Rough Diamonds

I heard on the radio yesterday that Jared Diamond is writing a book on the differences between “tribal” societies and “modern” societies, and if I hadn’t been balancing on my head in Sheershasana yoga pose while sipping herbal tea and imagining myself at the beach, I might have gotten angry. Serenity now…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this book will be as scrupulously researched, as downright clever, and as intellectually responsible as his magnum opus, Guns, Germs, and Steel. I expect it to also be just as wrong-headed. The basic premise of that book is that you can look to a variety of environmental factors (from animals available for domestication to mineral wealth to climate) as a way of explaining why a certain set of Eurasian civilizations have been so successful in surviving and conquering others. This is fine, as far as it goes, and if you want to think about the kinds of advantages that different environmental conditions provide for a “civilization,” then this is the book for you. The trouble is that “environmental determinism” explains much less than it seems to. Diamond wants his book to refute the racism of believing that Eurasian dominance can be the result of some kind of Eurasian intellectual, genetic or moral superiority, but that argument is only necessary if you already suspected the darker races to be racially inferior. If, on the other hand, you had already jettisoned the idea that skull size was an indicator of anything significant, you are left with a theory about history that wants to use internal social factors to explain everything about a society and external factors to explain nothing.

This is very important. Combating racism is basically a smoke-screen, since the sorts of people who might speak in favor of racial differences nowadays are not the sort of people who look to science for justification. Using carefully plotted out intellectual arguments and scientific data to disprove racial difference, in other words, is just beside the point (like using science to disprove creationism), and if you haven’t been convinced by the science by now, my guess is that you’re one of these guys. Instead, the book is popular because it provides a scientific justification for a different kind of racism, what some people have called “cultural racism.” In other words, by convincing you that the West “won” because of factors intrinsic to it, while the non-west also “lost” because of its own internal social problems, you start to believe that history was some kind of competition, where each society developed along different trajectories and the ones that did better than the others (for whatever reasons) conquered and asserted hegemony. Warmed over Malthus and social Darwinism. Yawn. I’ve seen it done better (Max Weber) and I’ve seen it done much worse; the point is simply that it has been done already.

The problem with this is that history is much more complicated than that. Even societies as far from each other as West Africa and England have not so much been in competition with each other as they’ve been in an interactive dialogue and commercial partnership with each other, for a very long time and that’s at least as important to understanding how they’ve developed as any internal factors. The slave trade is a great example: take that away and you take away the guts of Europe’s early industrial economy (without which modern capitalism is inconceivable), as well as removing the very reason for existing of many West African “slave” kingdoms, and without that interaction, history would be radically, radically different. This is just one example (there are many), but the gist is simply that history is shaped at least as much by trade and commerce between civilizations as it is by factors internal to them, exactly the thing that Jared Diamond‘s book filters out of view.

It is not surprising, then, that Diamond’s work has been very well received by folks like Bill Gates and has found himself invited to give talks on “How to Get Rich” (which is nice work for a guy whose position is in an ornithology department). After all, the fallacy that one’s intrinsic qualities are the reason one succeeds or fails (and that one’s position in society is essentially inconsequential, or at least can be overcome) is the favored Horatio Alger myth of free market boosters, people who want you to believe whether you succeed or fail is your own fault. By the same token, Diamond wants us to believe that the West’s success came because it pulled itself up from its bootstraps, that factors internal to Eurasia made it possible for Europe to dominate the world. But this only works if African slaves and American cotton and Asian inventions like gunpowder are also internal to “Eurasia,” at which point the whole argument just becomes ludicrous.

I’m not so much interested in a scrupulous deflation of the gist of Diamond’s thesis (if you want that, go here or here) since I lack the chops and the inclination. It’s been done, and even my patience for reinventing the wheel has its limits. But I find it oddly appropriate that a guy like Diamond would be the one to still be worrying away at the idea that a word like “tribal” can be used to explain a damn thing, that you can use the tools of evolutionary biology to explain the history of societies. By definition, evolution happens within species which cannot interbreed with other species; history happens precisely because societies interact with other societies.

Further on in this vein, via the dirt, I found a link to a game from the guy who made SimCity, now designing a game called “Spore.” As a weird hybrid of SimEarth and SimCity, in this game your job is to direct a group of creatures straight up from protoplasmic phase through to the development of civilization. But check out some of the language in this game’s description:

First, you’ve got the “Tide Pool Phase,” in which your creatures will “Fight with other creatures and consume them to adjust the form and abilities of your creature. It’s survival of the fittest at the most microscopic level.” Then you’ve got the “Creature Phase,” in which you “Venture onto land and help your creature learn and evolve with forays away from your nest. The only way to grow is by taking chances!”

Note that up until this point we are strictly within an evolutionary biology perspective: your creatures are fighting a war with all other creatures, in exactly the ways that a Malthusian Darwinism theorizes. But after this point, it gets hairy. You‘ve got the “tribal phase” in which “Instead of controlling an individual creature, you are now caring for an entire tribe. Give them tools and guide their interactions as you upgrade their state of existence” followed by the “civilization phase” where “once your city is established, your creatures begin seeking out and interacting with other cultures. Make contact with an olive branch or a war cry. The goal for your creatures is to conquer the planet.”

Clearly the “olive branch” tactic is a Machiavellian ply if your ultimate goal is world conquest. Commerce and peaceful co-existence? Not so much: survival and development are premised on destroying all competition. Sounds more like capitalism than social studies to me. And finally, the “Space Phase,” in which “the time has come to move on to other worlds in your solar system. Make contact, colonize, or terraform, then venture further to find other solar systems. A ‘mission’ structure provides new goals in your quest for galactic dominance.”

I love how the purpose of space travel always turns out to be colonization and conquest, as a great sweeping majority of the genre of science fiction demonstrates.  Anyway, my point is really fairly simple: if you want to imagine a basically Hobbesian universe, if you want to imagine that (per Malthus and Darwin) the point of existence is to dominate the competition and grab all the available space and resources, then evolutionary biology is a good way to make that seem like the natural way for societies to behave. It’s not racism, exactly, but it does give “strong” societies the right, even the imperative, to intervene and control “weaker” ones: they’re just following the logic of evolution, where the fittest societies have the right to survive and unfit societies have the right to not survive. That’s a vision that a great many powerful people (and governments of powerful countries for that matter) find attractive. And maybe its a little more attractive to those of us that like to play those sorts of games than we’d like to think.