Why did Western civilization overwhelm other civilizations? Why did the Europeans conquer the American continent and not the other way around? Is it ethnic, institutional, cultural, or some other?
In this seminal work, Guns, Germs and Steel, the famous scholar Jared Diamond uses archaeological, biological and historical evidence from the perspective of "evolution" to reveal the environmental factors that determine the development of human society and history, and to elucidate the reasons behind the modern world and many inequalities.
In Diamond's view, the reason why Western civilization has been ahead of other civilizations in modern times is the result of evolution, which is the so-called "evolutionary civilization theory". Moreover, the author focuses on answering 3 questions in this book:
First, why did the Europeans conquer the Americas and not the Americans conquer Europe?
Second, why did agricultural civilizations emerge in some areas and stagnate in primitive societies for a long time in others?
Third, why did modern technology begin in the West?
These three questions are stacked on top of each other, and ultimately answer questions such as "Why has Western civilization overpowered other civilizations in modern times?" Diamond's answer is: all this is a big luck, just because the geographical conditions in Europe are too good.
Is there any reason for him to say that?
1. Why were Europeans able to conquer the Americas?
On November 16, 1532, the Spanish adventurer Pizarro landed on the coast of Peru with his troops, preparing to conquer the Inca Empire of 6 million people, with a total of 168 men – 62 cavalry, 106 infantry. They were fighting an army of 80,000 men led by the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, with as many as 2,000 soldiers in front of them alone, more than 10 times that of Pizarro.
But the outcome of the war was astonishing, with more than 7,000 Inca soldiers killed, and even the Inca emperor was captured and killed by Pizarro.
A small number of 169 people destroyed a large empire with a long history, why did the Europeans have so much ability at that time?
In fact, Pizarro is not a famous player, he is just an illiterate. Pizarro's army had more than a dozen arquebusiers, and according to the technology of the time, a arquebus gun could only fire a bullet in 1 minute, which was of little practical combat value, but it was enough to frighten the Inca soldiers. The Inca soldiers had no metal weapons and went to battle with large sticks, which had no effect on the Spanish soldiers' chainmail.
In addition, there were no horses in the Americas at that time, and the Inca soldiers saw the Spaniards' war horses, thought they were devils, and were so frightened that they pulled their legs and ran, and the Spanish cavalry calmly chased after them and killed their opponents one by one.
In addition, Pizarro chose a very good time, the Inca Empire had just been attacked by smallpox, which was also brought to the Americas by the Spaniards from Europe. The old emperor of the Inca Empire died of this plague, and after his death, several sons fought to the death for the throne, and the national strength was greatly weakened.
It can be seen that the Spaniards conquered the Inca Empire by guns, germs and steel, but why did the vast American continent not have these three things?
2. The American continent and Eurasia have taken completely different paths
Native Americans are thought to be descendants of immigrants from Eurasia 14,000 to 20,000 years ago, when the overall earth's temperature was much lower than it is now, and the arctic and antarctic ice was thicker, so the sea level was lower than it is now. Today's Bering Strait was at sea level at that time, a land bridge about 1600 kilometers wide, from which people traveled from Eurasia to the Americas, and later multiplied and became indigenous.
After arriving in the Americas, these people began to go on a wild safari, and the Americas originally had wild horses, but they killed them all and ate them. The same madness occurred in Australia, when Australia was also connected to Asia by a land bridge, and as a result, all australian wild horses were killed and eaten, and even all animals weighing more than 100 pounds were doomed.
About 14,000 years ago, the Earth's temperature rose, arctic and antarctic ice melted, sea levels rose, and land bridges were submerged. Those in the Americas and Australia were thus geographically isolated, never to return to Eurasia, and embarked on different paths of civilization.
About 5500 years ago, horses were domesticated in the Eurasian steppes and became one of the important domestic animals. Eurasians are very lucky because of the abundance of wildlife, and 13 of the 14 large animals domesticated by humans have ancestors from Eurasia.
In addition to the alpaca, it is also the only large animal that has been domesticated in the Americas, but the alpaca cannot be artificially bred, the camel cannot be heavy, and it is not allowed to be ridden.
In addition to 14 large animals, humans have tried to domesticate other wild animals, but to this day, we have not been able to domesticate more than one.
There is evidence that cattle, sheep, pigs and other animals are domesticated by humans in different regions, which shows that people choose to choose, and these ten or so animals are most suitable for poultry and domestic animals.
However, raising animals also comes at a cost, because livestock and poultry transmit diseases to humans, such as measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox from cattle, influenza from pigs and ducks, whooping cough from pigs and dogs, and malaria from chickens and ducks. People and animals have been in contact for thousands of years, countless people have died because of this, and those who have survived have passed natural selection and are more resistant.
In 1493, after Columbus discovered the New World, a large number of Europeans came to the Americas, and various infectious diseases followed.
People in Eurasia have been raising animals for many years, so these diseases are small cases for them, but unlike native Americans, they rarely raise livestock, have never encountered these germs, and have no immunity to them. In addition, the Americans are descendants of a small number of Eurasians who came from the Bering Land Bridge in those years, and their genetic similarity is high, so they all fall ill as soon as they fall ill, and the mortality rate is particularly high.
Some scholars estimate that from 1500 to 1590, 90% to 95% of Native Americans died of disease, there were 40 million natives on the American continent at the earliest, and by the time the United States was founded in 1776, the total number of Indians in North America was less than 150,000.
3. The superiority of geographical conditions makes agriculture in Eurasia particularly developed
The famous historian Toynbee once analyzed the 26 civilizations that appeared in human history and found that 25 of them were either extinct or stagnant for a long time, and only marine civilizations eventually entered modernization. Toynbee has his own explanation for this, but the book's author, Diamond, takes it as a matter of providence.
European civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, also between West Asia and North Africa, mainly referring to the two river basins and a series of fertile lands nearby, which is the birthplace of human agriculture. In addition to the Fertile Crescent Land, ancient China, the Americas, ancient India, ancient Ethiopia and other places also developed agriculture independently, but the time was relatively late, and it was not as prosperous as the Fertile Crescent Land.
How can the Fertile Crescent be so advantageous? Because of the abundance of plant species suitable for domestication here, of the 56 most valuable wild grasses in the world, 32 are in the Fertile Crescent, and no more than 10 in other regions.
Before the advent of agriculture, humans lived mainly by hunter-gatherers. Some people have calculated that collectors can fill their stomachs with only 2 hours of labor a day, which is much more comfortable than being a farmer, who can eat 150 kinds of plants, several times more than modern people. The gatherers went out every day to find food, and brought some delicious and easy-to-grow plants back to plant, and slowly there was agriculture.
Europeans like to eat wheat and beans, but at first, in order to facilitate the spread of seeds, wild wheat ears will automatically fall off when ripe, and wild pods will automatically crack when ripe, which makes harvesting very difficult. However, more than 10,000 years ago, the wild wheat and beans in the Fertile Crescent had a genetic mutation, and the ears of wheat and beans no longer fell to the ground, which provided conditions for large-scale planting.
In East Asia, rice and millet were bred Chinese in ancient times, but the protein of rice was not high enough compared to wheat and beans. Fortunately, Eurasia is horizontal and suitable for human migration, because at the same latitude, climate change is not large, and people are not prone to disease. In this way, wheat was introduced to China, and China's millet also spread to the West.
Compared with Eurasia, cultural exchanges between the Americas and Africa are not so easy. First of all, they are all longitudinal continents, Central America is very narrow, and Africa has the Sahara Desert, so there is not much exchange between different civilizations.
The Mexicans invented the wheel very early, but the Inca Empire did not use it until its demise, and the Inca Empire produced alpacas, and the Mexicans did not know, because they could not find livestock to pull the cart, so they could not use the wheels, so they had to be used as toys.
Ancient Americans bred corn, sweet potatoes, etc., but the protein in these two crops was significantly lower than the combination of "staple food and beans" in Eurasia. Although the Americas also formed large agricultural civilizations, their population density was far inferior to that of Europe and Asia. The low population density leads to less interaction and a low degree of social organization.
When European colonists came to the Americas, the vast majority of American societies had just reached the tribal stage, and only a few places had countries.
Many people may ask: Today's United States is a big agricultural country, the land is very fertile, why did the Indians not make full use of it? Because today's American agriculture uses seeds of fertile crescent crops, and the Americas did not have these seeds, plus if you want to convert the wasteland into farmland, you have to rely on livestock to cultivate the land, but the Indians do not have cattle and horses. Therefore, it is not that the Indians are lazy, but that the conditions in the Americas were not suitable for the development of agriculture.
From this, it can be understood why the illiterate Pizarro was able to scare the Incas into a daze, because the inca empire was too small in society, people did not often meet each other, and anti-deception technology naturally could not catch up with the Europeans.
Is this institutional, cultural or ethnic? Obviously, none of them, the key is the surrounding environment.
4. Why did modern technology begin in the West?
Since natural conditions determine the fate of different societies, why is the Fertile Crescent so good, but today it is lagging behind? China claims to be rich in land and resources, so why has it not really entered modernization?
First of all, the fertile crescent, after the cultivation of a variety of crops here, they were transplanted to Africa, Europe and India in large quantities, and the advantages of the fertile land were no longer prominent, but the disadvantages became more and more obvious - the lack of water resources, as the population increased, people had to build a large number of water canals and underground canals to maintain agricultural irrigation. However, the Fertile Crescent Land is flat on all sides and there is no danger to defend, and many great empires that have arisen here in history will come to ravage it, especially the Mongol Western Expedition, which completely destroyed the underground canal system. Coupled with years of farming, the fertile crescent has become difficult to provide for itself.
Speaking of ancient China, through the Silk Road, China was able to communicate with Central Asian civilizations, so the level of agriculture in ancient China was also very high, and it was only one step away from modernization. But the problem is that although the difference between the latitude of the north and south of China is large, the climate difference is not too big, people are convenient to travel, not easy to get sick, so ancient China can achieve centralized power, thus transforming into an island civilization with imperial power greater than everything, and in the island civilization, it is particularly prone to technological regression.
For example, the eunuch Zheng He was much stronger than the West at that time in terms of scale and level, but the Confucians, worried that the eunuchs had too much power, successfully persuaded the emperor to order the suspension of navigation, and the famous minister Liu Daxia even privately burned all the navigation materials that Zheng He had accumulated for many years. At the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties, China's artillery technology was ahead of the world, but the emperor was afraid of rebellion under his subordinates, and strictly forbade the manufacture and research of artillery, and by the end of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese was helpless in the face of Western artillery.
In contrast, the gap between the north and the south of Europe was too large, the population flowed very little vertically, even the powerful Roman Empire failed to occupy all of Europe, and Napoleon was defeated by his expedition to Russia at different latitudes.
In addition, the European land is relatively broken, there is no Yangtze River and Yellow River like China running through the north and south, and the longest Rhine River in Europe only flows through 9 countries, unable to reach Northern Europe. So Europe was divided into more than 1,000 small countries at most, and after thousands of years of war, it was difficult to merge into 32, and then split into more than 40.
The geographical situation of Europe determines that no one can achieve great unification, so it is also trapped in the dilemma of island civilization. The center of Europe was constantly changing, from the Republic of Venice to Switzerland, to the Netherlands, to England, and finally to modern civilization.
Many people may ask: Is it true that europe and the United States have cultivated great inventors such as Edison, Watt, and the Wright brothers, which are also determined by geographical conditions?
In the view of Diamond, the author of this book, this is indeed the case. Because Europe developed on the basis of the fertile crescent land, and did not regress like China, the social composition became more and more complex, and exchanges became more and more frequent, which promoted the progress of science.
It should be noted that inventions are rarely original and more the result of borrowing and transformation. In developed societies, originality will spread rapidly, and later generations will continue to transform and expand on this basis.
For example, Watt is an improved steam engine, not an invention; the story of Edison's invention of the light bulb, in fact, the light bulb was already there 30 years ago, and Edison just made a little change. When Edison invented the tape recorder, he didn't know what to do with it, so it can be seen that the demand is not to promote the invention of technology.
Today, the United States issues 70,000 new patent certificates each year, the vast majority of which will not be applied. Because technology is rarely born out of demand, more from hobbies, an impulse to improve and improve the original invention.
Therefore, scientific and technological breakthroughs require two prerequisites: first, the accumulation of technology itself; second, the ability to transform these technologies into products. And these two points are closely related to the complexity of society, and what determines the complexity of society? As has been repeatedly explained earlier, the main influencing factor is the environment.
5. Society is the product of adaptation to the environment
Speaking of which, you should understand the clues behind Diamond's account of human history, right? In his view, it is different environments that create different civilizations.
So, which elements of the environment play a decisive role in social evolution? Diamond listed four points: first, how many wildlife resources are available for domestication; second, whether it is convenient for internal communication; third, whether it is convenient for external communication; and fourth, how much the total population is.
Diamond believes that the density of hundreds of people per square kilometer is a tipping point, below which it is difficult to form a complex society, let alone achieve modernization, and only above this density is everything possible.
Why is population density so important? If a tribe has 20 people, there are 190 possibilities for the relationship between the two people, and if it is a tribe of 2,000 people, there are 1.999 million possibilities for the relationship between the two people, and it is clear that human instinct can no longer cope with this situation, and a system must be developed to manage, such as religion, morality, tradition, culture and even government.
The larger the population, the more likely the relationship is and the more difficult it is to maintain peace. Therefore, the larger the scale of society, the more institutional civilization is needed. Of course, institutional civilization also has a counter-effect, such as limiting social progress, periodic collapse, and so on.
Through this book, we understand that not only are living things the result of evolution, but that the development of society is also affected by the environment. In addition, we can also learn from history, once any country becomes an island, it will inevitably go anti-civilization and anti-rationality, no matter how rich and colorful our cultural traditions are, we should keep an open mind to accept others, because this is the foundation of self-development and preservation.
Edit | Ryozo
Reading on the road: PhDs from world-famous universities read a good book in 30 minutes.