Badi Blog Update

Badi’ Blog Notes; More on Guns, Germs and Steel

 
By John Taylor; 2006 May 01

 

The readership of the Badi' blog has probably expanded substantially with its placement last week on the "Baha'is on line" website. For new readers and old, let us go over the basics of this blog and mailing list. First of all, you can sign on and off the Badi' Blog and either read back issues there or have the daily essays sent to your mailbox every day by going onto the Blogspot website (Badiblog at blogspot dot com) and signing on or off from there. This you can do without my knowledge or supervision. In fact I have no idea how many readers I have on blogspot. The only disadvantage is that this blog site does not accept graphics, at least not for non-paying freeloaders like myself. Budgets being what they are, it will be a while before I get a full scale blog going. Since once in a while I cannot avoid enclosing graphics the only way to received them right now is to sign onto my Badi' Mailing List and have me send it all to you directly, every day. To do that send me a request at <badijet@gmail.com>.

 
Alternatively, from now on you can read the Badi' essays at bahaisonline; they start off in plain ASCII but I like how pretty the automatic formatting engine there makes them look on this site. On the other hand, I am not entirely comfortable with the company they keep, for as you can see for yourself the blogs featured on Bahaisonline include not only loyal Baha'is but grumpy critics and veiled opponents of the Faith as well. As always with the Internet, one hopes the good outweighs the bad.

 
To bring new readers up to speed, the Badi' essays since the end of February have been examining in excruciating detail the primal Baha'i principle, the Oneness of God. We hit a speed bump a few weeks ago in the form of a book recommended by Bill Gates (no, he not recommend it to me personally, I read it in a printed interview), which he says is the most important book written in the past half century. The book is Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, and its influence appears to have informed Gates prodigious humanitarian charity to the crying needs of Third World nations. Going through the book I think most Baha'is would agree with Gates opinion, especially the late great Ruhiyyih Khanum. Here are some excerpts from the prologue. First, his thesis statement.

 

 
"Authors are regularly asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." (Guns, 25)

 

 
Like the Baha'i principle of Oneness of Humanity, at first blush this seems obvious, needless to waste our time paying attention to. But, as Diamond points out it most emphatically is not, and to neglect or ignore the answer is to leave Pandora's Box out unlocked, ready for anybody to open as they please. In effect we in the West are like football fans whose team just won over another town. Now, we think exultantly, our town is superior in every way, since we beat them soundly. But who is "we?" A football team is a bunch of professional athletes that we hired, and most of them come from other towns completely. The average person living here is no better or worse, no smarter or dumber, stronger or weaker, for the contest having taken place. Yet we all know in our hearts that anybody from our town is somehow better for this victory.

 
As Diamond puts it in the prologue, the displacement of aboriginal and tribal,

 
 

"peoples by colonists from industrialized societies exemplified the survival of the fittest. With the later rise of genetics, the explanations were recast once again, in genetic terms. Europeans became considered genetically more intelligent than Africans, and especially more so than Aboriginal Australians.

"Today, segments of Western society publicly repudiate racism. Yet many (perhaps most!) Westerners continue to accept racist explanations privately or subconsciously. In Japan and many other countries, such explanations are still advanced publicly and without apology. Even educated white Americans, Europeans, and Australians, when the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up, assume that there is something primitive about the Aborigines themselves. They certainly look different from whites. Many of the living descendants of those Aborigines who survived the era of European colonization are now finding it difficult to succeed economically in white Australian society.

"A seemingly compelling argument goes as follows. White immigrants to Australia built a literate, industrialized, politically centralized, democratic state based on metal tools and on food production, all within a century of colonizing a continent where the Aborigines had been living as tribal hunter-gatherers without metal for at least 40,000 years. Here were two successive experiments in human development, in which the environment was identical and the sole variable was the people occupying that environment. What further proof could be wanted to establish that the differences between Aboriginal Australian and European societies arose from differences between the peoples themselves?

"The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong. Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking. In fact, as I shall explain in a moment, modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Paradoxical as it may sound, we shall see in Chapter 15 that white immigrants to Australia do not deserve the credit usually accorded to them for building a literate industrialized society with the other virtues mentioned above. In addition, peoples who until recently were technologically primitive-such as Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans-routinely master industrial technologies when given opportunities to do so. (Guns, 19)

 

 
I am approaching Chapter 15 now in my reading and will be interested in learning the details of this argument. Yet the fact of history remains before all, some peoples won the football match overwhelmingly, and others lost pitifully. Surely there is something about the winners that makes them superior. If mankind is one, we have to be clear on this huge disparity.

 
Surely, surely it is the job of history to sort out this question and teach it to the next generation. Otherwise the distortion and fallacy will continue and racism and terror will persist. Yet historians blockheadedly shy away from grand syntheses, from the sort of explanation that this book sets out to give. This is a huge cop-out, a sell out of the soul of humanity, an act of cowardice similar to the linguists and professors of literature who cravenly shy away from the supreme intellectual challenge given them by this age: the job of settling on a world inter-language and thus putting an end forever to the language barrier, the greatest invisible structural iniquity in the world today. Diamond continues,

 

 
"Specialists from several disciplines have provided global syntheses of their subjects. Especially useful contributions have been made by ecological geographers, cultural anthropologists, biologists studying plant and animal domestication, and scholars concerned with the impact of infectious diseases on history. These studies have called attention to parts of the puzzle, but they provide only pieces of the needed broad synthesis that has been missing.

"Thus, there is no generally accepted answer to Yali's question. On the one hand, the proximate explanations are clear: some peoples developed guns, germs, steel, and other factors conferring political and economic power before others did; and some peoples never developed these power factors at all. On the other hand, the ultimate explanations-for example, why bronze tools appeared early in parts of Eurasia, late and only locally in the New World, and never in Aboriginal Australia-remain unclear.

"Our present lack of such ultimate explanations leaves a big intellectual gap, since the broadest pattern of history thus remains unexplained. Much more serious, though, is the moral gap left unfilled. It is perfectly obvious to everyone, whether an overt racist or not, that different peoples have fared differently in history. The modern United States is a European- molded society, occupying lands conquered from Native Americans and incorporating the descendants of millions of sub-Saharan black Africans brought to America as slaves. Modern Europe is not a society molded by sub-Saharan black Africans who brought millions of Native Americans as slaves.

"These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.

"It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We read of technical studies claiming to demonstrate inborn differences, and we also read rebuttals claiming that those studies suffer from technical flaws. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities.

"Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book. (Guns, 24-25)

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