guns, germs, steel

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(book review)

I've finally finished with a very long (425 pages) but extremely
interesting, well-written, and informative book of archaeology and
anthropology, Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL (Norton, 1997). The
book argues for a reasonable theory about why the occupants of Eurasia have
conquered the other continents (especially the New World) during the last
500+ years rather than being conquered by the rest of the world. In the
end, we of Eurasian extraction were _lucky_, having the right kind of
geography, access to wild plants and animals that could be domesticated,
plus a relatively small number of ecological or geographical barriers which
allowed diffusion through trade, migration, or conquest. This allowed us to
grow in population, grow geographically, and take over almost all of the
world. BTW, Brad DeLong has a good review of the book at
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/diamond_guns.html. As he
notes, the book is "truly a work of complete of total genius." He's at
least a genius at synthesizing others' research. But not being a
professional archeologists or anthropologist, I don't know how original
this book is. (I've heard rumblings that say the book "isn't new," though
that may be a protective response to a field being invaded by a
non-specialist.)

One thing that is clear from the beginning is that Diamond, despite his
origins and his residence (here in L.A.), makes a big effort to avoid
Eurocentrism. In a strange way, he comes off "New Guinea" centric instead,
even asserting that he thinks the residents of the New Guinea highlands are
superior to us White Americans. He doesn't see the Eurasian conquest as a
good thing, though he does see it as one example of a more general
phenomenon that includes the Austronesian conquest of much of Southeast
Asia, the Bantu conquest of most of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Maori
conquest of the Morioris in the Chatham Islands in 1835. And as Brad says,
the book really doesn't explain why those from Europe have dominated the
rest of Eurasia during the last 500+ years. Diamond's focus is on broadly
defined ecological zones (roughly, continents). For example, he defines
Eurasia as including North Africa. His time scale is even broader, dealing
with the 13,000-year time period before 1600 C.E. (A.D.) or so.

Diamond's theory is ecological, inspired by evolutionary biology. At one
point he summarizes it as embracing "geographical determinism," though that
determinism is at a very abstract level over very long periods of time,
leaving a lot of wiggle-room for specific differences in different areas
and time periods. To summarize his story, it's a bit like the spread of
"opportunistic species" of plants and animals (like those invading Hawaii
now or the "killer bees" entering my neck of the woods), taking over all
other possible geographical zones. As I read the book, I began to think
more and more of  a quote from Stephen J. Gould's concerning the worldwide
spread of McDonald's and similar restaurants. It "introduces
standardization at the wrong level by usurping the smaller spaces of
immediate and daily use, the places that cry out for local distinction and
an attendant sense of community. McDonald's is a flock of pigeons ordering
all endemic birds to the block, a horde of rats wiping out all the mice,
gerbils, hamsters, chinchillas, squirrels, beavers, and capybaras" (EIGHT
LITTLE PIGGIES, p. 244). When I looked up the quote, I found the reference
to rats and pigeons was not a description of fact. But the real world seems
to imitate Gould's fantasy: the process of urbanization seems to wipe out
all sorts of native species, allowing the pigeons to take over.
International transportation allows the spread of fire ants, "Dutch" elm
disease, and various weeds and germs, that wipe out or out-compete native
species, so that eventually we'll see pretty much the same plants and
animals ruling the roost in similar ecologies all around the world. Human
cultures and technologies follow a similar pattern, while bringing
opportunistic flora, fauna, and microbes with them. (You can see why I
don't think he's Eurocentric.)

Though genetics plays a role in Diamond's theory, he basically assumes that
all varieties of humanity and culture are equal in their inherent or
biological ability to innovate and spread world-wide. Further, the Eurasian
conquest, like related conquests, wasn't done through a Darwinian process
of competition of species and propagation via genetics as much as through
competition of ethnic groups and propagation via organizational and
technological advantage. The development of agriculture created an
advantage over the surviving hunter-gatherers, so that the hunter-gatherers
were shoved aside into the hinterlands. Farmers -- especially those with
access to a wide variety of wild seeds and potential load-bearing animals
-- could produce surpluses, encouraging the development of large,
densely-populated, sedentary societies that developed technology further,
including guns, steels, swords, ocean-bearing ships, political organization
(the state), and writing. (The graph on page 87 summarizes this for all of
us who think in pictures.) His story basically ends with the triumph of the
farmers organized by states over other groups, since he has little to say
about industrialization or capitalism, not to mention the industrialization
and capitalization of farming.

The process of conquest wasn't totally a matter of technology or social
organization, so that Diamond's description of the European conquest
doesn't fit "social Darwinist" conceptions. One of the most interesting
parts for me was the discussion of how the domestication of animals gave
people various diseases, like small-pox, that spread in crowds. Those who
were lucky enough to have a lot of animals at hand to domesticate (the
Eurasians) suffered dramatically from such diseases. Since the Native
Americans and other extra-continental forces couldn't take advantage of the
plagues to conquer them, the children of those who survived often had
immunities. This made them a bunch of "Typhoid Marys," facilitating the
conquest of the populations in the "New World" who hadn't been lucky enough
to have lots of animals available to domesticate (and to catch diseases
from). It wasn't simply the horses, armor, guns, and organization that
allowed Pizarro to conquer the Incas: the Incas had been weakened by
European-borne diseases that killed the head Inca and spawned civil war.
(The Incas had also been isolated not only from Eurasian germs but from
competing cultures of a similar level of development such as the Mayas and
were thus inexperienced at war.) Diamond argues that 95 percent of the
Native Americans were killed by Eurasian diseases.

Of course, diseases didn't simply help the Eurasians, since tropical
diseases blocked their spread to much of Africa and the rest of the
tropical zone for centuries. The African natives, however, had developed
immunities to tropical diseases.

For some reason, Diamond doesn't mention the possibility that human
diseases might spread to animals (or between species of beasts via
humanity). I'm no expert on this issue, but it seems like a possibility. It
also might help us understand the mass extinction of large animals when
humans enter their ecological niche. By the way, Diamond is agnostic about
the hypothesis that when the Native Americas invaded the New World, they
hunted the native "megafauna" to extinction (which would have been easy
given the fact that those creatures had lived for millions of years without
encountering people), suggesting that their deaths might have been a
coincidence. But isn't it possible that some of the extinctions were due to
germs? (Linking with the discussion above, in Diamond's story the
extinction of the megafauna gave the Native Americans a big disadvantage
when the Spaniards arrived, not only in terms of germs but war.)

The Eurasians had an advantage because they started with a large zone of
origin that was unified by similar ecologies and climates, not blocked by
large deserts or jungles. Since the megacontinent's axis runs east-west,
uniting temperate zones there were few long-term ecological barriers to the
spread of cultures, technologies, and germs. (Note the qualifier
"long-term": that's Diamond's frame of reference.) Within this large zone,
some cultures, technologies, and germs could beat out others. This gave
them the ability to conquer areas with similar climates outside Eurasia
once adequate transportation was developed (and eventually the ability to
conquer the tropics, once modern medicine took off).

In the end, the book reminded by of Frank & Cook's THE WINNER-TAKE-ALL
SOCIETY, in which in many labor and product markets, there are a very small
number of winners who get the lion's share of the winnings, while the vast
majority get just enough to survive in the market. Their examples are often
from professional sports (such as tennis), where a small elite get big
salaries, lucrative product endorsement contracts, etc., while the rest,
including those who are marginally worse than the elite, get almost nothing
beyond the cost of staying in the field. In their book, the phenomenon of
winner-take-all markets becomes worse when the market gets larger. For
example, before inexpensive recording technology developed, there were a
large number of local orchestras and a variety of different styles of
music. But with mass communication and cheap recording, only a few
orchestras and styles could survive, while the elite of highly-paid Big
Stars arose. They see this as part of the explanation of increasing
inequality in labor incomes in recent decades: increased marketization
encourages inequality.

Diamond isn't talking about market competition, of course, since markets
connecting various ethnic societies did not really take off until after his
period of analysis. But military and political competition can and do have
similar "winner-take-all" characteristics, encouraging increasing
inequality (along with death and destruction). The alternative to economic
(market) competition and military (political) competition is democracy, or
more correctly, socialism, a generalized version of Frank and Cook's
"positional arms control  agreements" that prevent winner-take-all
(positional) competition from having its destructive effects. But this is
getting us beyond Diamond's concerns...

At the end, Diamond qualifies the main theme of his analysis to suggest
that the existence of a large unified ecological zone can actually go too
far. He suggests that because of the natural unity of China, an empire
could arise that could suppress innovation. In contrast, Europe was
naturally disunited, and therefore was driven by constant
military/political competition to innovate. This is the beginning of his
incomplete discussion of why Europe won out in the competition amongst all
the Eurasian subregions. Within the context of his framework, however, one
could easily say that Europe just happened to be _lucky_, to conquer most
of Eurasia before some part of the rest of Eurasian conquered it,
especially given the advantage of being relatively close to the New World
(which in his framework was destined to be conquered by _some_ part of
Eurasia). If Europe had been further from the Americas, perhaps a
continent-wide empire could have been solidified which ended intra-European
competition, so that non-Europeans could have won.

Though his writing is lucid, Diamond doesn't really make it clear what his
theoretical framework is. It seems to be a matter of different groups of
human beings competing within ecological/geographical boundaries, then
developing new technologies that break down those barriers (as when the
invention of the outrigger canoe allowed the Austronesians to spread out
from Taiwan to become Polynesians, Indonesians, Malagasies, etc.) But
Diamond doesn't tell us what type of unit it is that is competing.
Families, extended or otherwise? or individuals? I guess it makes sense to
leave this vague, because human organization has changed so much over the
millennia. It's good that he doesn't focus on individuals, the way
economists do, since it's only recently (in his time frame) that
individualism has become dominant.

This book is far from being about cultural anthropology. Instead, he
basically sees culture as a "wild card," a random factor in the ecological
competition. Some cultures are technologically or organizationally
progressive whereas others are regressive (as with the Japanese suppression
of firearms after 1600). The former eventually win out over the latter in
the competition, unless they have the advantages of isolation, as Japan did
until the advent of Admiral Perry. So in the end, the cultural factors
don't play a big role.

Diamond presumes that people are, by their very nature, inventive,
developing new ways of surviving. Maybe. We should remember that
"innovation" has different meanings in different societies. There is kind
of innovation that favors human survival (which Diamond emphasizes), but
innovation under capitalism only includes those that promote individual
profitability and advantage in a competitive battle that can be
destructive. A couple of times, he hinted at a naive belief in the
benevolence of technological change. Luckily, this is not relevant to his
subject matter. Given his focus, technical and organization "progress"
increases the ability to win in competition with other cultures. But when
we start thinking about a future world in which such conquest has become
irrelevant, this kind of definition of progress means nothing.

Diamond also seems to presume some sort of Malthusian mechanism in which a
given situation encourages innovation, migration, and conquest. I guess
that makes sense, since it's only recently that Malthusian theories have
been rendered obsolete by technological changes.

It would be interesting to see what the similarities and differences are
between Diamond's book and the Marxian tradition. (As a liberal, he might
be upset by the similarities of his vision to that of Marx.) He is clearly
a materialist in his method. His discussion of the rise of the state and
organized religion seem very close to that of Marx. A lot of the book's
discussion is similar to the old Marx-inspired anthropology book by V.
Gordon Childe I read in college, MAN MAKES HIMSELF, though obviously the
two books try to answer with different questions and Diamond has the
advantage of access to a lot more information. As noted,  the time period
he deals with ends roughly in 1600, so Diamond really doesn't deal with
capitalism, unlike the Marxian tradition. At one point, in a table on page
269, he asserts that modern religion doesn't justify kleptocracy. But this
ignores secular religious such as neoclassical economics, that justify a
kind of kleptocracy that's diffused beyond the bounds of the state to be
shared among individual capitalists.

I was frustrated by the way that Diamond does documentation. It's like a
textbook, with a "Further Readings" section at the end. I don't mind the
absence of footnotes, but the lack of bibliography is a problem. Lacking
the patience to slog through all the pages of suggested readings, I
couldn't see if Diamond had ever read MAN MAKES HIMSELF. (He did read
another book by Childe, though.) Further, at one point I felt that Diamond
was either quoting or paraphrasing an article by Robert Carneiro on the
origins of the state. He does cite Carneiro in the back, but it veered
toward plagiarism, something we should discourage. I can imagine that a lot
of professional archaeologists are a little miffed at this book as a
result, seeing much of it as the same old stuff.

At the end of the book, as his discussion begins to be overly-repetitive,
Diamond begins to ponder methodological issues, concerning "historical
sciences." Here the sense of _deja vu_ really took over, since his
discussion seemed quite similar to that of Stephen J. Gould or
long-established discussions amongst Marxists and even among economists.
His discussion of "comparative method" seemed naive compared to that of
Theda Skocpol (who herself learned from Barrington Moore and John Stuart
Mill). Despite his efforts to eschew physics envy, he doesn't seem to be
acquainted very well with the social sciences. So he re-invents the wheel.

In the end, I think the book is very worth reading. Marxists and
non-Marxist leftists can learn from it.
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine/JDevine.html