Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies By Jared Diamond

Biography:

Jared Diamond is a a professor of geography at UCLA, although he began is academic career with a PhD in membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in 1961. He has been a professor of physiology, environmental history, and environmental health, eventually landing in geography, we suspect, because in his work he tends to survey the entire globe and all of history. His life's passion is birding in New Guenia, where he has lead numerous scientific expeditions studying the ecology and the evolution of the island's feathered natives.

In a 1987 Discover magazine article, he substantiated the oft-made claim that the development of agrigculture and hsubandry was humnkind's "greatest mistake", since it seaprated us from the relatively easy life of hunter-gatherers, completely altered the planet's ecology, and exposed millions to the devestation of famines.

We think his greatest merit as a scholar is his complete lack of racial or cultural bias, allowing him to make wide ranging comparisons without any particular agenda.

Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is the twenty-five-year, 500-page answer to a question once posed to Diamond by a native of New Guinea. Here's Diamond's story:

After a while, Yali turned the conversation and began to quiz me. He had never been outside New Guinea and had not been educated beyond high school, but his curiosity was insatiable. First, he wanted to know about my work on New Guinea birds (including how much I got paid for it)...He then asked how the ancestors of his own people had reached New Guinea over the last tens of thousands of years, and how white Europeans had colonized New Guinea within the last 200 years.

The conversation remained friendly, even though the tension between the two societies that Yali and I represented was familiar to both of us. Two centuries ago, all New Guineans were still "living in the Stone Age." That is, they still used stone tools similar to those superseded in Europe by metal tools thousands of years ago, and they dwelt in villages not organized under any centralized political authority. Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as "cargo."

Many of the white colonialists openly despised New Guineans as "primitive." Even the least able of New Guinea's white "masters," as they were still called in 1972, enjoyed a far higher standard of living than New Guineans, higher even than charismatic politicians like Yali. Yet Yali had quizzed lots of whites as he was then quizzing me, and I had quizzed lots of New Guineans. He and I both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans. All those things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

Diamond didn't have an answer for Yali then, but he does now.

We've never read a summation of history like Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies -- for one thing, we've never seen a book that so thoroughly incorporates Pacific and American pre-history into its arguments, which in and of itself was fascinating. Diamond's great strength is his ability to consider all peoples in the same light, providing lucid and compelling explanations for why groups of equally intelligent people lived in such remarkably different societies at the dawn of the age of colonialism.

This perspective alone is enormously refreshing -- throughout, Diamond criticizes the notion of "primitive Stone Age people" because not all societies began at the same time and not all societies had the same environmental conditions. Diamond rejects outright the idea that differences among people had anything to do with the relative sophistication of cultures in the 1500s; instead, he demonstrates how differences in geography and in endemic plants and animals shaped diverse societies. The age of colonialism, of course, put an end to the further native development of every society that was militarily weaker than the European powers.

Introduction:

We think that one of the main reasons Diamond's book won the Pulitzer is that it presents an enormously constructive and positive historical perspective on all the peoples of the world. Traditionally, white colonialists used Darwinian concepts of evolution to conclude that white people were superior to those they colonized or enslaved. Their technological superiority, they felt, was a material reflection of their genetic superiority. Diamond relishes his self-assigned task of blowing holes through this argument at every turn. As usual, he has access to a huge number of unique of anecdotes to support his thesis and to undermine the bigotry that runs rampant even today:

Passage:

But all such claims are based on pure speculation. There has never been a study of many societies under similar socioeconomic conditions on each of two continents, demonstrating systematic ideological differences between the two continents' peoples. The usual reasoning is instead circular: because technological differences exist, the existence of corresponding ideological differences is inferred.

In reality, I regularly observe in New Guinea that native societies there differ greatly from each other in their prevalent outlooks. Just like industrialized Europe and America, traditional New Guinea has conservative societies that resist new ways, living side by side with innovative societies that selectively adopt new ways. The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the more entrepreneurial societies are now exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors.

For example, when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930s, they "discovered" dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year-old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, used his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash, and bought a fleet of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. In contrast, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, the Daribi, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they briefly looked at it and just went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them.

On every other continent as well, certain native societies have proved very receptive, adopted foreign ways and technology selectively, and integrated them successfully into their own society. In Nigeria the Ibo people became the local entrepreneurial equivalent of New Guinea's Chimbus. Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings.

Among the supposedly conservative Aboriginal Australians as well, there are receptive societies along with conservative ones. At the one extreme, the Tasmanians continued to use stone tools superseded tens of thousands of years earlier in Europe and replaced in most of mainland Australia too. At the opposite extreme, some aboriginal fishing groups of southeastern Australia devised elaborate technologies for managing fish populations, including the construction of canals, weirs, and standing traps.

End Note:

In his chapter The Future of Human History as a Science Diamond turns this argument one more rotation, showing how bigotry is the conservative argument that binds us to a destructive and unhappy past, and that the progress of history as a discipline and as a socially formative force must embrace a more accurate and respectful portrayal of all human societies.