The US Public Broadcast System (PBS) is running a series based on the Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs and Steel. The Pulitzer Prize winning book, first published in 1997, sparked a debate regarding the relationship between "geographic, cultural, environmental, and technological factors which have led to domination of Western culture in the world."
Diamond's view provides a new way of understanding the world by trying to answer the following questions:
- 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?
The answers he found are provocative. According to his theory, what you could do, to a great extent, depended on what resources were available to you. And what resources were available to you was, to a great extent, based on luck (or geography).
For example, in order to progress from a hunter-gather society to a farming one, you must have plants and animals that can be usefully domesticated. Lacking such resources, he contends, no matter how intelligent you are, you cannot progress up the ladder towards what we now call Western civilization (such that it is).
Animals dramatically increase the productivity of farming, through their meat, milk, leather, dung, and as beasts of burden. Without them, farmers are trapped in a cycle of subsistence and manual labor.
Of all the animal species in the world, only 14 have ever been domesticated. 12 of these are native to Eurasia. One, the llama, is native to South America - and the farmers of New Guinea managed to domesticate the pig. But pigs can't pull plows, and until the arrival of Europeans in the twentieth century, all New Guinean farming was still done by hand.
Whether you agree with his theories or not, it is, I believe, a different way of viewing history and perhaps a useful way of predicting the future.
Aloha!
