On the evening of April 21, CITIC Publishing Group invited Professor Jared Diamond and Professor Xiang Biao to discuss "How did human society get to where it is today?" And where will it go? As the theme, combined with the new version of the Diamond series of works, we look back at the pace of the development of human civilization and explore the crisis facing modern society and the significance of writing history and society. Qiu Yu, a researcher of the "100 Talents Program" of Zhejiang University, was specially invited to host the dialogue activities. The following is a compilation of the contents of this dialogue.
Dialogue event poster
Moderator: We are honored to have two distinguished guests, the first of which is Professor Jared Diamond, a globally renowned polymath who is currently a professor of physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" is sure that everyone is familiar with it, and his series of works invite us to re-understand and read the past, present and future of human society from a unique perspective.
At the same time, we also invited Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Germany. Xiang Biao, one of the most internationally reputable anthropologists in China today, has long been concerned with international and domestic immigration, labor and social issues, and his anthropological monograph "Global "Hunting" has won the prestigious Anthony Liz Prize in the international anthropological community. In addition to his immigration research, Professor Xiang Biao also pays great attention to the social issues of China, India and the Third World, and is very active in public discussions in Chinese society.
In the next time, we will discuss a series of topics such as the trajectory of human civilization, tradition and modernity, crisis and future, hoping that through today's reading and discussion, we can help us better understand why human society has come to this day, its development trajectory and historical logic, re-understand the history of human evolution and migration, and understand the pluralistic evolution of human civilization.
Maybe we can start with a very simple question. I wonder what drove you (Diamond) to do this extraordinarily daunting task in the first place, to write a book about human history? What sustains you from writing one book after another for decades?
Diamond: For me, I don't think it's a tough task. Instead, I felt it was a pleasure and a hobby.
Since I was 3 years old, my mother, who was a teacher, taught me to read and write, write and draw in a notebook, list countries, list rivers, and list animals. I have always been interested in languages and have also become interested in different ethnic groups as I travel around the world to work. So, to ask me why I write a book, I write a book because it's the most enjoyable and fun thing I can do. However, I didn't start writing books for the public until 1987, when I was 50 years old. Until then, I had been working in the lab as a gallbladder physiologist. I am a world-renowned expert on gallbladders. I also study birds in New Guinea.
Jared Diamond
In 1987, my wife gave birth to our twin sons, and I became a father for the first time. I realized: People often talk about what's going to happen in the world, like rainforests that will disappear by 2050, problems that the world will face in 2050. Because I was born in 1937, by then I was 113 years old, and I was definitely dead in 2050, so 2050 was an imaginary year for me. But my children were born in 1987, and they will be 63 by 2050, the prime of their lives. I realized that my son's future depended not on the gallbladder, not on the birds of New Guinea, but on the state of the world, on the understanding of why different peoples in the world had different experiences. So it was the birth of my son that prompted me to move from gallbladder physiology to the study of history, geography, anthropology, and the social sciences, and to start writing books. I do write books locally one by one. When I write a book that doesn't cover all the interesting things in the world, I think about writing the next one. Each of my books usually takes 4 to 7 years to write. So my most recent book, Upheaval, was published 3 years ago, in 2019. I'm just starting to write my next book, hopefully on my 90th birthday, 2027. Really, I write books because I'm interested in what I write.
Host: On that last point you just mentioned, can you tell us more about the book you're working on?
Diamond: I'm working on this book right now, and part of it's going to be kept secret at the moment because I just started writing it, but I can tell you that it's about leadership. I have always been interested in the question of leaders, such as whether leaders have played an important role in the process of historical development. If the leaders are different, will the course of historical development change? Here's an example of Adolf Hitler, the terrible leader of Nazi Germany. In 1930, Hitler was nearly killed in a car accident when a heavy truck hit his car from the side, he was sitting in the passenger seat and almost died, it was 1930, 3 years before he came to power. If Hitler had died at that time, would there have been another World War II in Europe? Will there be another massacre that killed millions of people? One could argue that Hitler was an alien, evil, seductive man, and without Hitler there would have been no World War II or the Holocaust. But on the other hand, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I led to the possibility that Germany would try to reverse the defeat of the First World War, and Germany might still go to war again. And there has always been anti-Semitism in Germany. This is just one example, and historians are still debating whether leaders played an important role.
This is true in history, and it is also true in business. Bill Gates is different, Mark Zuckerberg is different, computers and social media wouldn't be different without Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? Or in the world of sports, there are some famous sports coaches, for example, at UCLA, where our basketball coach John Wooden is generally considered the greatest sports coach of all time, and UCLA has achieved great results. Would UCLA basketball be so successful without John Wooden? Finally, in terms of religion, such as the important religious leader, Jesus Christ founded the world religion, Muhammad also founded the world religion, Jesus Christ was in the Roman Empire at the time, the most powerful government organization of that era, and Muhammad lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. If Jesus Christ or Muhammad had not been born, would others in the Roman Empire or others in the Arabian Peninsula have founded a world religion? These examples illustrate the unanswered question of whether leaders will influence the course of historical development. This interesting and important question will be the subject of my next book, which I hope will be published in China by then.
Host: It sounds very interesting, involving a very classic question, who shaped history? Is it structural factors or individual agency? Your book on leaders seems like a great way to discuss this big problem. We are very much looking forward to your new book, as well as celebrating your 90th birthday.
I remember that when I was an undergraduate, I was very interested in social anthropology. I once chatted with a friend who was a computer scientist who worked in the IT industry. When I talked about my interest in social anthropology, he said, have you seen Guns, Germs and Steel? That's a very classic piece in the field. So, Jared, you can't imagine how popular your book is that even a computer scientist would read it. Xiang Biao, I don't know if you've also noticed that Diamond's books are so popular in China. Can you share some thoughts on this? And some of your thoughts on his other books?
Xiang Biao: Of course, I noticed that Jared's work was very popular all over the world, and I think it started with the book Guns, Germs and Steel, and his book has been very popular since then, and has become more popular with the subsequent publication of new books. I haven't specifically studied the acceptance of these books by Chinese readers, but I do know they are popular. I'd love to know how Chinese readers read these books.
I'm also very curious to know, Jared, have you noticed how readers in different countries understand your book? Are there any differences in the reader's understanding in different countries or industries? I was very touched when I heard Jared tell us why he wrote these books and how he wrote them. It is clear that he did not write these books for narrow academic purposes, but to address some of the fundamental problems that we all face during this critical period. That is why his vision is so broad, precisely because these questions are so real, so fundamental, that they cannot be answered by any particular narrow discipline. In addition, he wrote these books because he has always been concerned about the future of future generations. As a result, this drive is much deeper and more powerful than purely academic career considerations or scientific curiosity in the narrow sense. I think that explains why these books have such a broad appeal.
If I can, I would like to add that your books are important because they raise grand questions that need to be discussed about how we understand history. Another question for you, probably many people have already asked you, is your new Guinea friend Yali, it was his question that sparked your interest in writing Guns, Germs and Steel, how did he finally understand what was written in the book?
Can I ask this question here? I'm just wondering how the losers of history read the history of the rulers that always tell the story. Can history also be understood as the history of struggle, the history of the elimination of one side by the other? I would also like to suggest a small fragment from the book that I think is important for Chinese readers. For example, how do we understand Zheng He's voyage to the West, his voyage to East Africa. Is this a missed opportunity? Or is it a very wonderful example of global diplomacy? It is often seen as a missed opportunity because of the excessive concentration of power in China at the time in the imperial court and because of the political struggles within the court at the time. As a result, Zheng He missed the opportunity to colonize Africa and failed to land in the Americas before Columbus. But why is colonialism defined as the driving force of history? Can we define colonialism as the camera choice of history? So we have to look for another clue, one that is still hidden in human history. Of course, throughout history, if we look at it from the perspective of who was the ruler, who was the winner, who was the winner, colonialism was indeed a driving force. But can history be interpreted in a different way? So [Zheng He] that wasn't a missed opportunity, it's an example we can learn from today. I think this is an engaging debate that requires the collision of wisdom. Given China's position in the world today, I think this discussion has a very direct and far-reaching political impact.
Diamond: You asked a lot of interesting questions, and let me answer a few of them.
Ari is a Native of New Guinea, and I met him by chance in 1972. I was walking on the beach on an island and a New Guinean came over and walked with me. He was a very curious man and asked me all sorts of questions, about birds, about volcanoes. He wanted to know how much I got paid to study birds, and then he asked me questions about New Guineans and the history of New Guinea. Finally, his eyes sparkled, and he turned to me, and he said, "Why do you white people come to New Guinea and bring so much goods and material wealth, but we New Guineans have not made these things famous?" We looked at each other and I knew exactly what he was thinking and he knew what I was thinking. He knows that New Guineans are at least as smart as Europeans, and I've been working in New Guinea for 8 years, and I know New Guineans are at least as smart as Europeans.
Why, then, did Europeans come to New Guinea with writing and metal tools, as well as governmental organizations, whereas traditional New Guinea did not? It was 1972, and I didn't know what the answer was. It took me 15 years to figure out the answer I gave in Guns, Bacteria and Steel. But I never saw Ari again, so I couldn't answer him in person.
As for the difference between Chinese history and European history, this is an attractive and important issue.
Differences in colonialism. China was first unified in 221 BC and has remained in a unified state for most of the time since. Europe has never been unified, not even a military genius, Octavian, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, no one has been able to unify Europe. Today's EUROPEAN Union unites Europe to some extent, but it is not as strong as China's. Why are there these differences in the history of China and Europe.
To me, as a geographer and historian, naturally, the answer seems to be that geography plays a key role. You can imagine the map of China and the map of Europe, the coastline of China is smooth, China does not have a large peninsula; the coastline of Europe is very tortuous, Europe has the Italian peninsula (Apennine Peninsula), there is the Greek Peninsula (Balkan Peninsula), there is the Spanish Peninsula (Iberian Peninsula), there is the Danish Peninsula (Jutland Peninsula), these peninsulas have each developed into independent societies, with independent languages and independent countries, but China does not have these peninsulas. There are some big islands in Europe: Great Britain is a big island, Ireland is a big island, Crete and Sardinia are big islands. Each of these European islands developed a different society, often speaking a different language. China doesn't have that many big islands. Speaking of rivers, China has two major rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, flowing in parallel, and the land between the two rivers is low, so the Yellow River and the Yangtze River have been connected by canals very early in history. But the rivers of Europe, because the Alps are located in the middle of Europe, the rivers of Europe flow radially like spokes of bicycle wheels. The Rhine flows to the northwest, the Elbe to Berlin, the Rhône to the southwest, and the Danube to the east. The rivers of Europe divided Europe into different societies; the rivers of China connected China.
So, in my opinion, the differences between Chinese history and European history are partly related to geography, but I think they are also related to agriculture. Agriculture in Europe depends on wheat. China's agriculture initially relied in part on rice and millet, and it was only later that wheat was introduced to China. However, growing wheat is very different from growing rice. Wheat farmers can go it alone, and wheat farmers simply throw the wheat seeds out and wait for the wheat to be harvested. Rice is not like this, and farmers who grow rice need to irrigate the rice, so they must cooperate with others to run an irrigation system. So, in my opinion, the Chinese agricultural system requires people to cooperate, and the European agricultural system allows or requires people to become individualists. However, we have found another empirical example in China. In some parts of China, wheat is grown, not rice. I've also heard and read articles arguing that Chinese in wheat-growing areas tend to be more individualistic than Chinese in rice-growing areas.
This is a long-winded answer, but it shows that the history of China and Europe is very different. It fascinated me that in my book Guns, Germs and Steel, there is a whole chapter about China, and in my book Collapse, there is a whole chapter about China, trying to understand why the history of China and Europe has taken such different paths. I think at least part of the reason is geography.
Jared Diamond's "History of Man" series
Host: Our theme today is: How did human society get to where it is today? And where will it go? We can start with an overview of "the footsteps of human civilization." I think probably one of the main common denominators in the works of the two is the question of fluidity and interrelatedness. Jared, your work, including Guns, Germs, and Steel, not only emphasizes the flow of visible subjects, such as people, ships, and steel, but also mentions the tiny and almost invisible things, such as the flow of seeds, viruses, and germs, which play an important role in understanding the prosperity of a civilization. So please share with us your views on how migration or migration has provided an important impetus for human civilization and prosperity, especially in the early history of humanity.
Diamond: Immigration is an interesting topic, and immigrants behave differently around the world. You mentioned the example of Zheng He's voyage to the West, where in the 15th century, treasure convoys from China arrived off the coast of East Africa, and it looked as if these fleets were about to bypass the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and reach Europe. But the fleet returned. Why? Why have Europe's fleets been sailing forward? As a geographer, I think again of a number of geographical factors, including why people have different immigration impulses.
Let's take China as an example. Before the colonial expansion of Europe from prehistory to the 15th century, the greatest immigrants were Chinese, farmers from the southern coast of China. They first immigrated to the island of Taiwan, where they derived the Austronesian language family. These Chinese farmers migrated to the Philippines in 2000 BC, then to Indonesia, then to New Guinea, then to Fiji, then to Hawaii, where they became Polynesians, and they immigrated to Easter Island, then to New Zealand. In the prehistoric world, the greatest immigrants were the peasants of southern China. Why? In contrast, Africans never emigrate, even to the island of Madagascar. The first to reach madagascar appear to be Indonesians, not Africans. There are also the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas have never sailed to China, nor have they ever sailed to Europe. Why? I think part of the reason is that if you stand on the coast of Southeast Asia, if you stand in Singapore and look out, you see Sumatra. Looking out from Sumatra, you will see Java. And from Java, you can see Lombok. From Lombok, you see Flores Island, from Flores island you see Timor Island, and from Timor Island, although you can't see Australia, you can see the dust cloud of The Australian fire. Then from New Guinea, you see the islands of New Britain and New Ireland, as well as the Solomon Islands. In other words, the presence of islands stimulated people to build ships because they knew there was a place to go. In Africa, North america and South America, there are no islands in sight. In Europe, you stand on the coastline and you can see some of the islands, from France, you can see or loom the island of Britain, and of course, from the coast of France, you can see Corsica. And from Greece, you can see or feel Crete. Therefore, in my opinion, the existence of islands stimulated the colonization of Europeans, stimulated the migration of peasants in southern China, and did not stimulate the migration of Africans and indigenous peoples of North and South America.
These are all geographical reasons, but there are also cultural reasons. My understanding is that in 15th-century China, people thought China had everything we wanted. Why are we sending out fleets? Those fleets will only bring us back white giraffes. Those fleets are expensive, so why waste so much money on white giraffes? And Europe needed fleets to bring back spices, because european meat at that time, without refrigerators, smelled and tasted bad, and Europeans needed spices to cover up the bad smell of meat, so the Europeans eventually sent convoys to India and then to Southeast Asia. My answer is a bit verbose, and that's part of the reason I see people in different parts of the world making differences in immigration.
Host: So, Xiang Biao, I know that you are a scholar who studies immigration, and you are interested in many different kinds of immigrants, including domestic and international immigrants, skilled and unskilled immigrants. And you also mentioned that it's important that we look not only at individual immigrants, but also at the infrastructure of immigrants as a whole. In addition to the fluid infrastructure, I want to know what you think about immigration as the basic driving force of civilization, especially in today's world, with COVID-19 and many other social and academic issues.
Xiang Biao: My answer is hardly comparable to what Jared said. It's definitely a fascinating topic, especially the role that Jared talks about in the islands that spark people's desires that I've never thought of before. Jared is talking about ocean-going migration, and we know that in Africa and the Americas, in their north and south, there is a lot of land migration — at least according to recent archaeological studies, there have been very long-distance land migrations in North America. As far as I know, this still cannot be fully explained. How can people go so far with very limited means under very poor living conditions? It's as if they can expect to be helped along the way, or as if they expect to be welcomed at some imaginary destination. That is, incredible networks of exchanges have been established within the continents. So this actually raises another very interesting question, namely ocean migration and land migration, which are organized differently. Actually it comes back to your problem, infrastructure. They built different infrastructures. As we all know, China's Silk Road was largely a eurasian flow route, which stretched west to Europe. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was after the Song Dynasty that the flow of the ocean began to become very important. When the Ottoman Empire was crushed by European powers, Eurasia was almost in a mess, and the flow of land was not as smooth as before. Therefore, the flow of the ocean as a link becomes dominant. There has been a lot of discussion about this. Modern capitalism is also largely based on fluidity linked by the ocean, including military mobility and naval power under the deep sea, which is absolutely essential to global dominance. I don't know how to explain the role of mobility in civilization, but for me, mobility is important because it is a struggle between the strong for dominance and the struggle for freedom for the weak.
Throughout history, a very important motivation for mobility has been to escape tyrant rule and to a new world where people could exercise their freedom. Colonialism was not an escape, but in reality, it was the mass exodus of persecuted Europeans into the so-called New World. In everyday life, we know that flight is a very important motivation for mobility, which leads to the formation of various societies, including the formation of ethnic minorities, and so on. In my understanding, mobility is very important for civilization because it is a way of fighting.
Finally, back to the new crown epidemic, under the epidemic, today's mobility is really qualitatively different from the previous era, because the current flow is strictly regulated, controlled, and assisted by control, not only policies, but also various technical equipment. So we have so-called illiquid infrastructure, through which technical social systems normal mobility can come to an abrupt halt in an emergency. This illiquid infrastructure also refers to a system that can redistribute liquidity. For example, they can bring large numbers of citizens to their homes and quarantines to curb the spread of the virus. But at the same time, they encourage the rapid movement of a small number of people, such as workers in key positions, and essential labor such as couriers and medical workers. This ability to redistribute mobility among the population is new. This liquid infrastructure as well as the illiquid infrastructure has become more important than liquidity itself in the 21st century, so you could say this is a new phase of mobility civilization.
Host: Yeah, I remember 3 years ago, we didn't know what kind of world we were going to go into. Now, when we talk about the pandemic, it seems to have become part of everyday life. As a result, illiquid infrastructure is really making its way into everyone's daily lives.
Next we will turn to questions about tradition and modernity. Both have mentioned this before. Jared, in your book, especially The World Before Yesterday, presents a major analytical framework for the comparison between small societies and modern Western societies. You call them weirds of Western society. On the one hand, I agree that by moving away from our daily lives and the world we know, we can gain very rare insights. We cherish this and should indeed learn from the past. I very much agree that we should not simply romanticize traditional lifestyles, but should try to understand how we got to where we are today from a critical and comparative perspective. But what I care about is, in our contemporary world, as mobility has become a major feature, how has globalization and the mobility of people's ideas, commodities, changed the way we compare the traditional and the modern, the periphery and the center? Are these still valid analytical concepts today?
Diamond: It's also a good question, a thought-provoking one. It actually contains several different thought-provoking questions. I would like to divide this question into two parts, into two thought-provoking questions.
First, the difference between a traditional small society and a large society with hundreds or billions of people. For example, the society of New Guinea, where I have been working since 1964, is different from the modern large society. In the New Guinean society where I work, a typical New Guinean village has a population of between 50 and 200 people and does not have a strong leader. One could argue that New Guinean society is so different from my Los Angeles society, what exactly can I learn from New Guinea that I can use in Los Angeles? The truth is, what I learned in New Guinea has shaped the way I live in Los Angeles.
For example, I became a father at the age of 50 and I didn't think much about children until then. So when my wife gives birth to our twin sons, the template for raising the kids is not those American kids I never paid attention to, but New Guinea kids. In New Guinea, children are raised by giving them as much freedom as possible, and parents allow children to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't endanger their lives. This means that New Guinean children make their own choices by the time they are 5 years old, and they negotiate with adults. I remember a 5 year old New Guinea kid holding my hand and taking me down a trail because he thought I was scared. Another 10-year-old New Guinean child negotiated with me that he wanted to go abroad to study birds for a month, and he did not ask for his parents' consent. So I raised my own children in the free way I saw in New Guinea.
Let's take another example of health. In the United States, about 10 percent of Americans have diabetes. In New Guinea, no one has traditionally suffered from diabetes. Why? It's well worth learning. Because diabetes is an unfortunate disease. What can we learn from New Guineans to prevent us Americans and a new generation of Chinese from developing diabetes? It has to do with how people live, eat, and keep their bodies active.
That's the first half of your brief question about what we can learn from people who look so different from us. The second half of the issue is about globalization. Globalization, in some ways, has changed the rules of the world. The globalization I am talking about here is not only the globalization of transportation, but also the global problem, that is, people are aware of the problems facing the whole world. It's something new.
After World War I, pneumonia spread around the world, but it spread slowly, and COVID-19 spread very quickly around the world. For the first time ever, people around the world recognized that we face a global problem and that we need a global solution. But COVID-19 is a relatively minor issue, and at worst, it will kill 2% of the world's population. Because the COVID-19 death rate is 2 percent, COVID-19 has the potential to claim 150 million lives. But the world also faces far more serious problems than COVID-19, especially climate change. Climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution. The five economies of China, the United States, India, Japan and the European Union account for 62 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, so if China, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and India can agree on a policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, we can put pressure on the remaining 38 percent of the carbon dioxide emitters to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions as well.
As we all know, there is also competition between China and the United States. But the survival of China and the survival of the United States, and the survival of the world, will depend on mutual cooperation between China and the United States, as well as cooperation with the European Union, India, and Japan, to solve global climate change, to cooperate in resource depletion, and to cooperate in solving inequality.
These are my sincere responses to two of your thought-provoking questions.
Moderator: Xiang Biao, do you have anything to respond to about this?
Xiang Biao: I don't think I can say much. Globalization has an impact on all of us. I don't know if Jared agrees with that, but I think today we are facing a very peculiar state of globalization. First, at the technical level, global connectivity has reached an unprecedented level. Secondly, at the ideological or emotional level, there are deep doubts about globalization in different parts of the world. Third, as you articulated, the need for conscious global collaboration is more urgent than ever.
What I want to say here is that right now we seem to be facing certain contradictions.
Previously, around 1500, when Europe began to colonize abroad or explore overseas, the world was connected in an organized way, but this was largely achieved through competition, confrontation, self-interest-driven trade, and spontaneous immigration. Then we went through the war, we built the United Nations, and so on. Over the past few centuries, we have tried to build a world society and set up specific mechanisms to guarantee a certain sense of order. But somehow, I don't know if you agree, today's situation is different than it used to be. First, we know that global connectivity based on competition and self-interest-driven trade and exchange has reached a dead end. In fact, due to ecological protection and sustainability concerns, many production and trade activities are likely to return to the local area. Secondly, coordination and cooperation have become more important. However, we see that it lacks a foundation, even with all these international institutions, but I think in fact they are all in a rather deep crisis right now, unless we are able to make a major reform of the United Nations in the coming years, but I don't know exactly how to achieve that.
As a result, the global social architecture is in a difficult situation, and the need for cooperation is actually more urgent than ever. So, can we say that this is a new global era? Do you agree with this assessment?
Item soaring
Diamond: It's a new globalization, and it's happening in many ways, in the way you mentioned, and through immigration.
In China, there is archaeological evidence that there is a link between Chinese 450,000 years ago and Chinese today. A 450,000-year-old fossil of a "Peking Man" has a feature of an Inca bone on the head, which is a unique way of connecting skulls. Today's Chinese also have Inca bones. And teeth. If I put my finger behind my teeth, I can feel the posterior surface of my teeth bulging outward. In China, northerners who stick their fingers behind their teeth will feel that their teeth are sunken like a shovel. But the posterior surface of the teeth of southern Chinese, like that of Europeans, protrudes outward. 450,000-year-old Chinese also had those shovel-like posterior surfaces of teeth, suggesting that the genes of Chinese have been going on for more than 450,000 years.
This is not the case in the United States. Every American today is a descendant of immigrants, even native Indians immigrated 13,000 years ago, and other Americans immigrated from about 1610 onwards. Take my personal family and my wife's family, for example, my father was born in what is now the European country of Moldova, which was part of Russia at the time. You just mentioned the important role of communication networks in facilitating population migration, and my father was taken by his parents to the border between Russia and the Habsburg Empire when he was two years old. By some means, the grandparents crossed Europe with their father, who was still a baby, to the German city of Bremen. We don't know how they did it, and my grandparents had never left Russia before. How did they cross the Habsburg Empire and the German Empire? It may be that there is a network that helps immigrants. Eventually my father's family arrived in Bremen, and later they took a boat to the United States. My grandfather ran a laundromat and he didn't go to school, so my father had to figure out how to go to school on his own. My wife Mary's parents are from Poland, and they came to the United States three years after World War II and had to learn the American system. Mary grew up in the United States, but her parents were Polish and did not understand the American system. In the United States, there are many people from different cultural backgrounds, and you can see a lot of Asians, especially in California. I have a lot of Chinese friends who have had a big impact on my life. Introducing my wife Mary and I are a female friend from China, and we meet her every year on Thanksgiving. In my classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, more than half of my students are from China, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.
Moderator: I want to go back to Jared's point on COVID-19, you just mentioned COVID-19 and how we should join forces, the United States, China, the European Union to fight a global crisis like global warming and COVID-19. But I wonder what role developing countries like India, Indonesia or New Guinea should play in such a global crisis.
Diamond: What role do developing countries play in global crises? They play a direct role, because most of the countries in the world are developing countries.
The so-called developed countries, if we use the rough terms "developed and developing countries" (distinction), refer to the more economically advanced countries, such as the European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia, China is also increasingly joining the ranks. Their combined population is less than half of the world's population. More than half of the world's population is still developing.
In the Indian subcontinent (i.e., the South Asian subcontinent) – I mean not just the country of India, but also India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka– the total population of the Indian subcontinent is comparable to that of China. Africa has more than 1 billion people and Latin America has nearly 1 billion people. What role do India, African countries and other developing countries play in the world? They represent the majority of the world's citizens.
Consider the problem the world faces now: The rate of consumption, the rate at which we Americans and Europeans consume water, electricity, metal resources and food, is unsustainable. The current world no longer has sufficient resources for continued consumption in the current developed world. However, Americans and Europeans tell Africans, tell Indians that as long as you work hard, you can live the American way of life. No, that's not possible. Because the world doesn't have enough resources. Americans are extremely wasteful.
If the people of India and Africa reach the same rate of consumption, given that there are about 7.5 billion people in today's world, developing countries reaching the consumption rate of European and American countries is equivalent to feeding 90 billion people at the current consumption rate, and today's world is barely able to feed 7.5 billion people, how will it feed 90 billion people?
All of this suggests that for a stable world by 2050, you will have to reduce the rates of consumption in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. And it must be more equitable, with people in Africa and India raising their standards of living and Europe and the United States remaining unchanged. Many Americans say we don't sacrifice our standard of living. In fact, we don't have to sacrifice our standard of living, we just have to stop wasting because it's too bad in America.
So, in 50 years' time, I think if we want to have a happy future, we must create a world where the standard of living and consumption levels are more equal between Europe, China, India, Africa and the United States. If equity is not achieved, then we face an unstable world.
Moderator: Yes! I think one of the current debates about climate change and other global issues is that developing countries have never benefited from industrialization, and people in poor areas have never reached the level of consumption that Americans are currently consuming, but now they have to pay the price. Is that right? We have to reduce our consumption rates around the world, which is a very interesting topic that leads us to think about how we can reduce waste together.
Teacher Xiang Biao, I have one more question for you. You just mentioned globalization and the current contradictions surrounding it, especially as we have to deal with different types of global crises. There is a diminished need for collaboration, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where different approaches and different ideas emerge to explore how we can move further from the COVID-19 pandemic era. Do you think COVID-19 has provided us with an opportunity to come together and be prepared for other global crises, even existential crises? Do you think this is a good opportunity for us?
Xiang Biao: It can be a good opportunity because we can learn a lot from this crisis.
For example, as Jared mentioned, it goes straight to the core issues and makes us realize how close our relationship is. It is almost impossible for a country to fight an epidemic alone, even if it has not yet become a global epidemic. Fighting the pandemic alone is very difficult. This crisis will therefore be an important lesson to inform our future global action. But at the same time, there are other things going on in the world. I'm not at all optimistic that the world will become more collaborative in the coming years. The campaign against climate change is already on the agenda. As different parts of the world are rearmament, the military axis of the United States and the rest of the world has returned on a large scale, and it is now a global problem.
What can we do? I would like to return to the question of the role of the Global South that you mentioned earlier, which can be very important. The modern narrative does present us with a rather distorted picture that everyone should aspire to have the way of life that Europeans or Americans do. But we know that historically, this way of life was built on guns and germ colonization. It is morally problematic and ecologically unsustainable. Thus, the mission of the Global South is actually to provide a global answer. How can we do this? We've had characters like Gandhi who I think is a very creative thinker, a visionary. In China and Japan at the time, there were people like Tae-yan Zhang and Yoshinori Takeuchi, who were deeply critical of so-called Western industrial civilization and tried to imagine another way of organizing our personal and public lives. We can revive that tradition.
So there is one great thing to be done for the enormous task that intellectuals should undertake, and that is to develop the cultural self-confidence of the global South, to call on figures like Gandhi to stand up and declare: You have all this material wealth, but we are not interested. Our sense of well-being, our sense of gain, is different from yours. We have not seen such phenomena. I think that may sound unfriendly, but I'm afraid it's a revolution that has to start at the conceptual level. Then we can try to curb the development of militarization and the terrible axis of military industry, as well as a new enthusiasm for war. Personally, I would never like to see war in the short term.
Then there are the institutional issues of the Global South. Jared mentioned the South Asian continent, which was part of my research. Look at Pakistan, Sri Lanka, they are all in deep crisis. How can we achieve the unity of these societies and then try to find a way out for the future? This is a huge challenge. One possible solution is that the major powers should stop interfering in the internal affairs of the countries of the global South, which could be a starting point. Of course, this is another issue that we can discuss. I would say that we have to have a very cool head. I don't think the next few years will be easy, and we need to do some deep critical thinking, advocacy and debate.
Moderator: Jared, would you like to respond?
Diamond: I'm willing to respond because you're asking a key question that bothers not only you, it's bothering me. How can the world be more collaborative? What is the situation now? A major war is taking place – a war between Ukraine and Russia . Even before that, the sense of competition around the world was unusually strong. In the face of so much non-cooperation, so much competition and actual aggression, it is easy to be pessimistic, what reason do we have to be hopeful? If we have no hope, and if we have no reason to be hopeful, we should jump off the bridge now.
So, what reason do we have to be hopeful? What might make us collaborate more? Believe it or not, I think COVID-19 may make us more collaborative. Why? Because COVID-19 is a more pressing threat than the greater threat posed by climate change and resource depletion. COVID-19 can quickly claim human lives. However, the biggest problems we face are issues like climate change. Climate change will not take human life in two weeks or two days, it will take years to indirectly kill people through the spread of famine, tsunamis and disease. COVID-19 is a more efficient teacher than climate change. It warns us that we face a global problem that requires a global solution. Does this mean that the world has come together, with countries of the South and the North working together, and China, Europe and the United States cooperating to share vaccines and vaccinate people in every country? Not yet, but it's moving in that direction. Because now with outbreaks in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and China, it is clear that the world will not be safe until every country can safely protect against COVID-19.
COVID-19 is a more vivid teacher than climate change. I hope the COVID-19 pandemic will teach the world that we must work together. China, the European Union, and the United States will have to cooperate on vaccines, share vaccines with each other, and share vaccines with countries in the global South.
Once we learn the lessons of cooperation from COVID-19, I hope we can learn to learn from each other as well, as well as in addressing climate change and resource depletion.
That's why I remain cautiously optimistic. But if you ask me how optimistic I am? I would say: I think there's a 51% chance that we're going to achieve a satisfactory solution, and there's a 49% chance that we're going to achieve a less than satisfactory solution. But we have a chance, not a chance.
Moderator: I think we all agree with this part. Let's move on to the next step, which is writing about history and society. Xiang Biao, I remember once you mentioned that as an ethnographer, one of the most beautiful moments was a moment of disappointment, because in that moment you found a crack between different kinds of concepts, expectations and reality. I found it very interesting and inspiring because I took a lot of inspiration from the ethnographic knowledge we encountered in fieldwork. Therefore, we can call it an anthropological imagination. But what I learned from Jared's book is a different kind of imagination, perhaps I might call it the imagination of biogeography. Because as you just mentioned, we are really amazed by the large-scale and large-scale themes in his book, the temporal scale, the spatial scale. I think this is a very important perspective that is quite lacking in social anthropology today. In the discussion of anthropology, and in a lot of discussion about human and non-human interactions, we see the importance of the biogeographic imagination, which also plays a fairly important role in our research and imagination today. I don't know if you agree with that?
Xiang Biao: I think Jared agrees with that, he was indeed a great pioneer and an example of expanding our horizons to a global, long historical scope. I think what you said is important, and the reasons are obvious. Because we all realize now that relationships are directly shaped by the relationships between people and nature and between people and things, we do need to combine them. Moreover, it is important to understand social phenomena from a long-term historical perspective. Again, Jared's book is very important. It is indeed reshaping the public's imagination of our own existence, of our past and future. But just as importantly, it is inherently controversial in its definition, which also means that there are many ways to look at things in the long run. Chinese readers may not necessarily be familiar with it, but they know that there are other historians and political economists trying to tell global history from different perspectives.
I think that's also important. This may be different from Jared's idea. I don't think history can be a science because, fundamentally, history is a human activity— unless it's the evolutionary history of nature, that's another matter. But if it is a social history, it needs to be defined as the history of who it is. The history of the conquerors and the history of the victors cannot be the history of the victims, the history of the defeated.
I mention this because if history is not a science, then for me history is a moral story with a very important function that empowers people to understand where they are and how to act. Therefore, we need to give a sense of power to people like Ari, and a sense of power to people in Africa to historical narratives. According to certain versions of history, they were outside the centers of food production, outside the centers of global domination, and to some extent they became ruled for various environmental reasons.
But what is their moral place in human history? That's why I mentioned Zheng He's voyage to the West. According to the current historical narrative, Zheng He's voyage missed the opportunity, because colonization, expansion, developed industry, and the extraction of raw materials were considered the driving force of history. But this is a version of history. If you look at the peoples of Latin America, Africa, especially the indigenous peoples and Australian aborigines who were almost extinct like Hawaii or the Mayan Empire, history is the history of rules, the history of barbarism. So, how do we have a diverse narrative? I think we can give a sense of power and purpose to those who are not at the center of history. Then they can stand up and say: This is my understanding, this is the way of life I have chosen. So I stress once again how important Jared's book is that he raises all these questions that could trigger other narrative approaches to emerge and enrich our understanding of humanity.
Host: Jared, do you agree that history is a science, or that history is a moral story?
Diamond: I'm trying to make history more scientific than historians are after. This brings us to the question you raised. There are such great differences between peoples that they do not present the universal lessons of history. But I see the potential for universal historical lessons. I look at it from two perspectives:
The first angle is my work in New Guinea. The people of New Guinea are very different from the Americans on the surface, unlike the Chinese, unlike any people on earth. Until recently, New Guineans used stone tools instead of metal tools. They have no government, no writing, they are constantly fighting, they are cannibals. When I was bird watching with New Guineans in the jungle, we were always talking. The New Guinean asked me: How many wives do you have? How many pigs did you send when you married your daughter-in-law? How long do you stay with each of your wives? New Guineans seem very different from us. Despite the differences I faced when I was in New Guinea, I could understand them and they could understand me. Still, there are fundamental human traits in common between New Guineans and Americans. This, to me, implies the universality of history.
The second angle comes from the Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides is often considered the first historian to record the war between Athens and Sparta in the 4th century BC, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is still considered the greatest history ever recorded. As a universal historical text, Thucydides began to recount the Peloponnesian War, the war that broke out between Athens and Sparta. How did Thucydides describe it? There was a distant island that seemed unimportant to us, and it fell into conflict with Corinth, and then Athens joined the fight against Corinth, while Sparta joined the ranks of protecting Corinth, and the result was a war between empires. Why did war break out between empires? Thucydides pointed out that this was due to a lack of clear signals. The Athenians did not clearly indicate where their limits were, nor did the Spartans indicate their limits. In modern times, when World War II broke out, because europeans did not declare to Hitler what their limits were, after Hitler invaded Poland, he was shocked, he thought that Britain and France would not oppose, after all, Britain and France did not give a clear signal. Thucydides demonstrates some of these universal messages: If you don't signal, the other person will be surprised by your behavior. This is a universal lesson in history. But my experience in New Guinea has taught me that the people who eat their dead loved ones instead of burying them, the people who sell pigs for their daughters-in-law, are also people I understand very well, despite the differences.
So, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can turn history into science.