Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond—a review

Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of those books I’ve heard so much about—mostly in the positive—that it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading it. Published in 1997, it won a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve frequently seen it cited around the internet as a must-read book on the origins of the human species. Today I was able to finish it up.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is certainly well-worth reading. One of my petty complaints is that it more accurately should have been called Latitude, Longitude, and the Development of Human Society (I guess Guns, Germs, and Steel was catchier). That’s because Diamond postulates that all our development, including current inequities among continents like South America and Africa vs. North America or the countries of western Europe, can be traced to geography. “Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots: between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times,” Diamond writes. He then sets out in Guns, Germs, and Steel to explain how this unequal distribution of wealth and power occurred.

In short, Diamond argues that the topography and east-west alignment of Eurasia set the stage for its success. It was more conducive to farming, was populated with native, domesticable livestock and plant life that facilitated mass food production, and allowed for trading between various peoples and dispersal of scientific invention. This in turn led to sedentary populations able to devote time and brainpower to the invention of writing and the development of technology. Australia, North America, and Africa, with their north-south axes and corresponding extremes of climate, were late to the starting line of development. Their slower diffusion of cultivatable crops caused them to become history’s “have-nots,” leading to their subjugation or outright extermination and repopulation by foreign invaders, or their place as a third-world nation.

“The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel,” Diamond writes. “The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.”

First, what I liked. Guns, Germs, and Steel is well-written. It has an incredible scope, summarizing human development from our start as a divergent strain of chimpanzee up to the modern age. It’s very thought and opinion provoking as well.

Contrary to its title Guns, Germs, and Steel contains disappointingly little discussion on guns. I was hoping for some good debate on the effectiveness of the blunderbuss vs. the musket, for example. But Diamond does lay out a convincing case that germs, not guns, were the primary reason smaller groups of Europeans were able to dominate far more populous indigenous races. He shows how the introduction of germs derived from domesticated animals, introduced to native populaces with no immunities, resulted in catastrophic epidemics which in some cases resulted in a 99% mortality rate among the infected. It’s all very interesting, and it strikes me as true.

Now some negatives. Some of the arguments Diamond spends considerable time building feel rehashed and/or self-evident. However, this may be because Diamond’s book has been assimilated into mainstream thought. After all it was published 13 years ago.

But my main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is in the degree of importance Diamond attaches to geography. In Diamond’s view geography is the overwhelming factor in the “success or failure” of a nation (meaning its ability to produce food and thereby develop a complex culture). Diamond’s book takes no account—and I mean none—of the influence of different political systems, or religion, or even individual initiative. For him, human history is purely scientific, the result of geographic determinism. He argues that even the biggest individuals—the Alexander the Greats and the Adolf Hitlers of the world—are scarcely relevant in the grand sweep of history. In the epilogue Diamond anticipates arguments to the contrary with a half-hearted apology:

“The label [geographic determinism] seems to have unpleasant connotations, such as that human creativity counts for nothing, or that we humans are passive robots hopelessly programmed by climate, flora, and fauna. Of course these fears are misplaced,” Diamond writes.

Yet to me Diamond’s equivocating rings hollow. There’s seemingly little to no place in his intellectual universe for things like free will and personal responsibility. I felt personally diminished reading the book. That’s not a value judgment of Diamond’s book, just my personal reaction upon reading it.

Another area in which Guns, Germs, and Steel can be criticized is some of the petty biases that Diamond allows to creep into the book. His occasional forays into editorializing are simply out of place in a book that purports to exalt science. For instance, he flat-out calls modern native New Guinean hunter gatherers not equal, but smarter than your average educated, sedentary resident of Europe or North America. He relays another story about a noble Native American corrupted by coarse Montana farmers into adopting their hard drinking, wasteful lifestyle. Both of these observations are purely anecdotal, not the result of any scientific inquiry. I detected a slight undercurrent of disdain for modern life and a romanticized (albeit very faint) view of the hunter-gather lifestyle. Their presence diminishes the work.

In the end my opinion of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it is no more a true version of human history than a book about capitalism/communism or Christianity/Islam as the sole shapers of mankind’s destiny. It’s an important but incomplete piece of the truth.