[CPLX]

I’m all for rebuttals of just-so stories but that comment is wholly unconvincing.

He just says “actually it didn’t happen” in 5 different ways.

But, like, they speak Spanish in Lima and Mexico City and they don’t speak Aztec or Quechua in Madrid. The Europeans did in fact colonize portions of the entire world. There were German armies in Namibia and Dutch in Malaysia and Spanish in Patagonia.

That seems... notable?

I literally have no unique insight at all into why that happened. But it does seem like an interesting question.

I guess the answer could be “no reason” or “it was the result of a non-determinative complex adaptive system and the concept of why isn’t really relevant or repeatable” which are fine responses. But that comment you posted seems to just be refusing to engage with the question.

[karpierz]

The comment is explaining "Guns, Germs & Steel's explanation of why they speak Spanish in Patagonia is inaccurate". Did you find it unconvincing in that regard? If so, what specifically did you find to be flawed in the critique?

The comment isn't trying to explain "X is the reason why they speak Spanish in Patagonia". But I don't think that's necessary to rebut a poorly justified Grand Theory of History (tm).

[CPLX]

I didn’t think it was a critique at all. It was basically just saying well I have issues with how he describes the conquest. It didn’t happen like that, here are some nitpicks about how he’s describing it and now I’ll throw in some unrelated metaphor of a kid in a science class to say that disagreeing with someone’s specific takes on events that are fundamentally unknowable and hundreds of years old is the same as a little kid saying yellow is green.

The problem is that any moron can see the main observation that set off the discussion. There’s not an equal distribution of wealth and power across cultures at all.

I read guns germs and steel and it’s interesting and I didn’t remember it as being polemical or sure of its conclusions. My memory if it was basically a recounting of history that said this is all complicated and cause and effect is pretty murky but here is a grab bag of some broad ideas that could comprise a thesis for why things look the way they do.

I would expect any reasonable critique to either say actually no I think these reasons are overstated and these other ones are more important. Or they could say look human history isn’t deterministic the best way to think about this is mostly a series of butterfly effects. Or as complexity theorists would say, it’s just path dependence, aka a stochastic walk with absorbing barriers.

Those seem like reasonable alternate points of view. The critique I’m talking about here though is just like “nah didn’t happen” when confronted with a plainly observable chronology of global power and cultural expansion.

[karpierz]

I think if you view "Guns, Germs & Steel" as a book of hypotheses about world history, with no evidence for their factualness, then the critique isn't valuable. Essentially, you'd be viewing GGS as a fan-fic about world history.

If you think that GGS is making factual claims about the world, and if the supporting evidence provided for them isn't factual, then the claims aren't facts, they're just speculation. This is the point that the critique makes; the assumptions that GGS makes in its theories aren't true, and so the conclusions are just random ideas as opposed to truths.

[CPLX]

I mean I get the concept.

But let’s start with the beginning of the critique. He sets up the GGS hypothesis #1 as saying “Europeans decisively conquered the Americas”

His rebuttal is basically no they didn’t.

Then he links to a bunch of evidence and his thesis seems to be well actually there was a lot more fighting and it lasted much longer so it wasn’t decisive.

I mean, I guess? I thought we were talking about the obvious fact that the entirety of the Americas was conquered by the Europeans and not the other way around.

Of course there’s some subtlety to that. There always is. But, again, they’re speaking Spanish at the highest reaches of the Andes and not Quechua in Spain. And the mass quantities of resources went in one direction. The Incan gold went to Spain and the British Crown Jewels didn’t go to Benin.

So like something notable happened here that’s academically interesting to explore. The critique I’m seeing here is just saying “no it didn’t” as far as I can tell.

I like a “well actually” as much as the next guy but come on.

If you’re questioning the very premise when someone is asking why European military and economic power became dominant things have gotten pretty confused.

[karpierz]

> The critique I’m seeing here is just saying “no it didn’t” as far as I can tell.

The critique is: there's a difference between taking decades to colonize it (hence "decisive") and centuries to colonize it.

If your argument is: "well, the Spanish eventually succeeded", great, but that's not what GGS is saying. Otherwise it'd be a pretty boring book.

[CPLX]

> The critique is: there's a difference between taking decades to colonize it (hence "decisive") and centuries to colonize it.

Cool. Now tell me what the difference is.

This argument just seems silly to me. Is the argument really that it could have gone the other way?

Is there a reasonable counterfactual where the Aztec civilization successfully repelled European colonization efforts and eventually attacked and held European home countries?

Like from a vantage point of the mid 1400s when none of this had happened yet was that an equally likely outcome?

I mean that’s superficially plausible to me. Maybe it was just historical luck of the draw. If that’s what critics think then the critique should say that without hedging.

If not, the next question has to be why.