Guns, Germs, and Steel – a “Bad Good” Book
I recently spent three weeks in Panama on my honeymoon. Whenever I take a vacation longer than a few days, I usually take the opportunity to rediscover books. I’m sad to say that I read far too few actual books in my normal life. This trip was a chance to do some real reading, and I try to balance the books I read with both some trashy crime or mystery novels and some cerebral non-fiction as well.
For this trip I had really been aching to finally read the acclaimed “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning title and a national bestselling book – and one I have heard quite a lot of buzz about. The back cover is filled with endorsements from such luminaries as Bill Gates, and Colin Renfrew of Nature Magazine. The book is basically about how and why the various cultures on Earth developed differently, with some acquiring technology and power, and others seemingly remaining stagnant in their development. The author tries to refute the racist assumption that some groups are inherently less intelligent because they never began using iron or developed writing of their own. He ties all this to positive-feedback loops involving geography, climate, the interplay between societies, and naturally the arrival of guns, germs, and steel.
Sounds fascinating, right? Sure it is. How can it not be? To top it all off, the author himself has had a rich and interesting life story having spent considerable time abroad living in New Guinea, with his life occasionally in peril (be it from malaria or hostile tribes), and he mixes anecdotes from his experiences into the narrative of the book.
The great thing about a book like this too is once you’ve read it, there are like thousands of people out there you can talk about it with – because the book was so popular. Because I was travelling in Panama at the time and bumping into other tourists, this turned out to be true. But something curious kept coming up in these conversations – nobody I met had actually finished the book – and this included several academics I ran into from the Smithsonian. Myself, when I got about 3/4 the way through my eyes began to droop and I stopped looking forward to the next page and chapter. I mean, seriously.. this is one boring book. Its not boring because the topic isn’t interesting, but the author really had an odd way of approaching the subject. The most striking flaw is the amount of repetition. He keeps going back to the same examples over and over to illustrate the application some new subtlety or theory – and after a while you just get really tired of hearing about it.
My point is that I found it interesting that while people were so eager to praise the book for it’s ideas, people were almost ashamed to admit they found it kindof boring and didn’t actually finish it. It certainly doesn’t necessarily follow that because the subject matter is weighty, the narrative is dry or unapproachable. I would contrast GGAS with other popular non-fiction books like Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which were both fascinating and very well written at the same time.
I wonder if Bill and Colin read the whole thing.
Interesting. I did finish it but agree with your point about it being repetitious. His thesis is fairly simple but he tends to overwhelm it with too many words. I have not read the sequel “Collapse” but did read his other book “The Third Chimpanzee” a few weeks ago. I did not finish it and for all the reasons that you mention.
In the “The Third Chimpanzee” he rehashes the same old thesis although comes at it from a slightly different perspective. The first two or three chapters are actually quite interesting as he explores the connections between man and ape. He picks up on Darwin and evolution but really tells us little that is new. The rest of the book might just as well have been lifted directly from “Guns Germs and Steel” and I found my self skipping paragraphs, then pages and finally chapters.
Jared Diamond is an academic who has discovered that there is money to be made in the popular science market and has worked a fairly simple and obvious idea into three fairly popular and best selling books. I think that the books have been well marketed making people feel that they are a must read if one is to be “current.”
OK. I read both “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse.” I also read a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Prof. Diamond, and I felt compelled to respond in my blog (serpentsanddoves.com/blog). Here is a transcript. Warning: lots of folks go ballistic when corporations are criticized. They are criticized here.
Are You Serious? Redux
Speaking of “Small is Beautiful” (as I did in my last post), readers would do well to revisit E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 work on “Economics as if People Mattered” (1).” But first, this about Jared Diamond. In an Op-Ed piece “Will Big Business Save the Earth” (2) Diamond belies his own thesis of a few years ago. In “Guns, Germs and Steel” (3) Prof. Diamond makes the claim that ” … large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.” Further, in his later work “Collapse” (4) we find that, in Diamond’s view, civilizations collapse because they exhaust resources necessary for survival.
Prof. Diamond admits that not so long ago he shared the view held by many ” … that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil, and driven by short-term profits.” Yet here we find Diamond offering the opinion that corporations, and U.S. corporations in particular, are benign, indeed benevolent, a major force for “environmental progress.” Diamond writes that ” … today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.” What follows is an apology for big corporations. In Diamond’s present view, corporations have sensed that it is in their own interests to be environmentally “friendly.” He claims that giant oil companies avoid oil spills because they are bad for their image! That they are, but they are also expensive, including loss of resources, huge costs of cleanup, and many other costs. Oil companies do not avoid spills to improve their image, and they also do not particularly care about the expenses, except insofar as such expenses are less than those incurred if they did allow spills. If allowing spills to occur were to become a cost-lowering phenomenon, they would allow spills. Astonishingly, Diamond holds up for our approval the environmental practices of Wal-Mart! Even if Wal-Mart were a progressive environmental organization, it is still a premier member of that group of kleptocracies Diamond once held were more or less inevitable.
Diamond has put himself in a dream world. The World Wildlife Fund is among the most conservative of groups claiming to be protecting the environment (5). The WWF and Conservation International are themselves big businesses. The revenues of Conservation International totaled more than $240,000,000 in 2008. Big businesses do not relinquish their privileges voluntarily. Worse still, the big businesses Diamond holds up as exemplary are among the most predatory on the planet.
Of far more importance than their environmental propaganda are the business practices of the corporations Diamond so admires. For example, can he possibly simply cast aside the export of millions of jobs to foreign shores solely to cut costs? If Wal-Mart does not care about people, it certainly does not care about animals and plants. In the final analysis, Diamond’s conversion experience is grotesque.
Whatever Diamond’s opinion may be, corporations exist to make a profit, period. In this respect they are at best amoral, and at worst psychopathic. How can I attribute human characteristics to mere organizations? Easy. Corporations are defined as “persons” under the law. They can’t have it both ways. If they are legal persons, then they must accept the moral consequences as well as the pecuniary windfalls.
1. Schumacher, E. F. , “Small is Beautiful, Economics as if People Really Mattered,” Blond & Briggs, Ltd., London, 1973. Published in the U.S. by Harper and Row in the same year.
2. Diamond, Jared, “Will Big Business Save the Earth?,” NYT, Dec. 6, 2009.
3. Diamond, Jared, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” W. W. Norton & Company, NY, 1997, p. 288 et passim.
4. Diamond, Jared, “Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Viking Penguin, NY, 2005.
5. St. Clair, Jeffrey, “Panda Porn: The Marriage of WWF and Weyerhaeuser,” CounterPunch, Dec. 5, 2002.