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 In his 2010 book Ian Morris expands on Diamond's debunked theory of geographical determinism by adding more variables to it to explain why the west pulled ahead of the east, and adds a mathematical model quantifying social development globally: and wrote another book justifying and detailing the methods he arrived at it  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For_Now quote:When agriculture was first invented, areas with reliable rainfall benefited most. quote:Morris’s story is focused around a thesis of challenge and response. Societies develop and populations move as a response to climatic change that shapes the yield of crops and the nature of disease. Regular crises, driven by disease and famine as well as war, constitute a cyclical mechanism, in which human advance stalls and prosperous societies and complex political regimes simply collapse. Such crises form the “patterns of history” and they have so far occurred at repeated intervals: 2200 BC, 1750 BC, 1200 BC, 800 BC, 540 AD, 1250 AD, or 1645 AD. Every 400 years or so, climate change and drought set off migrations and state failure. Anyways I really liked the book because it taught me stuff about ancient Assyria and the silk road and how steppe horse nomads are bad because they kept invading people and bringing diseases with them which killed more people but also facilitated trade between Han China and the Roman Empire. It's also interesting how every cycle of civilization collapse/crisis is less bad than the one before it. So if you read the book (or not) let's debate and discuss it.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:15
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Typo posted:In his 2010 book Ian Morris expands on Diamond's debunked theory of geographical determinism by adding more variables to it to explain why the west pulled ahead of the east, and adds a mathematical model quantifying social development globally: and wrote another book justifying and detailing the methods he arrived at it I'm skeptical of anyone who claims ~social development~ can be quantified by a single indicator. Also, how is Diamond debunked? You can make the argument that geographical determnism isn't the only big influence on social development, but to claim that natural resources and geography don't matter is flat-out stupid.
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Aug 24, 2016 09:53
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:I'm skeptical of anyone who claims ~social development~ can be quantified by a single indicator. I think the scoring system used in the book is ridiculous, but it also isn't based on a single indicator. He goes into the various factors that make up the score in some depth. Why ridiculous? Well he uses the values in 2010 as the baseline perfect 100 to measure against, then looks at various categories he feels are important in determining the advancement of society. But then roughly half of them (e.g. military forces, information exchange) are ruled to have increased exponentially over the last century and a half. So roughly half the categories he felt were important to the overall score spend the entire tracked period at ~0. So the main thing he ends up tracking with his societal development score are size of largest city and energy capture, which have both increased heavily but not exponentially. I did find it quite a fun read, but it's really not useful as anything more than entertainment. EDIT: I do think it clues you in that it isn't properly a serious piece of historical literature fairly early on, when it opens with fan fiction about Prince Albert being captured by a Chinese admiral. Undead Hippo fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 11:46
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqLGAtvnMLU
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Aug 24, 2016 12:29
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blowfish posted:I'm skeptical of anyone who claims ~social development~ can be quantified by a single indicator. Also, how is Diamond debunked? You can make the argument that geographical determnism isn't the only big influence on social development, but to claim that natural resources and geography don't matter is flat-out stupid. Diamond isn't held in very high regard by historians. It's not that natural resources and geography don't matter, but Diamond tries to turn them into the basis of a grand unifying theory of history, and gets a lot of the specific facts wrong in the process.
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Aug 24, 2016 13:14
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Morris has been selling this idea that you can quantify cultural development for years and it's as ridiculous now as it was then. He's an excellent archaeologist who is highly esteemed in the realm of ancient Mediterranean studies but he's not really qualified to comment on other fields like Asian history, for instance. I asked him back in 2008 about how he approaches Chinese sources and he admitted he was just working with translations and secondary sources, which is a big red flag. Like his Stanford colleagues he basically got bored of his field and was famous enough to leverage his career into a big book deal. He's a wonderful guy, btw. Every time I've met him he's been extremely friendly and gracious.
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Aug 25, 2016 01:00
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Just read Michael Mann.Silver2195 posted:Diamond isn't held in very high regard by historians. It's not that natural resources and geography don't matter, but Diamond tries to turn them into the basis of a grand unifying theory of history, and gets a lot of the specific facts wrong in the process. Monocausal factors to explain world-historical development tend to sell books but don't stand up under any sort of serious scrutiny. Geopolitics, ideology, military developments, economic change and technology - all weave together in complex ways to create a giant patterned mess. Some factors are more important than others but pointing to any one decisive thing, especially over a long enough time frame, is too reductive. KaptainKrunk fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 01:13
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blowfish posted:I'm skeptical of anyone who claims ~social development~ can be quantified by a single indicator. Also, how is Diamond debunked? You can make the argument that geographical determnism isn't the only big influence on social development, but to claim that natural resources and geography don't matter is flat-out stupid. The problem with Diamond's book is that is that while highly accurate in parts pertaining to new Guinea which Diamond did a lot of field work in he pretty much made a lot of poo poo up to support his thesis. An example is that he claims that technology diffuses more quickly along a east-west axis (i.e eurasia) as oppose to a north-south axis (i.e the americas) which apparently has zero evidence supporting it. quote:EDIT: I do think it clues you in that it isn't properly a serious piece of historical literature fairly early on, when it opens with fan fiction about Prince Albert being captured by a Chinese admiral. Typo fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 01:19
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Typo posted:The problem with Diamond's book is that is that while highly accurate in parts pertaining to new Guinea which Diamond did a lot of field work in he pretty much made a lot of poo poo up to support his thesis. An example is that he claims that technology diffuses more quickly along a east-west axis (i.e eurasia) as oppose to a north-south axis (i.e the americas) which apparently has zero evidence supporting it. I thought that was specifically agriculture, not all technology. And it is true that crops fare better in similar climates along the same latitude.
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Aug 25, 2016 01:27
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The trick with these popculture books is to get enough right to make the rest of the bullshit you know is wrong sound plausible.
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Aug 25, 2016 01:29
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Ormi posted:I thought that was specifically agriculture, not all technology. And it is true that crops fare better in similar climates along the same latitude. I might be remembering wrong but he specifically says that Europe got a leg up in advance because it was on the end of the east-west axis so it got all the chinese techs whereas the aztecs and the incas didn't talk to each other because it was north-south It's being years since I've read it though so
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Aug 25, 2016 01:38
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I think his point was that most rivers in the world run East-West more than they run North-South. As rivers make travel and trade far easier by boating, new ideas and inventions were able to be spread much more quickly.
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Aug 25, 2016 11:55
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Typo posted:I might be remembering wrong but he specifically says that Europe got a leg up in advance because it was on the end of the east-west axis so it got all the chinese techs whereas the aztecs and the incas didn't talk to each other because it was north-south 1. The east-west axis ensures that crops can spread easily, creating a continuous corridor of civilization. 2. This corridor then becomes the basis for east-west trade routes. Conversely, a north-south axis makes the spread of agriculture harder, preventing the formation of continuous corridors of civilization. It'd probably expand a bit on this and say that the specific geography separating the Aztecs and the Incas, which even to this day means there's not actually a road connection from North America to South America, probably made a difference too. Eurasia's wide arid regions full of long rivers are probably an advantage here over a long thin strip of mountainous jungle, especially combined with horses.
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Aug 25, 2016 17:20
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Slaan posted:I think his point was that most rivers in the world run East-West more than they run North-South. As rivers make travel and trade far easier by boating, new ideas and inventions were able to be spread much more quickly. There's plenty of major north-south rivers in the world. The East-West thing seems like taking a look at how things actually developed in the world and attempting to explain the result with a general axiom ignoring any and all specific factors (like, for example, the fairly difficult terraain that just happens to occupy much of the middle of the two continents that are longer North-South than East-West).
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Aug 25, 2016 18:16
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Vicious takedowns of arguments goons can't remember ITT.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:39
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Arglebargle III posted:Vicious takedowns of arguments goons can't remember ITT. An unprecedented development.
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Aug 26, 2016 09:32
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Typo posted:I might be remembering wrong but he specifically says that Europe got a leg up in advance because it was on the end of the east-west axis so it got all the chinese techs whereas the aztecs and the incas didn't talk to each other because it was north-south If he does claim that he's flat out wrong. Metallurgy develops in what is now Ecuador sometime around AD 750-800 and by AD 800-850 it's present in West Mexico and starting to spread inland. You see very fast movement of needed technologies. Another good example is agriculture in the Southwest, it's a bit fuzzier because of the age and materials involved but it seems to basically enter the Southern Southwest around 2100 BC just outside modern Tucson, and you find evidence of it on the Colorado Plateau about 100 years later. Also, along the east-west axis, maize is late, it doesn't become a big thing in the Eastern Woodlands of the US and Canada until around AD 800. That alone falsifies a strict literalist view of Diamond's ideas. A Buttery Pastry posted:I haven't read the book, but it makes sense if you think of it like this: This is also not exactly congruent with the evidence from North America. You have some fairly decent east-west rivers for the development of boating and engagement between populations (the Arkansas River and it's tributaries, the Missouri River), but, other than Yellowstone obsidian showing up in extremely low levels at Ohio Hopewell sites and a tiny amount of Cerrillos turquoise from New Mexico at Spiro Mounds in East Oklahoma, there is little evidence for contact, and almost no evidence for boat-based trade to the Mississippi. These rivers cross-cut the long flat northern and southern plains and would have made good conduits to travel if the axis was important. Now, the lack of horses may have been an issue, yet there is limited evidence for horses until a bit after the period where an overland and sea-based trade linking Egypt, Sumer, the Arabian Peninsula and nearby islands and the west Indian coast which has it's earliest manifestation in the Ubaid Period of Mesopotamia and hits it's stride in the Uruk Period, with horses being a bit later, so there is some evidence suggesting that in some circumstances horses were not a needed technology to advance long-distance trade. Also, there was a trade between Mexican and Southern Ecuadorian/Peruvian cultures (Not always the Aztec or the Inca). It was the same trade that brought metallurgy north and was based on boating and shore-hopping. You find some Panamanian and other southern gold objects in sites in Mexico with some amount of frequency after AD 800 or so. In-between there are some pretty advanced societies in what are now Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua that were involved in this, basically forming a continuous corridor of civilization from Peru to the Maya in Guatemala and on to Mexico. It's just poorly researched due to post-depositional preservation and political issues. In addition, a continuous corridor of interacting cultures existing along a north-south axis independent of many large rivers existed in pre-contact Mexico and the US Southwest. There is a more or less unbroken series of cultures with similar material cultural traits and exchanging high value objects, including copper, spanning from the area around modern Jalisco, north to the Verde Valley in Arizona, based around going up the coast until cutting across the desert to modern Phoenix, and only following large rivers in it's terminal north extent. This area has similar ceramics, food processing technologies, shell jewelry designs and they import copper bells from West Mexico. While it's not a constant flow of people and goods, it's fairly consistent over a period of seemingly at least 2000 years, if not longer.
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Aug 26, 2016 12:58
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I remember Diamond's specific arguments about as well as everyone else seems to, but I believe that beyond his various factual errors, the book was criticized for painting a multitude of colonial atrocities as the result of geographical happenstance and thus absolving their perpetrators. The complaints about factual inaccuracies and simplification are par for the course when it comes to this sort of popular non-fiction. I think his actual argument re: east/west north/south was that most domesticated crops originated in northern Africa or Arabia and then spread from there, but didn't make it to a high enough latitude to make it over the land-bridge to the Americas. Wallet fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 23:43
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Wallet posted:the book was criticized for painting a multitude of colonial atrocities as the result of geographical happenstance and thus absolving their perpetrators. I remember hearing that before, and it seemed like a really strange reaction to me. Can't something be both inevitable and horrible?
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Aug 26, 2016 23:50
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Doc Hawkins posted:I remember hearing that before, and it seemed like a really strange reaction to me. Can't something be both inevitable and horrible? He makes a somewhat compelling case for the spread of virulent disease into the Americas being inevitable (though it was intentionally accelerated) because the mixture of high population density and proximity to domesticated animals made parts of Europe an ideal breeding ground. I don't think that is particularly objectionable (it may be factually inaccurate, I have no idea). I think many would argue, however, that European civilizations having the technology/power to subjugate pretty much everyone else doesn't make their exercise of that power inevitable.
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Aug 26, 2016 23:55
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Doc Hawkins posted:I remember hearing that before, and it seemed like a really strange reaction to me. Can't something be both inevitable and horrible? Framing it as inevitable removes some level of moral culpability - it implies that the people committing the crimes didn't have the option or ability to choose not to commit those crimes.
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Aug 27, 2016 00:01
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Wallet posted:I remember Diamond's specific arguments about as well as everyone else seems to, but I believe that beyond his various factual errors, the book was criticized for painting a multitude of colonial atrocities as the result of geographical happenstance and thus absolving their perpetrators. This makes no sense at all and was obviously not his intent. I always find CGP Grey's thoughts on Guns, Germs and Steel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ny338t8pts&t=901s
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Aug 27, 2016 00:01
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Wallet posted:I think many would argue, however, that European civilizations having the technology/power to subjugate pretty much everyone else doesn't make their exercise of that power inevitable. Would you argue that? If so, why?
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Aug 27, 2016 00:10
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Main Paineframe posted:Framing it as inevitable removes some level of moral culpability - it implies that the people committing the crimes didn't have the option or ability to choose not to commit those crimes. It doesn't, what Diamond set out to do wasn't to absolve the Europeans of Colonialism around three quarters of the globe, its to try and offer an explanation as to how they even had the capabilities of doing it in the first place. To do this he was explicitly trying to avoid the exceptionalist explanations that suggested Europe had some sort of inherent superiority either Racially or Culturally and instead framed the whole issue as being the result of factors that had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the people involved, particularly Geography, Botany etc. It hardly needs repeating that his arguments are flawed but I think its commendable that he made it his mission to try and offer an explanation that explicitly rejected the usual kind of barely disguised cultural superiority presented by the likes of Niall Ferguson. It really, really annoys me how much people on this site and elsewhere try to dismiss him as just another cultural elitist when he opens his book with a long preamble about how his Papua New Guinean friends were curious as to why it was Europeans coming to claim their islands from halfway around the world and not the reverse. Also something that was pointed out in the CGP grey podcast I just linked, Its not really about inevitability, its about what were the most likely outcomes given the makeup of the planet. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 00:27
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khwarezm posted:It really, really annoys me how much people on this site and elsewhere try to dismiss him as just another cultural elitist when he opens his book with a long preamble about how his Papua New Guinean friends were curious as to why it was Europeans coming to claim their islands from halfway around the world and not the reverse. A white man claiming he has
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Aug 27, 2016 00:46
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I'm sure that, if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's a grand unifying theory of history.
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Aug 27, 2016 03:09
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i remember the east-west theory being pertaining to disease; that similar latitudes with similar climates could support similar diseases among movement of peoples, thereby increasing likelihood of large-scale exposure leading to immunity from smallpox etc. after generations of kill-offs
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Aug 27, 2016 03:39
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Wallet posted:I remember Diamond's specific arguments about as well as everyone else seems to, but I believe that beyond his various factual errors, the book was criticized for painting a multitude of colonial atrocities as the result of geographical happenstance and thus absolving their perpetrators. As others have said, he's not trying to absolve colonialism, he's trying to explain why it's Europeans who got ships and guns to beat up the non-Europeans instead of like the Aztec or Iroquois beating up Europe
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Aug 27, 2016 06:35
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G,G&S was a reaction to conventional history being a long list of great white men that conquered the world because of their superior culture and moral fortitude.
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Aug 27, 2016 06:41
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Ratios and Tendency posted:G,G&S was a reaction to conventional history being a long list of great white men that conquered the world because of their superior culture and moral fortitude. You'd be hard-pressed to find many academic historians who buy into that narrative. If you mean conventional popular history, you may not be wrong, but that doesn't excuse trying to replace it with other simplistic narratives.
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Aug 27, 2016 06:46
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Silver2195 posted:You'd be hard-pressed to find many academic historians who buy into that narrative. If you mean conventional popular history, you may not be wrong, but that doesn't excuse trying to replace it with other simplistic narratives. otoh it's prob a step in the right direction
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Aug 27, 2016 06:52
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Was Guns Germs and Steel the book supposed to be an in-depth academic theory? It definitely seemed like it was packaged so it didn't require a history degree to understand.
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Aug 27, 2016 06:59
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Fojar38 posted:Was Guns Germs and Steel the book supposed to be an in-depth academic theory? It definitely seemed like it was packaged so it didn't require a history degree to understand. No, yes.
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Aug 27, 2016 07:01
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Fojar38 posted:Was Guns Germs and Steel the book supposed to be an in-depth academic theory? It definitely seemed like it was packaged so it didn't require a history degree to understand. It's not written to require a history degree to understand, but the general tone of the book implies some pretensions to authority - even an implication that Diamond is reinventing history from first principles along "scientific" lines and making conventional academic history obsolete.
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Aug 27, 2016 08:09
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I was always thaught the Khazars are why the West pulled ahead. And why modern civilization is being held back.
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Aug 27, 2016 08:54
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PleasingFungus posted:Would you argue that? If so, why? No, not really, which is why I stated it that way. I don't think that colonialism was necessarily inevitable, but I also don't think Diamond was/is saying that it was.
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Aug 27, 2016 12:09
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blowfish posted:I'm skeptical of anyone who claims ~social development~ can be quantified by a single indicator. Also, how is Diamond debunked? You can make the argument that geographical determnism isn't the only big influence on social development, but to claim that natural resources and geography don't matter is flat-out stupid. Diamond is not debunked, some D&D posters just don't like him.
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Aug 27, 2016 13:48
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Hogge Wild posted:Diamond is not debunked, some D&D posters just don't like him. It's quite funny, chapters of Diamond was required reading in my ecology course.
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Aug 27, 2016 13:51
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Diamond may have been totally wrong about the specifics, (although he probably wasn't, g,g&s were likely contributing factors.) But he was almost certainly right about the idea that the physical location of the West bad something to do with its dominance.
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Aug 27, 2016 14:19
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Any good model is going to get things wrong because data is noisy, in fact a model that tries and explain everything is almost certainly a bad one because of overfitting.
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Aug 27, 2016 16:35
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