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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
What is a “fate-based” religion?
I think Diamond’s book lays out the necessary but not sufficient reasons for—again—why Europeans went to the New World rather than New Worlders heading over to “discover” Europe.
And it is not at all absurd to recognize that a group of people of a stone age culture is nonetheless fully human and therefore extraordinarily intelligent. His description, as I recall, talked about how stupid he felt, blundering through the forest with his guides who knew hundreds of plant and animal species intimately and could “read” the landscape as easily as he could read a child’s book.
This makes sense to me. People are intelligent—it is a signature quality of the species. As he, himself, points out, the New Guinea tribesmen saw their first airplane, their first engine, their first European human being in what, the 1920s? And within a couple of decades, New Guineans were flying planes.
So: why did the Europeans have the planes to fly to New Guinea rather than the other way ’round? Are we seriously suggesting that if a New Guinean tribesman had just been bright enough to come up with monotheism and capitalism, he’d be buzzing Queen Isabella’s palace in a jumbo jet before Columbus ever set off to find India?
It wasn’t monotheism. The ground work was established by the Greeks and Romans who were anything but monotheists. They were polytheists and henotheists. Were it not for the Black Death and other plagues, it’s fair to speculate that Western Civilization would have progressed faster. I don’t think it was grain and cows that did it. I think it was respect for logic and science, a process begun at least with the Greeks, that enabled our civilization to prosper.
I would say that the Islamic monotheists also did a lot to disrupt advancement, and Christian monotheists likewise severely disrupted advancement until the Reformation broke the papal monopoly on the mind.
You are over simplifying the argument. Victor Davis Hanson has an entire book on this. Here is a fairly lengthy (16 year old) video where he explains the premise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy9OjltmbZc
The cultural features that gave the west huge advantages on the battle field originated in the 8th century BC in Greece, and disseminated from there.
Many others that I’m forgetting.
Not really. The West did not have a head start on the Middle East and certainly didn’t have a head start on China and the far East. They had all the same advantages. There were other things at play. For instance the difficulty in trade and sea voyages were not easier in the West then it was for the Americas. But even as far back as 1200 BC when the Trojans and the Greeks are killing one another, their weapons, armor and chariots all relied on tin and where did most of this tin come from? Afghanistan. How was it that Afghanistan was supplying the Greek and Trojan war machines in 1200 BC? Further if mines in Afghanistan could arm thousands of warriors as far away as Greece why was it not possible for the Inca, Maya, Aztec and other to interact more? We know it was possible, corn traveled up into the wilds of North America and the Inca made long Ocean voyages in their unique boats. So why didn’t they develop alongside of each other and engage in long distance trade more often?
Cultural explanations work better than geographic ones. It is hard for me to imagine 200,000 Europeans being beaten by 300 Indians even if the Indians had the technical advantage. European fighting style never would have allowed 300 to beat 200,000. If Europeans bother you think of the Zulu they had a much, much larger technological gap with the Europeans yet they managed to kill far more Europeans then the Inca managed with fewer warriors to boot!
The Native Indians also had the twin problems of trying to build closed societies and being pagan at the same time. The closed societies tried to answer all of life’s questions from within a system. The Aztecs, especially the Inca and Chinese and Japanese all did this as did the Byzantines in the West.
A closed society rests on a foundation of a fundamental balance of power. When that balance of power is disrupted whether it is Turks in the Antolia, Western Warships at Hong Kong or Nagasaki or Conquistadors from Spain a closed society has a very hard time adjusting. Their world view assumes that the outsiders know the culture and the rules of engagement but the intruders do not know these things.
In the case of the Native Americans they were pagan and fundamentally materialistic and therefore when their system of beliefs no longer answered their needs they abandoned them but they did not quickly replace them as depopulation, disease and enslavement robbed them of the civilization and education needed to come up with a new system of beliefs. With no means to resist and denied the intellectual resources and time to come up with a culture of resistance the Native civilization collapsed.
They would have created more open society that were a bit more unstable but also more dynamic different strategies might have been deployed, their entire social network may have not been disrupted and they may have adjusted too or even co-opted their invaders in some way but they did not have that flexibility because they had not built societies that were flexible and dynamic. @katebarestrup
@katebraestrup This is a subtle trap we can fall into. We can easily assume that people are not “clever” enough to make use of material, resources or opportunities that should make them more wealthy, or more powerful.
It is not about being clever though it is about what ends the cleverness is being put to use to achieve. So many people from the Guns and Germs department or the wonderful author of 1491 go to great ends to show that Native Americans and others were just as “clever” as the Westerners so that means that impersonal forces or situations must explain things. But that is simply not true. Egyptians were very late adopters of the wheel because they had a big easy river to use to ship goods, why bother with the wheel? We don’t need it. The Egyptians seemed to be saying but they eventually found a use for it and adopted it.
To a great extent the Christian led movement to find and create and honor the dignity of each individual does more to explain European success then any geography or animal husbandry advantages. As the Europeans slowly realized the individual matters people’s “cleverness” found new and varied outlets. The effects were subtle at first but grew less and less subtle over time leading to an explosion in innovation and learning.
Take the Chinese and literacy, from the Chinese perspective why would it be important for every Chinese to read any particular text? Current methods of production supplied all those that “needed” read and the vast majority of people didn’t really need to read any particular text. So why invest time and energy into mass printing? Why get approval for such a plan in the first place, what good could it possibly do? Better to learn the engineering necessary to organize an army of peasants with bamboo shovels to dig out an artificial lake and to make a durable artificial mountain to over look it because that kind of thing pleases the Emperor and pleasing the Emperor had a lot more practical value than working on mass printing so that Chinese peasants could read.
While Christianity’s focus on the the individual and the importance of a certain text taught people their was value in mass printing and that there was something that everyone would want to read. This gave a reason for individuals to work on solutions to the problems of mass printing and since everything was not focused on a single Emperor people could enrich themselves and others but focusing on such projects. No need to get permission you could just do it.
In North America Disease certainly cleared out many an Indian tribe and dramatically lowered resistance to the Whites but America is a vast, vast territory. Why didn’t the Indians have time to adjust and grow their numbers at least in the West before they were confronted by more White settlers? It was because Puritans liked to educate their women, which delayed their marriages until the women were in their early twenties enabling the northern women to raise 7 to 10 healthy children and to educate those children, because Northerners put great importance on motherhood, child rearing and education because their version of Christianity told them it was important. Massachusetts could grow their native population while at the same time sending out over a million settlers in just ten years. That takes a lot of children to pull something like that off. Indian mothers rarely had more than three children grow to adulthood and in the South where women’s education was less emphasized women would marry in their teens have two or three kids and then, I think for obvious reasons, not have children for a while and then might have another one or two in their late 20s. This is one of the reasons that by the time of the Civil War there were around 30 million Northerners and only 9 million or so Southerners.
That kind of demographic reality, high birth rates with extremely high priority given to education and individuals and literacy had a lot more to do with the success of certain cultures then any placement of ports, resistance to disease or military technology.
All people are clever and amazing and cool, however not everyone applies themselves to the same ends or goals and that matters quite a lot.
The general assumptions that the gods or nature or fate have prewritten the future/the universe, that each person has a destiny, that people do not have free will.
This is all really helpful Brian (et al) thank you. I’m still thinking there’s some both-and going on, a complicated interplay of factors that include but aren’t limited to whether there are a lot of navigable rivers, sheltered ports, domesticable animals etc. etc.
Right—and what seems like the best, or even the only solution to a given problem, either for a society (e.g. “we don’t need wheels, we’ve got the Nile”) or for a person (“it’s better to have babies early”) then creates conditions (both geographic and intellectual) for the next condition and the next.
But it’s not as if the record of European accomplishment was all good. To name the obvious, whatever the combination of all those multiple factors, Europeans created an extraordinarily powerful meta-society…which then murdered millions with its “guns, germs and steel” its science and technology. Say what you will about the Inca; they didn’t build Auschwitz. Is that because the Inca were genetically more virtuous or had, on the whole, better and kinder ideas? Decidedly not.
I’ll betcha VDH covers a lot of this in his book though, huh? I like his essays very much, so I’m sure I’d love the book.
I liked 1491 in part because it contradicted the Noble Eco-Friendly Native myth that never seemed completely plausible. Human beings are human beings; we do not live lightly on the land, passing through as delicately as a zephyr and leaving no trace of ourselves: we slash, burn, rearrange, optimize, annihilate and decimate. It’s how we roll. So of course the aboriginal people of the Amazon basin were figuring out ways to maximize the production of their environment. And of course the people left behind after the Western epidemics rolled through would be pathetic remnant bands too small in numbers to keep up the big plantations (which would’ve looked like “pristine rainforest” to anyone wandering through a century or so later).
Professor Rodney Stark makes pretty much that very argument in his book The Victory of Reason.
There is a reason why, now, billions of people come and go, and leave the world essentially unchanged. And yet a pretty small number (thousands or millions) have massively disproportionate impacts. It is specifically about worldview.
If you believe that people do not change, then you are right – about yourself. If you believe that the purpose of life is just to have it easy, then you are right – about yourself. If you believe that everyone should be content with their lot, then you might be content with yours. If you believe that a single person cannot make any real impact on the world, then you will not.
But if your beliefs are much more dynamic – that people can change, that life is supposed to be challenging and productive, and that it is not sinful to be ambitious, then you have the cultural ingredients that make it possible for people to change (and take over) the world.
Religions are the only thought systems that have been shown to persist for more than a lifetime (the span for communism/zionism/otherisms). So religion is where we find plausible explanations for long-term cultural trends.
Academics, of course, are allergic to understanding faith (and certainly to making value judgments that might disparage the Religion of Peace), so they look for answers everywhere and anywhere else.
The obvious and most important reason why the west invented the airplane was the invention of the scientific method and its rigorous experimentation.
No society could have invented the airplane without it.
To invent the scientific method, you need a culture that believes the universe is static and knowable,whereas many eastern cultures believe the universe is fluid and unknowable. Oddly as we learn more about the universe, we find that there is a lot fluidity and unknowability at its core.
There is a great book called the Tao of Physics that discusses this interesting dichotomy.
This is another way of “fate-based”.
Why do hydrogen and oxygen form water?
A physicist has one explanation; a chemist another. And they lead to more questions and investigations.
To a devout muslim, the answer is, “Because Allah wills it.” Which may be true – but it leads to NO more questions or investigations. The death of rational enquiry.
Not for lack of trying. The Aztecs in particular were savage when it came to treatment of prisoners, engaging routinely in unbelievable barbarism – the rather grisly ordeal of human sacrifice whereby the still-beating human heart is ripped out of its victim in an offering to the Gods being just one of the horrific things they were infamous for. It almost goes without saying that dismemberment and cannibalism were frequent features as well.
The Inca were in many ways no better, practicing ritual child sacrifice in addition to more run-of-the mill butchery.
The practice wasn’t novel to these particular cultures either – horrific examples of extended use of torture, mass-murder and cannibalism are periodically uncovered in the continental United States as well:
We are rightly horrified at the technological machinery of death the Nazis and Soviet Communists loosed upon the world, but do you really think that given similar means, the people capable of doing things like this would have somehow acted better? The examples keep piling up:
There is also the terrifying martyrdom of Jean de Brébeuf, who was killed in a mockery of baptism by having boiling water poured over him.
These examples of course stretch back from the time of the coming of white men to the new world practically as far back as we can find people inhabiting North America. I say this not to merely point out that Amerindians were bad – but that people in general tend to act badly and that the supposed savagery of white men was nothing new to the inhabitants of this hemisphere, who regularly were victims of and visited upon others innumerable and incalculable evils.
I actually somewhat disagree with this.
If we all concur that the agricultural revolution began sometime around 10,000 BC, (this is about the same time that we can reliably place human beings in North America) essentially all human societies were beginning from roughly the same condition: smallish bands of hunter-gatherers.
What happened after that point is what we’re essentially discussing. Humans in the new world wiped out the native megafauna which would have lent itself to domestication – indeed, elephants (or mammoths) might have made for some pretty sweet draft animals, but North American prehistoric populations are likely the reason why they went extinct. Horses and various other potentially domesticable creatures native to this continent were wiped out – apparently by human predation.
Compare this with Eurasia and the fact that not only were native populations of these animals hunted for food, they were also captured, bred and ultimately domesticated. There seems to have been a stronger conservation instinct at work in Eurasia which defies a sort of Malthusian narrative whereby a population moves into an area and consumes all of its natural resources beyond its “carrying capacity.”
No, that’s exactly my point. Human beings are human beings.
“Guns, Germs and Steel” and—arguably—the scientific method, and the primacy of science, the search for a scientific answer more rational than Deus Volt… gave us a lot of things, not all of them good. That doesn’t mean that the same forces didn’t produce some incredibly good ideas and ways of thinking along with the technology to make those good ideas manifest.
A conservation instinct??
Seems like you have made a great leap here.
One would have to explain why the presence of man in North America produced different results there than it did in Eurasia, where domesticable animals weren’t annihilated.
You could make the argument that the animals in North America evolved on a separate track, away from human influence and therefore had correspondingly less fear of man, making them easier to hunt and therefore wipe out.
Paradoxically, this same feature would make them better candidates for domestication than their Eurasian counterparts who evolved in parallel with man and had to develop a healthy fear of humans in order to survive man’s habit of killing and eating animals. Despite this fact, domestication of animals occurred across Eurasia and was practically nonexistent in the Western Hemisphere.
Clearly, by the time of the agricultural revolution there were people in and around the fertile crescent who observed that capturing and breeding animals for the purpose of performing labor, extracting milk, meat and other products from on a regular basis rather than on a random or irregular basis such as occurs in the hunter-gatherer context was superior or preferable. Thus, rather than annihilating the local fauna, Eurasians captured and cultivated it – despite the fact of the inherent difficulty of doing that with tougher animals.
How about, the easier to hunt, the less need to domesticate in general? How does that map?
But that’s what I mean about decision X creating conditions for subsequent decisions.
The Eurasians arrive in North America (together, arguably, with a change in climate that reduced the area of grassland) and see horses, mammoths, giant sloths as just so much meat on the hoof. There is so much easily available prey, so many creatures that evolved without having to worry about human hunters, that there would be no need to think about “hey, I might want to keep some of these horses around so I can plow a field.” The newcomers killed everything that was easy to kill —a behavior not limited to these original Americans, of course—and built up sizable human populations and only then would they have to develop a culture that thinks in terms of agriculture and animal husbandry. By that time, the mammoths and horses are gone. I don’t think it’s an accident that the most impressive cultures were created in South America, presumably by people who maybe learned a thing or two on their way from Alaska to the Andes, and didn’t just kill every alpaca they encountered.
Then, with Europeans seeding smallpox that then raced across the continent, killing most of its victims before they’d even seen the bearers of the plague, up to 90% of the native population was wiped out. Whatever they were doing (usually some mixture of hunter-gatherer, management of “wild” game and plant crops, e.g. blueberries, and gardening/agriculture) before the big die-off, the survivors would, in short order, find themselves living amid super-abundant game.
For example, one very plausible explanation for the famous flocks of passenger pigeons large enough to blot out the sun was that the indians who used to kill and eat them were dead and gone. A species that had evolved as a human prey animal was deprived of a predator and, like deer in a suburb, had a population explosion. No wonder so many early European accounts of the New World talked about how insanely abundant the prey was.
And any given hunter seeing flocks of birds that enormous might be forgiven for assuming that it was simply impossible to kill too many of them, let alone all of them. The fact that the natives were now hunting with guns rather than arrows wouldn’t strike them as an existential game-changer; why would it? Human beings notoriously fail to foresee the changes the introduction of a new technology or even a new idea will bring, let alone take preemptive cultural account of them. And we frequently forget the lessons our ancestors painfully learned and tried to pass onto us (see Bible, The for numerous examples).
exactly.
Easier to hunt… until they aren’t. We know that there was a transition to agriculture in multiple locations and perhaps by that time it was simply too late.
Another aspect to consider is that the indians wiped out the animals that were easy to hunt selectively, leaving behind only the nasty animals like Bison, Bears and Moose – but that doesn’t mean that those creatures were scarce. There were millions of Buffalo – so many in fact that one of the indians’ preferred methods of “hunting” them was to drive them off of cliffs en masse, negating the need to cultivate them.
Small note: cultures don’t go from HG to agriculture en toto. To this day, for instance, Maine combines large-scale, industrial agriculture with aggressive management of a wild species (blueberries, maples, clams, lobsters) and small-scale hunting and fishing.
Also: The switch over from HG to agriculture wasn’t an untrammeled good. The diet of a hunter-gatherer is generally considered to be far healthier than that of an agricultural worker. The skeletal remains of american indians have been compared to those of European serfs, and if physical strength and well-being was what you were after, you’d rather be a Iroquois than a Irishman.
Exactly.
Right—we agree. (Also about the myth of the ecologically-sensitive indian). And the question I’d have is whether the buffalo were always quite so abundant…or whether the plagues wiped out so many Indians that the buffalo, too, enjoyed a boom. It wouldn’t take long—a hundred and fifty years would do it—to go from a relatively large population of Indians hunting a relatively small population of Buffalo to the reverse… and the indians themselves, lacking written language, losing the tribal memory of how things had been done six or eight generations back.
As a counter-example: I talk to people all the time who think that large, carnivorous predators like bears, mountain lions and wolves “wouldn’t naturally harm a human being” and the latter should be reintroduced to Maine in large numbers, to make the ecosystem more natural.
I’m okay with doing this as long as everyone grasps what it actually means. A wolf would happily kill your pets, your Gentleman-Farm critters and your children. They will hamstring a whole herd of cows just for the fun of it.
What sort of cultural resources now available would actually serve and sustain the remnant if 90% of us were wiped out by the plague?
That’s just a matter of technology. I’m sure they killed plenty. I wouldn’t try to put killing innocents for a wicked religion and killing innocents for national socialism on a scale to see which is worse.
I question the existence of a conservation instinct, now or then. People from all continents have driven various species to extinction. People from continents west and east have figured out how to exploit animals without killing them all. Various factors would determine how people choose to exploit particular species, but I question whether anything like a “conservation instinct” would be a differentiating factor.
Llamas. It’s the only example, but only one example is needed to show that the “instinct” for it crosses continental boundaries.
Yes, that’s an excellent book… another one along those lines is How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods.