I'm going to respond to this because it reads like another "pop-culture rebuttal" of GGS that doesn't even bother to take the arguments made on properly. I'm not going to defend factual errors like how Diamond wasn't fully informed on, e.g., the Spanish conquest of Mexico. I am going to focus on the key underlying arguments.
"The hunter-gatherer stage" is a stepping stone to be jumped from into modernity.
Yes. When we talk about 'modernity' here, I think most people mean 'living standards, defined in terms of access to certain goods: education (particularly literacy), health, necessities", and so on. Regardless of which hunter-gatherer society you pick, you are unlikely to find one which is superior on many of these accounts in comparison to non-agricultural societies. I think your argument will run something along the lines of a) hunter-gatherer societies actually do provide necessities better, hence the absence of mass starvation prior to the adoption of agriculture, or b) choosing these particular things as present in living standards is a normative thing to discuss.
In response to a), I think that is probably at least partially true; the worst level of hunter-gatherer society probably does have better quality of life in material terms than the worst level of agricultural society. This is, however, to ignore the main thrust of the argument, which is that the highest level of 'development', defined here in terms of living standards, is not found in hunter-gatherer societies; and only agricultural ones.
b) is a different argument, which says something like "you're defining living standards wrong", or "you're defining modernity wrong". People in different societies to our own can obviously have equal living standards in terms of things like 'happiness', given that how happy someone is and the constraints on their happiness are normally contextually and culturally defined anyway. This is, quite obviously, true. However, you're now having a go at Diamond for poor choice of words, or not even that, your own decision to read into his words incorrectly. If you replace where he says "more modern", or words along those lines, to "higher living standards, with living standards defined purely in material terms"; you suddenly have no argument. We can still have normative discussions about whether we need to be materially better in order to have a 'better' society; about what it is that makes a better society, but that becomes an actual meaningful argument and not taking potshots at someone else's argument when you know what else they might want to say.
Certain polities are objectively more advanced than certain others.
I agree you probably can't say any polity is objectively more advanced *in all areas*. I think you can say that some polities are crucially advanced in particular areas, or, and this is the more important part, are more advanced when it comes to having the capability to subjugate other areas. We can presume that indigenous American peoples did not want to experience European colonialism for the most part, and indeed there is a long historical record of just that. Given that, if each had equal capacity *in being able to resist the other*, then there would have been no European colonialism.
Now, the precise reason that one culture was less able to resist the other requires a difficult and multi-causal explanation. I'd certainly not put forward a One True Reason, but Diamond sets out in GGS a very plausible set of reasons: germ immunity, for example, was absolutely critical to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Large-scale warfare typically requires stable political structure to be administer it, stable political structure is difficult when the Emperor Huayna has just died because of a highly infectious series of diseases to which natives had absolutely no immunity which had recently swept through land killing millions.
Exploitation by the more advanced polities is inevitable.
This is Diamond's biggest failing; I won't dispute it. However, I will say that even if Diamond doesn't set out to explain why more advanced polities have a tendency to exploit others, it is such a given constant in human history (it's very difficult to find a non-expansionary society on kind of scale larger than a few thousand people), the rest of his book *still works* if you take exploitation as the given mode of interaction between one society that has the capacity to exploit the other.
It might very well be complex, but your "causal chain" is still whig history.
Nonsense. It neither focuses on a Great Men story - in fact, revolving around geographical constraints, it is *entirely free* of Great Men - nor does it, in any way, imply some kind of necessary teleological progression towards liberty and enlightenment. It's an argument about living standards. This is what I mean by "pop-culture rebuttal". You don't actually have an argument, you're just content to throw out shitty rejoinders like accusing him of whig history without explaining why.
I'm acquainted. Diamond's brand of geographic determinism pivots around a) superior material culture and b) resistances to certain pathogens that render certain groups less adapted to a given environment than others. GGS is an attempt to rewrite what generations of anthro studies had attributed to racial superiority but using essentially the same terms as they did.
No. It doesn't in the *slightest*, and if you think it does you clearly haven't actually read either GGS or some of the earlier works in environmental determinism. The earliest works focused on how environmental determinism encouraged particular traits in people - being in hot climates made you lazy or stupid, for example. In the words of Semple, "leading geographers to feel confident on pronouncing on the racial characteristics of given populations". This was obviously a thin racist cover for justifying European superiority over non-European people: your environment determined who *you, as a person,
are* and could make you innately inferior *as a person*.
GGS argument relies on the *exact opposite* explanation. He explicitly says that people's capabilities are the same everywhere, regardless. The entire prologue to the book is based on this principle. GGS then asks; "well, given that people have the same capabilities everywhere, why do we see divergences in *living standards* (again, defined materially)* even very early in human history?" - for example, the Greeks having calorific content in their diets around twice as high as contemporary meso-American peoples. The answer is that people make do with what they have available to them - and some people have much less available to them. In other words: your environment places certain constraints on *what you can do*, and not *who you are*.
If your attempt to discredit GGS therefore relies on linking him to early racist anthropological works, you're not going to succeed on two accounts. Firstly, because that's frankly just a shitty way to rebut someone, akin to saying vegetarians are wrong because they're sort of like Hitler, and secondly, because that link *doesn't even exist in the first place*.
It's an attempt to eschew Eurocentrism when answering why Europe won. Despite it's ostensibly egalitarian premise, Diamond doesn't even hide Guns' Eurocentrism in the epilogue:
Diamond's book is Eurocentric in parts. The last third of the book, which deals with human divergence after c.1200, is quite poorly written and I don't think presents a very compelling argument for why, e.g., Europe diverged from China. However, it does a good job at explaining differences in material wealth that emerged before this point. To an extent, any question that is attempting to answer a comparative "why does X area have higher living standards than Y area?" will involve focusing on X and Y. Diamond's biggest failing is being Eurocentric rather than Eurasiancentric.
What's so seductive about the book is that it provides a euphemistic interpretation of imperialism, an avenue to explain how non-Western societies are set to die while absolving guilt of those doing the killing.
Bullshit. Pop-culture rebuttal at its worst. The book merely explains why Western societies *could* do this; had the capacity to do so. It certainly doesn't explain why they *did*, which is where the guilt lies. You are straight up making stuff up or reading into what isn't there now.
It doesn't explain the policies of settler societies to intentionally aggravate famine and disease among native populations through the use of war and enslavement. It doesn't explain the process of negotiation and compromise virtually all native groups engaged in when they came into contact with colonial settlements. It doesn't explain the disenfranchisement and dislocation experienced by many native populations once they were incorporated, oftentimes coercively, into nation-states.
No. As said above, Diamond doesn't attempt to explain why it is that some societies feel it necessary to exploit others. That's why it rests as an incomplete explanation. However, the fact his explanation is incomplete doesn't mean it is wrong, and you're being intellectually lazy to assume this is the case. Suppose that we look at the question *starting* from the perspective you want to begin with. Even when we have a sociological explanation for why some societies (or as I suspect, effectively all sufficiently large non-isolated societies) feel it necessary to exploit other societies, that doesn't explain why particular areas of the world ended up with higher living standards than others.
Even supposing that European societies developed this 'exploitation' instinct and others did not (which I think is a laughable hypothesis in and of itself; the Nahua peoples didn't become the dominant society of Mexico valley without a long and bloody series of wars in which they replaced or pushed out the Toltecs and the Tepanecs), you need to explain why they were capable of doing this to begin with. After all, if each society had equal capacity to resist (or more accurately, if non-European capacity to resist was greater than European capacity to subjugate), colonialism could not have happened. This therefore requires some sort of explanation for why particular societies had diverged *prior even to contact*. I wonder what possible work could provide some sort of explanation for this...
[I've ignored some parts of your original comment here as they seem directed at Opiate, not Diamond. Do let me know if I've misread the intent, I'll correct ASAP]
The pitfall of geographic determinism is that it eliminates agency in favor of a narrative that sees humans and human interaction as a series of atoms bouncing off of each other. There is no room for choice in Diamond's thesis, these poor, unfortunate souls were destined to die and be exploited at the hands of a superior material culture.
Wrong. You can only draw this conclusion if you're absolutely determined to shit on the guy no matter what. Diamond isn't saying "this was predestined". Obviously, if Europeans had turned up on American shores, gone "We come in peace", and shared their knowledge in return for the knowledge of the indigenous Americans, history would have gone very differently. As it was, they turned up on American shores with the intent of conquest and subjugation. He doesn't provide an explanation for this, no. However, it's relatively safe to take this as a constant of modes of interaction between sufficiently large societies capable of doing this to one another. That still needs an explanation in itself, of why humans do such monstrous things, but even if you provided that explanation, you then need an argument for why Europeans were capable of enforcing this conquest and subjugation. This is the argument Diamond provides.
Not only is this problematically reductive, it's dangerous. You literally said that a monolithic Sub-Saharan Africa falling behind in tech to Greece in 300 B.C. is more relevant to the current state of the continent's economic development than a century of European imperialism that ended within living memory. There are plenty of people in Rwanda, Somalia, North and South Sudan, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Liberia, and The Democratic Republic of the Congo who would beg to differ.
They're obviously related questions. If sub-Saharan African was capable of resisting European colonialists, then they wouldn't have been exploited. As it was, they were not capable of resisting. Obviously, imperialism inflicted massive damage on these countries; but it's 'problematically reductive' to just say "imperialism", and end there. What happens if you reverse the question? Why didn't Europe suffer at the hands of sub-Saharan imperialism? There were particular reasons *why* Europe was capable of imperialism, these reasons are what Diamond seeks to explain.