I’m about 30 years late to this discussion, so I might have nothing new to say. Nevertheless, here are some stray thoughts with no quotes or citations. 

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Guns, Germs, and Steel rocked the world when it was published in 1997 and quickly became a monolith of popular history and science. My understanding is that Diamond, originally a biochemist, makes some big claims here that actual anthropologists find sweeping, questionable, and poorly supported. The book is not citationally dense. It is not good anthropology, so its popularity is sure to make experts in the field bristle. I cannot defend Diamond from the experts who criticize his search for “ultimate causes” or pick out where he has misrepresented their field’s findings or consensus. I cannot defend his conduct as a person. However, I do think that this book still has immense worth in the less specialized and more popular sphere, and to that end I’d like to defend it from its popular critics.

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It has come to pass that certain societies have dominated the world. They have colonized, displaced, or exterminated others. Diamond seeks to find the “ultimate causes” of these events in the environmental circumstances which different societies developed in. Is this search naïve in its breadth and ambition? Anthropologists will say yes, and I agree. Does this commitment to a materialist frame discount the numerous, sometimes inexplicable idiosyncrasies of the human cultures involved? Yes to that too. Diamond sticks to his search for the ultimate causes to a fault—he’s not about to heap conditions, caveats, and exceptions on the thing. This makes for good popular reading and bad scholarship. So be it. I respect Diamond’s willingness to push his ideas to failure, and I also respect the experts whose job it is to add the conditions, caveats, and exceptions to his claims. This is how public discourse should work. The real scientists might quibble over whether his thesis on the continental axes holds any water, but they’d be unlikely to argue that Diamond isn’t on the right track by examining environmental barriers to the diffusion of domesticates, technologies, and ideas. Diamond modifies and packages established ideas in such a way that is—though scholastically irresponsible—extremely valuable to popular audiences for their anti-racist potential. This was true in 1997, and remains true in 2024.

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As I mentioned, there are certainly blindspots in Diamond’s framework. I do think the search for ultimate causes is naïve and not very politically relevant—it has explanatory power but not much actionable political relevance. This is especially clear to me in his 2017 Afterword, where he tries to use the framework established in 1997 to explain the wealth outcomes of contemporary nations. In the Afterword, he de-emphasizes corrupt institutions and legacies of colonization to focus on geography once more, which I can say made me bristle as an amateur scholar. Diamond’s view of the contemporary world has a certain neoliberal naïveté. Each country is seems to be a wealth-producing unit free of multi-national systems of extraction, the bullying of superpowers, or the particulars of capital. He implies that all of these explanations for disparate outcomes are merely “proximate” factors, and the ultimate factors lay deeper in time and geography. He might be right about that, but I question the relevance of such a high bird’s-eye view of human history. It doesn’t seem very useful to describe contemporary geopolitics that way. As I said before, it is explanatory but not very actionable. The materialist approach Diamond takes in Guns, Germs, and Steel does imply a certain inevitability in the outcome of the world. This might not be very useful for contemporary politics, but its explanatory power is very useful for dispelling certain social darwinist and white supremacist myths. For that reason, I think this book is valuable, and I’m skeptical of claims that Diamond has inadvertently written something racist.

 

Some of Diamond’s popular critiques go something like this: 

 

Diamond certainly thinks he has written some sort of anti-racist treatise, and he does argue persuasively against common white supremacist ideas, but nobody was taking those seriously anyway, and Diamond doesn’t realize that his own book is obliviously racist in several ways. 

 

I’m very skeptical of this take, and considering it has generated quite a few thoughts regarding the implications of this book. To argue that this book is worth something, I’d like to establish something first: Yes, this book is an anti-racist treatise, and yes, the racist ideas that Diamond disproves are still prevalent today. It is still common for white supremacists to take a social darwinist stance towards world history. To the Nazis, Europeans came to dominate the world because some kind of innate European superiority allowed them to develop the complex societies and technologies to do so. Though Diamond’s authorial voice is not very sentimental, it is the aim of his entire project to categorically refute this idea with persuasive power. Few would argue he fails. But the critique I mentioned above trivializes the importance of this intervention: but nobody was taking those ideas seriously anyway… In fact, I can speak from experience that quite a few people still take social darwinist ideas like this seriously in 2024. Intellectuals who think otherwise are likely cloistered in socially liberal enclaves. There’s a good chance your dad or uncle still thinks things like this in private if not in public. Check out a few corners of Reddit. When a white survivalist YouTuber builds a wooden shack in the forest, the top comment is something like:

 

when you advance more in three days than Sub-Saharan Africa did in 10,000 years 

 

Yes, things are that bad. Because I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, I know that such comments are not only racist, but factually incorrect, and rely on strange assumptions about how human societies develop. Maybe your dad could serve to know the same thing. Step outside the liberal arts classroom for a second, and you’ll find there are a lot of dads out there, and you bet they’re registered to vote. You might say I’m centering white identity, here. How useful is a book that just convinces white people they aren’t superior? On the one hand, as I mentioned, the white dads are voters. On the other hand, I think it is just as worthwhile to demonstrate to curious people of color how off-the-mark social darwinist theories are. Basic humanist morals are a solid backbone for anti-racism already, but ideas which invalidate the very basis of popular social darwinist myths (which attack humanist ethics) can only serve to validate the project of anti-racism and drum up anti-racist fervor—for both people of color and those voting white dads!

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To defend Diamond’s anti-racism, we have to defend him from accusations of his own racism. Diamond’s book is anti-racist because it is anti-essentialist, which is both the strongest point in its favor and the thing which gets it in hot water with certain critics who think the book perpetrates its own racisms. Diamond’s anti-essentialist framework is fundamentally a materialist framework, and therefore it carries some of the ethically complex baggage of other materialist frameworks, which I will discuss. He begins the book by establishing that he refuses to believe that any race has some sort of essential nature to which they owe their particular history. Instead, the particulars of climate, geography, and material circumstance are to blame for why certain societies took certain trajectories. Diamond prefers materialist explanations to essentialist explanations. The simplest way to boil this down is Circumstances made the whites lucky, and everyone else got the short end of the stick. The critic will say that this appears sufficiently anti-racist on the surface, but has some problematic implications. This frame seems to prop up a general human nature rather than many essential natures, Diamond seems to imply that other peoples, given the same circumstances as the Europeans, might commit the same atrocities. In this framework, the critics say, the Europeans committed those atrocities almost by accident, or at least they did what would come naturally to any humans with the same tools as them. This has the unfortunate effect of exonerating modern and historical Europeans from any accountability in these historical atrocities. I find this interpretation of Diamond’s work dubious.

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This is very tricky territory. As we’ve established, the white supremacist position is an essentialist position: White people dominated the world because they were inherently superior, and deserved to. If the anti-racist is to totally refute this claim, they must refute each part: that white people are superior, and that they should have dominated other people. We reject the latter on moral grounds—we value the lives and experiences of those massacred and abused by European colonial projects. To reject the former claim, we must denounce racial essentialism. This means that white people did not develop the societies or technologies they did due to any essential nature. Diamond’s entire purpose is to demonstrate that the circumstances under which European societies developed are to blame for these developments, nothing special in the Europeans themselves. It also implies that the violence perpetrated by Europeans on other peoples was not due to anything special in the Europeans themselves. I think it goes without saying that colonization didn’t happen because white people have some kind of special genocide gene. It resulted from various social, personal, and technological pressures exerting themselves on the white colonizers. But does this not paint white people as passive actors in colonization? Are you saying that we scapegoat some general human nature, rather than the decisions of white colonizers? Does this open up the possibility for a Well, you would do it too if you could! No, no, and no.

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Exterminations, Exterminations

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For those racked by white guilt, scapegoating human nature is a tempting prospect. However, the fact of general human violence has been observed in every corner of the world. I will argue that this does not imply European colonizers are blameless. It is true that Diamond’s picture of the human race is not one of happy campers or fair conciliators. The two victims of human violence, is Diamond’s telling, are animals and other humans. He identifies exterminations of large mammals in the Americas and Australia by migratory hunter-gatherers; he also identifies major displacement, replacement, and extermination events perpetrated by humans on humans in Eurasia, Indonesia, and Africa. Critics regard these portrayals as problematic for multiple reasons.

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Regarding the animal exterminations, I have seen some criticize Diamond for this portrayal because they seem to think he is indicting Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians for the killings. Not only is the mass extermination of animals on three continents apparently atrocious, Diamond goes on to argue that if more large mammals were domesticated in America and Australia, those indigenous peoples would have had an edge against Europeans. Critics will say this paints both groups as mean and short-sighted, which is not the point at all. Blame often doesn’t figure in Diamond’s descriptions of events, especially here in this primordial scenario. It is natural for humans to seek food from any available source, and to pursue abundant sources. The extermination of large mammals in the Americas was the result of generations of early Native Americans doing what any human group would do. The same environmental pressures exerted themselves on Eurasians and Africans, though the results were different. Diamond notes that large African and Eurasian mammals likely had an edge against human hunters because they had evolved alongside them for thousands of years. In Australia and the Americas, the sudden arrival of migratory human hunters was likely a shock to the local ecology. The indigenous animals could not respond effectively, much as dodos could not and penguins would not respond effectively to human encroachments on their habitats. This does not frame those people as brutal or mean, but simply as people pursuing survival, which they were. Similarly, it does not frame those people as short-sighted, because as Diamond explains, short-term needs have almost always triumphed over long-term visions in human societies, including those of Europe. West Asian pastoralists didn’t domesticate the horse so that Spanish armies could ride down the Aztecs thousands of years later. The Spanish inherited the horse from the legacy of those pastoralists, and it happened to give them an edge in colonization many years later. Diamond makes it clear that Eurasian individuals and societies were no more far-sighted than any other group on the planet. This is perhaps the easiest charge of racism to refute, because it relies on a disingenuous understanding of Diamond’s points.

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On the topic of pre-colonization displacement and replacement events, some have said that by highlighting these events, Diamond indicts colonized people as violent by nature, or at least prone to the same kind of violence that Europeans would later meet on them. In the best reading, this paints Europeans as blameless because See, everyone does it! In the worst reading, this justifies European domination because the people living in colonized areas were already prone to violence and European domination was a necessary intervention. It is true that Diamond uses examples of world population displacements as examples which demonstrate the advantages of food-producing societies over foraging societies. Primarily, he gives an extensive treatment to the Austronesian and Bantu migrations—both of which likely displaced or enveloped large hunter-gatherer populations in Indonesia and Africa, respectively, before succumbing to European domination many years later. It should be noted that Diamond does not portray these population shifts as totally violent, but complex multi-stage processes that took place sometimes over centuries or millennia. Again, no one in particular is blamed by Diamond. Those displaced and those doing the displacing are both subject to circumstances and pressures beyond them, which are give rise to certain outcomes in the world. Perhaps one could make a case that there is a slow violence implicit in such displacements, but if that is the case then it is a slow violence that is recurrent in human history all over the world. It is also made clear that Europeans have a parallel origin in the Indo-European migrations, which likely took on the same character. This makes the origins of European language and ethnicity as violent as all other in the world, and gives Europeans to privileged position to intervene as some kind of hand of reason or peace. Just because the ancestors of Bantu and Austronesian populations committed their own ethnic violence doesn’t mean they somehow deserve to be dominated by Europeans whose ancestors committed the same violence, and who will shortly reiterate it. Diamond does not justify European conquest even slightly. 

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Still, the more tricky problem of scapegoating human nature presents itself. Can Europeans be especially blamed for the violence of colonization if what they did was not “new,” strictly speaking? If European technology is a product of circumstance, and European violence is the same violence any people would perpetrate, where does accountability come into the picture? Does Diamond’s framework allow us to blame Europeans for their atrocities?

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You Can Still Blame White People

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I want to stress that Diamond’s ideas do not foreclose the possibility of holding European powers accountable. They may test our concepts of accountability, free will, and historical storytelling, however. Here we face the most astute critics who claim: The problem isn’t that Diamond blames dominated peoples for their failures, but the fact that he blames no one for anything! To start, I’d like to establish that Diamond’s accounts of European colonial violence do not mince details. The often sinister plots of colonizers to enact violence are never described apologetically, nor as passive actions. The agency of the colonizer is very much in the picture. Diamond is not preoccupied with the outcomes of colonialism, true, but that is not the aim of his project. The claim that Diamond’s framework for human history doesn’t allow us to condemn the decisions of European colonizers misses the point. Human decision-making still plays a crucial role in this version of history, as Diamond makes clear when he details how Europeans chose to sell blankets laden with smallpox to Native Americans, or decided to use cavalry to cut down Incan armies. His work is not so much an explanation of how it came to be that European colonizers made those decisions, but how they came to be equipped with the tools that privileged them to take those actions.

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If Diamond’s framework does leave human decision-making an active component of history, this means that historical Europeans can still be held accountable for the atrocities of colonialism. But wait, there still might be a hole here. Even if we trace the roots of certain actions to certain heinous individuals, don’t the pressures of circumstance still figure in? If we follow Diamond’s logic all the way, individual European colonizers made the decisions they did, drafted the strategies they did, under the pressures and incentives of their circumstances. We didn’t blame the early Native Americans for doing the same thing when they exterminated North America’s giant sloth bears. It’s likely that if one white man refused to kill an indigenous man, the circumstances of his society and his historical moment were such that he would be replaced by a white man who would. So does individual decision-making and accountability figure in? Surely we’re not satisfied to scapegoat circumstance, which isn’t so different from scapegoating human nature. This conundrum reminds me of conversations about free will and justice, another conundrum presented by materialist thinking. If we acknowledge that the classically liberal subject, the free-thinker, the free-willed actor, does not exist—if we acknowledge that people are shaped by their environments as much as their own decisions (because their ability to make decisions is determined by their environment, their incidental circumstances, the materiality of their bodies, like incidental brain chemistry)—this always erodes our notions of accountability and the fairness of justice. It is certainly a postmodern notion. In this way of thinking, the purpose of justice becomes practical, not punitive. We lock away murderers because they are a danger, not because punishment is a moral necessity. With our newer understanding of justice, we might acknowledge that the event of the murder was just as much a product of circumstance as decision-making (the murderer developed violent tendencies as a child because his parents were abusive; his emotional development was stunted; this resulted in alcoholism in adulthood; the murderer was under the influence of alcohol when he committed the murder, so he wasn’t all himself). This does not change the fact that we can blame the murderer for his actions. It just shifts the purpose of blame away from shame and moral proclamation towards more practical concerns. Now, laying blame serves the function of neutralizing his threat to other human beings. This should demonstrate that even when accountability is muddied by materialist thinking, blame still has a role in how we interpret events. The same is true for European colonization.

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We condemn colonial violence of the past (and present) because it has political and social implications for our present moment! Those are actually actionable. Remember that the legacy of European colonization is very much alive, and is responsible for the circumstances of people everywhere today (even if Diamond does account for it well in his Afterword). We float around ideas like reparations not to punish the no-good very-bad white race, but to repair the damage done to people living with the legacy of slavery and colonialism today. Watering down the importance of historical decision-making should only threaten your moral view of history if you’re invested in condemning Europeans for the sake of condemnation itself, rather than for the sake of righting historical wrongs as they relate to the present. This is an unproductive and archaic way of thinking, and it is beside the point.

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Why should we condemn the decisions of European colonizers under pressure of circumstance, and not the decisions of Bantu migrants under circumstance? By making the two equatable, doesn’t Diamond exonerate Europeans? This, again, comes down to the practical concerns of our current age. Sure, we can look back on killings of pygmies and Khoisan by historical Bantu farmers, and condemn Bantu farmers for that. Similarly, we can condemn historical Austronesian-speaking people for killing and displacing the long-forgotten hunter-gatherers of Indonesia. As it relates to our present, however, this is little more than an moral intellectual exercise. These events may have shaped the linguistic and genetic makeup of the world, but they are not as relevant to our current political moment. The injustices of European colonization are immediate in a way that the violence of ancient ethnic displacements is not. I will not cover this issue comprehensively, because it has been covered quite well by a host of postcolonial scholars and popular writers alike. If we condemn historical people because of some moral necessity to condemn evil, then sure, ancient ethnic violence of Bantu farmers is equatable to the violence of European colonization. Some people have clearly taken that as an implication of Diamond’s work, and have therefore deduced it is racist. I think it draws into question why the conversation about European violence is so important, and why we should or shouldn’t condemn historical people. It should also be mentioned here that the size and scope of European colonization was unprecedented in history. Its legacy affects people around the world in a very present way, is politically alive in the present, and contributes to continuing systems of violence and injustice in the present. Chastising the long dead colonizers for its own sake isn’t productive—the cat’s out of the bag; the villains are long dead, and the atrocities happened. Perhaps it fulfills some emotional or narrative necessity, but mostly blaming colonizers sets the record straight; systems of power are still in place which disproportionately benefit the ancestors of those perpetrators today. Therefore it is worthwhile to blame Europeans for colonization, but it is not worthwhile getting too preoccupied with the ethics of the Bantu migration. It is an issue of political relevance. Diamond does not even approach these conundrums in his book, either because of his own naïveté or because he thinks they are implicitly understood, depending on how much credit you give him. Nonetheless, the notion that he either exonerates European colonizers or implicates the colonized is not sound if your motivation for interpreting history is a practical one.

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The question of whether or not Diamond scapegoats human nature also falls apart when you consider historical blame as an issue of political relevance. We blame European colonizers because it is in our interest to do so, even if, hypothetically, another group of people would have done the same thing given the same circumstances. This is the You would do it too! problem. The hypothetical might seem problematic, but if we follow Diamond’s ideas to their conclusions, we find that it’s premise is sort of a fallacy. From a proper materialist’s viewpoint, the hypothetical of whether the victim would have committed the murder given the same circumstances doesn’t make sense at all, because the circumstances are also responsible for the murder’s very existence. If you were to simply place the gun in the victim’s hand, then no, he wouldn’t likely do the same thing. But in the view we’re taking, the circumstance runs much deeper than the location of the gun. It’s every possible circumstance that led to the murderer holding the gun. If you gave the victim the same childhood, the same maladaptive behaviors, the same history of alcoholism, the same dose of alcohol on that same night of the murder… then he would just be the murderer. To take any other position would not be materialist, but essentialist. Nothing makes the murderer himself but the details of his material existence. Therefore, it is irrelevant to ask whether the aboriginal Australians, given the same circumstances as the Europeans, would have committed the same atrocities. Diamond’s argument is that the particulars of their circumstances are what make the Europeans characterizable as European in the first place. European societies, cultures, technologies, and even physical traits would not have taken on the aspects that they did if they were not subject to the specific set of environmental factors that they were. Neither would their trajectories have taken the same course. You might as well ask: Would the aboriginal Australians commit the same atrocities if they were European? This question simply does not figure. The fact of the matter is that nobody else engaged in European colonization but the Europeans. Scapegoating human nature relies on a particular logical move: Well, anyone would do it if they had the same stuff. By “stuff” here, I don’t only mean technology but cultural and economic pressures to do colonization in the first place. Nobody could have had the same exact stuff, because nobody could have the same exact particulars of European technological and social development. Even those aforementioned pressures exist because of the particulars of European development. This should dispel any problematic implications of how human nature meets technology. At this point, we arrive at the initial problem I started this section with: So only the circumstances are to blame? As I have already demonstrated, the people can still be blamed, and the blame is validated for good reason.

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Systems, Not People?

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To some extent, Diamond leads us toward an indictment of particular societies and particular systems, rather than individual people or races. Earlier, I hypothesized that a European colonizer unlikely to kill the colonized would likely be replaced by one who would. We can blame the individual killer for that action, but we can also blame the larger system that selects the killer for his job in the first place. Understanding systems of colonial violence is important work that plenty of scholars are doing. Many of these ideas were old debates even in Diamond’s time: To what extent is the system implicated, and to what extent are those participating in the system implicated, even those who participate in the system by being passive? We might implicate Francisco Pizarro as an individual, but we should also implicate the accountants who helped provide logistics for his expedition. Should we then also implicate the Spanish peasants who farmed produce to sustain the Spanish empire and its colonial projects? These questions are difficult and much has been written on them. I would like to highlight two points: 1.) Since such discussions are already established, there is already precedent for de-emphasizing individual decision-making in discussions of historical crimes, and that these discussions of powerful and exploitative systems are just as important and worthwhile. 2.) Diamond does nothing to undermine these conversations. If anything, his work leads us to them. One of his chapters is a detailed account of how it comes to pass that power accumulates in the hands of a small group of individuals as population sizes around food production centers grow. He does make moral judgements here, going as far as to call historical and modern states “kleptocracies.” By synonymizing “state” and “kleptocracy,” Diamond acknowledges that injustice is implicit in every major human society. The process by which human societies grow into states is not treated as some natural and therefore justified process. Kleptocracy is an inevitable outcome of population growth and food production, yes, but it is still unjust. In Diamond’s framework, there is clearly room for acknowledging and condemning injustice even while understanding that material circumstances make it inevitable. 

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We can extend this principle to European colonization. It was the result of some very particular historical developments, and we can’t attribute all of those to European decision-making. European colonization was another autocatalytic process that fed itself and incentivized itself. It should be scrutinized and criticized, but that does not necessarily mean its participants—the white perpetrators—are let off the hook. Each participant in each colonial project enabled the mobilization of this system, and different participants may be implicated to different degrees. This is especially true because the effects of these colonial activities are present and urgent. As I mentioned before, condemning ancient Bantu farmers for killing pygmies is little more than an intellectual exercise. Condemning the British empire for its worldwide violence has direct implications for the present. Diamond’s emphasis on the inevitable outcomes of material circumstances is only problematic if you are looking to condemn historical people for the sake of condemnation itself. 

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Guns, Germs and Steel does not itself wrestle with the legacy of European colonization. For that, it cannot be described as a postcolonial work. Diamond leads us right up to the point where we should make our judgements of the European colonization, but ends there. The purpose of his project is not to defend it but to explain how it happened, accounting for the fact that there is nothing special about Europeans as a race. This does not lead to easy answers, or a clear scapegoat. Both individuals and incidental circumstances of history are to blame. Both can be true at once, and both must be true if we are to meaningfully examine the root of historical injustices. I admit that sometimes, this explanatory bird’s-eye view can feel a bit irrelevant. It satisfies curiosity, but doesn’t have an edge or any real implications. The one place where it is potent is in refuting social darwinism. Guns, Germs and Steel still negates white supremacy with incredible power. Diamond frames it this way, but doesn’t emphasize it much as his ultimate purpose—I think because he is probably still caught up in illusions on the value of producing explanatory knowledge. Nonetheless, this remains an anti-racist work, and I will stress again that the racist views in question still pollute the public imagination and must be challenged by influential works of popular science. For that intervention alone, I think this is a valuable publication, which is not to mention that it is also incredibly informative (Diamond taught me more about Papua New Guinea than I ever learned in public education). If you find Guns, Germs, and Steel on your white dad’s shelf, you shouldn’t roll your eyes at another dad-book—you should be pretty happy.