Stories

More than anything else, we tell stories. Stories about our life, our friends, our world, and our place in it. Especially important are our origin stories: Tales about how we came to be, from a grand perspective (think Biblical, Origin Myth, Evolution) to smaller, closer to home tales about our particular family.

Stories give us identity. We repeat the tales about the founding of our country to reinforce the ideals and struggles that led to its birth, and in the telling, we share a common history.

We elaborate and embellish. Rare indeed is the individual whose recounting of past events doesn't have themselves playing a more prominent role, doesn't have themselves portraying higher morals, forgetting errors, adding conquests. That's not all bad: By recounting how we want to be, how we wished we'd behaved, we create a powerful cognitive feedback loop that reinforces future behavior. We act out the roles we create for ourselves in the stories we tell.

Sometimes, though, the story we hear repeatedly starts to sound untrue. Evidence mounts that the original tale has been distorted, perhaps has reached the point of caricature, or has undergone so much wishful embellishment as to appear completely made up. Perhaps it no longer serves a universal purpose, but has been captured by a small group.

Stories that recount the innate superiority of Western Civilization have started to fall into this category. New evidence about commonality worldwide has surfaced. For instance, no matter who you are or where you are reading this, you stand an equal chance of sharing more common DNA with me than my immediate neighbor. Researchers have uncovered other clues about the vagaries of existence, clues about the role of language and culture in cognitive development, and exposed the fluidity of it all.

Into this maelstrom roars Jared Diamond with his book 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. Weaving together tales of biological availability, geography, cultural solutions to needs, he creates a new origin story about civilization. He creates an account of the development of immunity to germs through animal husbandry. He shows how some regions were ripe for agriculture through the availability of high protein grains, and how other areas, richer in other resources but lacking in cultivatable plants, had no compelling need to develop farming. He uses geography, and the ease or difficulty of traversing the landscape to explain why some migrations occurred, and others did not. The availability of domesticateable animals (for not all are!) explains population concentrations: With, a single farmer can supply many more; without, even transporting goods becomes difficult, forcing groups to live closer to their resources.

Diamond's story is a very good one. It parks at the door ideas about innate superiority, and instead replaces them with proximate causes, external factors. It provides a more equitable place in the world for all people, and forgoes judgment of civilizations that haven't expanded in the same way as ours.

However, it's always good to seek out criticism, to search for inadequacies in any story, to reveal options for improving the tale and our understanding of the world.

I've seen critics of Diamond in the past, but they always appeared to be angry that he had so successfully created a tale that didn't rely on innate differences to explain the world as we see it today. They were riled that they could no longer point to internal causes - one could easily see that in 500 pages Diamond had erased part of their identity. They were forced to recreate their own origin tales to fit in the new picture, or, they had to discount Diamond's account. Such criticisms are not substantive.

I ran across some more thoughtful, anthropological critiques yesterday by Timothy Burke (you can read them here and here.) The summary is that Diamond too easily ignores data that doesn't fit his grand story (his account is long, slow, and sweeping; what about short term, close in explanations that are sufficient?), that the stage is set in the 11,000 years leading up to 1500, and events since then have unfolded because of this long pre-history, ignoring "the importance of accident and serendipidity at the moment of contact between an expanding Europe and non-Western societies around 1500."

If you have enjoyed 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', I highly recommend that you read Burke's essays. They have certainly given me a larger appreciation for what anthropology is about, and a new way of viewing Diamond's works.

But, the crucial question: Does Burke invalidate Diamond? It would appear not. Like every map, which is just an approximation, capable of answering some questions about the terrain while leaving others out, so, too, any origin story is only an approximation, highlighting the salient points. Even accident and serendipidity don't require innate superiority to function. Diamond provides a useful account of human expansions and civilization that flies in the face of Western arrogance, and if we'd listen, perhaps provides us with a little humility.

It is useful, too, as we continue to create our particular story. That we strive for greatness of culture, of civilization is important. That we look for real ways to explain our relative success, that we can pass on our methods and share strengthens our tale. And, by not appealing to some innate quality, but instead searching and building on what we have, we open ourselves to more possibilities, to a greater society. Enabling broader participation in our story creation should lead to a more compelling story.