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Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

91 points by rufus_foreman 3y ago

j-bos 3y ago
I guess this is the historians' orangutan.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Is this referencing Robert Sapolsky? I didn't know there was controversy there also?
  - j-bos 3y ago
    I'm not sure. I vaguely rememeber the story about certain academics treating "the orangutan" as a great taboo that leads to endless fighting. Bizzare to an outsider, similar to my perception of the Diamond controversy.
thatoneguy 3y ago
All those words and not a peep about his board game Darwinopoly. I played it in college with some members of my anthrpology class as part of a class exercise and let me tell you, asking random classmates if they want to have sex and then rolling for paternity is a thrill that's hard to replicate 20 years later.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aslfjiasf 3y ago
  This review suggests that the game is now called "Tribes": https://amzn.com/dp/1556343558 https://amzn.com/dp/1556343558, but the author is not Jared Diamond. Is this the game you remember?
jrh3 3y ago
Wow. I read that book in college. No idea a backlash like that developed... That is crazy if that is how skewed university's have become. Guns, Germs, and Steel is an incredible academic work. Dang.
- angst_ridden 3y ago
  I think Diamond's greatest fault as a researcher is his reliance on reductivism. Anyone can cherry-pick history to support "5 simple rules that explain X" if the rules are even reasonably sane. It may be satisfying and entertaining to read, but human history is much more complex than just a few rules.
  - civilized 3y ago
    I bet I can take anyone's favorite history books and paint them as reductivist. The charge of reductivism can be made against anyone who attempts to explain big patterns in comprehensible ways. In fact, isn't it reductionist to claim that a historian's entire view on a topic can be reduced to theories they developed in a single book?
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Exactly. Have you seen how many WWII or Civil War books there are. Do I need to read them all before I am allowed a valid opinion? All history gets condensed and interpreted. This thread isn't really do a very good job arguing that Jared is wrong, it seems much more like they disagree with some particular point politically, thus he must be wrong.
    - George83728 3y ago
      It's easy to level a charge of reductionist when the book is presenting a model for why things happened a certain way, instead of just describing what sort of things happened. GG&S is all about the why, and is therefore inherently reductionist.
  - jrh3 3y ago
    I took his rules as high level observations of the environment's impact on human evolution. But human experience is much more nuanced like you say. I do remember thinking some of the observations could come across as very blunt. There is a video on the internet of him trying to shoot an old style gun... pretty funny... needless to say it's not his greatest skill. Jared Diamond Funny video: https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN- https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN...
angst_ridden 3y ago
I always found McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples" a much better read than Diamond's book on semi-overlapping topics.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  If it was at all popular, this thread would argue against it. Is it considered, 'more accurate'?
WalterBright 3y ago
> Diamond also attempts to explain why European, rather than Chinese, conquerors were the ones who did all the colonizing. This is a simple balkanization theory—Europe divided into many areas conducive to states, China formed a great homogenous core—that does not need lengthy restatement. Europe has a highly indented coastline with multiple large peninsulas, all of which developed independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments, plus two large islands. Roberts' "The Triumph of the West" https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Triumph-West-Press/dp/1842124439/ https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Triumph-West-Press/dp/1842124... has a quite different take on this. He says the difference comes from a different cultural perspective. It's been a long time since I read it, but I'll try to summarize it with the Chinese perspective was that phenomena could not be modeled. Everything was a unique creation. I.e. the behavior of a model could not be extrapolated to explain other behaviors, while the European perspective was always trying to explain things with models. Another cultural difference was the European notion (intentional or otherwise) of free markets. This is expounded upon by another book, "The Victory of Reason" by Stark https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-Capitalism/dp/0812972333 https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-C... My own observation of history is that the key factor is recognition of and protection of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness produce massive technological progress and the uplifting of society. Societies that recognize these rights thrive, those that do not, fall by the wayside as they are unable to compete.
- soperj 3y ago
  > > Diamond also attempts to explain why European, rather than Chinese, conquerors were the ones who did all the colonizing. This is a simple balkanization theory—Europe divided into many areas conducive to states, China formed a great homogenous core—that does not need lengthy restatement. Europe has a highly indented coastline with multiple large peninsulas, all of which developed independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments, plus two large islands. It's like he knows nothing about China. There's lots of different dialects, Mandarin wasn't the main language used by Government until around the time that the Americas were being colonized by the Europeans.
  - swombat 3y ago
George83728 3y ago
I never bought into the claims that Jared Diamond is some sort of racist; he book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it. Honestly. That said, some of Jared Diamond's arguments are really lame.. just poorly thought out. For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... of course he has and mentions them much later in his book, but dismissing the point as a "puzzling non-invention". This realization doesn't seem to have him question his earlier assertion that wheels for transportation would only be invented where pack animals are available. I think it's got nothing to do with pack animals, and the truth is that wheelbarrows, and wheels for transportation generally, are one of those inventions that are obvious only in retrospect. Even after you've invented wheels on toys, it isn't necessarily immediately obvious that wheels could have practical applications as well. A very small handful of people in the history of humanity had this idea and most people never did (and just copied it from other people). It's not because of geography or ecology, just shear dumb luck.
- seanalltogether 3y ago
  > For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... I pulled up a PDF of GG&S to search through and I can't see this argument in the book. What I can see is him making the observation that the wheels invented in mesoamerica didn't make their way north or south to be paired up with pack animals, and that this showed how hard it was for technological discoveries to travel vertically through climates.
  - George83728 3y ago
    He argues that because technology transfer was difficult in the Americas, the ancient Mexican wheel never found it's way to the Andes where it may have been combined with suitable pack animals. That much is fairly plausible. But he goes further than this: he also argues that because ancient Mexican wheels weren't combined with pack animals, wheels could offer no practical utility to ancient Mexicans and this explains why the wheel wasn't put to practical use in the Americas. This is too far, he's forcing the data to fit his model. The relevant passage: > While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters. It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.
yyyk 3y ago
The author needs to look at this in a wider context. GG&S may be defensible, but Collapse is pretty horrible, trying to force environmental explanations at the cost of downplaying European slave raids (Easter Islands) or utter absurdity (Diamond's suggestion that Viking Greenlanders preferred to starve than to eat fish). Diamond had a thesis and forced the facts to fit in the expense of integrity. After Collapse, it made much more sense to look askance at GG&S.
- api 3y ago
  I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals. These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten. I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker. A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed. In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    This seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong. This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
    - perardi 3y ago
the__alchemist 3y ago
I had a hard time interpreting the various criticisms from academics of Diamond in a way other than: This goes against our field's dogma, so I will fight it. Ie, I'm suspicious that, given the conclusions he came to, they would argue against it regardless of methods or the strength of his case. Eg, He underplays the role of culture? He's wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kgwxd 3y ago
[flagged]
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Knew there were some detractors, didn't know it was so wide spread and vindictive. Glad this sets out more current arguments.
WalterBright 3y ago
> Diamond absolves Europeans of blame for the crimes of imperialism through his geographical determinism, since the conquerors couldn’t help but seize the helpless Americas. Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures. For example, "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060/ https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Yeah. The Mongols were on a summer vacation, the Persian Empire wasn't invading ancient Greece, they were just sightseeing, the Vikings (Scandinavian not central european IMO) were just doing some exuberant boating, the Hans just wanted to sojourn in the Jungles of Vietnam, the Ottomans were just misguided proseletyzers, the Rus were just bored from Winter, etc. The Japanese in WWII were just looking for some iron and oil. If you have a large empire, chances are there was large scale conquest involved. Likely all "civilizations" involved small scale conquest of tribes. So the academics are all in arms about Diamond writing a pretty engaging nonfiction book that accessibly integrated a half-dozen historical / political theories into an interesting integrated theory. Was it perfect? Hell no, no way it was. Is there roots of truth in it? There has to be. More than anything, reading the book was thought provoking, because all history taught in schools is basically a bunch of personalities/leaders and battles, and almost no investigation of other factors outside of the human events. What's also bizarre is reading various modern historical analyses of the Mongol invasions as "eh, they weren't that bad". Like... what? I'm fully willing to admit European empire building was flagrantly unacceptable from the lens of the modern conception of universal human rights. But that Euros were some especially brutal oppressors/conquerors compared to the whole of human history? Come on. I mean... the Mongols. AND they almost conquered Europe.
  - swombat 3y ago
    For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wiped out the Georgian army which had been preparing for war for years and so was probably the best prepared army in Europe at the time. The rest of Europe was totally unprepared even for that small 10k force. Luckily for us, soon after, Genghis Khan died and the entire army turned back. Otherwise Europe would for sure have been conquered with no challenge. Luck of the dice.
worik 3y ago
> But Guns, Germs, and Steel—which is explicitly anti-racist Reminds me of: "I'm not racist, but...."
1letterunixname 3y ago
It's frustrating when people take scientific inquiry and dispassionate plausible explanation of historical circumstances as some sort of identity politics cudgel to bash a scientist over the head with erroneous value judgements like they're canceling a Neonazi. GGS was a good book. Independently, 2 MDs at my gym also came up and mentioned they thought it was a fascinating work. And my dept chair also thought it was a insightful work. In fairness, the last 1/3 of it kind of falls flat. Collapse isn't all that engaging.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Graeber/Wengrow's Dawn of Everything is a good critical examination. I don't see anyone in this thread mentioning the kind of points that book covers. But it is another one that rankles institutional beliefs.
- unmole 3y ago
  Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. Let's not pretend his political screeds are works of dispassionate scholarship.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Graeber*
    - unmole 3y ago
      Ugh, I almost always get it wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30830424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30830424 Fixed.
karaterobot 3y ago
When I first read GG&S in a university anthropology course in 2000 or 2001, I immediately disliked it. The reason was not because I thought it was racist or imperialist— I don't think it is. Instead, I disliked it because it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis. Now that I'm older, I understand that this is what pretty much every popular treatment of anything must do, and Diamond was just more successful at it than almost anyone else. Is that to his credit? As a writer, maybe. It's ultimately a complaint about the danger of arguments which are so simple, elegant, and easily understandable that they suck all the air out of the debate, not against him or his book per se.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis I think it's worth quoting Friedman from his essay on positive economics[1] "In so far as a theory can be said to have "assumptions" at all, and in so far as their "realism" can be judged independently of the validity of predictions, the relation between the significance of a theory and the "realism" of its "assumptions" is almost the opposite of that suggested by the view under criticism. Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense).12 The reason is simple. A hypothesis is important if it "explains" much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions. it takes account of, and accounts for, none of the many other attendant circumstances, since its very success shows them to be irrelevant for the phenomena to be explained" Diamond is often criticized for the simplicity, or geographic determinism of his argument but from the standpoint of an empirical science this is a strength. What matters is only the predictive power of a theory, not whether it is nuanced, realistic or representative. People sometimes seem to take almost offense to reductive theories in the social sciences. Btw one recent development to really test Diamond's theory is I think the development of tropical wheat developed in Brazil. If this works and drastically uplifts the global south I'd count that as a big piece of evidence in his favor. [1]https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/bwl/pruefungs-steuerlehre/loeffler/Lehre/bachelor/investition/Friedman_the_methology_of_positive_economics.pdf https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/bwl/pruefungs-st...
joatmon-snoo 3y ago
This blog post seems more of a strawman to me than anything else; GGS has a poor reputation in historian circles because it doesn't approach historical analysis with a level of rigor appropriate for academia. This quote[0] sums up things well for me: > Look through any r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can't be right, no matter how much it "makes sense." > For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation. The "Diamond is a racist" argument is not one that historians care about. What they take issue with is: * not questioning primary source bias (e.g. he takes Pizarro, Cortez, etc. at face value), * exaggerating the role that disease alone played, as opposed to how disease amplified vicious cycles[2][3] * made-up facts[0]: > In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comment/dk6htc0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comme... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/ [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/ [3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/ https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/ (Disclaimer: I haven't read GGS, nor am I familiar with the underlying theses. I just find myself fascinated by the controversy around the book.)
worik 3y ago
I no longer have a copy, so from memory.... The book opens with a sequence of Jarrad discussing with a New Guineaian, why it was Europeans that went to New Guinea, and not the other way around He goes on to discuss this, as if Europeans were the first outsiders there (we are not talking about the Highlands, that is more complex) Where he was having the conversation there had been at least four thousand years of international trade and commerce. Which he ignored At one point in time Europeans are dominant. He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever. Europeans (we) had our experience of world domination. It is not the natural order, as Jarrad suggested, but an historical blip. If the Industrial Revolution had gotten under way in India and it was the West Euro company from Bengal conquering Britain, then some India Jarrad would be telling a different story That is what is wrong with it. Post Hoc analysis and story tel.ing dressed up as scholarship Or racist drivel, to call a spade a spade
- thaw13579 3y ago
  Did you stop reading at the intro?
  - worik 3y ago
    I got about two thirds through Whatever you think about him, he really needed a more dominant editor.
- prepend 3y ago
  > He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever. He never claims the dominance will last forever. He just presents theories as to why Europeans are dominant now (or were 40 years ago when the book as published at least). It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. It’s racist to say that’s a good thing or destined or will last forever, but Diamond never argues that. I think you have some headcanon there.
  - worik 3y ago
    > It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. What is racist is to say it happened for a reason, not blind luck
prepend 3y ago
No one realistically believes GGS is racist except in a rule 34 kind of way in that every opinion has been stated by someone on the internet.
boringuser2 3y ago
Guns, Germs and Steel is ridiculous nonsense and an horrific just so story to explain European supremacy for a bulk of the modern era. I'd sooner listen to Jared Taylor than Jared Diamond, because at least the former's hypothesis is somewhat intellectually sound. It also has laughable, extremely racist tidbits such as Jared Diamonds unironic opinion that, on a genetic basis, people of Papua New Guinea are "superior" to Europeans, where he cited industrialization as dysgenic. Absurd.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> But military histories of the conquest support the assertion that the small parties of Spanish soldiers were able to defeat much larger Native armies thanks primarily to their superior steel weapons and organizational capacity, in line with Diamond’s argument. I don't have a bone to pick with Diamond, but this widely disseminated narrative lacks nuance. When people say that a few Spaniards conquered the largest Mesoamerican empires, at least when it comes to Mexico and the Aztecs, they are forgetting an important detail. When the ragtag band of mercenaries and adventurers following Hernán Cortés arrived at Mexico, they landed smack in the middle of a long-running regional war between the "Aztecs", i.e. the people of Tenochtitlan, and, basically, everyone else in the area. And of course, in the typical fashion of foreign invaders, the Spaniards immediately became fast allies with the enemies of Tehnochtitlan as the dominant power [1]. Thus, every time the Conquistadores fought the armies of Tenochtitlan, besides their guns, germs, and steel, and horses [3], they had with them thousands of allied local warriors, mainly from Tlaxcala, if I remember correctly, at least enough to stand up to the numbers of the Aztecs' armies [2]. Note that towards the end of the campaign, Tlaxcalla and the other kingdoms were indeed devastated by smallpox. But the same disaster was suffered by the people of Tenochtitlan, also. The Spaniards really were the plague [4]. _________________ [1] This is a story that has played out many times in history. For instance, when the Crusaders landed in the Holy Land, they immediately found themselves enmeshed in the constant churn of alliances and wars in the Middle East. Half of the time, half of the locals tried to kill them and the other half they tried to get them to help them kill the other half. The same thing happened in Iraq, when the US invaded. It is a story as old as invasion. [2] In much the same way, when the Spartans held Thermopylae, until that dog Efialtes, gave them to the Persians, the 300 were not, well, 300; more like 7000, at least at the start of the battle. Even in their famous last stand the 300 Spartans were accompanied by 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. The rest of the 7000 left to fight another day. Not that it would have made any difference anyway, not against the fully might of the Persian empire. Remember Leonida's apocryphal quip: when he was told that the Persians' arrows would be so many that they would darken the sun, Leonidas said "good, we'll be fighting in the shade". [3] And La Malinche, a formidable woman who acted as their interpreter and go-between, and was probably a main reason the Spaniards managed to ally themselves to the locals in the first place. [4] My source in all this is the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo who was there and saw it all with his own eyes, so god be his witness. My source for the Crusades is "Les croisades vue par les Arabes" by Amin Maalouf.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Peter Turchin, as another 'pop-sci' author with some speculative theories. It is a counter theory on why civilizations 'Collapse'. Since this thread seems so opposed to the 'environmental' causes of collapse that Diamond proposes, the Turchin theories on how societies naturally go through stages that lead to collapse is interesting second train of thought.
superultra 3y ago
Maybe I misread, but this author creates some pretty huge straw man arguments here and in so doing over simplifies what is, I think (as a lapsed but trained historian),pretty valid critique. While some of the pop culture criticism of Diamond could be assigned to so-called cancel culture or “racism,” that characterization really does not summarize much of the academic critique of Diamond. The best critique I’ve read and certainly the most fun is the Davids Wengrow and Graeber’s big tome “Dawn of Everything.” Part of critique is simply Diamond making some broad strokes and it’s always the nature of synthesis that they decay quickly as new research comes available. I’ll link to their more broad editorial, but the David’s’ biggest critique of Diamond and other neo-Raussians is that much of the foundation of those assertions are based on broad and bad preconceptions about so-called pre-history from the Enlightment. Once stated more plainly, very few of us in 2023 or even 20-40 years earlier, would agree with anything stated about other cultures in the Enlightment. And yet somehow, entire world histories - Diamond’s included - never question these basic foundational assumptions. This is a mistake that is increasingly disputed by not only pre-existing 20th century anthropology, but most certainly by 21st century anthropology included LiDAR and satellite imaging. This author addresses some of that critique but to frame it as some kind of racist critique or cancel culture is frankly absurd. I’m surprised because as a historian surely Kedrosky has read the same books and articles I have, and certainly must know how historiography works - likely better than I do! - and yet this framing is so disengenious it’s a bit surprising. In any case I recommend Dawn of Everything. It’s not a retort to Diamond/neo-Raussian as it is a kind of “huh!” with a lot of fun framing of preexisting research - some of which Diamond himself pulls from. An op-Ed to whet the appetite: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-d...

91 points by rufus_foreman 3y ago

j-bos 3y ago

I guess this is the historians' orangutan.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Is this referencing Robert Sapolsky? I didn't know there was controversy there also?
- j-bos 3y ago
  I'm not sure. I vaguely rememeber the story about certain academics treating "the orangutan" as a great taboo that leads to endless fighting. Bizzare to an outsider, similar to my perception of the Diamond controversy.

thatoneguy 3y ago

All those words and not a peep about his board game Darwinopoly. I played it in college with some members of my anthrpology class as part of a class exercise and let me tell you, asking random classmates if they want to have sex and then rolling for paternity is a thrill that's hard to replicate 20 years later.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aslfjiasf 3y ago
This review suggests that the game is now called "Tribes": https://amzn.com/dp/1556343558 https://amzn.com/dp/1556343558, but the author is not Jared Diamond. Is this the game you remember?

jrh3 3y ago

Wow. I read that book in college. No idea a backlash like that developed... That is crazy if that is how skewed university's have become. Guns, Germs, and Steel is an incredible academic work. Dang.

angst_ridden 3y ago
I think Diamond's greatest fault as a researcher is his reliance on reductivism. Anyone can cherry-pick history to support "5 simple rules that explain X" if the rules are even reasonably sane. It may be satisfying and entertaining to read, but human history is much more complex than just a few rules.
- civilized 3y ago
  I bet I can take anyone's favorite history books and paint them as reductivist. The charge of reductivism can be made against anyone who attempts to explain big patterns in comprehensible ways. In fact, isn't it reductionist to claim that a historian's entire view on a topic can be reduced to theories they developed in a single book?
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Exactly. Have you seen how many WWII or Civil War books there are. Do I need to read them all before I am allowed a valid opinion? All history gets condensed and interpreted. This thread isn't really do a very good job arguing that Jared is wrong, it seems much more like they disagree with some particular point politically, thus he must be wrong.
  - George83728 3y ago
    It's easy to level a charge of reductionist when the book is presenting a model for why things happened a certain way, instead of just describing what sort of things happened. GG&S is all about the why, and is therefore inherently reductionist.
- jrh3 3y ago
  I took his rules as high level observations of the environment's impact on human evolution. But human experience is much more nuanced like you say. I do remember thinking some of the observations could come across as very blunt. There is a video on the internet of him trying to shoot an old style gun... pretty funny... needless to say it's not his greatest skill. Jared Diamond Funny video: https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN- https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN...

angst_ridden 3y ago

I always found McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples" a much better read than Diamond's book on semi-overlapping topics.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
If it was at all popular, this thread would argue against it. Is it considered, 'more accurate'?

WalterBright 3y ago

> Diamond also attempts to explain why European, rather than Chinese, conquerors were the ones who did all the colonizing. This is a simple balkanization theory—Europe divided into many areas conducive to states, China formed a great homogenous core—that does not need lengthy restatement. Europe has a highly indented coastline with multiple large peninsulas, all of which developed independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments, plus two large islands. Roberts' "The Triumph of the West" https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Triumph-West-Press/dp/1842124439/ https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Triumph-West-Press/dp/1842124... has a quite different take on this. He says the difference comes from a different cultural perspective. It's been a long time since I read it, but I'll try to summarize it with the Chinese perspective was that phenomena could not be modeled. Everything was a unique creation. I.e. the behavior of a model could not be extrapolated to explain other behaviors, while the European perspective was always trying to explain things with models. Another cultural difference was the European notion (intentional or otherwise) of free markets. This is expounded upon by another book, "The Victory of Reason" by Stark https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-Capitalism/dp/0812972333 https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Reason-Christianity-Freedom-C... My own observation of history is that the key factor is recognition of and protection of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness produce massive technological progress and the uplifting of society. Societies that recognize these rights thrive, those that do not, fall by the wayside as they are unable to compete.

soperj 3y ago
> > Diamond also attempts to explain why European, rather than Chinese, conquerors were the ones who did all the colonizing. This is a simple balkanization theory—Europe divided into many areas conducive to states, China formed a great homogenous core—that does not need lengthy restatement. Europe has a highly indented coastline with multiple large peninsulas, all of which developed independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments, plus two large islands. It's like he knows nothing about China. There's lots of different dialects, Mandarin wasn't the main language used by Government until around the time that the Americas were being colonized by the Europeans.
- swombat 3y ago

George83728 3y ago

I never bought into the claims that Jared Diamond is some sort of racist; he book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it. Honestly. That said, some of Jared Diamond's arguments are really lame.. just poorly thought out. For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... of course he has and mentions them much later in his book, but dismissing the point as a "puzzling non-invention". This realization doesn't seem to have him question his earlier assertion that wheels for transportation would only be invented where pack animals are available. I think it's got nothing to do with pack animals, and the truth is that wheelbarrows, and wheels for transportation generally, are one of those inventions that are obvious only in retrospect. Even after you've invented wheels on toys, it isn't necessarily immediately obvious that wheels could have practical applications as well. A very small handful of people in the history of humanity had this idea and most people never did (and just copied it from other people). It's not because of geography or ecology, just shear dumb luck.

seanalltogether 3y ago
> For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... I pulled up a PDF of GG&S to search through and I can't see this argument in the book. What I can see is him making the observation that the wheels invented in mesoamerica didn't make their way north or south to be paired up with pack animals, and that this showed how hard it was for technological discoveries to travel vertically through climates.
- George83728 3y ago
  He argues that because technology transfer was difficult in the Americas, the ancient Mexican wheel never found it's way to the Andes where it may have been combined with suitable pack animals. That much is fairly plausible. But he goes further than this: he also argues that because ancient Mexican wheels weren't combined with pack animals, wheels could offer no practical utility to ancient Mexicans and this explains why the wheel wasn't put to practical use in the Americas. This is too far, he's forcing the data to fit his model. The relevant passage: > While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters. It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.

yyyk 3y ago

The author needs to look at this in a wider context. GG&S may be defensible, but Collapse is pretty horrible, trying to force environmental explanations at the cost of downplaying European slave raids (Easter Islands) or utter absurdity (Diamond's suggestion that Viking Greenlanders preferred to starve than to eat fish). Diamond had a thesis and forced the facts to fit in the expense of integrity. After Collapse, it made much more sense to look askance at GG&S.

api 3y ago
I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals. These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten. I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker. A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed. In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong. This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
  - perardi 3y ago

the__alchemist 3y ago

I had a hard time interpreting the various criticisms from academics of Diamond in a way other than: This goes against our field's dogma, so I will fight it. Ie, I'm suspicious that, given the conclusions he came to, they would argue against it regardless of methods or the strength of his case. Eg, He underplays the role of culture? He's wrong.

deleted 3y ago
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kgwxd 3y ago

[flagged]

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Knew there were some detractors, didn't know it was so wide spread and vindictive. Glad this sets out more current arguments.

WalterBright 3y ago

> Diamond absolves Europeans of blame for the crimes of imperialism through his geographical determinism, since the conquerors couldn’t help but seize the helpless Americas. Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures. For example, "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060/ https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Yeah. The Mongols were on a summer vacation, the Persian Empire wasn't invading ancient Greece, they were just sightseeing, the Vikings (Scandinavian not central european IMO) were just doing some exuberant boating, the Hans just wanted to sojourn in the Jungles of Vietnam, the Ottomans were just misguided proseletyzers, the Rus were just bored from Winter, etc. The Japanese in WWII were just looking for some iron and oil. If you have a large empire, chances are there was large scale conquest involved. Likely all "civilizations" involved small scale conquest of tribes. So the academics are all in arms about Diamond writing a pretty engaging nonfiction book that accessibly integrated a half-dozen historical / political theories into an interesting integrated theory. Was it perfect? Hell no, no way it was. Is there roots of truth in it? There has to be. More than anything, reading the book was thought provoking, because all history taught in schools is basically a bunch of personalities/leaders and battles, and almost no investigation of other factors outside of the human events. What's also bizarre is reading various modern historical analyses of the Mongol invasions as "eh, they weren't that bad". Like... what? I'm fully willing to admit European empire building was flagrantly unacceptable from the lens of the modern conception of universal human rights. But that Euros were some especially brutal oppressors/conquerors compared to the whole of human history? Come on. I mean... the Mongols. AND they almost conquered Europe.
- swombat 3y ago
  For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wiped out the Georgian army which had been preparing for war for years and so was probably the best prepared army in Europe at the time. The rest of Europe was totally unprepared even for that small 10k force. Luckily for us, soon after, Genghis Khan died and the entire army turned back. Otherwise Europe would for sure have been conquered with no challenge. Luck of the dice.

worik 3y ago

> But Guns, Germs, and Steel—which is explicitly anti-racist Reminds me of: "I'm not racist, but...."

1letterunixname 3y ago

It's frustrating when people take scientific inquiry and dispassionate plausible explanation of historical circumstances as some sort of identity politics cudgel to bash a scientist over the head with erroneous value judgements like they're canceling a Neonazi. GGS was a good book. Independently, 2 MDs at my gym also came up and mentioned they thought it was a fascinating work. And my dept chair also thought it was a insightful work. In fairness, the last 1/3 of it kind of falls flat. Collapse isn't all that engaging.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

Graeber/Wengrow's Dawn of Everything is a good critical examination. I don't see anyone in this thread mentioning the kind of points that book covers. But it is another one that rankles institutional beliefs.

unmole 3y ago
Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. Let's not pretend his political screeds are works of dispassionate scholarship.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Graeber*
  - unmole 3y ago
    Ugh, I almost always get it wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30830424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30830424 Fixed.

karaterobot 3y ago

When I first read GG&S in a university anthropology course in 2000 or 2001, I immediately disliked it. The reason was not because I thought it was racist or imperialist— I don't think it is. Instead, I disliked it because it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis. Now that I'm older, I understand that this is what pretty much every popular treatment of anything must do, and Diamond was just more successful at it than almost anyone else. Is that to his credit? As a writer, maybe. It's ultimately a complaint about the danger of arguments which are so simple, elegant, and easily understandable that they suck all the air out of the debate, not against him or his book per se.

Barrin92 3y ago
>it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis I think it's worth quoting Friedman from his essay on positive economics[1] "In so far as a theory can be said to have "assumptions" at all, and in so far as their "realism" can be judged independently of the validity of predictions, the relation between the significance of a theory and the "realism" of its "assumptions" is almost the opposite of that suggested by the view under criticism. Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense).12 The reason is simple. A hypothesis is important if it "explains" much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial elements from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid predictions on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions. it takes account of, and accounts for, none of the many other attendant circumstances, since its very success shows them to be irrelevant for the phenomena to be explained" Diamond is often criticized for the simplicity, or geographic determinism of his argument but from the standpoint of an empirical science this is a strength. What matters is only the predictive power of a theory, not whether it is nuanced, realistic or representative. People sometimes seem to take almost offense to reductive theories in the social sciences. Btw one recent development to really test Diamond's theory is I think the development of tropical wheat developed in Brazil. If this works and drastically uplifts the global south I'd count that as a big piece of evidence in his favor. [1]https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/bwl/pruefungs-steuerlehre/loeffler/Lehre/bachelor/investition/Friedman_the_methology_of_positive_economics.pdf https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/fachbereich/bwl/pruefungs-st...

joatmon-snoo 3y ago

This blog post seems more of a strawman to me than anything else; GGS has a poor reputation in historian circles because it doesn't approach historical analysis with a level of rigor appropriate for academia. This quote[0] sums up things well for me: > Look through any r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can't be right, no matter how much it "makes sense." > For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation. The "Diamond is a racist" argument is not one that historians care about. What they take issue with is: * not questioning primary source bias (e.g. he takes Pizarro, Cortez, etc. at face value), * exaggerating the role that disease alone played, as opposed to how disease amplified vicious cycles[2][3] * made-up facts[0]: > In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comment/dk6htc0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/comme... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/ [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/ [3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/ https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2cfhon/ (Disclaimer: I haven't read GGS, nor am I familiar with the underlying theses. I just find myself fascinated by the controversy around the book.)

worik 3y ago

I no longer have a copy, so from memory.... The book opens with a sequence of Jarrad discussing with a New Guineaian, why it was Europeans that went to New Guinea, and not the other way around He goes on to discuss this, as if Europeans were the first outsiders there (we are not talking about the Highlands, that is more complex) Where he was having the conversation there had been at least four thousand years of international trade and commerce. Which he ignored At one point in time Europeans are dominant. He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever. Europeans (we) had our experience of world domination. It is not the natural order, as Jarrad suggested, but an historical blip. If the Industrial Revolution had gotten under way in India and it was the West Euro company from Bengal conquering Britain, then some India Jarrad would be telling a different story That is what is wrong with it. Post Hoc analysis and story tel.ing dressed up as scholarship Or racist drivel, to call a spade a spade

thaw13579 3y ago
Did you stop reading at the intro?
- worik 3y ago
  I got about two thirds through Whatever you think about him, he really needed a more dominant editor.
prepend 3y ago
> He makes up a story about why Europeans are dominant, not dominant now, in this time, but forever. He never claims the dominance will last forever. He just presents theories as to why Europeans are dominant now (or were 40 years ago when the book as published at least). It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. It’s racist to say that’s a good thing or destined or will last forever, but Diamond never argues that. I think you have some headcanon there.
- worik 3y ago
  > It’s not racist to try to explain why Europe conquered New Guinea and not the other way around. What is racist is to say it happened for a reason, not blind luck

prepend 3y ago

No one realistically believes GGS is racist except in a rule 34 kind of way in that every opinion has been stated by someone on the internet.

boringuser2 3y ago

Guns, Germs and Steel is ridiculous nonsense and an horrific just so story to explain European supremacy for a bulk of the modern era. I'd sooner listen to Jared Taylor than Jared Diamond, because at least the former's hypothesis is somewhat intellectually sound. It also has laughable, extremely racist tidbits such as Jared Diamonds unironic opinion that, on a genetic basis, people of Papua New Guinea are "superior" to Europeans, where he cited industrialization as dysgenic. Absurd.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> But military histories of the conquest support the assertion that the small parties of Spanish soldiers were able to defeat much larger Native armies thanks primarily to their superior steel weapons and organizational capacity, in line with Diamond’s argument. I don't have a bone to pick with Diamond, but this widely disseminated narrative lacks nuance. When people say that a few Spaniards conquered the largest Mesoamerican empires, at least when it comes to Mexico and the Aztecs, they are forgetting an important detail. When the ragtag band of mercenaries and adventurers following Hernán Cortés arrived at Mexico, they landed smack in the middle of a long-running regional war between the "Aztecs", i.e. the people of Tenochtitlan, and, basically, everyone else in the area. And of course, in the typical fashion of foreign invaders, the Spaniards immediately became fast allies with the enemies of Tehnochtitlan as the dominant power [1]. Thus, every time the Conquistadores fought the armies of Tenochtitlan, besides their guns, germs, and steel, and horses [3], they had with them thousands of allied local warriors, mainly from Tlaxcala, if I remember correctly, at least enough to stand up to the numbers of the Aztecs' armies [2]. Note that towards the end of the campaign, Tlaxcalla and the other kingdoms were indeed devastated by smallpox. But the same disaster was suffered by the people of Tenochtitlan, also. The Spaniards really were the plague [4]. _________________ [1] This is a story that has played out many times in history. For instance, when the Crusaders landed in the Holy Land, they immediately found themselves enmeshed in the constant churn of alliances and wars in the Middle East. Half of the time, half of the locals tried to kill them and the other half they tried to get them to help them kill the other half. The same thing happened in Iraq, when the US invaded. It is a story as old as invasion. [2] In much the same way, when the Spartans held Thermopylae, until that dog Efialtes, gave them to the Persians, the 300 were not, well, 300; more like 7000, at least at the start of the battle. Even in their famous last stand the 300 Spartans were accompanied by 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans. The rest of the 7000 left to fight another day. Not that it would have made any difference anyway, not against the fully might of the Persian empire. Remember Leonida's apocryphal quip: when he was told that the Persians' arrows would be so many that they would darken the sun, Leonidas said "good, we'll be fighting in the shade". [3] And La Malinche, a formidable woman who acted as their interpreter and go-between, and was probably a main reason the Spaniards managed to ally themselves to the locals in the first place. [4] My source in all this is the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo who was there and saw it all with his own eyes, so god be his witness. My source for the Crusades is "Les croisades vue par les Arabes" by Amin Maalouf.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Peter Turchin, as another 'pop-sci' author with some speculative theories. It is a counter theory on why civilizations 'Collapse'. Since this thread seems so opposed to the 'environmental' causes of collapse that Diamond proposes, the Turchin theories on how societies naturally go through stages that lead to collapse is interesting second train of thought.

superultra 3y ago

Maybe I misread, but this author creates some pretty huge straw man arguments here and in so doing over simplifies what is, I think (as a lapsed but trained historian),pretty valid critique. While some of the pop culture criticism of Diamond could be assigned to so-called cancel culture or “racism,” that characterization really does not summarize much of the academic critique of Diamond. The best critique I’ve read and certainly the most fun is the Davids Wengrow and Graeber’s big tome “Dawn of Everything.” Part of critique is simply Diamond making some broad strokes and it’s always the nature of synthesis that they decay quickly as new research comes available. I’ll link to their more broad editorial, but the David’s’ biggest critique of Diamond and other neo-Raussians is that much of the foundation of those assertions are based on broad and bad preconceptions about so-called pre-history from the Enlightment. Once stated more plainly, very few of us in 2023 or even 20-40 years earlier, would agree with anything stated about other cultures in the Enlightment. And yet somehow, entire world histories - Diamond’s included - never question these basic foundational assumptions. This is a mistake that is increasingly disputed by not only pre-existing 20th century anthropology, but most certainly by 21st century anthropology included LiDAR and satellite imaging. This author addresses some of that critique but to frame it as some kind of racist critique or cancel culture is frankly absurd. I’m surprised because as a historian surely Kedrosky has read the same books and articles I have, and certainly must know how historiography works - likely better than I do! - and yet this framing is so disengenious it’s a bit surprising. In any case I recommend Dawn of Everything. It’s not a retort to Diamond/neo-Raussian as it is a kind of “huh!” with a lot of fun framing of preexisting research - some of which Diamond himself pulls from. An op-Ed to whet the appetite: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/graeber-wengrow-d...