英文エッセイに挑戦・・・２

My Impressions of "Guns, Germs and Steel"



The main idea of the writer, Jared Diamond, in this book is that humans who were able to do cultivation and domestication owing to the place they live in could develop their society. All the environmental conditions for this development were met only in the Eurasian Continent. Therefore, the determination of the social growth indicator did not depend on the abilities which people originally had but depended on the regions where people had immigrated in ancient times. The aim of his writing is to prove this theory. Diamond utterly excluded racial elements to let readers understand his intention clearly.



Humans could escape from the historical setting, in which “they must work only to survive”, owing to farming and the taming of animals and the subsequent improvement of their lives through the accumulation of surplus food. According to Diamond, this improvement led these people to invade and reign over others’ territories. As a matter of course, the fact that the strong survive and the impotent are selected is true, following the law of natural selection. But, until which era can this fact be adopted in human society? The Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire; people today would not criticize those historical conflicts with the comment that they massacred people over and over again for the purpose of invasion and domination. If that is the case, how should it be accounted for the fact that since 1500, European countries had made raids into the New World and slaughtered aboriginal people, as they had in Africa or Southeast Asia? The time when Europeans infringed on the American Continents might have been the historical turning point, something arbitrary having been insinuated into the law of natural selection.



Diamond writes that the Eurasian Continent was the ideal place to provide all of the conditions for the development. He says that European countries dominated the American Continents but it was unattainable the converse would occur. Europe was not only superior in the Eurasian Continent. There also existed China or Arabia there. Why did they not try to conquer other countries? Were there not different characteristics and religious concepts between them and Europeans as well?



In fact, he himself indicates in the epilogue, that it can be said there were some primary factors behind the advancement of Europe; like the rise of the merchant class or capitalism, the spiritual climate to handsomely support patent rights, the abolition of absolute monarchies and the traditional ideological chain; Greece—Judea—Christianity, which stresses the importance of positivism. In regard to China which did not attempt a conquest of the world, he bases his theory on the fact that it has had political homogeneity throughout history since it first achieved unification in 221 BC. On the contrary, in Europe, there were hundreds of kings who opposed each other at all times. Diamond said that Europeans might not have colonized the American Continents if an emperor had all the lands of Europe under his sway. Concerning religious concepts, he asks himself why China did not exploit religion for conquest while Europe and West Asia profitably employed Christianity or Islam, which compel non-Christian people to the conversion, for colonization or subjugation. Furthermore, he admits that native uniqueness unrelated to the environment originally did not influence society but gradually produced an effect on social development. He confesses that a conclusion has not yet been asserted, though.



In my view, Diamond could not give an answer to Yari, a New Guinean politician, after all, whose question was why New Guinea had been colonized by Europe and why, even now there is an imbalance in wealth around the world. I go along with his theory regarding occurrences in the distant past but the vital point of the confirmation is to explain what led Europe towards the subjugation of colonies. The theory of “farming and domestication” would not be enough to explicate all of the things having happened in the American Continents or other places. He remarkably considers avoiding “racial discrimination” so that he desperately tries to remove gaps between races from resolving the history of the human development. The existent differences between races do not, however, directly connect with discrimination. Discrimination would result from dogmatic thinking about “what is correct” or “what is superior”. In other words, it is significant not to link “differences” with discrimination and elimination.



Diamond also mentions that hunting-gathering lives are not always more severe than agricultural ones. Even now, food producers who live more comfortable lives than hunter-gatherers exist only in developed nations. Therefore, “the advancement” would be achieved by exploiting food producers. Exploitation makes it possible to feed people who are not engaged in food production. In short, there is the fact that the fed side usually exercises influence over the feeding side. Now, it is becoming rare that a race controls other races with armed aggression, but the structure, in which the developed countries have been going into developing countries with capitalism and then exploiting them with low wages or something under the market economy system, still remains.