Given enough time, a researcher could likely find an academic journal article on domesticated llama herding in the Southern Andes, 1820-1824. This type of micro-study has come to dominate the historical field since the 1970s as specialties continue to branch off into more specific subsections. Not so with Guns, Germs, and Steel, a big history with one specific goal, to answer the question of why some societies dominated others in modern history. Wasting no time in stating his focus, Jared Diamond declares that “This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.”(Diamond, 9) Arguing against any lingering theories of racist genetic inequality, Diamond purposes that history played out along the course it did
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Post hoc ergo proctor hoc is a faulty Roman proverb, an early form of causality. Simply stated it implies that everything that happens after an event in a linear line has its roots in that initial event. Jared Diamond takes this theory and expands on it to cover the entire world for the past thirteen millennia. Unfortunately, the reason this is problematic is that the technique removes all human agency from the equation after the initial act. The idea of free will, of individual innovation and creativity, or of random dumb luck is reduced to a series of events leading to an inevitable outcome. His arguments for the importance of early agriculture and domestication of animals, the invention of writing, and the easier dissemination of innovations along an east/west axis are compelling, but implying that 13,000 years ago the script was written removes humans from the story. Ideologies matter. Just because Europeans had swords does not mean they had to use them. By telling this story of inevitability, and then arguing if roles were reversed and the indigenous population of the Americas was switched with Europeans, they would have conquered the world, it somehow reduces the responsibility for European
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc is a faulty Roman proverb, an early form of causality. Simply stated it implies that everything that happens after an event in a linear line has its roots in that initial event. Jared Diamond takes this theory and expands on it to cover the entire world for the past thirteen millennia. Unfortunately, the reason this is problematic is that the technique removes all human agency from the equation after the initial act. The idea of free will, of individual innovation and creativity, or of random dumb luck is reduced to a series of events leading to an inevitable outcome. His arguments for the importance of early agriculture and domestication of animals, the invention of writing, and the easier dissemination of innovations along an east/west axis are compelling, but implying that 13,000 years ago the script was written removes humans from the story. Ideologies matter. Just because Europeans had swords does not mean they had to use them. By telling this story of inevitability, and then arguing if roles were reversed and the indigenous population of the Americas was switched with Europeans, they would have conquered the world, it somehow reduces the responsibility for European