The Controversy of Yali’s Question

This is the 2nd article in an ongoing series of articles discussing Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The 1st article in the series can be found here and a table of contents of this series can be found here.
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The first paragraph of Guns, Germs, Steel:
“This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t: as you will see, the answers to the question don’t involve human racial differences at all. The book’s emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations, and on pushing back the chain of historical causation as far as possible.”

Yali’s question is very controversial subject because there are lot of people who have immoral answers. The mere effort to talk about Yali’s questions can be confused as effort to justify why certain groups of people have dominated others. As Mr. Diamond points out psychologists attempt to analyze the minds of rapists not to justify the act, but to understand the causes so that future rape crimes can be prevented.

Throughout history and even today have used very racist justifications for dominating and enslaving other groups of people. For example, slavery of Africans in the United States was justified for many slaveholders because it was believed that people with dark skin where somehow sub-human. Obviously this a ridiculous belief, but sadly the idea that one race is better than another still persists in our world. The Holocaust is the obvious example and by far the most horrific example, but Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing reconstruction of New Orleans have brought racism front and center once again.

The fact that you’re reading an article written by me is simply a byproduct of my environment. I was born into a loving family in the most powerful and wealthy nation the world has ever know. Would you be reading this article if I had been born into the few remaining hunter-gather tribes still in existent? The odds of that happening would be very slim.

As this book explained to me (and I will explain to you) is that Eurasian people were simply dealt a winning hand in terms of geography and ecology. They got lucky. Because they got lucky thousands of years ago, the basis for modern civilization came into existence. They got a head start and these advantages were passed along to my ancestors who came to America in early 20th century from England, Ireland, Poland, and Russia. That is why you’re reading this article. I’m no better a person than individuals born in a hunter-gather tribes during 1981. Not only is it arrogant and racist to believe this, it’s simply scientifically false.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

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Stay tuned for the next article in this series on Guns, Germs, and Steel.

For a table of contents of this series, click here.