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20 Years of Guns, Germs, and Steel
There are a lot of 20th anniversaries for me this year. 1997 happens to be a year of outsized importance in my life — I graduated from Ponderosa High School and started attending the Colorado School of Mines, after all — but important cultural winds were blowing aside from matriculation, including the release of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Although I didn’t pick up the book for several years after its publication (I was busy doing other things … like calculus) the influence that this work would have upon the world — and the worldview of those who have read it — is important and worth discussing now that time has allowed for cool reflection upon its central and provocative thesis.
That thesis, in short, is this: European powers were capable of overwhelming native populations in places like the New World due to the confluence of technology developed by those societies, largely as a result of factors outside of their control. The development of germs to which native populations had little resistance was mostly due to the domestication of animals that passed their diseases over to their symbiotic partners (humans) and the presence of those domesticable animals was itself a function of geographic luck in the first place.
Eurasian populations also benefited from temperate climates which had enabled the selective breeding of highly productive plants which set off a positive feedback loop, improving agricultural outputs, allowing for urbanization and economic specialization, development of technology, and the centralization of political power. The relative alignment of Eurasia also led to inherently greater speed with which technology and domestication could occur due to large East-West travel routes of similar climate, so such innovations didn’t need to be invented sui generis in every geographically distinct location.
So, how has Diamond’s thesis held up over the last 20 years and why is it important to me? To begin with, I’ve always been fascinated by history. If I weren’t numerate, I could have envisioned myself becoming a historian, and my college and high school transcript reflect it. A four on the AP American History Exam (I had mononucleosis when I took the test…) and a five on the AP European History Exam are probably my crowning Prep School achievements which I attempted to continue even in the environment of engineering higher education.
I keep my copy of Palmer and Colton’s “A History of the Modern World” as a reference whenever I need to place important historical events in context. Although those AP courses wiped out most of my liberal arts requirements, I nonetheless kept up my interest with elective classes like “The History of Technology” and a couple of other courses which led me directly into reading Guns, Germs, and Steel.
It is precisely that academic and casual interest in history that has led me to the conclusion that Diamond’s thesis is deeply flawed, and flawed not because he presents facts which are incorrect, (although some are certainly debatable) but because he allows his personal views and attachments to the native cultures that he has personally studied and interacted with to color his judgment. It’s arguable that Diamond is also something of a cultural relativist, given how far he goes out of his way to point out that even though the vast majority of scientific, mathematical, and societal achievements have come from Eurasian civilization, this has nothing to do with the inherent intelligence or moral character of the native populations that he has come across. Instead, he lays credit for the outcome of history — European hegemony over the known world such as what had emerged by the 18th century — at the feet of what I’ll call “geographic determinism.”
Several facts militate against Diamond’s explanation for this ordering of world affairs.
This piece does a workmanlike job of taking down at least one of the legs of the stool of Diamond’s thesis — mainly the portion about Germs — in which his unsupported assertion that many areas had undomesticable animals and plants is debunked. There were animals and plants available for domestication in those far-flung locations but the proper incentives to do so likely didn’t exist. He may have been correct about Europe being a petri dish for novel bacteria and viruses, but for the wrong reasons. Many of the diseases endemic to Europeans didn’t leap from animals, but are ancient. And add to this the fact that there were simply more people to serve as a breeding population for pathogens, and a population that needed to resist them to survive and, voilà, you can have carriers of disease that are resistant to that disease but can nonetheless pass it along to others without such resistance.
What I’m more interested in, however, are the looming counterexamples that Diamond omits on the frontiers of Guns and Steel. Really, this is one topic in that you can’t have guns without steel, but what this actually consists of is an expression of a society’s capability to synthesize something novel out of a variety of unrelated disciplines ranging from mathematics to metallurgy to chemistry and even economics.
The counterexample to which I refer that bestrides the horizon and casts severe doubt upon these remaining legs of Diamond’s thesis is of course China.
China’s culture is incredibly old. There is evidence of Homo Erectus using fire at some sites in China over a million years ago, and there is a relatively unbroken string of historically documentable civilization there going back at least 2,000 years before the Common Era (BCE). For reference, classical Egyptian civilization extends as far back as 3000 BCE, but whereas Egyptian civilization essentially collapsed from within and before an onslaught of various outsiders, including Persian conquerors and dynastic failures, Chinese civilization was defined primarily by consistent internecine rather than external conquest, the exception being the conquest of Genghis Khan.
Chinese civilization possesses many of the features and advantages that Diamond claims Eurasian civilizations benefited from and came by naturally, including:
- temperate weather
- navigable rivers
- domesticable animals
- abundant natural resources
- plenty of arable land
- over-land routes of transportation to other Eurasian civilizations enabling easy transfer of technology
Using these numerous advantages, the population of China surged and its civilization prospered such that by the time of the 10th century, many of the features of the modern technocratic state had emerged. Alongside the invention of advanced metallurgy and knowledge of chemistry which allowed for the manufacture of functional firearms, the Chinese pioneered the invention of moveable type, had invented hydromechanical clocks and were even practicing the use of insurance for ships involved in commerce and performed exchange with paper money.
While classical European civilization had collapsed with the end of the Roman Empire, the Chinese were sailing to Eastern Africa and possessed the world’s largest naval fleet. Using this economic and technological might, China grew into the dominant power of Southeast Asia until the coming of the Portuguese and Dutch in the 1500s. After that time, Chinese power relative to European colonial power ebbed, as both internal and external foes steadily ate away at the Empire.
So, what happened between the height of classical Chinese civilization and the coming of the Colonial powers that shifted the balance so dramatically that the British seized Hong Kong in the Opium War? The aforementioned internecine warfare, of course, but something else entirely novel to Chinese civilization. In comparison to its Western European rivals, one of the principal features of Chinese culture was its adherence to Confucianism, which led in turn to a more inward-looking and xenophobic society just as China was reaching its zenith economically and politically relative to its neighbors around 1200 CE.
Given similar advantages to those possessed by the vast majority of the Eurasian powers, Chinese society chose instead to look inwards rather than out, and the advanced technology that they possessed relative to their competitors was quickly surpassed. The various warring factions within China failed to unite under a common banner and proved intractable when faced with new and diverse threats, preferring to maintain its older culture rather than advancing where possible.
For instance, everybody “knows” that Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press sometime around 1450, but the reality is that this technology had already existed for hundreds of years in China at that point. So, why did this invention help spark a scientific and cultural revolution in Europe, while the technology had seemingly peaked in China? The answer of course is that Europeans possessed the pre-existing technology of Phonetic written language, whereas the Chinese written language (especially prior to the “simplification” of written Chinese) consists of over 80,000 unique characters. With just 52 interchangeable characters (upper and lower case — not counting numbers or punctuation) a person could theoretically spell out any message in English, and adding just a few more characters gets you close to practically any European language you want to select. In comparison, it is impractical to have on hand a sufficient number of type-set worthy characters to mass print and transmit anything beyond the most rudimentary message in Chinese. Add to this the difficulty of regional dialects and usage, which were quickly overcome in Europe due to the efficiency gains associated with coalescing around common usage and grammar.
Also, in order for this to be useful, you must not only be able to read and write this complicated language (an elite educated class) but possess all of the prerequisite technology to build a printing press, (such as metallurgy) the medium upon which you are going to print (paper or papyrus), and lastly, have sufficient numbers of people available who want and are able to read what you’re printing.
When mating the technology of the printing press together with phonetic language, Europe was able to leap far ahead of their Chinese counterparts by quickly disseminating all manner of knowledge throughout the economic spectrum and radically increasing the value to an individual of learning to read and write. Meanwhile, the economics of reading and writing the Chinese language remained prohibitive for all but the wealthiest members of Chinese society. Serfdom in China carried on for centuries, long after it had been functionally abolished in Europe, largely as a result of the explosion in knowledge brought about by the printing press.
The story of this sort of technological transfer and improvement is repeated in the European context over and over again, where it was ultimately put to very effective use in conquering of most of the planet.
This synthesis of varying technological strands into one Earth-shaking invention is the sort of cultural dexterity that Jared Diamond scoffs at and dismisses when he ascribes all of the differences in outcomes that we see between cultures to what boils down to luck of the draw in where your ancestors ended up.
Thomas Sowell once said, “Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal.” Guns, Germs, and Steel attempts to answer that thorny dilemma and does so in a very compelling manner. It’s an important book and should be read — but it should also be examined and have its flaws explained even as its virtues are extolled.
Published in History
One interesting thing about Guns Germs and Steel as well as 1491 and other books that take the “Guns and Germs” thesis is that they avoid other more likely explanations for what happened.
In 1491 especially in the discussion of the Inca Empire the author makes the point over and over again that the Inca Empire never would have fallen if measles had not be ravaging the population and killed the old Emperor started a vicious civil war in the Inca Empire before Pizzaro arrived.
But he is too good a historian to make that theory stick. He points out all the real flaws in the Inca Empire for instance the Government was run by a families of Necromancers that spoke for the Mummies of old Emperors. This locked the system of government down eliminated one of their greatest cities from being a asset to the Empire making it instead a drag on their society. Also the style of Inca Government allowed it to be decapitated when Pizzaro captured the Inca Emperor no other institution in the entire Empire could rally troops or raise armies to fight the invaders.
The Inca system functioned fine against the their less organized and less advanced tribal foes in South America but what is the case that his system ever could have worked in competition with a better organized and technologically advanced foe? The amount of gold the Inca possessed make it financial viable for the Spanish to wage nearly any kind of war they needed to wage to get that gold and the Inca would never had anyway to stop them.
As was shown when the Emperor escaped Spanish custody and called out his armies. More than 200,000 soldiers came to his call and attacked about 300 Spanish. The Inca were brave and fought with really cool burning sling stones and all the rest of it but the lost that battle. 200,000 to 300. At one point I remember that Pizzaro’s brother had too assault an Incan fortress and he had about 75 men. There were a few thousand Inca defenders in the fortress and many thousands of Inca warriors outside the fortress. Not only were the Spanish fighting on two fronts outnumbered about 30 to one but they were out in the open. Not only were they out in the open, not only were they assaulting a stone fortress, not only were they outnumbered 30 to 1 but they had to construct ladders while under attack set the ladders up and climb the walls of the fortress.
And they took the fortress and they lost one or two men from falling stones, that is it. What other advantage could the Inca have had? Numbers, positions, fortifications they had everything going their way and they could kill only one or two guys and lost their castle? Remove the disease from the equation and the Inca were never going to keep their gold away from the Spanish and they never going to drive the Spanish out.
Also one the last Emperor died the Inca though it had served for centuries an built a massive, complex and advanced civilization had no way to legitimize resistance or cooperation between the tribes to resist the Spanish in the future. That was a deep failure of the Inca culture and is a far better reason for why the Inca fell then any disease no matter how devastating.
Confucianism long predated turning inwards. So had little if anything to do with Confucianism.
It was a matter of it was one family that pushed exploration. That family was in Taiwan (building fortifications) rather than on the mainland. Couple this with being gone a long time on the expeditions without any supporters other than the emperor. That emperor died and his successor didn’t like his predecessor and reversed his policies. No more explorations.
This made me laugh out loud.
Has it really been 20 years? Lord, when did I get so old?
I didn’t much like that book.
Well, there they go again. Somebody please fix the second tag in the title and add the / in. @majestyk @max @exjon
There was a Spiritual dimension to the Chinese inwardness as well. They took their special nature seriously and even surrounding people often ranked themselves in the social hierarchy by how close they were to China. So Korea was better than Japan because Korea was closer to China.
When you are the top, top dog and you have no rivals, why take on the “Yellow Man’s Burden” to improve the rest of the World? If the World wants to improve they come and learn from China. That makes for a very inward looking traditional minded society. It became a pretty common belief among everyone that China simply had nothing to learn from anyone else.
The World however developed more dramatic and effective systems in the West that went to China only when China had nothing really to teach them and so China had to under go a pretty brutal tutorship as they realized the new shape of the world.
Korea often shocks me too. They developed highly effective cannon and an advanced Navy that no one near them could match. But once their war with Japan ended and the nobles interested in cannon and the navy died they just let all that advanced technology go and forgot about it. Imagine if the West had come East and been met by a highly advanced and effective Korean navy? The history of the world would be quite different I think.
Jared Diamond was a physiologist, with an emphasis in renal physiology. He taught the renal section of the first year course in pathophysiology at UCLA when I was a medical student there in the 1970’s. He was a flamboyant lecturer and well liked by the students. But he was strictly an amateur in the fields he expounded on in his book. I read the book when it came out, due to a vested interest of having been taught renal pathophysiology by Diamond. The book then was disappointing and clearly a rather tendentious conglomeration of mostly nonsense. The titillation and interest it engendered originally seemed to me entirely much ado about very little, and a misleading very little. Unfortunate that it took this commentator so long to figure that out.
Admittedly, I read GGS after reading Hanson’s Carnage and Culture, but when I did read it, I couldn’t help but think the whole point of GGS was to diminish any pride in Western Culture.
Yeah, my recollection, which must questioned since I now realize I read it 20 years ago, is that he definitely wanted to make it appear that western civilization was not a product of the rise of capitalism, but that wealth and capitalism were the result of having cows.
I thought his argument was interesting, but while he complained about Europe bringing its diseases around the world and killing everyone, he didn’t seem to put much value in that Europeans survived the Black Death and plenty of their own wars.
That other cultures didn’t domesticate animals or grow grain crops seems to be circular. He seemed to say that we survived animal borne diseases (how? By a whole lot of people dying, of course) and we were blessed to have a climate that grows grains well, but he seems to dismiss that these grains did not spring up over night or naturally. They were cultivated. Other cultures could have done that as well. The cow may appear docile now, but the auroch that it is descended from was ferocious.
I just thought he had an interesting theory that in the end was a bunch of hogwash.
To be fair, I think I figured it out pretty quickly. I don’t disagree with you that some of Diamond’s claims were facially incorrect – the business about New Guineans’ intelligence for instance is practically farcical if you’ve read any Murray whatsoever – but the overarching narrative could have some explanatory power if not for the fact that details which support that narrative aren’t correct. The process of discovering why the thesis isn’t correct and the truth underlying why the facts don’t support it are the important part of the journey of education.
After reading the book I found myself searching for the reasons why, but what I discovered was that I had many of the reasons in my possession already. The ability to synthesize all of that knowledge into a coherent counter-narrative which can compete with that developed by a learned scholar possessing decades of head start on you intellectually is something that doesn’t occur overnight.
It’s interesting that you point out that you were a medical student in the 1970s and had Diamond as a physiology professor. You have a bit of a head start on me too in that regard, given that I was only born at the twilight of that august decade. :D
Fascinating OP, and fascinating comments. A few quibbles. I’ve only skimmed, but I’m guessing that no one has touched on 1-4, which are linguistic quibbles. Someone may have touched on 5, which is non-linguistic. Back to more detailed reading of the fascinating comments once a send off this!
Quibbles:
1. All languages are phonetic.
2.Writing systems are not languages, but representations of languages.
Writing systems based on sounds rather than meaning are obviously amenable to the printing press since all languages have roughly 60,000 commonly used words; so meaning-based writing systems are extremely cumbersome (though they do have some advantages). Syllable-based writing systems are excellent if you have, say, less than a hundred possible syllables. For many languages this works. But if you have a thousand possible syllables, you need a sound-based system. At one extreme there are languages with eleven or twelve sounds, at the other there are languages with about a hundred and fifty sounds. Most European languages have about 30-50 sounds but hundreds (or even thousands) of possible syllables, so writing systems with one symbol for one sound developed naturally. They developed from the one symbol per syllable writing system of Phonecian, which developed naturally from Chinese-like one symbol per word system of Egyptian. I never considered the relationship before reading the OP, but the fortuitous sound systems of European languages which led to one sound-one symbol writing systems made the European languages printing press friendly.
3. European languages didn’t coalesce around common grammars. They started out with a common grammar (Indo-European, 7-9,000 years ago in southern Ukraine or possibly Turkey, or both) and diverged. As I.E. speakers spread into Europe, Iran, and Northern India, they diverged into (to consider only Europe) Germanic grammars in the north, Italic grammars in the south, Slavic grammars in the east, and a few others like Greek and Celtic grammars.
4. Homo Erectus a million years ago in China, or Neanderthal half a million years ago in Europe and the Middle East, or any of the other hominids scattered about are pretty much irrelevant. The were all wiped out by “us,” after the final genetic prerequisites for modern language kicked in to place about 60,000 years ago among a small group (maybe 5,000 people) in Eritrea-Ethiopia. Language, plus the intelligence to use it, led to a population explosion within that group and expansion around the world. Yes, the history of “us” is actually rather short.
And one non-linguistic quibble.
5. Sowell actually does go into something like geographic determinism in great and convincing detail in a number of his books. But geography, he points out, is always working together in complicated ways with other factors. Therefore, it’s not pure geographic determinism.
No, they didn’t – perhaps I should clarify: the widespread dissemination of the written word in Europe had the effect of solidifying many standards of grammar and usage. As ever, language is a bottom up, emergent-order phenomenon and those who seek to codify its usage are always going to be fighting the last war. But in this case, the amount of regional variation declined rapidly because the benefits of adhering to a more regular or commonly agreed-upon set of rules benefited all who chose to adhere to it.
I don’t know that this is a novel thought on my part – I think I might have picked the idea up in college, but can’t credit where.
Yes and no … cultivatable grains are not distributed equally over the world. Domesticateable animal are not distributed equally over the world. Zebras and wild horses may look similar, but the differences of the animals’ “cultures” for lack of a better word mean that zebras have never been domesticated, while horses have been for thousands of years. Teosinte took much longer to domesticate into maize than Eurasian grasses, and the Eurasians had much more variety of domesticable grain, with wheat, oats, rye, barley, bulger, spelt, millet, kamut, rice, and farro, while the Americas had maize, amaranth, and quinoa.
No amount of culture can turn nothing into something; it can, as we see in the case of China, waste the something down to nothing.
No has spent a thousand years trying to domesticate a zebra.
No, but modern science has been trying with no luck. The Soviets managed to domesticate foxes in just 30 years (though the results were useless for the fur trade).
Ummmm… that’s sort of Diamond’s point, isn’t it?
That is, that because of the geography, the presence of so many of the easily domesticable animals and plants… the West had a head start. And once an individual or a society has got a head start, he or it can build on it with all that human cleverness. If,, along the way, he or it develops some really good ideas, and these get tested within a competitive environment and prove to be awesome, well, the next thing you know you’ve got modern Western capitalism and John Locke and all the rest of it.
Living in close proximity to their domesticated animals created immunity even in the abscence of widespread death. Though smallpox killed plenty of Europeans, nonetheless a people routinely exposed to cows and cowpox were primed to survive smallpox in greater numbers than never-seen-a-cow Indians did. The latter died en masse.
Again, I don’t really see why Diamond’s thesis threatens “pride” in Western cultural superiority. I thought he just did a pretty good and interesting job of explaining why —given that human beings have adapted in creative, interesting and enduring ways in all sorts of environments—it was the Europeans who sailed to the New World and discovered the Inca rather than vice versa.
The notion that it’s all “good ideas” just begs the question—why did the good ideas pop up and endure in this place and not some other place? And the genetic explanation (yes, I’ve read Murray) is silly: Look how quickly and thoroughly the Plains Indians figured out what to do with horses once they were (re)introduced to the Americas by the Spanish? By the time a Plains Indian laid eyes for the first time on a European, he was using horses to hunt, wage war, haul stuff around, and given another hundred years might well have considered whether maybe those wheeled toys he made for his kids might be useful in other ways too?
What’s that famous risk… of deriving ought from is?
I listened to the discussion between Diamond and Hanson posted above and I’m even more certain that his point was to diminish any pride in western culture. He said on the show (to paraphrase) that he disabused himself of his racist beliefs that western culture was better after he first visited a primitive culture.
But I also found something Diamond said to be exceedingly stupid. He said in the short run, which he defined as much as 2,000 years, culture could dominate geographic factors. Given that Western Culture is only about 2,500 years old, he seems to be trying to avoid the challenges presented by others about his core thesis without giving up his core thesis, i.e., he knows he is wrong but won’t admit it.
When I read his book, I thought he could have made the simple argument that geographic accidents determine which areas can create a productive surplus that are a necessary but not sufficient condition for culture to arise. But that would not allow him to denigrate western culture, which was the primary motivation of his book.
Interesting discussion, but we should remember that until about 1500 Europe was no more advanced than most cultures in Asia the India Subcontinent and in the Arab world.
Egypt East to Afghanistan has been richer than the West for most of human history. China and large parts of India were more advanced than Europe for most of Human history. Only the West became a global phenomena. Which is fascinating and has little to do with guns, germs or steel.
What a great review! I just ordered the book. Good job.
Very nicely stated! And I totally agree with (2). As for (1) and (3), I would say partially true. Central governments, first in Italy, then France through the Academie Francaise (and that project continues to this day), and then through much of Europe and the world codified and unified language around the dialect of the power centers through quite aggressive policies imposed by the central government. They had limited success, though, until they were able to impose language through public schools. Ironically, governments are now often involved in trying to revive languages and dialects they once stamped out, a much more difficult project, and in fact impossible unless there remains a vibrant community of interested native speaker to work through and build on.
Point (1) though continues apace through emergent-order processes. British English is becoming more American and American Enlish is becoming more British. It’s even becoming more Australian. No worries, though.
But none of them are becoming more Canadian.
I’ve noticed this in myself, after years of working with an international cast that included British and Australian, among everything else.
There is one exception to the idea that languages can’t be revived, though it required some rather exceptional circumstances. Hebrew (or something like Hebrew) was brought back from the dead – if dead is defined, as it normally is, as being without a body of native speakers.
Ha ha! But I wonder. It seems to me the t in often, -st on among(st) and a few other words, and the /ai/ pronunciation of either/neither are making strong comebacks in the US. I suspect a British invasion on this, but there might be some Canadian troops involved, too.
I believe there is an effort underway to revive Cornish as well, though the last known native speaker of it died (I think) in the 1700s.
Isn’t the first thing we should look at in understanding this remarkable reversal the animating spirit of a culture – its religion? What the West had that the Chinese didn’t was Christianity. Of course the case would need to be developed that religion in fact ultimately accounts for the different histories of East and West (which I won’t do in this comment). Diamond’s book strikes me as an attempt to explain the difference while studiously avoiding the obvious.
I don’t understand why you used the word “but” rather than “and.”
I should clarify. I don’t see the contradiction between “leap from animals” and “ancient.”
Exactly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK114494/
If you don’t have cows, you don’t catch the tuberculosis that is endemic to the species. (This is why pasteurization is such a big deal!)
Fate-based religions lead to inherently much less ambitious and creative people. The difference in religions, by itself, goes a long way toward explaining the key contrast between the West and the East.