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Guns, Germs, And Steel: The White Hegemony And Black Lack Of Power
Unlike other subjects in the world, facts can only be black or white, there can never be gray. This is what everyone searches for and wishes to accomplish at the end of the process. We as authors wish this to be valid, but unfortunately, it’s not. Human history is one of those few subjects where we always can find gray facts. “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” that was Mr. Yali’s question to Dr. Diamond. Mr. Yali was a local politician. Dr. Jared Diamond was a biologist. We will discuss how Dr. Diamond responded to this question, and we will also address the things that he ignored.
300 years ago the European people or the western side of the word started classifying the human species with a scale of hierarchy. They had the European as the superior just because they believed that they had pure genetics and the others species were denoted as sub-species. This was not only a thought that they had on paper, but they actually put this in to action, and the slavery period started to grow from here. This might be the reason behind their domination! That’s what the whole world is thinking, but is it the truth though? No, it’s all luck. Dr. Diamond answered Yali’s question, and he focused only on the environmental factors rather than the biological ones. He addressed that the White European had the opportunity and the reasons that pushed them to do such a thing, and skills were never one of the reasons that he addressed.
When did the inequalities started? It started when people stopped being hunters and gatherers and shift to the civilized or to the agriculture life-style. People then had to risk themselves to get food and they had to face different obstacles every day in their life. When the revolution of agriculture started, they had more time on their own places which allowed them to stay busy but the advantage was that they were safe which important thing is. What this also mean is that they had more food to eat which allowed them to expand more rapidly and had more time to build their infrastructure.
First, the shift from Hunters and gatherers to settle is extremely hard and there were many factors behind its success. You would need crops to start that agricultural life-style, simply because of the rich nutrition that it has, luckily, they had crops. You might think why would crops be so much important at that time? Not only because of the vitamins and nutrition that it has, but also because of its ability to be stored for a long time. Also, you would have to have a dry climate to keep store those crops. Storing extra food can be really bad, but not when you have domestic animals to feed. With all of these factors, you can grow your population really easily, and more people means more power, more building, and more technology. Luckily, this was the case with the Eurasian, they had pretty dry climates and lots of animals that could be domesticated. They had different types of wheat, sheep, horses, donkeys… etc. Eurasia had 14 animals that could be domesticated, but Africa didn’t. However, in Africa they over hunt animals which could have been domestic ones.
Second, the immune system that the white Europeans people had, was extremely one of the most important factors behind their success. This also goes back to the domestic animals they had. However, when you live near domestic animals, then lots of disease would be transferred from those animals to you. Over thousands of years you would develop a great immune system which will make you secured against different types of viruses. As they traveled, they had these types of viruses with them, which killed thousands and thousands of people who had never been exposed to such viruses
Third, their location on the world played a very good role too. They were in a middle of everything. Due to the fact that the Eurasia continent stretches from east to west, this allowed more trade to occur, which resulted in exchanging more domestic animals and diseases. You might think, why this is so critical! The Tropical line is stretched from east to west, this means that climate and the temperature stays almost the same around it. While this is not the same case with America or Africa, where it stretches from north to south. This will make it impossible to exchange living things like domestic animals and crops, simply, because of the climate change between the two areas. They had pretty good location in which allowed them to transfer domestic animals and crops from southwest Asia to Europe, which gave them the priority in learning all the techniques and strategies on how to plant and raise animals. This grew the chances of getting more jobs and technology, so they grew economically. Therefore, this allowed them to build their power. Since they had all the resources needed they started developing guns and steel, which let them to colonize the world.
At the end of their discussion they both, Mr. Yali and Dr. Diamond, agreed on one thing which is the European were not smarter than the New Guinean people, it all at the end depends on the culture and the environment that they both had to live in. You can make a strong argument that the none- Europeans like the Africans were even more intelligent, due to the fact that they invented all of the inventions by 1500 like writing, paper, calendars, time scale (watches), complex aggregation systems, agriculture…etc. Also, their kids had better social life not like the Europeans, where they were busy with technology and indoor activities Where the European had nothing but adapting others ideas. There were many attempts on trying to test the level of their smartness, but in fact all failed because there was no such a way. They tried the IQ test but this also failed due to the fact that it measures cultural learning and not pure intelligence.
I believe that the author, Dr. Diamond, listed very strong and logical points. He claimed his reasons with enough evidence to prove him right. However, this does not mean that he gave us enough reasons behind the success of the white European over the past 200 years. Dr. Diamonds summarized his book saying “history followed different courses for different peoples because of difference among peoples’ environment, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”. He argued about the biological side of the story only, but not the social one. The racist of the white European was at its highest at that time and it played a strong role in the human’s history. This period was one of the very main factors that Dr. Diamond missed or ignored. We should accept the fact that not all the winners deserved the win, in many times it’s only luck.
To sum up, Yali asked Dr. Diamonds “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”. Dr. Diamond answered him focusing on the biological aspects. He illustrated the reasons behind this were mainly based on the geographical location that the Eurasian had. He said that they simply had the most critical location in the world which made them grew enormous power in a very short period of time.
