtful) Marxist circles as early as the 1970s.
I don't think anybody is going to get far looking for the causes of European dominance in the bronze age. You can certainly develop a useful causal narrative that links conditions in the Western Asian neolithic with Western European/North American global hegemony in the present. But conditions and events at point a directly impact those at point a1, not those at a42. The chain of causation from antiquity to modernity may be deterministic at a high enough resolution, but that resolution is probably unobtainable in practice, and contingency is a far more useful concept to approach it with.
Personally I find the idea that irrigation needs would affect political structures to be deeply plausible
Mutter mutter trickle down economics or something.
I swear to God, I think I learned about the "hydraulic empires" theory from Robert Heinlein.
Via a commenter at Crooked Timber: http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/.
730: Possibly Larry Niven? That's where I heard of it first.
706: But you're right: we should add Palestine as a small weight to the equally tiny drams of Syria and Lebanon.
By which of course you mean Palestine, all of Lebanon, the western and northern portions of Syria; and a significant swatch running generally E-W through SE Turkey, northern Iraq and NW Iran corresponding to northern part of nearly everyone's definition of the Fertile Crescent save apparently for the revised standard Lord Castock version.
As I said above I do find it a bit geographically sloppy that Diamond (and many others, as you can see if you do a Google Scholar search) use the term for what really are two somewhat overlapping zones with different roles in early agriculture. But in the end I'll hang my hat with folks like this (see Figure 1).
731: I'm a bad person, but that made me laugh.
732: That sounds plausible. One of those know-it-all blowhards. I have a really strong stereotype of science fiction writers as know-it-all blowhards, and I formed it by reading people like Heinlein and Niven.
It wasn't a main plot point of the book, though. It was just some weird tangent that one of the characters went off on (Which is what makes me think it was Heinlein.)
The right wing argument is that until China and India and other similar nations act, the rich nations shouldn't either, because it is really important that China and India cut emissions.
Libertarians don't comprehend the existence of collective action problems. Rightwingers embrace collective action problems.
The conservative logic goes something like this: Solving problem x requires collective action, therefore, no matter what anybody else does, it's irrational for me to participate.
So in the U.S., the only right-wing argument I've heard is that it's unfair to ask developing nations to restrict emissions, and it's entirely understandable that they refuse to do so. I literally can't come up with a U.S. rightwinger who thinks developing nations ought to act on global warming.
a significant swatch running generally E-W through SE Turkey, northern Iraq and NW Iran corresponding to northern part of nearly everyone's definition of the Fertile Crescent
You're taking the piss and you must know it, unless it genuinely hasn't occurred to you to actually compare your map in 703 with an actual map of the Fertile Crescent. Which I suppose is possible.
The later "understanding" and inclusion of Egypt having precisely zero to do with the subject under discussion, but rather the suitability of the Nile Valley and Delta area for early agriculture techniques so that new agrarian practices could be adopted there.
This was the part I was wondering about. Is Lord Castock contending that Diamond merely misnamed a region, or is he saying that this misnaming had an impact on the substantive underlying argument about agriculture?
Going back to the original post, I'd argue that the former error wouldn't be particularly damaging, while the latter error would be serious indeed.
unless it genuinely hasn't occurred to you to actually compare your map in 703 with an actual map of the Fertile Crescent.
Fuck you. Really.
Of course not: the whole thing is a hoax by dirt worshippers who reject capitalism and Christianity.
Hee. So, uh... you see the floating tent at Occupy Cal?
728: The "Oriental despotism/hydraulic empires" model was largely brought into common currency because it was adopted by one Karl Heinrich Marx.
Marx certainly accepted it, but I always thought it owed more of its cachet to figures like Wittfogel, Gibbon and Weber.
738: It hadn't, had it? That's hilarious.
687 might be responsive to my 737:
If someone had chosen to argue about the virtues of comparing crops instead of diets and how it's not so bad that he wasn't all super precise and stuff, the discussion would have a similar contour.
So do I understand that you don't have any problem with the underlying thesis necessarily, just that perceived errors in detail cause you to distrust that thesis? Again, this goes back to the original post.
736: Looking at the linked maps, I really don't understand the point you're making. In the climate map linked in 703, the Csa area looks to me to overlap most of the Fertile Crescent. I get that you think the point being made is absurd, but the basis for your mockery is unclear.
742: Oh Jesus Christ, read what I wrote and look at the maps at the various links I've posted. And of course I looked at the map that represented "Breasted's enligtened[sic] standard" to quote a great man.
As I said above, it would be a lot more precise if Diamond (and many others) were more specific in referring to what amounts to the western leg of the Fertile Crescent (sans Egypt) and its northern periphery. Diamond does overstate the extent of the Fertile Crescent which is in that precise climate zone.
Now would you admit that SE Turkey and Northern Iraq are both in the Fertile Crescent and withing the Mediterranean climate zone, and that they (along with the Levant down into Palestine) were according to archaeological evidence where almost all of the action took place with regard to the original domestication of grains and animals? It's a test.
you guys should start sniping at each other about the precise boundaries of the fertile crescent; the extent to which that overlaps with a mediterranean climate, and whether the overlapping area constitutes the largest mediterranean climate in the world, up in the "fuck off" thread, since the site gets creaky with 700+ threads sometimes. I'll go up there and say lord castock is being both incomprehensible and snide, and then you guys can take it from there, ok?
744: You don't? "Most of the Fertile Crescent" is Mesopotamia (and Egypt, of course, but I left that out in deference to the focus of Stormcrow's map and with due reverence for James Henry Breasted). Look at the first map linked in 703. Is most of Mesopotamia yellow? No? Then "the Csa area" does not "overlap most of the Fertile Crescent." Just thin strips on its northern and western edges. It also doesn't include SW Turkey.
It also doesn't include SW Turkey.
Shhh. Not yet.
SE Turkey, I should say.
745.2: Another look at your second map in 703 makes your point clearer. You weren't taking the piss to the extent I initially thought you were, so I'll retract that.
One might read the archives and get the impression that JP Stormcrow actually knows a thing or two about geography....
And geology. Now instead of saying, "Pittsburgh is really fucking hilly" I say "Pittsburgh is really fucking dissected plateau-y."
One of the most striking things about GGS to me was that it claims that Europeans / Asians were less vulnerable to diseases. Yet all the most devastating sexually transmitted diseases -- syphilis, AIDS, and so forth -- were apparently transmitted from "primitive" regions like aboriginal America and Africa to more "advanced" nations. They seemed to become more virulent as they spread. Is there a GGS argument that Europeans/Asians are naturally more sexually continent than other races, or could you also hypothesize that this is a kind of "return of the repressed"?
That would be striking, but I don't recall that argument being made.
And those early descriptions of syphilis cases are pretty brutal. If anything syphilis got a lot less dire over time.
There's no such argument, no. In the book the hypothesis is that Eurasians _and_ Africans tend to be less vulnerable to certain zoonotic diseases because both groups have lived in close proximity to a wider range of domesticated animals for thousands of years and have had time to build immunity to diseases that weren't native to the (smaller number of) domesticated animal species in the Americas.
753: Small pox, the flu, measles, and whatnot killed something like 80% to 90% of the people in some areas of the Americas.
I meant, more virulent as it spread from Meso America to Europe during the 16th century. Early syphilis was the AIDS of the time.
Also, I'm less interested in pedantic historical nitpicking (although the reference to 'zoonotic' diseases is very interesting in relation to STDs) than about the role of sexual repression in the lives of Unfogged commenters today, and how this might relate to the history of European civilization as laid out in GGS.
Disease often becomes more virulent when it hits a new population. But the thesis wasn't that Old Worlders have better immune systems or were less affected by disease. The thesis was that they were conditioned to deal with a particular set of diseases that were more deadly that the diseases to which the New Worlders were conditioned to deal with. Because of the animals, as ttaM says.
Also, the resistance to disease we are talking about is a population trait, not an individual trait. If small pox kills half of the people who have never been exposed to it in two populations, the populations are not necessarily equally vulnerable. If one population has endemic smallpox, the unexposed people are only the small children. This is tragic, but has nothing like the consequences you'd see in a society where nobody has been exposed and half of the entire population dies.
Speaking of sexual repression, is there any more cogent explanation for this?
Oh my God, teo is right: every Unfogged argument eventually becomes an argument about definitions.
Probably a characteristic of arguments generally -- if they don't break down, or resolve in agreement, you're going to dead-end on a definition somewhere.
I want 759 not to be ironic, but alas, I fear that's too much to hope for.
761: I really thought Utah would be among the places where it's most popular, though. I guess everyone there reads it but they don't like it? Is that how I interpret the combination of color-coding and the quoted statistic?
759: The prevalence of the missionary position was a direct consequence of Eurasia's primary axis being east-west.
Von, are you going to the GA that the chancellor is addressing today?
I'm on the other side of the country, apo, so no.
766: I didn't get that either. The fact that Utah was blue means that the book is not popular (which makes little sense) but the stat that it has the sixth largest number of readers of Twilight would say that the book is popular (which does make sense.)
In any case, it is clear that the books are terrible and we need to shelter our daughters from them.
The Atlanic seaboard or the bottom of the North American plate?
The only explanation I can come up with is that the Mormon connection has led more people to reading it than it would normally appeal to.
769: That would make it pretty difficult, I suppose.
Further to 761, Yggles links to that map and makes this howler in his Twitter feed: "Evidence that Obama has a shot at winning Wyoming and North Dakota". I think it's Carp and Cecily who should take offense, but it's hard to be sure. (H/T LGM)
775: I saw that and had the graciousness to assume that it was tongue-in-cheek.
774: it would be a long commute, yes, and I can't really leave where I am. That said, I thought about returning, as two of my graduate students are among the leaders of the campus movement (as distinct from the broader Occupy movement that has come to campus).
What's the howler? That he mistook Colorado for Wyoming?
One of the UC Davis profs I know posted a Facebook status about heading out to teach a class and then try to get pepper-sprayed, so it looks like the protests are spreading.
For those interested, my colleague is live-blogging the demonstration on the Davis campus.
OK, thread deader than Queen Anne, but this is funny.
726
the cuts in the u.s. wouldn't cause a corresponding rise in emissions in other nations; there's no remotely plausible causation there. thus "displaced" is false and disingenuous
In the short run oil consumption is largely determined by the amount of production and is rationed by price. If the US consumes less the price will fall allowing other nations to consume more.
In the long run emission restrictions in the US which are not applied to imports will encourage high energy use industry to move out of the United States.
Those bands of ex-IBMers in garages with their laptops would never have achieved what they did at Apple without the work that went before them: the valuable achievements of software engineers working in Tully's outlets on their iPads in the late 1960s to create UNIX.
