Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 1st Edition

Two decades ago a UCLA geography professor named Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond hypothesized that the arc of human history was dramatically shifted by geographic, environmental, biological, and other factors, resulting in the worldwide dominance of the leading industrial powers during the past 500 years. The book won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.

Why is economic development so uneven around the world?

Diamond posed questions fundamental to the experience of the human race. “Why did wealth and power [among nations] become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?” “[W]hy did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” “[W]hy were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?” In his award-winning book, Diamond posited a “unified synthesis”—a unified field theory of history. Drawing from his wide-ranging knowledge of medicine, evolutionary biology, physiology, linguistics, and anthropology as well as geography, he surveyed the history of the past 13,000 years and identified plausible answers to the questions he had posed. In the process, he wrote what I consider to be the single most illuminating book on the history of the human race.

Academic critics howled

However, academic critics howled shortly after the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel:

They referred to supposed errors in geography and history, which I find largely pointless. For example, geographers complained that Diamond referred to Eurasia as a single continent rather than separately to Asia, North Africa, and Europe. That’s nitpicking, as far as I’m concerned. And many of these “errors” could simply be differences of opinion. Academics are unbearably dogmatic and dismissive of those who reject their pet theories.

Some accused him of racism, although he rejected racist explanations early, forcefully, and often. That criticism is not only unsupported by Diamond’s book, it’s insulting to the reader.

The most common and far-reaching complaint was that Diamond had succumbed to the heresy of “environmental determinism.” Understandably, Diamond grounded his argument in geographic and environmental factors—but he repeatedly cited numerous other influences as well. Ultimately, of course, everything we humans do, and everything we’ve done in the millions of years since our ancestors first climbed out of the trees, has been environmentally determined.

There were complaints that Diamond had overlooked the contrast between temperate and tropical zones (he didn’t) and that he had only explained what happened 500 years ago but not subsequently (untrue). It might appear that at least some of Diamond’s critics never read the book.

However, the most aggravating criticism was that he had ignored the motives that led the industrial nations to undertake colonialism and imperialism on a broad scale. Diamond addressed only the means that enabled the colonial powers to dominate, not the reasons why they chose to do so. To my mind, that’s no error. He didn’t pretend to explain colonialism and imperialism, merely to describe how it had become possible.

Is it possible that most of these academic critics were simply bitter that Diamond hadn’t cited their own specialized research?

The roots of academic criticism

Though the critics undoubtedly uncovered a misplaced fact or unwarranted conclusion here and there through the book, the errors were exceedingly minor in the context of Diamond’s expansive hypothesis. It should be clear to any dispassionate reader that the academic reaction stemmed, above all, from narrow-mindedness and jealousy. The world of academia today is atomized. Specialties, sub-specialties, and sub-sub-specialties abound. It’s not unusual for a scholar to build a career on the study of a single obscure question that, when answered, will be of interest to virtually nobody. Interdisciplinary studies are frowned upon in most academic circles. Generalists are regarded as “not serious.” And scholars who write popular books, must less bestsellers, can expect a chilly reception from their peers.

A wealth of meaning behind the title

To understand where the academic critics went wrong, it’s useful to look at what Diamond signified by his title, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Early in his book, he dwells on the confrontation between the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Inca god-king Atahuallpa. “The immediate reasons for Pizarro’s success included military technology based on guns, steel weapons [such as swords and daggers], and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing. The title of this book will serve as shorthand for those proximate factors.”

Diamond’s argument in a nutshell

In a Prologue, Diamond poses the question at the heart of this book. He quotes a friend in what is now Papua New Guinea from a conversation in 1972, when he was studying bird evolution there: “‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?'” To answer the question, Diamond begins his story around the year 11,000 BCE, when the last Ice Age was drawing to a close and human beings were beginning to form villages in a few places around the world. It’s unclear whether the formation of villages preceded the deliberate cultivation and production of food, or vice versa. However, regardless of the sequence, that shift from hunter-gatherer society to agriculturally based settlements set in motion the course of events that have led to the “civilization” in which we live.

Diamond argues, convincingly, that the much greater availability of domesticable plants and large animals in Eurasia than in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Furthermore, he explains that the east-west orientation of Eurasia from the Bering Strait to the Atlantic Ocean made it possible for the development of agriculture and animal husbandry to spread quickly to distant lands. By contrast, the north-south orientation of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa—and the presence of barriers such as the Sahara Desert, the Panamanian Isthmus, and the deserts of northern Mexico and southwestern United States—impeded the spread of these (and, later, other) new technologies to the extremities of those continents. The advent of food production enabled the development of ever-larger settlements. This, in turn, spelled the emergence of labor specialization and eventually the growth of empires as well as the appearance and spread of communicable diseases contracted from domesticated animals. Those differences in historical development eventually led to the “guns, germs, and steel” that made Eurasian dominance possible—and dictated the huge differences in economic development between what today we call East and West.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is crammed with facts and densely written. It doesn’t make for light reading. But if you have any interest in understanding how the world came to be as it is, you’ll find this book highly rewarding.

Love it or hate it, agree with it or not, this Pulitzer Prize winning book delivers thought-provoking theories. Combining geography and physiology, the author sets out in great detail his theories about why human civilizations developed the way they did across the millennia. Does he have some confirmation bias along the way? Sure. But, this is a very important book and a must read for thinking people pondering human civilization on this planet, past and present. I thought about this book on a recent trip to Alaska. Cruise and tour guides were constantly pointing out how the native peoples survived there for 12,000 years as hunter-gatherers before the arrival of people from other countries. I kept thinking yes, but we wouldn't be here visiting without the trains, planes and automobiles (guns, germs, and steel) brought by the new inhabitants. But, then I visited native villages that are as they were for thousands of years, and I was in awe of one particular large building that was made of wood that was fit together perfectly without nails. it was ingeniously designed to defend hearth and home, heat the occupants, provide for a "walk-on" closet under the floor, and was completely portable! More confirmation bias? Perhaps. But, thought-provoking? Definitely. I highly recommend this book to any thinking person.

People have been recommending this book to me for at least a dozen years. I am happy to have at last gotten around to it. Professor Diamond basically says, to vastly oversimplify things, that geography is destiny. Some societies succeed and others don’t primarily because of their location. If our ancestors were in an area where there were plants and animals suitable for domestication, they had a head start, because food production made people available for specialized tasks, which ultimately led to a stratified, organized society capable of carrying out larger projects. This makes sense to me. The Americas, Africa, and Australia did not have enough animals suitable for domestication, and the few suitable plants were, for the most part, inferior to those of Eurasia. Thus, Eurasians came to dominate the earth, rather than Africans, Native Americans, or New Guineans. Diamond stresses that this dominance came not from innate superior strength and intelligence, but rather from their advantageous geography. This was his reason for writing the book.

I appreciated the way that Diamond approached his material from multiple disciplines. He supports his arguments with archaeological evidence, genetic testing, paleolinguistics, climatology, et cetera. This kind of scholarship was very impressive in his examination of the migrations of peoples.

The only part of his argument I didn’t really buy was his idea of “continental axes.” According to Diamond, Eurasia has a natural east-west axis, which allows the rapid diffusion of crops and innovations. The Americas and Africa, on the other hand, have north-south axes. To my way of thinking, there are too many exceptions for this to be completely accurate. One thing that puzzled me was why Diamond never examined the idea that if Polynesians were capable of travelling in rafts and canoes from Indonesia to Hawaii, why couldn’t the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, who were adept whalers, travel by boat to Tierra del Fuego, if they wanted to? Was the so-called “bottleneck” of Panama really that great an obstacle?

Before reading any work of history it’s good to remember what Orwell said: “He who controls the past, controls the future.” Virtually all history writers have an agenda. Diamond states his up front. He also rather disturbingly hints in a couple of places that some people could interpret one’s disagreement with him as an act of racism.

I enjoyed this book and found it very stimulating and provocative reading that asks big questions and tries to answer them.