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.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
He that knows how to overcome the Lord in prayer, has heaven and earth at his disposal.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
To be more free is the goal of all our efforts, for only in perfect freedom can there be perfection.
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