By some method or chance beyond my cognizance, I was born American. And of course there have been moments when I wondered just how it came to be that America is currently the world's only superpower. But that is merely a surface question. When you dig into it, you discover deeper and deeper questions about why Europeans are now in America, why China didn't conquer Europe with its more advanced culture, and on and on. (Diamond likens this aspect of historical questioning to an onion).
The history of humans on Earth is mind-boggling. For more than 90% of our brief history, we wandered in small bands, scraping out an existence in a world fraught with danger from animals, the weather, and disease. Only recently did we decide to settle in villages and grow our food rather than hunt and gather it. And then we learned to live in larger societies, eventually forming governments, class structures, economies, and empires. And some of these societies came to dominate others, and some got richer than others. They waxed, and they waned.
How did we get from there to here? Why, in the year 2000, is the world configured the way it is?
These musings can tread a bit close to dangerous territory. Racists have declared that whites are genetically superior to, or more "advanced" than, other races, and hence came to dominate the world. Counter-racists have declared that whites are genetically more aggressive than other, more "peaceful," races, and hence it is these other races that are superior, or at least purer and more righteous. With these emotional arguments running so hot, is there any hope of having a reasonable discussion about the intriguing question of why Europeans spread all over the world during the past few centuries to a greater degree than ever before in human history?
Jared Diamond is willing to take on this task in his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." Diamond takes a wide-angle view of world history from very high up, traversing continents and millennia to provide an overview of human societal development from about 11,000 BC to the present. It's an impressive undertaking, but overall, I found his presentation to be a little uneven, making this book difficult to rate. In the end, I'll settle on an average score of "weak +".
Despite the fact that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (GGS) is broad and attempts to cover all major aspects of societal development (including technology, politics, language, and economics), it is important to understand its limitations before discussing it, for they do exist. GGS is a book that works very well within the specific range it covers, but it turns out that that range is somewhat limited. In other words, Diamond is guilty of false advertising. The book's cover and Introduction imply that he is going to tell us why people from Europe came to domimate the world in the past few centuries. He does nothing of the sort-- his arguments do not apply on that time (sort) time scale, nor do they apply to such a modern situation. So I think the book is well worth reading, as long as you are aware of where it fits in the historical landscape.
Diamond focuses on the geographical and environmental factors that affect human societies. These are indeed very important factors. Remember that humans used to live outdoors. We used to carry most of our belongings with us. We used to know very few humans outside our own group. We used to be at the mercy of where the herds wandered, what the weather was like that year, and what the climate was like that decade. Diseases and droughts regularly wiped out whole tribes. Rivers or mountain ranges could literally be uncrossable for years at a time if conditions weren't right. For the majority of human history, we have been profoundly shaped by the immediate surroundings in which we lived, be it a Polynesian island, a Siberian forest, or the African steppes.
Diamond makes a compelling case for why some areas of the world learned things earlier than other areas. How could a society possibly learn to domesticate animals if no domesticable species lived in that part of the world? How could they learn agriculture if few or none of the native plant species were domesticable? Indeed, the distribution of animal and plant species suitable for human domestication was not very equitable in the ancient world. Some areas just had it luckier than others. The winners were in Eurasia, which had the largest number of "qualified" candidates for domestication. (For animals, "qualification" has to do with temper, reproductive cycles, and other factors that make them easy for humans to adapt and modify to their purposes. For plants, "qualification" is about having large grains, being cultivable from cuttings, and other factors that make farming worthwhile compared to gathering). In contrast to Eurasia, Africa and the Americas suffered from lack of candidates and some unfortunate late Pleistocene extinctions that further reduced the options.
Hence, agriculture arose first in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East (now Iraq) and in China, both about 10,000 years ago. It also arose in parts of Central and South America, albeit much later (perhaps 5,000 years ago). It may have arisen in Central Africa and New Guinea also, but this is not so clear (it may have been acquired from outside). Agriculture was certainly borrowed in such regions as Western Europe, the Indus Valley, and parts of North Africa. Looking at purely geographic evidence of where the domesticable plants and animals were, this makes perfect sense. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.
This line of reasoning can be carried further. Geography also affects the spread of information-- or it did for most of human history. By looking at archaelogical findings, it is possible to trace who knew what when, at least roughly. You can see types of pottery getting passed from society to society, for instance, as well as farming techniques and tools. Using this type of evidence, it quickly becomes clear that east-west axes allow for faster spread of information that north-south axes. This is because going east-west, the climate tends to stay fairly constant. So you can grow the same crops, wear the same clothes, and use the same animals. Try taking a reindeer to the Equator, or try growing oranges in Finland! Not likely.
Hence, regions with large east-west expanses tended to share information faster, thus accelerating their development compared to regions with mostly north-south expanse. Once again, this favored "horizontal" Eurasia compared to largely "vertical" Africa and the Americas. In fact, Africa had the additional hindrance of a desert cutting through it (for much of its history), and the Americas had it worst of all with a narrow isthmus squeezing the central region, slowing the information flow. Isolated areas such as Australia and the Pacific Islands were even more disadvantaged through the luck of geography.
As Diamond tells the story, the early advantages of geography and animal and plant distribution further tipped the scales because of the repercussions of developing agriculture and animal domestication first. Agriculture and animal domestication bring humans into close proximity through the formation of towns. Also, humans engaged in farming tend to stay in one place for longer, further increasing interaction. Even more important, animal husbandry brings humans in close contact with animals, which are the source of many human diseases. Societies with farming and animals got sick, and it was a bad scene for a while, but they emerged stronger-- and with nasty germs to which hunter-gatherers had no resistance.
Thus it was that when hunter-gatherers or other non-agricultural people encountered those who had raised animals, it was more often that the former succumbed to the latter's germs than vice versa.
I won't go through all of Diamond's logic because you probably have the flavor by now. Many of his arguments are believable. The Earth is the way it is, and humans have been marvelously adaptive to be able to live in many diverse regions, from desert to tundra. But that doesn't mean that all humans had an equal shot at developing new lifestyles or at inventing new technologies. (It would have been impossible for metalworking to evolve on some Pacific islands-- since some of them have no metal!). In many cases that Diamond describes, those humans who developed certain capabilities are exactly the ones you would expect to have done so, given the physical surroundings they lived in.
Thus, GGS is a detailed, well-researched, and thoughtfully synthesized account of what I would call "physical history" (I'm sure there's a real term for this that I just don't know). Diamond describes undeniable advantages that Eurasia had over the rest of the world. As he says, "I expect that if the populations of Aboriginal Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the Late Pleistocene, the original Aboriginal Australians would now be the ones occupying most of the Americas and Australia, as well as Eurasia, while the original Aboriginal Eurasians would be the ones now reduced to downtrodden population fragments in Australia." (p. 405). It's the environment, not the people.
He has a point. But beware his tactic: he has set up the above sentence so that if you take issue with it, you seem to be advocating the idea that people themselves do have inherent differences, hence placing yourself in the racist camp.
The way out of this trap is to realize that there are other factors besides genes and environment-- or more precisely, the two are themselves intimately linked to each other and hence it is not a zero-sum system. For lack of a better term, we may wish to bring up the concept of "culture," even at risk of complicating the picture. I think this is acceptable because Diamond's picture is actually too simple.
There are many specific issues that can to be brought up to react to Diamond's treatise. They could fill a book in their own right, so I'll just mention two. First of all, there are a lot of auxiliary factors that are important in societal development that cannot be explained by geography, local wildlife, and climate. They include:
Which brings me to the second major sticking point I have with Diamond's purely physical explanation for the fates of human societies. One can hardly avoid noticing that the story of human history, particularly in the past 10,000 years (ie, the focal period of GGS), is the story of reducing our dependence on the physical environment. That is not to say that it has no effect, only that it has less effect now than it did when we were wandering around in groups of 40 people or so.
Hence, Diamond's arguments must have less and less weight as time goes on. In particular, they have very little weight in recent times, such as during the European expansion all over the globe. A key question that kept nagging at me was a simple one: for much of Diamond's historical tale, Europe was a technological and social backwater, far behind the Middle East and China, as well as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Sahel region of Africa. Why didn't the people from one of these other regions-- particularly a Eurasian one-- play the role that Europe ultimately did?
Diamond is also aware of this issue, and even brings it up explicitly in the book's final chapter, where he looks beyond his own analysis. The fact is that cultural factors are critical in recent history and really cannot be ignored. Diamond's arguments go a long way toward explaining the head start of various regions and the momentum that they had as the world began to become a global place instead of just isolated human groups. But they cannot explain everything.
The bottom line is that physical arguments are very broad-brush. They are perfectly acceptable when considering large swaths of history that cover thousands of years during which humans were totally dependent on their environment. But they cannot help on short time scales, where local cultural effects matter a lot. Nor are they relevant in the modern, interconnected world where geography plays much less of a role.
So GGS is a solid book to explain such things as why Native Americans developed agriculture after the Chinese did-- and why some Pacific Island cultures never developed it at all. It explains why small pox and syphillis were so devastating to tribes of the "New World," while their diseases rarely did so much damage to people of the "Old World" (there are exceptions, of course, such as malaria, but the broad pattern is for the nastier germs to come from societies with domesticated animals). It explains why cultures that had agriculture could go on to develop complex states, which supported specialist classes, including the class of soldier (who could go forth and conquer, secure in being fed by the political state back home). But don't expect to learn why Britain hates France or why China adopted Communism. These things are "below the resolution" of a broad-brush physical analysis. Like trying to measure the length of a dust grain with your parents' old wooden yardstick.
Diamond would add a caveat. He would say, "Yes, it's true; my analysis can't reveal those details, but look at the legacy of the long time period when geography mattered. Only a deliberately ignorant person would claim that 10,000 years can be swept aside now that we have the Internet. Africans and Aboriginal Australians are simply not at the same place as Europeans in relative cultural status, and we can't change that. History thrust us into this position, and that history was largely environmental." OK, fair enough. But there are lingering cultural issues from long ago (see the three bullet points above, for example) that imply that Diamond's analysis is not the whole story.
The fact that Diamond seems to be aware of the larger picture and the limitations of his viewpoint gives me a more positive impression of this book than if he had simply written it as if it explained everything. So in the end, I'll stick to what I said at the beginning: this is an excellent book for the range it works in. But that range is a bit limited. I am planning to read some other books that address the same question as GGS ("Why did Europe 'win' the most recent advance in humans over the globe?"), but do so from other angles. I think that will help give a more complete picture.
One final note: One can't help but wonder to what degree books like this are driven by Western guilt. Could an African have written GGS? Would a Native American buy Diamond's arguments about how Eurasia got a big head start by having the best selection of domesticable plants and animals? I don't know. It's so hard to tell.
So in the end, GGS rates a "weak +" for a complicated combination of reasons, including its limited viewpoint, its nonetheless compelling arguments in some cases, and Diamond's admirable awareness of and forthrightness about his own limitations. Take a look if you're intrigued (or if you're a guilt-wracked European descendent? :-)).
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
