Professor Jiang Xiaoyuan of the Department of History of Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Jared Diamond (1937-), professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, is considered one of the contemporary thinkers on human society and civilization. This time, CITIC Publishing House launched four of his books that are intrinsically related to each other, which is very valuable. Here are my interpretations of these four books. Overall, Guns, Germs and Steel is the most thoughtful and inspiring, followed by Collapse, and the other two are less enlightening, but also quite desirable.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Society (1997)
Diamond begins the book with a "problem with Yali," a local political leader on the island of New Guinea in the Pacific, who asks, "Why do white people make so many goods (referring to modern industrial products) and ship them here?" Why haven't we blacks made any name for ourselves? Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel in an attempt to answer Ariel's question.
Aali is actually asking: Why did modernization (industrialization) appear in Europe and not in New Guinea? This question is more familiar to Chinese academia" Weber) asks "(Why eastern societies such as China and India have not embarked on a path of rationalization independent of the West in the fields of political, economic science and even art)" and "P. Kuhn's question "[why China hasn't developed a modern state] is actually the same thing."
In such questions, weber or Kong Feili's Western-centric position is obvious, for example, if Weber's question is to be established, what he calls the "rationalization road" can only be understood as the "Westernization road"; if Kong Feili's question is to be established, the "modern state" he calls can only be understood as a "Western-style state". We don't have to dwell too much on this, but it is Yali's questioning method, and it is even less likely that this problem will occur.
Deriding such questions as "just asking why the pear tree didn't produce apples" is a form-powerful solution to the theoretical value of such questions, but it is indeed more constructive than trying to answer these questions head-on.
Diamond is trying to answer these questions in a positive way—seriously explaining why pear trees don't produce apples.
To answer Ariel's question head-on, several paths have been tried before.
The first is to argue from an ethnographic point of view of how the "white man" and "black man" mentioned in The Question of Alyssa differ. But this path directly points to racial discrimination, which is politically incorrect, and is now a strict forbidden area in the "white left" dominated American universities, and Diamond certainly does not dare to set foot in it, and he also refutes such a theoretical path.
The second path is "geographical determinism," a path that has a long history and is not politically incorrect, so Diamond chose this path. He said that if he had to explain the purpose of the book Guns, Germs and Steel in one sentence, it would be: "The history of the various peoples has followed different trajectories, which are the result of differences in the environment rather than biological (i.e., racial) differences." ”
Diamond tried to give a more elaborate argument for "geographical determinism", setting four criteria for the geographical environment:
Food resources, including domesticable animal resources and available plant resources. With abundant food, a larger population can be fed, and only then can there be manpower engaged in work other than foraging, thus forming cultural accumulation.
Second, the conditions for transmission and migration. With spread and migration, civilization can spread and communicate. Eurasia, for example, is clearly conducive to transmission and migration, while New Guinea, as an island in the Pacific Ocean, has very unfavorable conditions for transmission and migration.
3. Conditions for intercontinental transmission. Eurasia has its own advantage, while the Americas are worse and Australia is worse (can be seen as an enlarged version of New Guinea).
Area and population. There must be a large enough land area and a sufficient population for civilization to develop at a high level.
Operating according to these four standards, the region most conducive to the development of civilization must undoubtedly be somewhere in Eurasia. In fact, Diamond found two such places in Eurasia.
The first is the "Fertile Crescent zone of the Middle East", which is roughly the Two Rivers Valley and its surrounding areas, that is, mesopotamia in ancient times, present-day Iraq and its surrounding areas, according to the evidence that has been found today, this area is indeed the earliest area where human civilization developed. The second is China, which is a unique region in Diamond's eyes.
However, then the question arises: the Fertile Crescent and China have not seen the emergence of "modern states" in Europe and the United States.
Diamond's explanation of the fate of the Fertile Crescent is "first to the point, then to the powerless": "Almost every major innovation in the western part of Eurasia — the domestication of flora and fauna, writing, metallurgy, wheels, nations, etc. — was invented in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. After Alexander's crusade and the conquest of the Roman Empire, the center of power repeatedly moved westward, and the Crescent Region could only be used as a dowry for others, but it itself declined.
If we agree that Diamond's explanation of the fate of the Crescent is passable, then his next biggest problem is to explain the fate of China. Diamond knew that before 1450 AD " China was the technological leader of the world " .
But by this point, Diamond seemed to feel that "geographical determinism" was no longer able to do anything about it, and he turned to the political system. He believed that the division of Europe was superior to the great unification of China, and the evidence he found was that there were hundreds of princes in Europe, so Columbus could finally find a patron after several encounters with the wall and sponsor him to "discover" the Americas; and the unified China would have a complete shutdown of Zheng He's huge fleet as long as the government ordered it. So, a unified China eventually fell behind, and a divided Europe eventually won. And Diamond believes that as long as China continues to be unified, "the same catastrophe will repeat itself."
Here we must note that Guns, Germs and Steel was published in 1997 and completed in 1996, when China had not yet become the world's factory, otherwise the question of Yali would have been replaced by "Why did Chinese make so many goods and then ship them here?". In 1996, Diamond could not have imagined the rise of China at its current scale, an important historical limitation that we must be aware of when examining Diamond's analytical arguments.
Collapse: How Society Chooses Success or Failure (2005)
In this book, Diamond's interest turns more to environmental issues. This is also intrinsically linked to the "determinism of the geographical environment" in Guns, Germs and Steel.
Now we have entered the "finite earth era", which means that the resources on the earth are limited, and the earth's ability to tolerate pollution is also limited. In fact, we humans have been in the limited earth era from the beginning, but we did not realize this until very late. For a long time before that, the resources of the earth, the earth's ability to tolerate pollution, seemed to have been hypothesized to be infinite. Even if its finiteness is not denied at the level of reason, these two limits are pushed into infinity—which can be squeezed as infinity at the moment. Because at that time there were still large areas of virgin land on the earth that had not been reclaimed, and on the land that was already inhabited by humans, the pollution caused by low productivity was extremely limited compared with today. But once industrial civilization and modern science and technology appeared, they showed amazing acceleration. On the large time scale of human history, almost instantaneously, those two distant limits came to us unexpectedly.
Today, many people also take it for granted that the issue of environmental protection is understood as a scientific and technological issue. It is believed that as long as the pollution control technology is further developed, the problem can be solved gradually. But in fact, today's environmental protection problem is not a scientific and technological problem in the first place, or even almost a scientific and technological problem. Diamond has made it clear at the end of Crash: "We don't need science and technology to solve problems!" His rationale: "While new technologies may make a difference, most of the problems are simply the need for political forces to implement existing solutions." ”
The text of The Collapse is divided into four parts.
The first part, "Modern Montana," is basically just an introduction, similar to the "wedge" in Chinese novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. His "Problem with Ariel" in Guns, Germs, and Steel is basically the same.
The second part, "Past Societies," first examines the collapse of several societies in history, including Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Island, the Anasaz, the Maya, and the Vikings. A basic conclusion is that the main reason for the collapse of these societies is that the environment has deteriorated – mainly because the resources available to the local area have been depleted. Those societies at that time naturally did not have today's science and technology (otherwise more resources could be exploited and utilized), nor globalization (otherwise it was possible to take resources from elsewhere), and the ability to maintain their societies and ways of life was too weak compared with today's developed countries, so they collapsed early. The last chapter of this section (Chapter IX) discusses cases in New Guinea, Japan, etc. This, on the other hand, supports the conclusion of the previous seven chapters – that "environmental degradation leads to social collapse". This conclusion is a crucial link in the book's perspective.
The third part, "Modern Society", discusses four individual cases: the genocide in Rwanda, the Dominican Republic versus Haiti, China, and Australia. The original edition of this book was published in 2005, so the book is based on the situation and data of China in the past two decades. Diamond spends a lot of time in this chapter talking about China's resource shortages and environmental pollution, which is sometimes alarmist. As for calling China a "wobbly giant," it is because he believes that China has had a tradition of centralized power for thousands of years. In this regard, his understanding is still stuck in the state of "Guns, Germs and Steel" ten years ago.
The fourth part, "Lessons from Practice," focuses on why environmental protection is not a scientific and technological issue but a political one. Diamond knew: "If you tell China not to aspire to the standard of living in first world countries, China certainly cannot tolerate this attitude." "But you want the people of first world countries to give up their standard of living today, and they certainly can't tolerate it." And what about everyone living a life of "poverty and luxury"? The earth cannot tolerate it. In this way, environmental issues, resource issues, and development issues will naturally become the biggest political issues in the future.
The once black and smelly River Thames has since been cleared and fish can be seen, which is often said to be the result of "pollution control", but the problem is, if only through industrial transfer, the polluting factories are relocated from the riverside of the Thames to a river in the Third World, from the perspective of the whole earth, pollution is still the same pollution, what is this "governance"?
Unfortunately, much of the pollution in the First World is "treated" in this way. In fact, what happens often is that pollution is transferred from the first world to the third world and from the developed to the underdeveloped. The latter are often willing to accept this transfer in order to quickly get rid of poverty and become rich.
From this, it is not difficult for us to know that the problem of environmental pollution, in the final analysis, is caused by some people preemptively living a life of poverty and luxury. Therefore, on this issue, the solution can only be a cruel game of interests of all parties, who has the bigger cards in hand, who plays the cards more shrewdly, who is more able to seek advantages and avoid harms, and this will not become naked politics?
Diamond wants people in the First World to realize that even if you can transfer pollution to the Third World now, there will be a day when you can't continue to transfer. It is politically impossible for first world dwellers to reduce their impact on the earth's environment. Even if the Third World does not resist, the limits of the Earth's pollution will soon be reached. Although Diamond positioned himself as a "cautious optimist," the following passage is full of pessimism:
Since human society now lives an unsustainable lifestyle, the world's environmental problems must be addressed in the lifetime of today's children and youth, regardless of the method. The only question is whether to solve it in a pleasant way that we have chosen voluntarily, or in an unpleasant way that we have to accept, such as war, genocide, famine, infectious diseases and social collapse.
The World Before Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? 》（2012）
This book can be regarded as a work of cultural anthropology about New Guinea, because the author has lived in the local area for a long time and has made quite meticulous observations and reflections on the local society.
The book discusses nine themes of local society in New Guinea: community, dispute resolution, parenting, how to treat the elderly, how to face danger, religion, language and its diversity, healthy lifestyles, and disease.
This kind of description and discussion of local social culture was originally common in the cultural anthropological works of European scholars, but many such descriptions and discussions in the early days often carried different degrees of Western-centric perspectives and a sense of cultural superiority that Europeans were arrogant. Diamond differs from them in focusing on the book's subtitle, "What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies." He believes that the traditions and ways of doing things in the local society of New Guinea are worth learning from modern Westerners. Such a view undoubtedly belongs to the category of political correctness in today's European and American universities.
Upheaval (2019)
The book selects seven countries to discuss how they responded to crises from historical events. The seven countries are: Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
Most of the historical events discussed in the book are familiar to readers who care about history, but Diamond's focus on "how to deal with the crisis" to describe these events gives more meaning to these events. For example, although Finland made the Soviet Union pay the price in the Soviet-Finnish War, it still finally compromised with the Soviet Union to clean up the aftermath of the Soviet-Finnish War. Another example is Japan's opening up to the outside world in response to the "black ship attack" of the United States in 1853, which had a profound impact. Discussions about Chile, of course, will focus on the fall of the Allende regime and Pinochet's military rule, but Diamond's account of it makes his American friends feel that "this chapter is the most terrible part of the book."
Diamond describes the book as "in a narrative style", and in his understanding , " this is the traditional way of writing of historians , dating back more than 2,400 years when Herodotus and Thucydides developed history into a science " . He also considered methods such as "quantitative historiography", but later abandoned it because the sample size was too small (only seven countries) and "this task can only be left to future projects to be completed", and the reader may be able to wait and see.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Ding Xiao