"Guns, Germs, and Steel" on PBS Tonight

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DonNikmare

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I have no idea what the show is about but it's on at 21:00/9pm Central here in Texas.

Ok, google brought forth some more info... http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/index.html


Overview

Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, Guns, Germs and Steel traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years – from the dawn of farming at the end of the last Ice Age to the realities of life in the twenty-first century.

Inspired by a question put to him on the island of Papua New Guinea more than thirty years ago, Diamond embarks on a world-wide quest to understand the roots of global inequality.

Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?
Why didn't the Chinese, or the Inca, become masters of the globe instead?
Why did cities first evolve in the Middle East?
Why did farming never emerge in Australia?
And why are the tropics now the capital of global poverty?

As he peeled back the layers of history to uncover fundamental, environmental factors shaping the destiny of humanity, Diamond found both his theories and his own endurance tested.

The three one-hour programs were filmed across four continents on High Definition digital video, and combinied ambitious dramatic reconstruction with moving documentary footage and computer animation. They also include contributions from Diamond himself and a wealth of international historians, archeologists and scientists.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a thrilling ride through the elemental forces which have shaped our world – and which continue to shape our future.

-----------------
It's 3 episodes, I assume they'll show one per week.

Nik
 
This is a great (not so) little book about the development of human civilizations through time. It is not so gun-oriented, but instead address this question:

We know that Europe conquered much of the world because of three things: Guns, Germs, and Steel. The question is, how did it end up that the people of this region and its civilizations end up with just the right combination of these things at just the right moment in history? After all, guns came from the Chinese, steel came from the middle east, places like Syria, and all areas of the world have diseases. It is realy quite a fascinating read.
 
The PBS thing tonight was.. uninspiring. It left the impression that Mr. Diamond's "lifework of 40 years" uncovered.. well... pretty much exactly what every junior high school social studies textbook has been saying for fifty years. :scrutiny:

Tomorrow's doesn't look much better.. from the preview, I'm guessing it'll be more "white men carried diseases that laid waste to the population of the Americas, leaving it open for exploitation." Which while more or less true last I heard, isn't exactly news.

I seem to recall the book as being a little more worthwhile, but just as agonizingly PC. First time I watched PBS in years. Now I remember why it's been so long.
 
I can't comment on the PBS series, but the book was very interesting. Mr. Diamond really lays out his theories in a way that is very approachable for the novice. I wouldn't judge the book (or the author) based upon a series on TV. This is only thing I've read by Jared Diamond, and I stayed with it all the way through. He states his thesis in each chapter, and he keeps building and building on each one. He is very clear and to the point, and I didn't catch one whiff of political-correctness (as I understand the term). You might think it's PC if you believe the Western Europeans rule the world because of some kind of racial superiority...
 
I only caught part of the PBS series. Uhm, didn't hold my interest.

The book isn't that bad. It dealt with, amoung other things, cultural development. Why some cultures basically froze their development. Some for long periods of time, some for relatively short, others near completely. I've seen better books, but it's far from the worst.
 
GG&S doesn't teach anything that isn't taught in other texts. What it does is tie it all together and explain it in fairly simple terms.

I can't remember the exact quote, but somewhere in the last half of the book, Diamond makes a statement about guns and self defense that gave me the impression that he's no liberal anti, fwiw.

I'm slogging my way through Collapse, his book on the collapse of civilizations. I'm not far enough into the book to give a good review of it, nor to even get the gist of his point yet (only 50 pages in). I also have another of his books, The Third Chimpanzee. The last time I picked it up was during late blackpowder season while I was sitting in my treestand. There's your gun content. ;)

Chris
 
Thank goodness. I thought I was the only lazy Yankee deer hunter who sat in tree stands reading books. ;)
 
Here is a quick synopsis of the book. Europeans kicked butt because we developed on an East-West axis continent rather than a North-South one (better for travel and climate, apparently), had better work animals like horses, and better grains like wheat (BEER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Excellent book.
 
The first post listed several "why" questions . . . is it only me, or did it strike anyone else that one will have to apply a healthy dose of political correctness to come up with "acceptable" answers in order to get anyone - press, publishers, producers, etc. - to pay attention?
 
That honestly was my impression. Both the book and the PBS thing went out of the way to avoid any cultural explanations for differences in material progress. This was explicitly stated on more than one occasion. "I know it couldn't have been cultural reasons, so I looked for a material one." He created his thesis, then went explictly looking for evidence to support it.

That's every bit as blind as the 19th c. "Imperial Westerners" the show makes light of in the first few minutes, looking for evidence of European superiority, and of course, finding it.

I'm not talking genes here, I'm talking culture.

And culture does impact material progress. That should be patently obvious to anyone. Heck, look at East and West Germany in the last century. You can't ask for a better experiment. Two nations with identical peoples, identical histories, and both basically rebuilding from scratch after WWII. One is rebuilt under capitalism, one under communism. Just four decades later, the differences in national wealth were staggering.

The arguments are likewise incomplete. North America had resources equally well suited to domestication as Europe. We know that because domesticated maize, potatoes, squash, and so forth are grown today. We know bison can be ranched rather than hunted in the wild because we're doing it today.. Need work animals? The horse evolved on this continent, before being (best we can tell last I heard) hunted to extinction. And there's plenty of East-West room right here.

And that's just the start. The Middle East was technically more advanced than we were for centuries. At the time of Columbus, China had a navy centuries beyond ours. But it was recalled home and dismantled.

To insist that "it's all what happens to you, it's "luck of the draw" just rubs me the wrong way I guess.
 
This book is the first I've read that answered the question "Why did the West conquer the New World?" without some implicit assumption of racial superiority. It was the first I read that pointed out--correctly, I think--that there was an implicit assumption of racial superiority in the explanations I was taught as a child.

Is this book PC in that it bends the facts in order to reach the correct conclusion? I dunno, but I don't think so. I think it's on the up and up, even if its conclusion coincides with PC.
 
A related book that some of you might like is "Carnage and Culture."

It talks about how western culture made us better war fighters.
I find it to be a good companion piece to Guns, Germs, and Steel.
 
Kaylee said:
Both the book and the PBS thing went out of the way to avoid any cultural explanations for differences in material progress.
Click to expand...
What a strange thing to say, since the book attempts to explain cultural differences. It's all about cultural differences, and all the environmental factors that go into shaping cultures.

The arguments are likewise incomplete. North America had resources equally well suited to domestication as Europe. We know that because domesticated maize, potatoes, squash, and so forth are grown today. We know bison can be ranched rather than hunted in the wild because we're doing it today.. Need work animals? The horse evolved on this continent, before being (best we can tell last I heard) hunted to extinction. And there's plenty of East-West room right here.
Click to expand...
At this point it's quite obvious that you haven't read the book. Everything you mention is explored in great detail.

At the time of Columbus, China had a navy centuries beyond ours. But it was recalled home and dismantled.
Click to expand...
Actually, this point has a whole chapter at the end devoted to it! Columbus had to shop around to get financial backing for his adventure; and luckily for him, Europe was heavily politically fragmented, so he could shop around. China on the other hand is and was incredibly politically centralized, a feature that heavily contributed to stifling innovation. One single political entity can dismantle an entire region's navy, while competing political units can't. Why was China so politically centralized while Europe wasn't? He theorizes on that too.

Jared Diamond starts with the premise: if racial differences can't alone account for the wildly disparate states of the various cultures in the world, then what can? He also states quite clearly that his is not the final word, and that he is merely attempting to pull together various scientific disciplines to address his central question.
 
Thank you Ragged. It has indeed been some time since I skimmed (not read in detail, you're correct) the book, and obviously my memory of it isn't perfect. Nor do I have a copy at hand.

The thesis I got from both book and PBS thing was that said cultural differences were effects rather than causes of material development. In fact, the PBS narration said this straight out. Often.

While I'm sure both factors play off each other, I believe the predominate thesis, pounded over and over ad naseum -- that cultural development is almost entirely "luck of the draw" based on geographic factors to be grossly incomplete, and yes, PC.

Hence my getting frustrated with the book and not finishing it.:)

-K
 
Kaylee,

You can borrow my copy of the book when you're down next time.

Diamond proposes that with maize, corn and squash, but without the bredth of domesticated animals (horses came over with the europeans and bison are ranched but are too ornery to be domesticated) the americas were missing all the pieces of the foundation to develop the technologies needed to rise to equal footing with the europeans. The same lack of variety occured in cental and southern Africa as well.

As to the chinese, china's exploration fleet was suspended and dismantled by the emperor after several years of success and reaching all the way to east Africa and returning home. Most likely because of a political decision or perhaps because of the threatening popularity of it's "admiral's" success, but certainly because of an executive decision in a monolithic empire.


What Diamond is saying is if you look at humanity and realize that a New Guiena cannibal raised in New York would not be at a disadvantage to a 4th generation New Yorker you have to ask whether it was dumb luck or some physical factor that brought these cultures to the level they achieved. Climate, domesticated animals, domesticated crops provide the 3 supporting legs that everything else is built upon. If a leg is absent or too weak (not enough crop or animal variety) then the structure built doesn't advance very far.
 
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Kaylee,

Sorry if I'm coming across hyper-critical, I'm having a bad week at the office :mad: and I'm very grumpy today.

I haven't seen the PBS special (it's a big book, I can't imagine it all fits into one show), so I don't know what they were saying there.

I agree (and I think the book does too) that cultural differences affect a society's development, but would the fact that a given hypothetical society is, for example, Christian rather than pagan (a major cultural difference), have a more dramatic effect on that society's development from hunting/gathering to farming, than say, the availability of domesticable plants? The book is more concerned about how a society reaches a point where it can make metal tools or pottery, than it is about what is painted on said pottery.

The ideas in the book are very broad and leave a lot of room for other factors. It certainly leaves room for the affect of qualitative differences in cultural values, etc. The author does point out that there are a whole lot of areas in his theses that still need to be explored and filled in.

When you're done reading the book, I look forward to discussing it with you! :) It's worth a read, and I didn't detect a hint of PC pandering in it at all, unless you believe race (genetic, inherent) factors are the primary deciding factors in the development of various cultures (which I can't imagine you do). In that case, you might perceive the premise of the book to be PC...
 
I believe that the reason the great Chinese exploration fleet was recalled was because after it had been dispatched, the imperial city was struck by lightning and most of it burned down. (1421? 22?) Many took this as a sign of divine dislike against the empire's outward expansion, and thus began a long period of isolationism.

Interesting alternative history for us, if lightning hadn't struck, would we all be speaking Chinese right now? :)

It took my ancestors another 200+ years to reach the ship building and navigation abilities that the Chinese had in the 1400s. Now the Portugese, there was a tiny little nation that proved with a little bit of initiative, greed, and good old fashioned violence, you could take over a lot of stuff. :D
 
Sorry for the rant but

Sorry for the rant but I think this needs to be said,

Part one of the series seems to have been a well dressed introduction to the typical PBS commie rant that evil white people have destroyed the world of the peaceful native populations for all of history and prehistory.
This makes me really want to watch the conquistador rants in part 2 wow they have a real chance to blame all of the things wrong in the world on evil expansionism.
Truth be told if you can filter out some of the communist dogma you can actually get some useful historical information out of the show but the bits of actual information are spread so far between the politically corrected revision of history information that I could hardly stomach it.
Save your children from this tripe and teach them your self.

DarthBubba :banghead:
 
+1 for Victor Davis Hansen's "Carnage and Culture". (heck, anything VDH writes)

He points out that when Western cultures met non-Western states with comparable advantages and systems (ie India v. Alexander) it was still the Westerners that triumphed because their culture WAS "better" as far as growth, warfare and innovation goes.

Remember, on the whole, Western armies fight non-Westerner's on the non-Westerner's turf, typically at significant numerical disadvantage and even when the non-Westerners adopt Western tech and such they STILL lose.

He has some rather pointed things to say in other writings about Diamond's premises.

Now there is a book called "Battle" by John Lynn, that treats VDH pretty rough, although I don't think his arguments are are solid as he maintains, (he does a lot of "well VDH said "this" which obviously means "insert strained, limited definition he is able to counter") but it too points up indirectly that Diamond was overstating his case as far as us being slaves to geography flora and fauna.

Some good info in Diamond, but he tries to excuse too much to avoid calling a spade a spade.
 
The 1st episode concluded by Diamond concluding it's all about "georaphy" ie luck of the draw and that if the current very undeveloped countries' residents were just born elsewhere they'd be doing just as well as the developed countries are doing today.

While, geograthy is a big factor I can not help but agree with the points about culture and other factors Kaylee made.

BBC recently did a news special comparison of the progress made in the last 50 years between Malasia and an African country ( I forget the which one but it started with a "z"). Both countries had a similar level of development 50 years ago and received similar amounts of foriegn aid. Yet today Malasia is very much ahead in all aspects of develpement.

Culture, values, and the traditions which result from them have a powerful impact just as geography does.

I hope episode 2 and 3 have a little more focus on metal and weapon's development.

Nik
 
He points out that when Western cultures met non-Western states with comparable advantages and systems (ie India v. Alexander) it was still the Westerners that triumphed because their culture WAS "better" as far as growth, warfare and innovation goes.
Click to expand...

"Better", I suppose, is a relative term. The Soviet Union was "better" at smashing smaller country and executing their own citizens by the tens of millions. I still would not have enjoyed living under the USSR.

The Germans were superior in warfare and innovation, in my opinion. Sometimes the hord tactic works, yanno? Sometimes it comes down to simple numbers.
 
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