Guns, Germs & Steel: Live!

Just happened to catch a PBS presentation, Guns Germs, & Steel, based on the book by Jared Diamond, who also appears in the program. As with the book, the show begins from a question asked of Diamond thirty years ago by a New Guinean friend: "Why do Europeans have so much while New Guineans have so little?" It sparked Diamond and led him to some remarkable conclusions.

The book is not technical and is a completely absorbing read, so I'll over simplify for you here. High-protein grains made it possible for peoples of the Fertile Crescent (modern day Iraq and Iran) to grow excess food, which allowed some members of the community to specialise in non-food production things. Settled communities then led to high-protein domesticated animals, which increased the amount of work one person could do, and thus the number of "excess" people a community could support. It was the unique combination of grains and animals in the Fertile Cresent, not found elsewhere in the world, that gave those people the head start.

When the area became too dry and fragile to support them, those people moved to the East (India) and West (the Eastern Mediterrainean & Europe), taking their knowledge, grains and animals with them. Other parts of the world had good grains (China and rice) or fair enough grains (America with beans, squash and corn) but no domesticatable animals to increase the work load, and so never got the "oomph" to advance until too late. Many parts of the world had poor or no grains and still no animals.

Anyway, to carry forward, Europeans also had a large amount of metal to work with, and the "excess" people to work it. They were also a filthy people, which made them hardier (in some senses) and more dangerous to less dirty people (native American tribes). They also devoted a lot of technological energy to developing weapons to defeat their enemies.

Read the book, as Diamond makes these points convincingly and much more interestingly than I. He makes clear that had any other part of the Earth had nearly the same base foodstuffs, metals and development it, too, would have become as successful as Europe. He scrupulously avoids questions of cultural relativism in favor of more neutrally deterministic forces.

The PBS series is fair enough at following Diamond's theses and ideas, with pretty graphics and recreations. It fails, for me, in that a whole lot of PC is injected that wasn't in Diamond's book. He was pretty agnostic on comparing the "superiority" of cultures or race, the program isn't. We get an actor playing the New Guinean who first prodded Diamond on his way, and his scowling, accusatory face is repeated in the program.

Eurpoean arrival in the Americas and the terrible result of two materially unequal but culturally vibrant civilisations meeting becomes the "conquest." Man's ability to control some of his environment, through domesticating crops, becomes the introduction of Evil in the world. I'm sure there will be much more, and much worse, as the program continues.

But. For anyone interested in learning more about how such mundane things as crops, animals, germs and metal could have such powerful and fateful influence on history, I highly recommend this show. Mondays at 9PM.