The thesis of scientist Jared Diamond’s influential book Guns, Germs and Steel is that the destiny of societies is not determined by a race’s supposed innate genius or gift for innovating technology. Rather, Diamond suggests that it is environmental factors that shape a society’s progress and destiny.
The common, yet unspoken presumption is that the reason European civilisation created advanced economies was because of an innate superiority. Europeans had it in their DNA to create sophisticated technology, advanced communications systems and a complex political organisation.
The end result of this process was to export such a political and economic model – whether by gun or sheer dominating influence – to the rest of the world.
Why Didn't Aboriginal Australians Invade England?
As one example Jared Diamond asks, why was it that Europeans successfully transplanted their culture, language and technology to the continent of Australia? Why, on the other hand, did the indigenous peoples of Australia not instead invade England and colonise it?
According to the author, the common thinking on this question is often a racist one. To put it crudely, Europeans think they were smarter. For Jared Diamond, who has spent many years living with the peoples of New Guinea, this assumption is hard to accept:
“My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.”
Environment, Not Race, Creates Destiny
Unable to accept that New Guineans are in any way inferior intellectually to Europeans, Guns, Germs, and Steel maintains that the reason European society became more technologically and politically advanced was the fertile environment that these peoples found themselves living in.
An environment that allowed food production, the domestication of animals and plants, could allow a modern economy to flourish. Once ‘food security’ was assured, free time was allowed for other pursuits, like the development of writing for advanced communication, more complex political organisation, war and conquest, and technological innovation.
The indigenous peoples of Australia, on the other hand, lived in one of the most inhospitable environments in the world. Population numbers could not rise very high. Much of the land was dry, infertile, and did not lend itself to farming.
When the English colonised Australia, they did so using technology imported from Europe. Diamond writes: “All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.”
Hence it was the fertile environment of Eurasia that allowed agriculture to develop, which ensured surplus food, which in turn allowed what could be called a ‘research and development’ budget that Australia’s indigenous population could not take advantage of.
European civilisation could create the superior steel weapons and guns with which to take over other countries. A by-product of intensive animal farming over thousands of years would be the development of germs. Over time Europeans would develop an immunity, but the people they colonised would be wiped out. Within a year of European arrival in Australia, the native population would succumb to smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, typhus, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and syphilis.
Guns, Germs, and Steel provides a fascinating challenge to orthodox thinking on why some societies become ‘advanced’ while others don’t. According to Jared Diamond, race is not destiny. But environment most definitely is. More than we like to acknowledge
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, is published by W.W. Norton (1997)
Also by Jared Diamond The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
Chris Saliba - Chris Saliba is a freelance writer. Read more of his workplace articles at chrissalibafreelancewriter.blogspot.com
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