Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
Interpretation
The quote questions the disparities in development and wealth distribution between different races and cultures.
Jared Diamond's quote addresses the historical and geographical factors that have contributed to the unequal distribution of resources and technological advancements between societies. It invites contemplation on the influence of environment, history, and societal structures in shaping the capabilities of different groups and raises important questions about race and economic disparity.
In practice
In a discussion about cultural development and historical context.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
If you say, Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God, then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design.
In every heart there is an inner room, where we can hold our greatest treasures and our deepest pain.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
the masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things.
To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother's keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .
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