Is Guns, Germs, and Steel that bad?
I know it’s been heavily challenged since its publication, but if I remember correctly (been a very long time), it seems like the closest thing you get to materialism from a lib.
Isn’t the main argument that certain cultures were able to advance because of access to resources and exposed to certain germs and other factors that were decidedly not idealist?
I’ll say that I think it’s better than the standard American education on world history, which is a pretty low bar to clear. There are probably better books to recommend to someone interested in the question “why is European society so dominant in the world today”, but someone whose read GGS has a better picture of the answer to that question than someone whose only history lesson on the topic is the chapter on the Atlantic slave trade they did in eighth grade.
At the very least, they’re prepared to talk about material conditions shaping societies - as opposed to someone who read The Bell Curve or something like that. The shortcomings of GGS are mostly in how heavily it elevates the things it talks about while ignoring a lot of other things it could have chosen to talk about instead, leading people to think that the shape of the world’s societies were totally predetermined by plate tectonics rather than that being just one of many, many factors in shaping them.
There are probably better books to recommend to someone interested in the question “why is European society so dominant in the world today”
Das Kapital, for instance. :lea-smug:
At the very least, they’re prepared to talk about material conditions shaping societies - as opposed to someone who read The Bell Curve or something like that.
Honestly, the loudest arguments I’ve heard about GG&S tend to be *anti-*materialist. They boil down to “Europe didn’t dominate because of technology or immune-exposure, they dominated because of Racism!”, which… okay, yeah kinda? But also the tools that afforded domination globally created the social incentives to develop racist views. If Cortez had ended up like Magellan and the American Natives sent back a boat full of Novel Influenza to ravage Europe for a century, New World Colonization would have failed and nobody working out of a university in the Tribal State of Massachusetts would be talking about White Supremacy as a serious theory of history.
I wouldn’t recommend reading it, not just because of it’s historical short comings but also because it’s a real slog at parts.
It’s not completely accurate but it is someone arguing against racism and almost getting there wrt to materialism so if it meets someone where they are at to push them away from worse ideas then it’s ok even though there are much better books they could have read instead.
It’s bad if someone is idk really committed to geographic determinism but at this point I think that group is literally just Jared Diamond himself.
Is Guns, Germs, and Steel that bad?
I also haven’t read it but I recommend this part of the wiki on the /r/askhistorian sub (one of the rare good parts of :reddit-logo: - along with /r/AskAnthropology).
There have actually been many times when changes in geography and climate have occurred over the timescales of human civilization. Rivers change course, little ice ages happen, fertile soils are depleted, coastlines recede and put coastal cities inland or underwater and so on. Plus now we’re hitting the whole climate change era in earnest, which will have plenty of impact.
What he’s saying is definitely not wrong though on the whole, geographical variability and changes are at most one of many factors that shape the material conditions of societies.
