Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Ever since the heady days of the Age of Reason, hyper-rationalists have sought to replace the traditional means of historical inquiry--which emphasizes philosophy, culture, religion, ideology, and politics--with a starkly scientific and empirical method that points to ecological factors, evolutionary genetics, and geographical "accidents" as the driving force behind historical trends. This school of thought, termed Geographical Determinism, posits that people groups alternately expand or contract not because of their political structure or culture, but because of their land's food production capacity, and, consequently, its capacity to support large population densities. All of human history, the theory goes, can be extrapolated from this basic premise.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, the magnum opus of the Geographical Determinism movement, won a Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1997, showing the bold new theory's appeal among global elites. At its core, the book is an attempt to distance evolution from the racist ideologies (such as Nazism) that Darwin's theory spawned. Evolution and the notion of human equality can be reconciled, Mr. Diamond argues, because the success of one group of people over another is due not to innate difference between races, but to ecological and geographical circumstances.

This argument is not so much wrong as incomplete. First, Mr. Diamond sets up a straw man and repudiates an argument that no one is making; few serious historians now argue that race is the driving force of history. Second, Mr. Diamond is much too hasty to label cultural and civilization arguments (e.g., Europe came to extend its influence across the world because of its philosophy of progress and exploration) as fundamentally racist, when in fact they raise profound cultural and philosophical questions that the scientific method is unable to answer, or even admit exist. By subtly smearing opponents of his theory as either covertly or overtly racist, Mr. Diamond is engaging in precisely the kind of reactionary thinking that he so eloquently laments.

The intricacies of Mr. Diamond's arguments are too complex to be fully presented here, but there are some broad outlines worth noting. History can only be understood, he asserts, by distinguishing between the "proximate" and "ultimate" causes of civilizational success. Proximate causes include technological, literary, organizational, and viral immunity advantages that one group of people has over another. For example, the Spanish Conquistadors were able to overrun the vastly larger Aztec and Inca empires through superior weapons technology (guns vs. bows and arrows), a written language (which the Incas and Aztecs lacked), a complex political structure, and a developed immunity against diseases such as smallpox, which ravaged the unprepared New World populations.

But why did the Spaniards possess these advantages, and not the Native Americans? Why weren't Spanish explorers met with Aztec warriors armed with steel weapons and firearms? Why were the Native Americans so vulnerable to Old World pestilence, while the Europeans were able to withstand New World diseases? And why were the Spanish the ones to land on American shores, rather than Aztec expeditions arriving unannounced in Europe?

The answers to these questions, Mr. Diamond claims, are found in the ultimate causes that later gave rise to the proximate advantages enjoyed by Cortez and Pizzaro. The "most ultimate" of these causes is a given region's food production capacity, which is determined by its supply of domesticable large mammals and the fertility and crop selection of the land. The food surpluses brought by intensive food production allows populations to expand, which in turn frees up members of society to pursue specialized professions other than farming and hunting. Higher population densities are the catalyst of the proximate causes; for instance, complex political organizations stem from the need to effectively control and govern large and growing populations. To efficiently manage a society larger than a few villages, a written language is needed. Natural immunization to disease are built up among large populations groups, because smaller bands of people are often totally wiped out by disease, leaving no immunized survivors to pass on their developed resistance. Thus, to return to the Conquistador scenario mentioned earlier, Europe's advantages over the Incas and Aztecs were due solely to its earlier development of sustained food production--in Mr. Diamond's words, an "accident of geography."

But can the broad trends of history be so easily explained? Much like Einstein's fruitless quest for a Unified Field Theory of physics, historians have been grappling for centuries for an authoritative, all-encompassing Theory of History that can explain everything and predict where history is headed, but to no avail. Perhaps Mr. Diamond's entry into this long-standing debate signifies a revival of the sweeping histories of Toynbee and Durant. But there is a reason why historians have long been frustrated over history's seemingly intrinsic ability to defy pat theories: History is too complex, too varied, and too prone to the unpredictable outbursts of human nature to be scientifically catalogued.

In the case of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Mr. Diamond's elaborate theory breaks down once it reaches modern times. Environmental and geographical factors alone cannot explain why some highly developed civilizations prospered, while others stagnated. For instance, how can Mr. Diamond's thesis explain the strange case of the medieval Chinese Ming dynasty, which, at the cusp of an age of exploration that would have dwarfed the meager efforts of the Portuguese, instead chose to destroy all its fleets, cease all technological development, and withdraw inward? All the proximate causes of societal success--a large, literate population; ample domestic food production; a complex and highly organized government--were present in China during the 1400s (indeed, these factors were much more highly developed in China than in Europe at the time), and yet China began a half-millennium of decline while Europe ascended to worldwide prominence. Only cultural factors could have created such wide differences over the centuries, but this is an argument that Mr. Diamond deems too "racist" to even contemplate. For all their claims of expansiveness and bold thinking, the theory of Geographical Determinism in general, and this book in particular, are severely limited by this slavish devotion to political correctness.

If there is one constant amid the fluctuations of the past that can inform us on broad historical trends, it is the permanence of human nature. Unfortunately, in his effort to minimize culture, philosophy, and religion as the engines of history, that constant is the one that Mr. Diamond seems to have missed. Science is a useful suppliment to traditional methods of historical inquiry, but it is no substitute.