>Basically that geography and isolation caused Africa to be shitty and not Africans?
Africans had the same population of trading network as any other equivalent region,
Any good arguments against Germs, Guns and Steel...
Andrew Clark
Aaron Scott
I read "Guns, Germs and Steel" some years ago, and provided many "aha" moments. Diamond's explanations are extremely compelling, even to someone with more than a passing education in history, geography and historiography. Of course, they are all a "just so" story, rather than an accurate representation of how things turned out. Geography *of course* is important in the historical development of different nations and civilizations. Is geography (along with associated factors of agricultural technology, domesticated animals and his pained explanation about why Europeans were better with guns than the Chinese who invented them) the only factor in why Western Civilization grew to dominate others? Of course it isn't. Europe had no unique access to these things: Asian civilizations had arguably superior such advantages.
Victor Davis Hanson makes a similar "one factor" argument in his book "Carnage and Culture." Hanson's argument is that Westerners are simply better at war than other civilizations, because most Westerners were influenced by the Ancient Greeks, who developed a superior method of combat and of developing innovations than other nations did. Is Hanson's theory 100% the One True Answer? No, the rise of Japan and the invincibility of Mongol raiders rather puts his theory to fault, but it's at least as important as geography. There are all kinds of "one factor" arguments possible, all of which could make for as convincing a book as this one.
Victorian historians thought it was the vigor of "Nordic" civilizations which made Western world domination inevitable: also convincing if that was the only book you had read on that particular day, and also ultimately deeply silly (basically, this means the West dominates because it is dominant). Other Victorian historians made out human history to be the product of great battles, all of which had a huge element of random chance.
Nolan Jenkins
Yeah and lemme guess, all those African things you listed were made in a non nomadic civilization.
Alexander Morris
> Basically that geography and isolation caused Africa to be shitty and not Africans?
it may very well be that africans played a part, as in that they did not wish to develop or could not because they were too dumb themselves.
However to say that geography and isolation did not play a huge part in this is some bs you don't believe in your life. Of course it did. It is a universal phenomenon though it knows exceptions, that in rough climates and sorrounded by deserts or oceans without much exchange with other cultures, you will not develop very much. Of course that is true. Heat is an enemy to hard work and a cool head to think with try living in those regions and see how well it is working out for you.
The mesopotamian areas had cultural exchange despite the deserts and the heats, I believe the vast african wilderness offered less opportunity.
But the character of the people plays a large part. Africans are tribal and nature bound, they developed athletic bodies to perform well in their environment but not the brains to develop great civilizations.
Caleb Martinez
Spengler also famously thought of civilizations as "cultural organisms" which eventually get old, become frail and die, just like any other organism whose telemeres have gotten shorter. I would imagine, like in, say, finance, the actual explanation for history is kind of complicated. I bet the Greek way of war has something to do with it, along with geography, culture, the Catholic Church, language and a whole lot of random chance. It's nice to think we know exactly why something happened, but a lot of what happens in the world, especially the world of human beings, is just plain random noise. Putting one factor explanations on history as Diamond does is not particularly helpful.
There is also the matter of historical perspective. Diamond writes as if everything leading up to the present time of European world cultural domination were some kind of historical inevitability, and that *of course* -thus it will always be. This is the sheerest nonsense. At various times in human history, "Western Civilization" consisted of illiterate barbarians living in mud huts. In very recent times in human history (like, say, the 1930s), it kind of looked like that's where the West was heading again. Other civilizations culturally and physically eclipsed or dominated the West through history: the Japanese, the Chinese, the Islamic civilizations, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mongolian, Persian or Russian (if you count them as different, which I do) civilizations made Western civilization irrelevant through vast swathes of human history. Such civilizations may again eclipse Western civilization. Just to take one example, the Zoroastrian Persian civilization lasted longer than Rome, covered more territory and was in many ways more advanced: they even generally beat the Romans in warfare in the middle east.