Jared Diamond’s Trilogy of Sorts
This is part of a series of posts where I look at how people have looked at long periods of human history.
Jared Diamond wrote a series on books about people, and then about civilisations. And like Francis Fukuyama, they are linked to each other. As people are related to the great apes, it helps to study how people compare with these apes when it comes to sociality. Diamond did this in The Third Chimpanzee, and compared people’s behaviour — our sexual and social natures, with the chimpanzees. The assessment is that, although human beings have distinctly different sexual and social behaviours in terms of having the capacity for pair-bonding/monogamy, we have the same violent tendencies with apes for mass killing. The Third Chimpanzee — now looking back, was a teaser for the next two books — for Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse.
I am more interested in his next book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. The primary thesis about GGS was that civilisation developed first in Eurasia because of the fortunes in that area. People there had a wider variety of crops and animals to domesticate compared to other parts of the world. Zebras could not be tamed, but horses could be. Also, the Sahara had become a desert then, and posed a formidable barrier to immigration after. That Eurasia is very wide means that the same plants could be planted across a huge expanse, since it is easier for crops to spread horizontally in the same latitudes then to spread across different latitudes from North to South. That means wheat could be planted from Northern China to the Middle East — a huge geographical expanse.
The question about Europe — how is it that a peripheral peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass came to dominate the rest of the world — is answered in a classical way. The geography of Europe created many small polities that competed against each other, making it hard to unify politically. That Christopher Columbus could go to different royal courts for his expedition to America underlies this fact. Zheng He could not go to a competing court for the same kinds of exploratory expeditions.
Jared Diamond’s work is significant from a meta-perspective. His works was restarted interest in large histories, the grande duree, so to speak. And others after him have actually taken similar approaches. Ian Morris also took a geographically based approach. Francis Fukuyama also incorporated biological ideas into his political institutions-based approach. And Yuval Noah Harari has taken that biological approach and pushed it further, incorporating it with the historical slant with meta-narratives about history.
Diamond is especially interested in ecological collapses, and how these were brought about by human activity. He shows several examples of how ecological collapse is not a given, and that several human societies were able to make better decisions about their ecological resources. Ecological collapse is not inevitable, and the sooner we make better decisions about our resource base, the better for us.
(An afterthought: one could argue that Jared Diamond’s the World Before Yesterday could be included in this collection. In this instance, I didn’t want to include that, because Diamond’s job in Yesterday to me, was about reviewing particular societies in terms of their social dynamics — how they deal with conflict, personal risk, and with the elderly — things that are important but were on the societal side. I thought this was different enough from the big-civilisational questions about macro-scale trends and behaviours that impact larger social groups at the level of civilisations. I could change my mind about this…)
