WHY are some nationstates so much wealthier and more successful than others? According to the distinguished Californian biologist Jared Diamond, there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the thesis that Americans are genetically more favourably endowed than Zairians, or Japanese than New Guineans. If the answer is not biological, it must presumably be environmental or cultural. In an ambitious trawl through. world history, using his vast knowledge off molecular biology, genetics and epidemiology, Diamond tries to find the answer. If he fails, as I think he does, this is presumably because the question is unanswerable. No one could have made a more conscientious stab at a solution to the conundrum than this author does.
Diamond argues that the deep causes of the greater success and wealth of the West are four fold: the conquest of germs, literacy, technology and centralised government. The great defining moment in human history was the switch from hunter gathering to food production. Food producing societies are sedentary rather than nomadic, they generate a surplus which sustains full time rulers, soldiers and bureaucrats. A key element in food production was the domestication of animals; these animals in turn spread lethal diseases to which settled societies gradually built up resistance. All historians have remarked on the way the conquistadores devastated the native American inhabitants with killer diseases, while not succumbing to American strains themselves. Diamond argues that there were no lethal American diseases as the Aztecs and Incas had no domesticated animals.
The argument from epidemiology is not really conclusive, as Diamond partly concedes, for Africa remained the "Dark Continent" until the late nineteenth century precisely because malaria and yellow fever barred the path to European expansion. The section in technology is even more of a muddle. The triumph of the West seems to have come about as a result of a number of accidents rather than for Diamond's structural reasons. South America apart, before the eighteenth century there was little sign of an enduring European technological predominance.
The Vikings failed to gain a foothold in North America precisely because they had no superiority in weapons over their Indian assailants. The Japanese, today's superpower, were among the most backward nations on earth little more than a hundred years ago. And does not the preponderance of the pax Mongolica in the thirteenth century show that until very recently nomads could hold their own and even lord it over the settled societies? Much of Diamond's argument is vitiated by circularity. What he mainly does is to identify successful societies and then isolate as the cause of their success the factors of climate and geography that are found in constant conjunction with them. But to assume that these variables are causes is to take for granted what has to be proved.
Strangely, for a book that covers much of the same ground as Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Diamond pays very little attention to capitalism or, indeed, to cultural factors. If one sought a proximate cause for why the USA is so much wealthier than Zaire, this would have to encompass an explanation of the peculiar wealth creating mechanisms of capitalism. To penetrate deeper into why capitalism emerged in some parts of the world and not others would involve one in an infinite causal chain of contingency or accidents; pace Diamond, it is unlikely that there are any scientific laws at work in history.
TOWARDS the end of the book the author seems to recant on his "structural" explanation. He says that post 1492 European attempts at conquest succeeded because Europeans used the correct source, target, latitude and time. But this is an argument from contingency, and is incompatible with his earlier deterministic scheme based on the quarternity of disease, literacy, technology and central government.
For all the many incidental pleasures of this volume, one has to conclude that Diamond's weaving in and out of conjunctural, and structural perspectives is not so much "dialectical" as mere confusion.