Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.
Diamond views the history of the entire world through evolutionary lenses, and he has no room for God except as an evolutionary development that needs to be explained by reference to those lenses. But if I put on my biblical lenses, there’s still great value to be had in Diamond’s work.
Those biblical lenses tell me that God has a Plan A (a decretive will) that human history never deviates from, but that He uses earthly means to accomplish that heavenly work. The various plants and animals available to different peoples is surely part of how He structured his story.
I found Diamond’s description of plant domestication to be particularly interesting and engaging. I had heard about corn domestication, but it never occurred to me to wonder when and how most other staple foods were brought under human dominion.
And that little word is a tip-off to another major portion of the biblical lens: I read Diamond’s sweeping narrative (can anything but the Bible be more sweeping?) not as a record of the evolutionary progress of homo sapiens but as an outworking of God’s original mandate to man:
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth. (Gen 1:28 CSB)
Perhaps I’m building too much on a minor point, but I believe that the word “blessed” suggests that this mandate is both an indicative and an imperative. God didn’t just give man a task but a blessing. Maoris, Austronesians, and Incas all exercise dominion whether they know about Yahweh or not, because God blessed them with that ability and yearning.
I can’t say I know the reasons behind God’s providential organization of the continents, but Diamond persuaded me that the obvious difference in axes is significant to world history. Simply the first “food production package”—the full suite of plant and animal domesticates necessary for hunter gatherers to become sedentary farmers—developed in the Fertile Crescent (any connections to the Bible there?). And that zone connects to others contiguously all across the massive Eurasian continent, making it easy for the package to spread. The same is not true for north-south oriented continents like Africa and the Americas. Developments in dominion, up to and including writing, could not make their way easily up and down through different temperature zones and over mountain ranges. And Eurasia had the best candidates for plant and animal domestication to begin with.
It was the superior food production package which gave Eurasians the edge anytime they encountered other cultures. High yields-per-man-hour allowed some people to specialize in politics, marshaling man-power to produce even higher yields through things like irrigation products. This sedentary lifestyle also helped farmers develop guns, germs, and steel. It was these things which were most effective in raising Eurasians to prominence over others. Germs were especially powerful. Farmers living close together developed immunities to certain germs, and those germs utterly annihilated North American Indian populations without anyone ever having to fire a shot. (The story of Pizarro capturing the Inca god-king Atahuallpa is especially vivid and interesting.)
In any case, this book answered for me decisively the question of whether racial superiority is the reason Eurasians have taken the ascendance in many ways in this world. Diamond tackles that question head-on and gives a firm answer: no.
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Greenville-Area BibleWorks Seminar
I will be putting on an area-wide BibleWorks seminar at Morningside Baptist Church. There will be two sessions:
Beginner-Intermediate (Feb 11, 9:30 am–12:00 pm)
Gain a solid understanding of how to use BibleWorks in real-life exegesis and sermon prep. I assume you know nothing and then give you all the skills you need to use BibleWorks daily.
Advanced (Feb 18, 9:30 am–11 am) + Logos 4 Crash Course (11 am – 12 pm)
We’ll cover all the advanced features of BibleWorks, including the textual critical advancements in BW 9. Then for one hour I will give you tips on how to use Logos 4 and what to buy. (Those with BibleWorks 7 and 8 should do fine except for about half an hour of the advanced course.)
There will be a break in the middle of each session, and I hope to provide generous time for questions and personal attention after each session.
Free snacks may appear if my wife is so inclined and my children are good the day before. =)
Cost:
- STUDENTS: $10 each session ($15 to attend both)
- NON-STUDENTS: $20 each session ($30 to attend both)
- $5 if you want to attend only the Logos Crash Course
We should have space for walk-ins, but click below to reserve a spot. Those who sign up will receive a very small goody hardly worth their effort.
Google Sign Up! Facebook Sign Up!Uncharacteristic (?) But Genuine Gushing
Jim Berg is one of my favorite preachers in the world. Of course, there are many preachers I benefit from. “All are yours,” Paul said (1 Cor 3:22)—Piper, Packer, the Puritans—and the Internet has made them all readily available for my benefit. Praise God!
But providentially, I have a pastor. And a long-time Sunday School teacher. And a former Dean at the institution where I work (that’s Berg). These, my top three favorite preachers in the world if anyone’s counting, are God’s special gifts to me and the others who share my providential space in life. These and a very few others are my “fathers” in the faith (1 Cor 4:14–15), men to whom I have and owe special respect.
Thankfully, I don’t have to force myself to give honor to these men. I feel it naturally; their love for God and skill in handling the Word make them worthy of it. I find myself praying that I might by God’s grace be like them (Paul follows up 1 Cor 4:15 with a command to be like him).
Listen to this glorious sermon!
P.S. Can you put a P.S. on a blog post? The Internet says I can. So P.S.: all the men whose preaching and teaching I value the most were trained at Bob Jones University. It is not a perfect place, and there are many other good Christian schools, but if you want to be a preacher whose head and heart are both submitted to the Word of God, BJU is a very good choice.
Funny Quote on Technology Guaranteed to Make You Laugh or Your Money Back (If You Do Laugh, Would You Consider Giving Me Some Money?)
From John Dyer’s From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology :
When it comes to technology, each generation sees the issue from a slightly different perspective. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once grouped technology into three categories. First, “everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.” Then, “anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it.” Finally, “anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.”
What a Great Idea!
This is why I bought a Kindle and not a Nook—Amazon has it together as a company, a lot like Apple but without quite the same visual panache.
I can now more easily send any document on my computer straight to my Kindle. That’s real handy for someone like me who likes the ergonomics of the Kindle better than those of a laptop or desktop. The root meaning of “ergonomic” has something to do with “lying on a couch,” I think, and that’s why I like my Kindle.
Now, Amazon, please develop this for the Mac!
Update: It works really well. Here’s the little options screen you get every time you try to print or send to Kindle:
I’m afraid this screen reveals to careful readers that I have lost one Kindle… =( I took it on church visitation and never saw it again. No one has deregistered it, so I hope they’re reading the Bible… But I suspect it’s just languishing somewhere. I have prayed often that it would find its way back to me. =( One small blessing is that Kindles have gone way down in price since I bought the one I lost.
HT: Dustin Battles (HT: Lifehacker [HT: Jeff Bezos])
Congratulations, Greenville!
My humble home town makes the front page of the New York Times! That home looks like it’s in Dellwood—that’s my best guess. Not a lot of Newt fans in West Greenville, I don’t think… Or beach cruisers.
Crossway e-Book Sale! Every Book Just $6!
Crossway is selling all of their e-books for just six bucks a piece—until Jan 15th.
Here’s a little gem from one I picked up, Mark Dever’s The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made. I’ve been planning on buying this for some years now as a homiletical aid. Finally, the price was right!
In order to acquire a sense of the grandiosity of God’s work, the majesty of his plan, the tenacity of his love, there is no replacement for the Old Testament. Deprive yourself of this part of God’s revelation, and your God will seem smaller, less holy, and less loving than God really is.
That is so true.
I bought the following:
New Years Resolutions: Grace or Guilt?
Join the discussion over at Charlie Johnson’s blog. Or turn it into a discussion, I guess!
I think Charlie raises a great point—but then again, so does the first commenter! =)
Review: Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books
Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books by Tony Reinke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.3 When 1 percent of what you read is life-transforming gold, the labor of sifting through the other 99 percent is not troublesome.
Interestingly, this is the one thought that has really stuck with me from reading Lit! by Tony Reinke. It may sound a little discouraging: are those little nuggets worth the effort? Yes, I know they are. And I think the 99% is still shaping me, even if not always in conscious ways.
Instead of providing a review, let me just share with you the other thoughts and lines that I highlighted—even if none of them managed to stay in my active memory (that’s why we take notes, after all)!
Wait! After going through these notes, I realized that there is another thought that really stuck with me:
I read books on a Kindle e-book reader for eighteen months. In those months I discovered that I could read faster and that I could read more easily on jet planes, at the park, and in bed. I could download new books instantly. Never before had books been more accessible, and never had one hundred books fit more comfortably in one hand. With all these books I found myself flipping between multiple titles at the same time, becoming quickly tired with one book and switching to another, more promising, book. About a year into my friendship with Kindle I noticed that my online reading habits were creeping into my e-book reading habits. All my distracted fragmented browsing habits began appearing as I read books on my Kindle. I noticed:
• I was less discerning with the e-books I was reading.
• I experienced a persistent feeling of being rushed.
• I found it difficult to maintain sustained linear attention.
• I rarely meditated while reading an e-book.
• I reacted to what I was reading, rather than stopping to think and meditate.
• I found myself tempted to flip to a different book unless the book arrested my attention at all times.
• I found myself browsing and skimming books….You may be more disciplined that I am (actually, there’s a good chance of it). But in my life I noticed several unhelpful reading patterns emerge. No matter how I tried, I could not reverse them. After eighteen months I went Kindle-free, and I recommitted my life to printed books.
This, of course, caught my attention. Interestingly, his experience appears to be the opposite of Alan Jacobs’, who said in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction that the Kindle actually rescued him from distraction. Because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of an iPad, it forced him to read in a linear fashion. My own experience falls in between Reinke’s and Jacobs’: the Kindle helps me read in a linear way without distractions, and it’s great for helping me just read more, period. It’s always available and always holds something interesting—and I don’t find myself bouncing around. But I do think—and here’s where Reinke helped me—that it contributes to an overall, persistent feeling of being rushed. The Kindle makes so much available that I feel overwhelmed with it all—and I feel like I have to finish what I’m reading fast so I can get to those other things.
I believe that society will find e-readers to be good ways to read some books and bad ways to read others. Those in the gray area we may read on an e-reader for convenience. What I haven’t figured out how to do yet is rid myself of the stress of “so much to read, so little time!”
Okay, here are the other quotes I saved. Their quality may give you an indication of whether or not you ought to take some time out to read Lit!
The strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading . . . is the search for a difficult pleasure.” (Quoting Harold Bloom).
Literature is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, interpretation, creativity, beauty, and understanding. These are ennobling activities and qualities. For a Christian, they can be God-glorifying, a gift from God to the human race to be accepted with zest.
By appreciating the beauty of literature, we honor God, the Giver of all beauty.
The best Christian novelists write from a biblical worldview, one that is not afraid of digging into the soil of common human experience. O’Connor once addressed what she called “sorry” Christian fiction: Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is.
God’s “amazing grace” is especially displayed when it “saves a wretch.” To some degree, the author must paint a picture of the wretchedness of sin in order for grace to emerge in its brilliance. Thus, grace-filled literature is often not “clean” literature. In fact, God’s redemptive grace is hard to capture in “clean” fiction. This is especially true of conversion stories, because conversion is about contrast. So how much sin is required for the contrast to become clear? What type of realism is permissible in fiction? Where are the lines drawn? These are very difficult questions, and the gutters are deep on both sides of the street. On the one side of the road, we cannot merely shut our eyes to depictions of sin and evil in literature. We find depictions of evil in the Bible. On the other side of the road, we cannot affirm fiction that glorifies sin or applauds unbelief.
Christians should neither undervalue nor overvalue literature. It is not the ultimate source of truth. But it clarifies the human situation to which the Christian faith speaks.
For many of us, reading is more a matter of desire than of a lack of free time. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
Meet David Ulin. David is the book editor for the Los Angeles Times newspaper. David reads a lot of books because he gets paid to review a lot of books. It’s David’s job. But one day David noticed something alarming—the task of reading books was becoming more and more difficult. That’s bad news for a professional book reader. The problem was not the lack of will to read, but the lack of concentration. He wrote about his experience in the autobiographical article, “The Lost Art of Reading”: Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. . . . In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.1 Ulin pointed to the Internet as a primary cause of his withering concentration. And he is not alone. In the summer of 2008 journalist Nicholas Carr published an article in The Atlantic that brought these concerns to popular attention under the provoking title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He wrote, Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . . And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
The Internet offers us streams of fragmented information that must be quickly browsed as they pass.
Social media (like Facebook and Twitter) and online browsing patterns will train our minds to hunt for information in small, isolated bits. In fact “reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” writes Susan Jacoby. “What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
The Internet is designed to encourage us to browse information, not to slowly read and digest it. Carr writes, “Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” And we like distraction. We want distraction. Distraction is how we stay busy enough to avoid the self-discipline required to read books.
Traditionally, a reader selected one book and sat alone in a reading chair. When great ideas were encountered, the reader internalized those ideas and reflected on them. If the reader encountered points of disagreement, the reader also stopped to reflect on what made the point disagreeable. In other words, traditional readers engaged with a book and engaged their thinking. This has changed with online social interaction. Now, when we come across an idea that we like, we are tempted to quickly react, to share the idea with friends in an e-mail, on Facebook, or on a blog. Or when we disagree, our initial response is to ask for the input of others. With online access to so many friends, the temptation is to react, not to ponder, and it’s a problem Kevin Kelly notices. In his article “Reading in a Whole New Way” he compares reading from a book page to reading from a screen. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it.
The point of this chapter is pretty simple: as Christians, convinced of the importance of book reading, we must periodically gauge the effects of the Internet and social and electronic media upon our lives. The concentration and self-discipline required to read books requires years of practice to build and consistent exercise to maintain. If we are careless, this concentration and discipline will erode, and we will find ourselves in a losing battle—losing our patience with books and losing our delight in reading. The skill and concentration needed to read books is a skill and concentration that’s worth fighting for.
Jesus Among Other Gods
I was thrilled and deeply encouraged by this testimony—and it is full of great sermon illustrations.
HT: Gerald McDermott
Great Article Ya Gotta Read It
If you’ve been wanting a good summation of the hot issue of Christian political involvement, look no further. I read this article a little while back when it came out, and when just now I ran across a few quotes I saved from it, I knew I had to recommend it to you and you.
Dan Strange writes with exceptional clarity on a hot issue, and I love his title: “The Sufficiency of Scripture for Public Theology.” Not everyone, it seems, believes in that sufficiency. Here’s Strange laying out the program for his article.
In what follows I compare and contrast two broad positions within Reformed theology:
- The first, and at the risk of caricature, are those who both for theological and tactical reasons argue for the ‘insufficiency’ (or maybe less polemically ‘illegitimacy’) of the use of the Bible in the public realm but rather the ‘sufficiency’ (or probably better, ‘legitimacy’) of natural revelation embodied in a natural law.
- The second argue for precisely the opposite.
To whet your appetite further, here’s a great quote he offers from John Frame:
The Great Commission is the republication of the cultural mandate for the semi-eschatological age. Unlike the original cultural mandate, it presupposes the existence of sin and the accomplishment of redemption. It recognizes that if the world is to be filled with worshippers of God, subduing the earth as his vassal kings, they must first be converted to Christ through the preaching of the gospel.
And lest you be afraid of anyone who brings up the cultural mandate at all, look at his summary of the view he argues for:
In this vision, if cultural transformation is a desired end, this should not and will not come about by imposed morality but by men and women being converted and willingly submitting themselves to the King of Kings and his rule.
Review: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If not a book for guys, at least a book clearly written by one. There wasn’t a single word about the relationship of the six guys on the raft that I noted—it’s all adventure.
My rating: 5 stars for bravery, 4 for literary merit (Heyerdahl does write well; I found myself wondering how a Norwegian native could have such a command of English, but I was unable to ascertain if a translator or editor was employed), but only 3 overall—because I felt the book was long on adventure and short on depth.
“Short on depth.” That’s not nearly as good English as Heyerdahl’s. A good vacation read. It stirred my desire to buy and read a book whose Kindle sample captivated me: 1491.
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