Canter Bridge

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You may not have seen them, but lurking out there in the highways and byways is a tribe of scholars who believe that everything you presume about the way humans make history happen is, well, rubbish. Most of them do not write scintillating narrations of a grand theory that falls well on the deterministic side of center, as grand theories go.

But Jared Diamond does. That’s a good thing.

Diamond’s affection for the New Guinea tribal people who have befriended him during his field research places an endearing frame around a dissertation that might otherwise have seemed rather unfeeling. Indeed, the programmatic question of one of them—hereafter to be known as ‘Yali’s question’—serves as the spinal chord of these nearly five hundred pages:’Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’

Now there’s a big question. Diamond thinks it can be answered.

Tongue lodged in cheek, Diamond opens his preface to the book’s paperback edition with this sentence: ‘This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.’ Upon review, however, Diamond’s statement is not entirely jocular. It actually describes with unusual clarity the book he has placed in many thousands of readers’ hands. His evidence may be limited–so the word ‘attempts’–yet he is happy to admit such and still press on with what might turn out to be an early attempt at an ecological-geographical theory of history that will eventually produce more sophisticated and convincing successors. This is one of the ways that science proceeds or advances–you choose the verb, depending on your methodological persuasion. When it is self-correcting, as Diamond in his most prudent moments trusts that it will be, this is not a way to do science. Or history. Or whichever best approximates to the task Diamond has set for himself and, fortunately, for our over-his-shoulder curiosity.

A man of Diamond’s convictions is bound to consider the hunters-and-gathers, missionaries, academics, and historians whom me meets upon the way as distinctively naïve. Still, to his credit, he does not regard them as dangerously naïve. Instead, he utilizes a generous dollup of case studies to open our eyes to how preexisting conditions set the course of human histories in a way that ought to be considered to complex for responsible investigation and conceptualization.

Diamond tells a good story. He is clearly warm to his topic and it does not require much effort to be affected by his contagious enthusiasm. I found his concluding ‘The Future of Human History as a Science’, replete as his meditations are with sensitivity to the reality that different phenomena require distinct methodologies if they are to be understood.

Still, I can’t help but suspect that—regardless of the the author’s caveats—the driving conviction behind his method is deterministic and overly dismissive of factors like individual personality and religious ideology independent of any determining elements that might have brought it into just the shape it has at any moment.

Still, let’s take him at his word. Considerations that can perhaps best be labeled ecological largely set the stage for what is possible in human history and humanity’s future. It is then up to us what we make of it.

This might not be a general theory of everything our race, in its global context, experiences. But it’s an interesting and competent stab at a piece of it, well written and effectively framed.