Guns, Germs, and Steel

I have heard many and mixed review of this book, from the former AP student, who groans at its mention, to my father, who has trouble keeping it "in stock" at our house because he is continually gifting it to friends and acquaintances. I now hear my classmates' languishings with some sympathy. Yes, it is a long book, and yes, it could be a third shorter shy the repetitions and reiterations, but it is also a beautiful, evolving masterwork.

In form it is almost 19th-century [1], and the painfully exacting logic which leaves no equid unturned was galling at first, but I began to appreciate it as I took in the vast scope and depth of Diamond's imparted knowledge. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a highly relevant multidisciplinary analysis of our planet: its geography, its inhabitants, and the massively complex underlying movements that got today's societies where we are today. That Diamond was able to make his research, which spans such various fields as biology, sociology, epidemiology, archaeology, and linguistics, at all accessible to the layperson is remarkable.

It saddens me that this book has received criticism for being racist. Diamond has been accused of prescribing racial deficiencies, for example, when he says that Native Americans "failed" to domesticate a local species of apple. This is preposterous. In Diamond's own words, "The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong." His theory of socioeconomic evolution is not only comparative, but comprehensive. He stresses again and again that, had disparate populations of humans been interchanged in prehistory, or local geographic and ecological conditions been different, Montezuma could very well have sent conquerors to Spain and brutally dethroned King Charles I, instead of the other way around.

In fact, it is the specificity of these contentious illustrative examples which makes Guns, Germs, and Steel so interesting and valuable. The sections which absorbed me the most were always the stories of real people and peoples, some of whom my Euro-centric upbringing had not even seen fit to mention. This book is very scientific, almost mathematical, in nature, but it was conceived and driven by a passion for human understanding. It shows the tribes and nations and races of our world not as alien curiosities, but as the cultural and material sums of millions of years of interaction with their environments. I believe that it is at least as significant, if not more so, for this image, as it is for its charts of cereals and carbon dates.


[1] On the Origin of Species could have been a pamphlet.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Yes, probably. Or at least it is making us shallow and diffuse. I too have been worrying about my changing reading habits, and it is refreshing to hear an adult admit to his own waning attention rather than pawning off his concerns on "today's youth."As a prerequisite to the course I took at Northwestern University this summer, I had to take a "web fluency" seminar, conducted entirely online. Many of the assignments, and all of the quizzes and exams, were timed. Although I feel I benefited from exercises, it bothered me that in almost all cases the information itself was secondary to the skills I was learning. It is as if all summer I have been living a double life as I switch between two ways of thinking.

I have also noticed that I write very differently in different media. When I write using a pencil and paper, I always feel more connected to my work. I need to carefully consider what I write before I write it because I cannot simply strike a key to change it or interchange sentences and paragraphs at whim. For this reason, I often write out my more important assignments and more personally valuable works longhand. When I type them into a computer, it is a part of rewriting and editing process. For me, this blog feels yet one more step removed. It is ethereal and transient, and consequently I tend to be lazy and careless with it.

I used thesaurus.reference.com to find the word "diffuse" for the second sentence of this post. I was not being stupid. I know the word diffuse, and I knew I wanted to use it, but I couldn't quite place it in my mind. It would have taken me some time to remember it or use a physical text to find it. Most people would deem this particular use of the internet "defensible," but soon thereafter the line blurs. Reference.com is meant to be used--well, as a reference. But the internet automatically changes any material into quick reference: it is there, not as a whole, but as a collection of phrases, bits of information to be sifted and siphoned by undiscerning browsers. The main substance of any length of writing lies in the connection and ordering of ideas. The "search" and "find" functions ultimately destroy the text as a cohesive entity and thereby obviate the authorship.

Carr has a point, though, in discussing past resistance to technologies we now take for granted. We can never see ahead, and there will always be late and early adapters. We can, however, be cautious and open-minded when considering how new technologies are shaping our culture. Each of us, individually, holds the power to become become a pancake or not. I still read books and long articles. Hell, I still memorize. I also use the internet frequently and extensively, and I feel I have benefited. Kudos to all of you who made it this far, who read this as a whole and not the sum of its parts, as well as to those of you who faithfully read the mouseover text on webcomics. Extra points for the use of the word "gewgaws."

http://baryka.blogspot.com/2007/05/and-he-ate-only-pops-that-were-lolly.html

Responce to Wollstonecraft excerpt

This was a bit of a shock after the meticulously logical (as well as modern) outline of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The title and date lead me to expect a carefully structured academic argument, not such a personal essay. Although I enjoyed a few of Wollstonecraft's more artful phrases (eg. "out Quixote Cervantes"), I at times found her argument difficult to follow when she began to discuss what she might have written instead, or why she wasn't going to write about a topic about which she was writing. Most aggravating were the tangential supporting arguments she squished in around the corners. Many of her metaphysical ponderings about the nature of love and evil did eventually relate back to her arguments for the moral capacities of women, but they were not always presented in an effective way, or even in one contiguous piece.

To do every thing in an orderly manner, is a most important precept, which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness, that men who from their infancy are broken into method, observe.

So maybe it's not her fault. Or maybe people in general just didn't write in such an "orderly manner" during her time.

The greatest criticism I have of the substance of this essay is that it focuses exclusively on the upper class and bourgeoisie. Wollstonecraft names idleness, preoccupation with appearance, and lack of education as deficiencies in the required feminine character. During the late 18th century, a woman of the lower class could not afford idleness or a "fondness for dress." Education would be out of the question for her; her husband and sons would be lucky to be literate. In the lower class, sexism usually extended to subordination and condescension without the insulting pampering.

Wollstonecraft's social exclusivity is not the only indication that her mode of thought is strongly flavoured by the principles of the Enlightenment. The terms "natural" and "instinctive" are used numerous times throughout the essay as she asks the reader what is quintessentially "feminine." At a time when intellectuals were seeking the "natural" solutions to everything, and "natural" often meant "intended by God," it was easy for philosophers like Rousseau to leave women out of a social revolution by explaining that the natural, and therefore best, social structure places women below men, where they can best express their natural qualities of gentle deference. Wollstonecraft's refutation of "nurture" rather than "nature" must have been wildly unpopular. She clearly supports "natural" religious virtue for humankind as a whole, but refuses to accept double moral and social standards for the sexes. However, she chose to chop this provocative assertion up into little bits wedged into remote parts of the essay, and she rarely committed to more than rhetorical supposition. Was she trying to placate less receptive readers by interspersing it with the more familiar ethical preaching?