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There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "W

by c3534l 8y ago

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?" It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> It's a wonderful rhetorical device. It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".
- c3534l 8y ago
  I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.
  - ramshorns 8y ago
    Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      > Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made." Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.
        forapurpose 8y ago
        There is an endless debate among historians, AFAIK, about whether events are due to structural (that is, systemic) issues or due to personal agency - the 'great person' hypothesis. You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier? In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad? My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  If you read Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't argue that the specific sequence of observed history was inevitable. In fact, it argues against an "inevitability" position. The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments. Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.
w-ll 8y ago
There's a book by that title. I havn't gotten a chance to read it yet, but was told its very good. https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552 https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...
- wolf550e 8y ago
  Beware, historians don't like the book: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
  - c3534l 8y ago
    The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discussion of computer hardware.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses. One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic. [1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.
jcranmer 8y ago
The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence. For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies. [1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?
- o_____________o 8y ago
  > For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > including environmental determinism[1] Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?
    - michaelt 8y ago
      https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/ https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-ger... I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points, his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. Diamond claims that the differential success of the world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture, except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers.
airwebster 8y ago
The essay you read might have been by Yanis Varoufakis. (Former Greek finance minister.) The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile. An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage: "Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile. I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose? And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?
madhadron 8y ago
Except that Jared Diamond cherry picks material to fit a theory he already came up with. His "history" has little to no relation to actual course of history. He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.
euyyn 8y ago
If I recall correctly that's literally how the book starts.

by c3534l 8y ago

vanderZwan 8y ago

> It's a wonderful rhetorical device. It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".

c3534l 8y ago
I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.
- ramshorns 8y ago
  Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made." Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.
      - forapurpose 8y ago
        There is an endless debate among historians, AFAIK, about whether events are due to structural (that is, systemic) issues or due to personal agency - the 'great person' hypothesis. You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier? In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad? My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.
ubernostrum 8y ago
If you read Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't argue that the specific sequence of observed history was inevitable. In fact, it argues against an "inevitability" position. The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments. Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.

w-ll 8y ago

There's a book by that title. I havn't gotten a chance to read it yet, but was told its very good. https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552 https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...

wolf550e 8y ago
Beware, historians don't like the book: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
- c3534l 8y ago
  The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discussion of computer hardware.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses. One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic. [1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.

jcranmer 8y ago

The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence. For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies. [1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?

o_____________o 8y ago
> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > including environmental determinism[1] Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?
  - michaelt 8y ago
    https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/ https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-ger... I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points, his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a distorting disservice to the real historical record. Diamond claims that the differential success of the world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture, except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers.

airwebster 8y ago

The essay you read might have been by Yanis Varoufakis. (Former Greek finance minister.) The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile. An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage: "Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile. I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose? And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?

madhadron 8y ago

Except that Jared Diamond cherry picks material to fit a theory he already came up with. His "history" has little to no relation to actual course of history. He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.

euyyn 8y ago

If I recall correctly that's literally how the book starts.