Guns, Germs, and Collapse

Gregg Easterbrook reviews Jared Diamond's latest effort in the NY Times Sunday book review today.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel two or three year ago and, for some reason, took a much different message from its context than many others. To me, the book is indeed a study in cultural relativism, but from a different perspective. Mr. Diamond (perhaps unwittingly) debunks the notion of the uniqueness of Western aggression and colonialism by clearly stating the lessons of history: 'imperialism' and 'colonialism' are the natural results of technological imbalance between societies. In other words, Western (European) expansion occurred because the advantages of guns, germs, and steel allowed them to spread. If cultures elsewhere had been able to harness the same tools, the results likely would have been similar...but with Europeans now railing against Middle Eastern or Latin American colonialism - and Latin American or Middle Eastern scholars decrying their flawed society's uncontrolled aggression while praising the simple, peaceful ways of the European.

As the review suggests, Mr. Diamond often fails to deal with the fact that culture can, in fact, influence history. And neither Mr. Easterbrook nor Mr. Diamond address the likely effects of technological advances (made for whatever reason one wants to posit) on the culture they occur within. In other words, the natural advantages described by Mr. Diamond allowed European culture to advance. As the culture advanced, it evolved and developed, allowing it to better use the tools available.

But putting all that aside, let's focus on the review: Jared Diamond has a new book out - Collapse. It appears to be well-researched and thought-provoking. Gregg Easterbrook believes it also makes some flawed assumptions (as he believes Mr. Diamond's original book did). Both books, however, encourage critical thinking and intelligent debate. What more can we really ask from an author?

Update:

For those too looking to skip reading the comments (or frustrated by the 1000 character limit), I am consolidating one reader's (outstanding) explanation of how Western culture has capitalized on the favorable hand it was dealt by location:

I wouldn't say that Diamond's first book was about cultural relativism. Instead, it focused on the fact that societies exist within particular environmental realities - biomes - and adapt to those realities. You can't grow wheat in the arctic and that leaves a society with minimal economic options, a limited capacity to support a population, and therefore, it functions within a basic technology. The West (Europe) exists in one of the richest biomes of the planet - and it is this ecological reality that moved it into an increasing population base and a concomitant requirement for an expanding knowledge base and technological inventiveness to support this population.

That's not relativism, for the culture is grounded within hard data - the reality of the biome.

Tim, I wonder if the problem is your use of the term 'relativism'. To me, this refers to a situation where one says that A, B and C societies cannot be compared; that their modes of operation are self-defined and cannot be evaluated. So- if A society moves into democracy and a complex technology and B society functions within tribalism and a simple technology - relativism would reject any analysis of WHY these different modes existed. Relativism merely focuses on a current description of WHAT each society is doing. It ignores causality and therefore, ignores that a particular mode might become dysfunctional if the population size increases.

In the case of the West, it is a fact that it emerged as 'the West' only because of the richness of its ecological base - soil, water, climate. That enabled population increases, which required it to move to more complex political modes - i.e., democracy, and required it to develop innovative technologies.

Innovation requires independent thinking and entrepreneurial actions. WIthout this - the West would have been unable to support its ever-increasing population..and would have had to 'fall back' on the earlier, pre-technological change tactics of famine, plagues, wars. But- dispensing with these as a method of population control, and moving its population into a social mode of independent thinking and actions(democracy and capitalism) - the west was able to support that increasing population with new technologies and agricultural, medical, industrial tactics.

Without that rich biome, their population would not have increased beyond the capacity of the stable, nogrowth peasant agriculture..and 'forced' them into a social mode of life that motivated individual freedom. As a result, the West did indeed become wealthy, entrepreneurial, free-thinking, inventive - and this dominated the world.

The rest of the world doesn't have that rich biome and was able to stay in 'no-growth' position and operate within a collectivist, stable, non-individualist state that denigrates independent thinking. You can see this difference right now in the Middle East - which is fighting to remain tribal and collectivist even though its population base has risen beyond the capacities of such a mode of organization. The ME must become democratic -

So- I agree - the 'rise of the West' has absolutely nothing to do with Western Culture or an innate aggression or other such nonsense. What should be realized is that the West, as a 'culture', is a product of deeper infrastructural domains - namely - its population, which rests on its rich biome..and which requires an economy and political mode (capitalism and democracy) that can support that growth population.

There is nothing 'relativist' about this. Instead, the analysis is grounded and can comment on
why other societies did NOT become dominant - which again, has nothing to do with the 'culture' of these other societies. It has to do with the fact that their biomes did not encourage explosive population growth and therefore, did not require the social organization to drastically change to permit innovative technologies.

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