College Nihilist.

 I want to review Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel by way of analogy with another work of popular scholarship, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers. Gladwell’s thesis, is that “genius” is not an innate quality but the product of hard work and passion, and that fortuitous circumstances like birth date and social systems contribute to facilitate this work. Gladwell once excoriated an interviewer who protested that, contrary to Gladwell’s, that genius is innate.  Gladwell called the interviewer’s position: “Gloomy Nietzscheanism.” Ironically, Gladwell’s worldview, like Diamond’s, is best summed up similarly to the way the sociologist George Simmel condescendingly described another American philosophy: “pragmatism is what happens when Americans read Nietzsche.” Diamond’s book is likewise “what happens when Americans read world history.” To be sure Diamond is not a historian, but a biologist, but he suffers from a characteristically American affliction, pernicious optimism and a belief in the equality of all things.

Diamond’s contention is that much human history consists entirely of environmental circumstances, and in this respect is the answer to a question put to him by a New Guinean native: “Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo? .” (p.9); cargo here denoting wealth and technological advantage of Europeans. His answer begins by understanding how accidental factors like resistance to disease might contribute to a natural advantage rather than anything pejorative like heritable intelligence. In short, Diamond’s book is an apologia for what might be summarized as the “tragic view of history.” This view is that history has no apparent purpose, progress or rationale, and that those accidents favour some groups of human beings over others. The problem, however, is that he goes from what is a fairly trivial descriptive account of world history to a prescription for the humanities and an account of the individual which are both demonstrably false.

The view of historical progress Diamond presents is more or less correct; the lessons he draws from it are not. The scope of the book (i.e. The entirety of human history) make it impossible to review each claim in the space of a review. But the claims can be viewed within the rubric of “historical accident versus agent intent.” I will explore the three themes; guns, germs and steel, in that order and then go onto the latter part of the book where Diamond attempts and fails to show why humanities can be reduced to sciences.

Diamond begins by showing how fortuitous circumstances in the so-called “fertile crescent” in what is now the middle east contributed to an explosion of human development 11000 years ago in the wake of a re-merging ice-age. For instance, among the numbers of plants and animals that can be domesticated, a preponderance of them appear in the fertile crescent. Domesticated plants and animals cultivated by inhabitants of this area were bountiful and could be farmed to feed and create a surplus so that other members of the community could specialize in things other than farming hence developing sciences and technologies giving the community a distinct advantage: “food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. ” (Diamond. 86)

Diamond moves on to show how European populations, scourged by bubonic plagues, smallpox and other germs were, as the progeny of disease resistant forebears, more genetically resistant to disease.. The conspicuous example was Pizarro’s conquest of the new world which were facilitated by the small pox virus which preceded them and decimated native populations. To show how germs themselves were indifferent he proceeds to show how Europeans attempting to colonize areas north of the tropic of Capricorn were ill prepared for tropical climates and the blight of malaria endemic to the area so, as they did in Europe, attempted to found their settlements close to rivers and other waterways infested by mosquitoes which are the vectors of the disease whereas native populations in the area settled in dryer area as a result of adaptation to the environment. (Diamond, 78)

With respect to guns, all too obvious cases of New Guinea and South Africa are presented to show how 19^th century colonial powers possessing smaller numbers, but automated machine guns could decimate entire armies armed only with rudimentary spears and shields. Diamond shows how in a most dramatic case; the Pizarro’s encounter with the emperor Atahuallpa, 168 Spanish troops were able to decimate 80,000 Inca soldiers and capture their emperor. (Diamond, 71-74).

Diamond concludes by making some prescriptive statements, and here’s where the book goes awry. Diamond laments history’s more “humanistic” face and wonders whether it might be best turned into a more scientific enterprise:

“…the histories of dinosaurs, nebulas, and glaciers are generally acknowledged to belong to fields of science rather than to the humanities. But introspection gives us far more insight into the ways of other humans than into those of dinosaurs. I am thus optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs—and with profit to our own society .” (p. 415)

Presumably, the scientific study he intends is one to show accidents of history, forces beyond our control effect geometrically, the progress or regress of human populations. If the purpose of his historical science is to show that human beings are often impotent in the face of a disinterested universe, it needn’t bother. Since the era of Greek tragedy, the inconsequential nature of human beings has been explored ad nauseum. The reason history is a humanistic pursuit is it attempts to present a narrative so that one might learn or put it to use in order to overcome the tyranny of a hostile or indifferent universe. The kinds of stories generated by a humanistic history are calls to action, whereas those of Diamond’s are tales of resignation and helplessness. Of course, no one should be suprised that the recent American vogue for science worship should penetrate every aspect of the academy, but its nihilistic implications should be met with antipathy if not outright hostility.

Of course the lie the American church of science tells is so seductive it’s not hard to see why science worship with its implicit claim to reduce all normative claims to descriptive ones should fit so nicely with a bland egalitarian ideal: “you too can be great, since greatness is just being in the right place at the right time, nothing is inherently better than anything else.”

Granting everything Diamond says as true doesn’t really amount to much. Yes, it’s true that guns, germs and steel all contributed to European superiority over the planet for the past two millennia. At the risk of sounding facetious: So what? Simply because the antecedents of an advantage are based on accident, in no way diminishes those advantages or the achievements, nor presents anything like a helpful or normative claim about what to do with them. The reason humanities do separate themselves from science is that they try to have something to say about the uniqueness of the human condition. That the west does enjoy such fortunes does nothing to tell us how to proceed to use those fortunes.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel fame and success is a result of its function as a placebo, it basically amounts to the same banal statement: “If you want to be happy or successful, be born in the right place at the right time in the right circumstances.” It at once provides a comfort to those who have achieved little in life, but also intimates the false hope that all one needs is a little luck and hard work to achieve or progress. Of course, this belies the fact that the luck or circumstances are entirely absent in most people’s lives and that within all human populations there is further variation in aptitude between individuals. Diamond makes short shrift of variation between individuals towards the end of the book where he dismisses what he terms the “Great Man Theory”:

“Like cultural idiosyncrasies, individual idiosyncrasies throw wild cards into the course of history. They may make history inexplicable in terms of environmental forces, or indeed of any generalizable causes. For the purposes of this book, however, they are scarcely relevant, because even the most ardent proponent of the Great Man theory would find it difficult to interpret history’s broadest pattern in terms of a few Great Men. Perhaps Alexander the Great did nudge the course of western Eurasia’s already literate, food-producing, iron-equipped states, but he had nothing to do with the fact that western Eurasia already supported literate, food-producing, iron-equipped states at a time when Australia still supported only non-literate hunter-gatherer tribes lacking metal tools. Nevertheless, it remains an open question how wide and lasting the effects of idiosyncratic individuals on history really are. ” (p. 420)

In my more ambitious moments I do think myself quite extraordinary indeed, but I have never entertained the thought that what separates me from Mozart is “a little luck and hard work”; modesty, to say nothing of common sense would forbid. Further, it’s true, for instance, that Mozart did not invent a piano, a more efficient means of chopping trees, nor contribute to a temperate climate in 18^th century Vienna, but he did provide a new reason to play music.

To paraphrase Karl Marx: Jared Diamond has interpreted history in this way and that, but the point is to change it, and to this end, we have little to learn from Diamond. His entire enterprise is an exercise in the obvious, ‘nature is often arbitrary and intractable in the fortunes she bestows.’ The book can perhaps be recommended as a purely descriptive account with caution since, as mentioned, it leaves its reader with a distinct sense that variation amongst individuals is inconsequential to history.