I’ve gotten a decent way into Collapse without feeling the impule to add anything to the criticism I laid without reading the book. At the end of the seventh chapter (on Greenland at its peak) I felt I had enough negative thoughts to merit a post. Although I haven’t yet gotten to the chapter where the Inuit appear in Greenland, Diamond has already said that they play a significant role in the collapse of Norse Greenland civilization (he even explicitly says that without them it would not have happened). He has repeatedly noted the failure of the Norse to imitate the Inuit, who managed to survive the lean years that drove the Norse off. Diamond considers the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity to be responsible for this. To be fair, he also often pairs Christianity with Europeanness or Eurocentrism, indicating that Christianity bound them to continental Europe with its high living standards and gave them an aversion toward being at all like the Inuit. I think in order for that to make any sense he would have to argue that in a counterfactual in which they adhered to their traditional Norse religion they would have been more amenable to Inuit culture. He offers no such argument. It almost seems as if he’s lumping all non-Christian, or at least non-monotheist, religions together as sufficiently similar to him that they would seem similar to their adherents. I really don’t think that would be the case. At least by some standards the Hindu religion might seem “pagan”, but I think Hindu civilization is just as proud of its religion and resistant to imitation of even a conquering monotheism (whether the Muslim Moguls or Christian British) as any faith to its west. I would say the same about the Zoroastrians except that they were rather effectively smashed and driven to India to become Parsis. More importantly, it seems to me, the Vikings were primarily a settled agricultural people (though they were forced to rely to a significant extent on hunting) whereas the Inuit were hunter-gatherers still in the Stone Age. Presumably, like the failed Vinland colonists, the Greenlanders always had the option of sailing back where they came from when things got too rough, so they weren’t in the same position as many of the Polynesians Diamond discusses earlier.
William Weir has referred to Normandy as the battle which determined whether England would be part of Greater Scandinavia (“Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys, and Dublin, as well as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden”) or drawn closer to mainstream European (especially French) civilization. At that time some Scandinavian kings had become Christian, but they were viewed by some as still a pagan people of “the heathen North” separate from European Christian civilization. Keep this in mind when Diamond says the Greenlanders were “more European than Europeans” (his comment about the Britishness of Australia does remind me of Mencius Moldbug on Rhodesia). All his examples for how Greenlanders followed the fashions of Europe are things like changes in burial styles tracking those of Norway. But Greenland was a colony of Norway, and that presumably would have done so even if none of the Norse had converted to Christianity and they remained a distinct Greater Scandinavia. I’m not going to assert that the conversion changed nothing, Roderick Long makes a plausible case that it helped lead to the end of Iceland’s anarcho-capitalism.
One major puzzle about the Greenlanders is the apparent lack of fish in their diet, which Diamond attributes to a strong food taboo like the well known religious probitions on pork or beef (he also analogizes it to American distaste for horse or frog-meat, but Americans are an exceptionally highly-fed people and even then still contain rednecks that would each such food). That seems very odd as all the Viking peoples that the Greenlanders came from and stayed connected with were cuckoo for cod (as are present day Greenlanders). Diamond gives good arguments against other explanations, but his own about Erik the Red or someone else getting bad food poisoning and then insisting no one eat fish is just not convincing to me. It seemed difficult enough to order Norse colonists around, especially to end their traditional ways, that I doubt Erik could have pull that off. It is certainly doubtful that his own taste could dictate to the bishop sent by the King of Norway and other elites and/or newcomers. I admit that I can offer no good explanation either, but I just think Diamond’s is really weak. He often seems on quite shaky ground when speculating what people of the past were thinking. He says despite how implausible it seems to us today we should really imagine what went through the heads of Easter Islanders and they chopped down the last trees, when as I discuss in the first link of this post, it apparently due to rats who didn’t give it any thought at all. He imagines (obviously as an allegory for our time) that ancients may have thought technological advancement would save their collapsing civilization. One doesn’t have to go as far as Greg Clark to acknowledge that periods before the Industrial Revolution were seriously different in the pace of technological advancement so that it is doubtful such ancient people would have thought of it. As Diamond himself attests, they instead hoped their gods would save them, and when that didn’t happen they went after the priests and divine kings they had relied on.
August 13, 2008 at 7:40 pm
People have asked me what the harm in holding irrational beliefs is.
If you believe in miracles, and the existence of powerful and knowledgeable beings capable of them, why would you be careful about preserving the foundations of your ecology?
There was a time when many Christians believed that types of animals could not become extinct because God would not permit it. That sort of mindset tends to exploit resources to their breaking point, because it doesn’t believe the breaking point exists.
August 13, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I hadn’t heard that bit about God not permitting species to go extinct. I had heard that some plains Indians believed that the more buffalo were killed the more were created, but I don’t know how much credence I can give to that. They didn’t have any system of writing, they were wiped out fast enough to leave much of their past unknown and its the sort of thing that moderns would make up or at least find interesting.
April 26, 2009 at 5:04 pm
[…] inflexible as he claimed. Hat tip to Gene Callahan. I was suspicious regarding just that in my post on the book. […]
December 29, 2012 at 10:11 pm
[…] rather than attempting to deal with the situation. I would call that a strawman, except that Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” bears too much resemblance. He also mentions Richard Wilkinson’s documenting that […]
May 28, 2016 at 10:41 am
[…] back I criticized Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, specifically on the subjects of Greenland and Easter […]
November 17, 2022 at 7:14 pm
[…] rise to the level of fearing for our future as a species. He brings up Easter Island as an example (I’ve discussed how he got its history wrong in “Collapse” before), but even those Islanders weren’t like the deer marooned on a Canadian island who ate all […]
December 3, 2022 at 6:58 pm
[…] LeBlanc divides the post-introductory material of his book up into sections which a Victorian might have recognized as progressing to their own civilization, and which Diamond/Henrich, Keeley and Gat covered with overlaps: our ape/chimpanzee ancestors, bands of early human foragers, “tribal” societies of largely egalitarian settled farmers, and finally “complex” societies ranging from hereditary chiefdoms to modern states (whose chief distinguishing characteristic is the existence of a bureaucracy). Throughout he repeatedly notes that each type doesn’t live in ecological balance by voluntarily restricting population growth (there is plenty of infanticide, but its often practiced against the offspring of defeated males by victorious males like a more sex-biased version of The Tragedy of Group Selection), and instead they grow until they fight over limited resources with neighboring groups (though more complex societies will also ally with other groups to better outnumber & overpower enemies). He notes how anthropologists studying egalitarian societies initially observed fighting but dismissed it as not “real” war due to low numbers of casualties per skirmish, but counters that with high rates of population death in war, with something like a 25% odds of a man dying that way over his lifetime and unknown probabilities for children (women of course have lower probabilities of being killed since they can be seized by victorious males, but also have a higher rate of death from war than in contemporary society). The relatively low-intensity of setpiece-free warfare that only achieves “victory” via wiping out rather than conquering the enemy is part of what makes those battles “constant”. An archaeologist like LeBlanc may not be the best to discuss the least complex societies, because they left less archaeological evidence (although that is at least better than a historian reliant on written records), although there are skeletal remains with arrowheads (at least among those possessing arrows, so not chimps or Aborigines) in them and other telltale signs of violence. One odd bit is that he sided more with Marvin Harris than Napoleon Chagnon on the motivations for warfare, saying that interviewees only initially claimed it was over women while later admitting resource constraints were behind it, and even saying the former motivation is just the result of female infanticide caused by food shortages (despite earlier acknowledging abductions of females among chimpanzee raiders, who lack a sex bias in infanticide). He also unfortunately makes the same mistake as Diamond on Easter Island. […]