Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is an exploration of historical and global differences in quality of life between cultures, and how they came to pass. Diamond constructs a compelling explanation for these variations in outcomes that relies on geographic and not racial or genetic differences. His geography-based perspective has valuable applications in other fields, and combines well with Ruttan’s notions of induced technical and institutional change. However, it is important to maintain perspective on the work and remember the limitations of its scope, as a broad brush retrospective piece.
At its heart, this book is an examination of the material world for the root causes of inter-societal distinctions. There have been and still are countless arguments which attribute the advantage of one group over another to be due to some intrinsic superiority of the group, frequently cast in racial, or class terms. What is perhaps most significant is that it breaks with the search for characteristics of the population itself to describe successes of the population. And it does so in a compelling way.
The search for tangible, environmental factors to explain societal phenomena adds a dimension to many social analyses. Looking at global inequality, as has been done in this book is one example. The spread and evolution of religions, languages and other cultural practices may be others. It also discredits the explanations which have been used for centuries to proclaim one group’s intrinsic superiority over others. However, it is important to consider the scope and scale of the rules of thumb he develops.
Guns, Germs, and Steel poses a very sweeping question played out over centuries and millenia and finds answers in advantages from material factors of the environment. It is tempting to apply these analyses to smaller scale and shorter term analyses and events. The geographic and temporal scale of the question is important though. While the events may play out similarly on a smaller scale, as Diamond suggests with his analysis of Polynesia, historical events have a great many contributors that are not directly derived from geography. It is important to consider the way in which the large numbers of people, groupings, and generations allow the author to draw these strong conclusions. More particular contributing factors are not accounted for, and may be of increased importance at the smaller scale.
It doesn’t require a deep historical insight to realize that the New World was conquered by the Old World through disease and more advanced technology. But analyzing where these evolutionary advantages came from is a more significant question. Diamond pointed out the consequences of geography, and how it became the deciding factor in the global struggle for survival and control. That is the great contribution that Guns, Germs, and Steel provides. What this says about our future is uncertain, but one element is certain, the effects of geography are profound and ought to be considered.
An amazingly unbiased review. I have no clue if you enjoyed reading it, or would recommend it to others.
Practicing for the GAO, I suppose. =)
I think the book rocked. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing the world, and helped replace my discomfort with the social darwinist arguments regarding racial superiority with something more akin to a familiarity with the wrongness of the argument and a confidence in its incorrectness.
Wow – I would have never known that. It seemed you were trying to tell people to be cautious when reading it.
You should check out his new book, Collapse.
Halfway through it. 😉
I like Diamond’s stuff alot. After this, I’ll read his “third chimpanzee” or whatever it is.
A few months ago, there was a somewhat interesting debate in the blogosphere about GG&S. Some scholars of Papua New Guinea over at Savage Minds (<http://savageminds.org/2005/09/07/diamonds-argument-about-the-haves-and-have-nots/>) contended that Diamond actually misunderstood Yali’s question, which provides the narrative underpinning for the book. They make a pretty weak argument for this, PNG scholars though they be. (Although other scholars agree that Diamond tends to heavily downplay important cultural signifiers in favor of material ones; see <http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=94>). But one of their attendant criticisms is genuinely interesting.
They charge (warning: simplification ahead) that Diamond’s analysis, for all its showy, self-conscious anti-racism, actually just lets generations of colonialists off the hook for their racist, genocidal behavior. His geographic determinism allows us (“the haves,” they call us) to basically absolve our ancestors of the part they played in bringing about this unequal world, and distracts us from the cultural factors that played into these events. Pizarro didn’t slaughter the Incas because of some amoral geographic imperative brought on by the presence of hayseed on the Iberian peninsula.
Diamond preemptively answers this charge obliquely in his introduction. Explanation isn’t justification, he says. And besides, he says, it’s not as simple as haves-vs-have-nots. He spends much of the book examining interactions within cultures, for example, the displacement of speakers of Miao-Yao languages in China by speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages. East-vs-west is a very simplistic frame through which to view the current arrangement of the world.
For my part, the critics’ argument is interesting, but unconvincing. Yes, Diamond does neglect the cultural factors that have had a truly profound effect on how the world has been arranged. But those considerations lie well outside the purview of his book. There could be a companion book, an epic sociological study examining how the cultures developed the way they did, but GG&S doesn’t really suffer for lack of that.
I didn’t like Diamond’s belaboring of the point of how very anti-racist his book is. I agree that his book undermines racist beliefs about the ordering of the world. But I think his tendency to call attention to that over and over again casts suspicion on his own research. It feels like he stacked the deck. Like he picked his conclusion and amassed all this evidence in favor of it. And because I really don’t have the intellectual arsenal to examine his claims and imagine all the potential counterclaims, it makes me suspicious. I want very badly to believe everything he says, but then he interjects some self-congratulatory, I-am-so-progressive remark and I wind up wondering all over again if I’m getting the full picture or just a convenient crop.
Of course, I wouldn’t want him to be all on-the-other-hand-y about it, ’cause then I’d just be horribly confused. But if he allowed the conclusions to argue for themselves, I think it would have been a stronger book.
That said, it’s a marvelous book. Not like I read every book published in ’97 or anything, but come on. If GG&S didn’t earn its Pulitzer, what book ever did?
The most delectable bits of GG&S for me were in the 1999 afterword, where he talks about how his analyses apply to organizations beyond just ethnic groups, and about how his methodologies could be applied to other fields in the humanities. That essay goes the farthest in taking the book beyond being a coherent set of observations and really making Diamond’s analysis a lens through which to view the world.
Matt <http://www.snarkmarket.com/>