Artthropology

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond reviews Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In his review, he restates assumptions about environmental and social history that reinforce White Supremacy and colonialist assumptions about non-Western peoples. Although he provides a veneer a scientific information, his arguments actually ignore a huge body of scientific evidence, and are instead based on his own brand of pro-European apologetics with no scientific or sociological grounding.

At first, it seems like Diamond’s review is moving away from the environmental determinism that has characterized his work. He seems to praise Acemoglu and Robinson’s focus on sociopolitical institutions as the primary basis for understanding why some nations are rich and some are poor. This view, of course, critically overlooks the role of international institutions that are connected to systematic violence and domination, but at least it is a step in the right direction. Quickly, however, his arguments devolve in to the same old foolishness that people continue to use to explain European world dominance over the last few centuries.

Diamond reveals his failure to grasp the nuance on non-Western social structures when he writes that:

That cruel reality underlies the tragedy of modern nations, such as Papua New Guinea, whose societies were until recently tribal. Oil and mining companies there pay royalties intended for local landowners through village leaders, but the leaders often keep the royalties for themselves. That’s because they have internalized their society’s practice by which clan leaders pursue their personal interests and their own clan’s interests, rather than representing everyone’s interests.

This statement assumes that in state societies such as Western European nations, leaders represent “everyone’s interests” rather than the personal interests of themselves and their close relations. This is patently absurd. If that were the case, inequality would be much greater in Papua New Guinean clans than in state societies. This is simply not true. While it seems that institutionalized inequality was a part of some clans in Papua New Guinea even in the pre-colonial period, such as the Enga, this inequality coexisted with highly complex egalitarian institutions, resulting in a social structure in which disparities in wealth between clean leaders and the poorest members of society do not even begin to approach the levels of inequality found in, for example, the United States or the United Kingdom (Wiessner 2002). His statement also places the blame for inequality on the clean leaders, and not the oil and mining companies he mentions. This elides the history of resistance to these companies and role they have played in social disturbance in Papua New Guinea. Finally, his decision to focus on Papua New Guinea overlooks the !Kung San and African Pygmies, non-state societies which practice radical egalitarianism but are nonetheless negatively affected by neocolonialism as practiced through the interaction between nation-states and transnational corporations and financial institutions.

Diamond then writes:

The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. For example, Europe began to acquire highly productive agriculture 9,000 years ago and state government by at least 4,000 years ago, but subequatorial Africa acquired less productive agriculture only between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago and state government even more recently.

The dating of the emergence of agriculture is the bedrock of Diamond’s arguments for the inevitability of European world dominance, but his assertions are highly flawed, selective, and not grounded in the available data. To refer to his previous example, we know that agriculture had emerged in Papua New Guinea at least 9,000 years ago, just as long as it has existed in Europe (Aswani, in a response to Wiessner 2003: 253). This simple fact alone demolishes Diamond’s argument, but I will go ahead and provide even more evidence of his pseudoscientific racist ideology. Work by historical ecologists has demonstrated that throughout the last millenia, agriculture in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica was equally, if not more technologically complex and fruitful as it was in Europe during the same time period (Balée 2006, Woods and McCann 1999). In what is now called Arizona, in the Salt River Valley, as well as in what is now the state of Wisconsin, geological and archaeological evidence demonstrates conclusively that pre-colonial Native Americans irrigated and farmed vastly more land than is currently in use today through complex systems of canals and hundreds of garden beds each consisting of up to several hundred acres (Denevan 1992).

                                                                 Canals in the Salt River Valley

Throughout Subsaharan Africa, the landscape has been intensively altered and utilized both by non-state societies as well as kingdoms in, for example, Angola and Namibia, for thousands of years ( Balée 2006). His claims further break down when we consider that the earliest agriculture known to humans based on archaeological evidence was not in Europe, but in what is today known as the Middle East. Yet the Middle East is home to a great deal of poverty as well as institutions Diamond would call “bad”–a gross oversimplification, but one I will leave in tact for now because it shows how his own arguments contradict themselves.

There is a huge body of research that contradicts Diamond’s claims, but either through laziness or intentional manipulation of the facts, he ignores this data to support his own assumptions about the inherent superiority of Europeans over everyone else in the world. It is pseudoscientific White Supremacy at its finest.

Diamond gives a brief nod to the deadly power of colonialism, but then says that “in formerly poor countries with sparse native populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work,” completely ignoring the outright genocide of native populations. This is perhaps his most morally repugnant statement, though the article is full of things which make me wonder just deeply it is possible for people to banish the history of violence from their minds in order to justify their perception that White domination is the way it should be.

He argues that temperate climates create wealth and tropical climates create poverty. This argument is not unique to Diamond but in fact has a long history in colonial apologetics. As the evidence I cited above demonstrates, there is nothing inherent in these climates that makes societies more or less wealthy, if by wealth we mean the ability for all members of a society to have their needs taken care of thoroughly. The modern poverty of Subsaharan Africa has almost nothing to do with its environment, and everything to do with hundreds of years of systematic violence. Prior to colonialism, tropical parts of the world and Europe were either equally wealthy, or societies in tropical parts of the world were wealthier than Europe and other places with more temperate climates, such as Japan. The current poverty of nations in tropical climates, then, has nothing to do inherently with their environment and everything to do with systematic extraction of resources through an ideology of racism and violence. The wealth of Europe is directly correlated to the genocide, enslavement, and colonial domination of people of color across the globe. Even though most of these nations have gained political independence, except for places such as the United States and Australia where the genocide was particularly thorough, neocolonialism through multinational corporations backed up by the power of state violence has continued this extractive relationship.

Diamond also argues that tropical diseases retard tropical economies. Again, the historical evidence demonstrates that this is not the case. Rather, the role disease has played in this equation was the introduction of foreign diseases by European colonizers, which spread their genocide faster than their bodies could move. This created a situation in which Native populations died out even before colonial settlers arrived in person, thus creating the myth that they were arriving in a pristine landscape (Denevan 1992).

He further claims that tropical environments create poor soil quality, making agriculture inefficient. This is patently false. Amazonian Dark Earths are the richest soil on the planet, and they are the direct result of thousands of years of intentional human manipulation of the environment. Although the scientific research is sparse, it seems that similar soil exists in Central Africa.

                                        Amazonian Dark Earth

On the wealth of Britain, he writes that:

Within Europe, Britain had the further advantages of being an island rarely at risk from foreign armies, and of fronting on the Atlantic Ocean, which became open after 1492 to overseas trade.

The fact that he calls post-1492 interaction between Britain and the Americans and Africa “trade,” as if it were a reciprocal relationship, demonstrates his failure to grasp the reality of colonial violence.

Diamond criticizes Acemoglu and Robinson for making assertions not backed up by facts. As I have shown, Diamond’s entire worldview is based on baseless assertions with no connection to the available evidence gleaned from archaeology and environmental science, as well as the work of cultural studies scholars such as Andrea Smith [link to video] or Eduardo Galeano, whose work thoroughly unravels the ramifications of White Supremacy, (neo)colonialism, and state violence against indigenous peoples. He claims that “[institutions] provide 50 percent of the explanation for national differences in prosperity,” but I see no statistical analysis in his article—he simply pulled that number out of a hat to support his own need to justify a morally bankrupt, hateful, genocidal, violent ideology of domination that continues to form the basis of interactions between White people and People of Color, both within and between nation-states.

                                                      Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890

In conclusion, Jared Diamond is a racist who claims the mantle of scientific accuracy to support his faulty arguments while ignoring actual scientific evidence and failing to give due consideration to culture. In other words, Diamond relies on faulty environmental science. If we actually examine the environmental science, we see that the environment does almost nothing to explain modern disparities in wealth between nations. Furthermore, wealth disparities within nations are just as important as those between nations. What we see when we actually examine the evidence is that culture, not environment, is the primary factor here. Environment plays a role, but a role that is subservient to culture.

European culture has developed fundamentally around an ideology that treats violence against people of color as a foundational value to society; that treats genocide as an inevitability rather than an intentional destruction of other human beings through bloodshed and rape; and that contorts science to justify these beliefs. Diamond’s apologetics are just one more in a long list of abhorrent attempts to make this disgusting ideology seem like it is the only way things could be. I assert that it is not. I believe we have the power to see through these facile arguments and work to develop ideologies that are not grounded in racism and violence. If we fail to work intentionally towards this goal, then we are complicit in a system that destroys everyone involved in it.

References (You may not be able to find these without access to university library–if you want to read any of these articles I can send you a PDF):

Balée, William. The Resarch Program of Historical Ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006.

Denevan, William M. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1992.

Wiessner, Polly. The Vines of Complexity. Current Anthropology, 43(2): 2002.

Woods William I, and McCann J.M. The Anthropogenic Origin and Persistence of Amazonian Dark Earths. In Yearbook 1999 - Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, Vol 25, edited by C. Caviedes, 7–14.University of Texas Press, Austin. 1999.