"Guns, Germs, and Steel" on PBS Tonight

[carebear]

That's why I qualified better as growth, warfare and innovation (and of course there's more). The Soviets obviously weren't good examples of the true "Western" way since they came and went so quickly.

And Russia per se is kind of a hybrid of backgrounds and muddies the lines of the theory, they mixed raw numbers AND a deeply Western heritage.

Hansen discusses how, since Western armies are typically expeditionary, they could be overwhelmed since they were typically fighting on the non-Westerner's front door. Basically, the example is that the Zulu's won at Isandwlana but never threatened even Cape Town, much less England itself.

One or two winning battles against a smaller force on your own turf (followed by collapse) does not a successful culture make.

 

[peteinct]

Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I have read both Guns... and Collapse which is a study of societal failure. Guns tries to answer why the West was able to overpower the rest of the globe. His answer is that at the very beginning Europe had more varied plant food sources and better draft animals that gave them a boost compared to other societies. His answer as to why europe went outward as opposed to becoming self centered like China was that it couldn't due to its geography. I am not sure if I buy that answer completely. I think there are more factors such as the role of Protestantantism and the industrial Revolution which are important.

A previous poster said he liked how the book provided an explanation of the West's success that wasn't a racial superiority tract. I don't think that race has anything to do with anything but I do believe that culture does. I think that some cultural handicaps include not being able to trust anyone outside your family (tribalism), not being able to let go of the past, thinking that hard work is only for the lower orders, and having an unpredictable corrupt absolutist government.

Mr. Diamond is an anthropologist who studies primitive cultures. In the book Collapse, which was very interestng, I think he underestimates the transformation of society after the industrial revolution and the power of a free people. Some parts of his book seem to say that an authoritarian approach is the best way to solve the problems. I think that is wrong and that history shows that free socities can and do out perform closed ones.

pete

 

[Pug Puppy]

Social Organization is why Europeans took over much of the globe. In European society, the individual was rewarded for innovation. Johannes Gutenberg is praised as the father of the printing press. In the Ottoman Empire, the scribes guild suppressed printing presses until the 1800s. This is why the East lags behind the West.

 

[toivo]

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 TV program does tend to oversimplify, but I think the premise is valid because even the development of culture is subject to the other factors in Diamond's thesis. For example, you don't see the shift from paganism and polytheism to abstract monotheism until well AFTER the hunter/gatherer stage. And individualism is a characteristic of societies that have moved beyond subsistence to a more complex structure where there is division of labor and a wide range of occupations.

There's always going to be a symbiotic relationship between culture and material conditions, but what Diamond is saying is that historically the primary trigger for change is always one of the physical/geographical factors. (I say "historically" because there's really no such thing as an isolated culture anymore, so the significant factors in difference, or "inequality," as Diamond calls it, are now going to be cultural, economic, and political rather than physical/geographical.)

I think it is his use of buzzwords like "inequality" that raises the PC specter in many people's minds. It seems to me that his basic concept is pretty much neutral. It's really the old "nature vs. nurture" argument: that the innate differences do exist, but they are far less significant than the effects of environment. There's a bit too much of the "good guys/bad guys" spin in the TV presentation, an inversion of the old "manifest destiny, European superiority" rhetoric which was the PC of its day. But underneath that is a fairly rigorous examination of how societies progress, which is pretty much a value-neutral scientific inquiry.

Of course, both sides (pro- and anti-European) have their own sanitized, self-serving versions of how it really went down, which are both equally worthless. History isn't a comic book.