 “Guns, Germs and Steel” (1999) is an ambitious book. Diamond sets out to explain, in explicit opposition to racism, how Western Europe came to dominate the world.
The problem is that arguments based on the biological superiority of whites, which were so popular in the colonial period, have been exposed as rubbish. Nonetheless, the world is profoundly divided on racial lines. Africa is the most poverty-stricken region in the world and the USA and Western Europe are the wealthiest. This racial divide is reflected everywhere, from Argentina to Aotearoa.
In the last 30 years, historians influenced by postmodernism blamed the effects of racism on racism itself – the ideology – and hunted for its origins in European history and psyche. But believing you are superior is not enough to dominate the world. I doubt there is any traditional culture that does not believe itself to be the centre of creation.
Europe’s dominance, argues Diamond, can be found in a series of ecological and geographic lucky breaks. The emergence of civilisation depends on a network of factors, including, crucially, having plant and animal species that can be domesticated. The Eurasian landmass, Diamond shows, was dealt the best hand – largely but not only because it is the largest land mass.
Diamond is clear that the emergence of civilisation is not all good. Settled agriculture means surplus food can be produced, giving people leisure time to create technologies like writing, but control of that food falls into the hands of an elite. Diamond refers repeatedly to the stratified societies that result from agriculture as 'kleptocracies' (the rule of thieves) and provides an abundance of evidence for this from all over the world. It is remarkable that what was once an ideological contention of Marxists is now so firmly established by layer upon layer of scientific evidence.
Diamond has two weaknesses though; one stems from a latent commitment to Hobbesian liberalism and the other from a lack of faith in revolutionary change.
In the first case he goes to unwarranted lengths to emphasise all instances of violence in pre-class societies, drawing heavily on (often anecdotal) evidence from what was probably the most violent region in the world - the Papuan island. I would argue that in Papua three factors - low-yield agriculture, mountainous geography and a lack of trade routes - led over millenia to the establishment of geographically fixed, linguistically separate peoples with a disproportionately high level of warfare. Diamond, either because his extensive experience in Papua has made it a norm for him or because of ideological predilections, suggests the Papuan experience shows that the transition to stratified 'kleptocracy' brought with it an escape from the constant threat of homicide (cf Hobbes' mythical state of nature, where life was 'nasty brutish and short'). While primitive communism (as Marx and Engels referred to hunter/gatherer societies) was not paradise on earth, in most cases it offered living standards that surpassed agricultural class societies but could not create technologies – especially military technology – to match more advanced societies.
Diamond's second weakness is most obvious in the (very dreary) book 'Collapse', which is an appeal to the powers-that-be to learn from history and transcend private greed. The reality is that in an economy based on self-interest, production will always be anarchic. As resources become scarce, the supply and demand mechanism of the market merely forces the price of those goods up and makes exploitation more profitable. The privatisation of water and resource wars, like the invasion of Iraq, are examples. Diamond’s appeal to the powerful is doomed because they are unable to democratically plan the rational shepherding of the earth’s limited resources.
On the whole, it is astounding and worrying that an intelligent, well-educated scientist could be apparently unaware that his work on the evolution of human societies follows so closely that of such well-known thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but, on the positive side, it is testament to the continued vigour of the scientific community and the intellectual appetite of the reading public that works such as “Guns Germs and Steel” are produced.
Andrew T |
