Guns, Germs, and Steel is a monumental work that manages to encapsulate an explanation for why human history is the way it is within 500 pages. If you are interested in why the world’s societies are they way they are today or want to understand the chain of events that led to where we are today, then you owe it to yourself to read Guns, Germs and Steel.
Many centers of learning are currently engrossed in teaching new generations self-loathing based on some of the genoicidal atrocities committed by past generations. While I think it is important to learn from the past, there are positive as well as negative lessons buried there. This book deals with many of the cataclysmic events in human history where societies exterminated one another through various means. It certainly makes clear that history has been peppered with ruthless people willing to wipe out entire cultures in order to dominate. But Guns, Germs and Steel looks much deeper than that. Reading this book will make it clear that the firecely competitive cultures which embraced new technologies are the ones that now dominate and flourish.
Guns, Germs and Steel is not going to be palatable to everyone, as it contains wordy explanations of why farmers triumphed over hunter gatherers. It often bored me somewhat with lists of various grains, food types, domesticated livestock and so on. However, the serious student of human history will read carefully because the content offered, including the lists, is the most coherent explanation of the who, what, where, when and why in relation to the modern world that I have read.
Most interesting to me were the strongly presented comments by author Jared Diamond that related to systems of governance:
In fact, precisely because Europe was fragmented, Columbus succeeded on his fifth try in persauding one of Europe’s hundreds of princes to sponsor him. Once Spain had thus launched the European colonization of America, other European states saw the wealth flowing into Spain, and six more joined in colonizing America. The story was the same with Europe’s cannon, electric lightning, printing, small firearms, and innumerable other innovations: each was at first neglected or opposed in some parts of Europe for idiosyncratic reasons, but once adopted in one area, it eventually spread to the rest of Europe.
These consequences of Europe’s disunity stand in sharp contrast to those of China’s unity. From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: it abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and technology in general after the late 15th century. Those potentially harmful effects of unity have flared up again in modern China, notably during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when a decision by one or a few leaders closed the whole country’s school system for five years.
Humans have an innate need to manage one another, but Guns, Germs and Steel touches on which types of management lead to societies which prosper.
It remains a challenge for historians to reconcile these different approches by answering the question: “Why Europe and not China?” The answer may have important consequences for how best to govern China and Europe today. For example, from Lang’s and my perspective, the disaster of China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a few misguided leaders were able to close the school system for five years, may not be a unique one-time-only aberration, but may presage more such disasters in the future unless China can introduce far more decentralization into its political system. Conversely, Europe, in its rush toward political and economic unity today, will have to devote much thought to how to avoid dismantling the underlying reason behind its successes of the last five centuries.
Are you listening America? Keyphrase: decentralization of political power leads to successful, vibrant and dominant societies with the best technology and superior militaries. And there’s more:
All of this suggests that we may be able to extract a general principle about group organization. If your goal is innovation and competitive ability, you don’t want either excessive unity or excessive fragmentation. Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication-like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition between our 50 states.
Reading Guns, Germs and Steel reinforced my own preconceived notion that our federal government’s growth since the Civil War hashad a largely negative impact, slowing growth and innovation as the individual states themselves become less and less autonomous. As Congress has perverted the Constitution and robbed powers they are expressly forbidden from the sovereign states, the country appears more and more homogenous.
Jared Diamond concludes that finding the right balance between indepedence and unity, couple with totally open communication is what gaurantees successful societies. If his conclusions are correct then I think we’re probably slipping away from the right balance for a successful society in the United States, here in 2006.
But go read the book for yourself. You may draw different conclusions than I did. You will certainly learn some things you didn’t know and see others from a new vantage point.