GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES— 25th anniversary of Jared Diamond’s now classic work in history and anthropology. A Marxist Appreciation By: Thomas Riggins

6/20/2022

GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES— 25th anniversary of Jared Diamond’s now classic work in history and anthropology. A Marxist Appreciation By: Thomas Riggins

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Francis Bacon, at the beginning of the 16th Century asked, in his The New Organon, what caused the differences between Europe and less developed regions of the world, He answered that the difference “comes not from soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts.” Had subsequent thinkers been more attentive to Lord Bacon’s observation we might have been spared many specious arguments attempting to justify racism.

Jared Diamond’s book is still dealing with the question of these differences 500 years after they were posed (and answered) by Bacon. Diamond, a geography professor at UCLA, has spent many years in the field, in close contact with indigenous peoples, engaged in research  (studying birds) in New Guinea. He was inspired to write Guns, Germs, and Steel when one of his New Guinea contacts, Yali, asked him his own version of Bacon’s question.”Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” The purpose of the book is thus, Diamond tells us, to answer the question “ Why did human development  proceed at  such different rates on different continents?” His answer, like Bacon's, is perfectly consistent with a historical materialist interpretation.

Diamond informs us that “the most basic fact of world history’’ is the conquest or extermination of non-literate farming societies and societies of hunter-gatherers using stone tools by literate societies with metal tools. The treatment of Native Americans in the U.S. is an all too familiar case of a process that is still going on throughout the world. A more contemporary example is the treatment of the Amerindians in the Amazon basin of Brazil.

Our species had pretty much settled the world between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. We should note that  “ the biggest population shift in modern times (perhaps ever!)  has been the colonization of the New World by Europeans, and the resulting conquest, numerical reduction, or complete disappearance of most groups of Native Americans,” a process continuing even today and not confined to the Americas, thanks to the the global reach of the capitalist system.  As for germs, Diamond estimates that European-Introduced diseases killed off an astounding 95 percent of the American Indian population.

And not only Native Americans. The Australian Aborigines  were almost destroyed by epidemics  introduced by the English at Sydney in 1788. Smallpox, again from the English, began the destruction of the San people (Bushmen) in 1713— and ditto for the people of Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, and so on.

Why were native peoples more susceptible to European germs and not vice versa?

Diamond maintains that the gigantic Eurasian landmass with its east-west orientation and climatic variations provided more opportunity for early human groups to come into contact with each other, survive plagues and diseases, and eventually build up resistance to the most common germs.

Meanwhile, the north-south orientation of the Americas and Africa, along with the relative isolation of island populations in the Pacific and Australia, was not conducive to the intermingling  of vastly different human groups, as was afforded by the Eurasian landmass (including North Africa as opposed to Subsaharan Africa). The immune systems of these people had not developed adequate defenses to the germs the Europeans, whose immune systems had adapted to them over millennia of cross-cultural contact, brought with them.

This explains the European advantage vis-a-vis germs, but what about guns and steel?

Diamond points out that it was due to environmental factors that Europeans had a head start over Africans and Native Americans. It just happened that in Eurasia, especially in the Fertile Crescent, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, etc., could be domesticated. In the Americas, for example, the only domesticates were the turkey, the dog, the llama, and the guinea pig. Thus, a much lower protein yield was available, as well as the  opportunity to build up immunological defenses, since most human plagues are modifications of animal diseases  that humans came in contact with through the process of domestication. Also, Eurasia had more crops such as cereals  and with higher yields, than did Africa or the Americas.

There were only a few grain crops in Africa or the New World. West Asia, North Africa, and Europe had 33 large seeded grass species compared to 11 for the Americas and 4 for Subsaharan Africa. There is thus a material and natural basis for a greater quantity and variety of food production in the Eurasian  area. This also helped produce a greater population.

MORE FOOD, MORE IMMUNITY, AND MORE PEOPLE:

Greater food resources, a stronger immune system, and a larger population all contributed to the Eurasian head start over other areas of the world, not race. As Diamond concludes, “this very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than people of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.” This is all perfectly consistent with a materialist or scientific explanation. The larger populations that arose in Eurasia stimulated cultural contacts and the growth of invention, and finally the development of science. All this has nothing to do with “race.” It is in fact a confirmation of Bacon’s position — differences between groups  of people are due to the development of the “arts.” Diamond explains how these differences came about (especially interesting are chapters such as “How  China China became Chinese” and “How Africa became Black,”)

There is in fact a Marxist approach in this book, although Diamond himself only makes one passing reference to Marx. But Diamond is in effect explaining the development of cultures and the differences between them, based  on the material conditions of production with which people found themselves confronted — availability of plants and animals for domestication as well as the size of land masses, etc. These material conditions were the basis for the development of the relations of production — the way people had to relate to each other and to nature in order to effectively exploit the resources available to them. And the two together gave rise to the various belief systems, ideologies, religions, etc., that arose around the world as humans reflected on these conditions and tried to make sense out of the world in which they found themselves.

Bill Gates was impressed by this book and is quoted in a cover blurb: “Fascinating. Lays a foundation for understanding human history “ (Hegel had already done that!). I suppose if there had been more than passing reference to Marx in the book, if the basic Marxist origins of Diamond’s type of historical analysis had been pointed out, developed and even credited (especially the chapter “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy”) Mr. Gates would not have been so fascinated.

There is at least one important caveat worth noting. Diamond, in order to demonstrate his solidarity with the people of New Guinea, maintains the belief they are “smarter” than Europeans. This is due to their living in a complicated undemanding environment, as a result of which they developed “superior intelligence” as opposed to the likely “genetic disadvantage” of Europeans. While it is refreshing to have Europeans targeted as “genetically disadvantaged” for a change, this really won’t do (just reverse  the argument to see what I mean). Once you start giving a scientific veneer to labeling any  group of humans as genetically superior vis-a-vis intelligence— the floodgates of racism are opened. In this respect, Francis Bacon, a philosophical pioneer of the Age of Reason, was truer to the cause of science than our UCLA professor.

Author

Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. He is the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism.