Some concordances are planned, such as a book on the siege during a visit to Vienna or an opera by Janacek in Brno. Others occur by chance, and are more likely than first glance might suggest, although no less surprising when they are noticed. . However, at the beginning of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, I didn’t expect to find myself reading about the importance of pandemics in history while actually being part of one.
Purchased from a thrift store that smells of old clothes, feet, and other essentially human things, the book’s cover proclaims nothing less than A Brief History of Everyone Over the Past 13,000 Years. Much of that history seemed to surround me, as I paid a euro for this and two other books, thinking that they would be useful to read during the holidays on a couple of pending trips. In fact, they have accompanied me in a now-forced confinement during the major corona virus epidemic in Spain, as pending trips were summarily and understandably canceled. Such a concordance cannot be predicted and is even more powerful as a result.
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel features a discussion based on an unanswered, perhaps unanswered question. It was posed to the author by a New Guinea politician in 1972. Its essence was why the story seems to be a transfer of things from white Europeans to others and not the other way around.
There is an easy and racist answer. Like most easy answers, it is inaccurate and wrong, but neither arguing nor dismissing it is refuting it. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond attempts to offer such proof. He cites many factors, racial characteristics not among them, in the construction of the social, economic and technological development of the human race.
The title, incidentally, Weapons, Germs, and Steel, can also be read instructively as aggression, disease, and technology. In reverse order, we learn that technology began in solving problems that arose from success. That resulting technology endowed its holders with significant advantages over others who could not access it. Along with the development of agriculture, it also promoted a more sedentary and socially concentrated lifestyle to replace the unsustainable but previously universal hunter-gatherer society that had existed since humans took that name and perhaps earlier.
Along with the proximity came disease, transferred to and from now domesticated animals and to and from close people who, for the first time in possibly millions of years, were not genetically similar family members. With the advantages of knowledge coupled with ability, the opportunity arose to assert control of resources through aggression. Possibly, the notion always existed, especially if one considers that human existence contains an essentially competitive streak. But what increased human development was the possibility of sustained success.
Jared Diamond traces the development of agriculture since its first known manifestation in the Fertile Crescent of West Asia. Later, but in the same place, writing was developed, probably as a means of recording the transactions that happened between commercial producers. Jared Diamond then discusses how this new organization of human affairs differed from earlier times, places, and cultures, as far as we can tell from the archaeological evidence.
But what is also interesting about this analysis is how its author divides his world. Instead of the normally named continents, it uses a paradigm in which the Americas are seen as a unit, along with Sub-Saharan Africa and Australasia. Unusually, it combines Asia, Europe, and much of North Africa into a single unit that it calls Eurasia. It included everything from Japan and China to Portugal and Ireland and also includes all those lands along the Mediterranean coasts of Africa that in recorded history were part of the northern empires. This grouping is important for the author’s argument, because Eurasia thus defined forms a continuous land mass whose main axis is east-west, that is, at approximately constant latitude, as opposed to north-south and at variable latitude as was the case. in both countries. Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. The crossing of Eurasia allowed a majority of crops and domestic animals to accompany migrants and conquerors, while climatic changes meant that north-south movements had to continually face new challenges. The paradigm, crucial to Jared Diamond’s argument, reflects population movements and migrations in prehistory, with a predominant east-west trend in Eurasia versus a north-south preponderance in the Americas and Africa.
Australasia, uniquely and as a result of its remoteness from other land masses, always deserves special consideration. Jared Diamond does much of this east-west versus north-south orientation and attributes to it a propensity for development through assimilation, transfer, conquest and cultural communication in Eurasia that did not exist elsewhere. Other continents always lacked at least one of the essential elements, most of which had to be available to facilitate change through increased ability to survive.
Therefore, the development of human societies, their technologies and policies could happen, transfer and adapt within Eurasia much more easily than anywhere else. Along with this, Jared Diamond cites the increased availability of animal and plant species suitable for domestication in Eurasia and contrasts this with the scarcity elsewhere. Therefore, the weapons and steel aspect of power arose from a historical, geographical and ecological accident and was therefore not a racial accident.
But it was the germs that really changed things. These developed as a result of sedentary lifestyles that led to agriculture and thus increased social contact. The domestication of animals, a process that spanned millennia, also exposed humans to regular doses of new microbes and viruses, but at a rate that allowed immune systems to develop resistance among those who survived the experience. When it was suddenly communicated to people whose lifestyle and development had not gradually introduced this resistance, the lack of immunity resulted in the near extinction of entire societies and races. This was, of course, the predominant experience of colonialism and European expansion as experienced, but those that were on the receiving end of the process. We now live on a planet where a dominant lifestyle and social organization have undoubtedly emerged. And its origins lie in gradual change through the adoption of agriculture, writing, technology, and immunity that were possible in Eurasia, but not elsewhere. And that provides the answer to why the transfer of influence is moving in the direction that it undoubtedly does.
Guns, Germs and Steel is a fascinating read, although in some places it is certainly quite repetitive. It’s a brilliant and compelling case, but it also illustrates how difficult it is to argue against prejudice, which, in fact, always has answers. Fermat’s Last Theorem, perhaps analogous to the racial basis for explaining colonial history, is easy to state but very difficult to prove. The theorem was eventually proven, but clearly not in the way its creator intended. Perhaps racial theories of difference could simply attempt to identify the mechanisms on which their blind claims are based. But in completing the book, it is also reminded that the perceptions of advantage are perhaps less permanent than we might have once believed. The Eurasian dominance of other peoples and the environment may just be a pandemic of pure illusion.
