First Impressions

So where do I start...

I realized the extremely well documented introduction to the novel of the story of Yali, a local politician of New Guinea that befriended Jared Diamond during his stay in the pacific island. This incorporation was near-to-perfect, with the start of the novel with Yali’s question on the apparent disparity between how the whites obtained such large amounts of technological, social and scientific advances while blacks (New Guineans) did not have any of their own set of influence goods.

Jared Diamond called this question simple, and I was about to think about it myself and answer but I realized I was lost in a huge bath of ideas and brainstorms. I realized that as the seconds passed of thinking of one simple answer, it became much more complex, difficult and obscure. Jared Diamond writes “This book, written twenty five years later, attempts to answer Yali”.

He first goes into examination by going into the past and zooming out into the world to witness the different continents and civilizations that existed in the 1500s, and even further back to the 11,000 BC. As he goes back in time, he rephrases his questions from “Why did the wealth and power become distributed as they now are?” to “How did the world get to be the way it was in A.D 1500?” to “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” I thought maybe geographical reasons? But Diamond goes on to witness the importance of interactions among disparate people that permitted conquests, epidemics and genocides.

But it’s not only the physical factors that affect such a disparity among the general populous but also the innate racist explanations that explain why natives are primitive and tribal in the eyes of advanced civilizations. Jared Diamond rebukes this inherent racism as wrong because in fact, “Stone Age people on average are probably more intelligent than industrialized people” Fact

Diamond also further describes the controversy in rating the intelligence of natives comparative to citizens of industrialized nations by describing the New Guinean natives on their ability to be more adept than Westerners in their surroundings. Obviously a New Guinean who was placed to study higher level Calculus or AP Chemistry might look foolish and stupid, but in a converse manner, a Westerner who was left alone to live in a rainforest for a week would die or look extremely incompetent. Opposition to this might state how “intelligent people are likelier to escape cases of high mortality than the less intelligent New Guinean natives”. Well, epidemic diseases and its spread have very little to do with intelligence and instead involved with the area of spread itself and the details of body chemistry. Proof

Diamond goes on, describing the subtle aspects of describing and answering Yali’s question, and he often arrives in dead ends or places where he cannot explain the differences among development of tools or the apparent discovery of bronze tools in certain parts of the world. Yet, he still rebukes the obvious inherent disparity between people of different races. He thus states his reasons for writing this book: the proof to censure the ‘logical’ approach to state that racist biological explanation is correct no matter what.

He ends his introduction with one profound sentence: “History followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”. I hope that this novel will satisfy my intellectual curiosity and in fact allow me to answer Yali’s question as best as I can in the end.

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