Judge thou my course

John Cornwall

GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL: A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYBODY FOR THE LAST 13,000 YEARS by Jared Diamond Cape, £18.99, pp. 400 Do you know why the keyboards of the world are configured according to the QWERTY arrangement (so named after the left-most six letters in its upper row)? You always thought it was designed for maximum ease and speed. But apparently this familiar layout was dreamt up in 1873 in a bid to slow down typists by scattering the commonest letters across the keyboard and concentrating them on the left — nor- mally a difficult task for right-handers. The reason for this contradictory aim was that pre-1873 typewriters jammed if adjacent keys were struck speedily. Later, when more efficient non-jamming machines were constructed, the QWERTY was so solidly entrenched in the habits of hundreds of million of typists and typing teachers that manufacturers blocked all moves for a change.

That's just a taste of the huge circuit of weird and paradoxical factoids dispensed by Jared Diamond in his quirky, ambitious new book.

Diamond tells us that he was inspired to write his 13,000-year history after meeting a local politician called Yali on the beach of a tropical island in New Guinea. Yali had asked him: 'Why is that you white peo- ple developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?'

Good question. Somewhat expanded, and viewed from a Western standpoint, the enquiry is about the reasons why Europe and the Near East gave rise to modernity, capitalism and science, early and first, while Africa, Australasia and the Americas lagged late and, for them, disastrously behind.

Diamond thinks he has the answer:

Authors are regularly asked by journalists [he comments, as if the two species are separated by an unbridgeable gulf] to summarise a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: 'History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples, environments, not because of biological differences among peoples them- selves.'

From this prescriptive beginning there follows a breathtakingly self-opinionated history of the world such as only a full-time physiologist might write — for that is Professor Diamond's normal day job, which, I venture to suggest, he should emphatically not abandon.

Diamond is all too conscious that there are other, more conventional arguments arguments that he will obliterate by broad brushstrokes from his lofty overview of the gargantuan canvas. 'Compressing 13,000 years of history on all continents into a 400-page book,' he informs us, 'works out to an average of about one page per conti- nent per 150 years, making brevity and sim- plification inevitable.' Yet this very compression he assures us brings a com- pensatory benefit: Tong-term comparisons of regions yield insights that cannot be won from short-term studies of single societies.'

Diamond's thesis is a disputatious repu- diation of the notion, mooted as far as I am aware by no sane person nowadays, that inequality in human fortunes is a conse- quence of racial or genetic inequality. Inequality, he argues, is a result of the dis- proportionate resources available to people across the globe. Regions that enjoyed the largest quantity of domesticable wild ani- mals and plants, and with geographical niches appropriate for cultural innovation, had a permanent advantage over others. In time they were able to colonise, enslave or destroy less endowed communities through their guns, germs, and steel. Germs, inci- dentally, were generated and spread, in Diamond's view, by the possession of domesticated animals.

Diamond has a wonderful fund of eccen- tric information, which makes for a refresh- ingly idiosyncratic romp through history.

But he can only urge the narrow scope of his essentially Darwinian overview — with its obsessed emphasis on advantageous niches — by caricaturing the extraordinary complexity and pluralism of alternative contributory causes.

An example is his cursory aside on the Great Man theory of history. Once again he has one of those highly significant trivial factoids to hand. In the summer of 1930, he tells us, Hitler was a passenger in a car that collided with a lorry. The lorry braked just in time to avoid crushing Hitler to death.

Diamond makes much of the fact that 'the form of an eventual World War II would probably have been quite different if the truck driver had braked one second later,' but then the muddle deepens. Whizzing back through history like Jimmy on his Magic Carpet, he asks: did Alexander the Great 'nudge the course of western Eura- sia's already literate, food-producing, iron- equipped states?' Ah yes, he concedes, but

he had nothing to do with the fact that western Eurasia already supported literate, food-producing, iron-equipped states at a time when Australia still supported only non- literate hunter-gatherer tribes lacking metal tools.

For all that, he lamely concludes: 'It remains an open question how wide and lasting the effects of idiosyncratic individu- als on history really are.' Ditto say Ito that. No less confused and understated are his speculations about a 'history as science'. With the consummate certitude of the autodidact he asserts that

the difficulties historians face in establishing cause-and-effect relations in the history of human societies are broadly similar to the difficulties facing astronomers, climatologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists.

The root problem, he tells us, is the impos- sibility of performing in history, as in these other disciplines,

replicated, controlled experimental interven- tions, the complexity arising from enormous numbers of variables, the resulting unique- ness of each system

and so on. Diamond is of course, alluding Judge thou my courseto the currently fash- ionable notion, prompted by chaos theory, that the flap of butterfly wing in a Brazilian rain forest could cause a tidal wave in Bangladesh, or whatever. The impossibility of finding empirically verifiable connections between butterfly wings and the tide of human history does not stop aspirant biologist-historians from hankering after such equations. The trou- ble is, though, that the hankering encour- ages not history but ahistorical, astrological kitsch: the fateful congruence of macro- geographical constellations, mysteriously but indissolubly linked to the determinist realm of our molecules and atoms (or is it the other way about? It matters not a jot). Meanwhile the intermediate world of con- scious persons and peoples, with their rela- tionships, hopes, dreams and loves, vices and virtues, gets lost in between.