MythBuster

My last blog entry might have been well written (the jury is still out on this) but it doesn’t really have a lot of myself in it.  It’s long on exposition, and there’s very little personal reaction in it.  The subtitle of the blog, I might remind myself, is “my response to what I’m reading”.  Apparently, I had little response to the pages I read that week.  The blog entry is more of a synopsis of what Diamond already wrote, but there’s not much of me in it.


Since I started reading the Guns, Germs, and Steel, I keep thinking of a guy I know.  As will become clear, I have ambivalent feelings toward the guy, for a host of reasons.  (Perhaps a more accurate explanation of the relationship would be that I do not have ambivalent feelings toward him at all, but actively dislike him, for a host of reasons.)

One of his favorite themes was the thoughtless greed inherent in Western Culture.  He proudly cherishes a mythologized image of Native American nobility, and is constantly holding up this image against American culture, and finding, unsurprisingly, that American culture falls far short of his idealized image.  This image of the nobility of the Native American is ridiculously stereotypical, artificial, and contrived, and reminds me of the anti-littering television ad from several decades ago, in which a Native American quietly weeps at trash blowing by his feet.  Key elements of this image are that Native Americans consider all of nature as brothers, view the hunting of animals as a religious experience, use the entire carcass from any animal killed, and only hunt what is absolutely needed.

However, Diamond tells a different story.  Diamond presents an image of human nature and culture being more constant over time and space, and argues that no society can hold itself up as possessing greater intellect or spiritual gifts than any other society.  Throughout the book, whether he is addressing the first arrival of humans on a continent, the development of agriculture, or the domestication of animals, he has mentioned a startling fact.  It appears that large mammal species were nearly exterminated from the Americas shortly after the arrival humans on the continents. As humans evolved in Africa and Eurasia, they slowly became more and more efficient hunters.  The large mammals that lived on those continents had the advantage of evolving along with us, and managed to develop a fear of humans as we became more proficient hunters.  By the time humans arrived in Australia and the Americas late in our evolutionary history, our hunting skills were highly developed.  The number of large mammal extinctions in Australia and the Americas is quite high shortly after the arrival of humans on each of those continents, where the native fauna had not developed a fear of humans.

So much for the image of Native Americans possessing a spiritual approach to living with the environment.  If that environmental sensitivity is not just a beautiful mythology, it only developed after large mammals across North and South America were hunted to extinction.