The Fates of Human Societies
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Jared M. Diamond
Notes
History followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves…Immediate reasons for Pizzaro’s success (over Atahuallpa) include military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing.
Germs thus acquired ultimately from domestic animals (from farming societies) played decisive roles in European conquests of Native Americans, Australians, South Africans, and Pacific islanders (hunter-gatherer societies)…In all parts of the world where adequate evidence is available, archaeologists find evidence of rising densities associated with the appearance of food production.
(Eurasia’s east-west orientation facilitated food and technology distribution along the lateral coordinate while the longitudinal orientation along the continents of America, Africa, and Australia hindered the spread as climates/environments changed accordingly.)
As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strausse put it, ancient writing’s main function was to “facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”
My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been reinvented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn for the first time in history how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part of a solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.
Kleptocrats throughout the ages have resorted to a mixture of four solutions:
- Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
- Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways.
- Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence.
- Construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy
Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation…the residents of New Guinea were already food producers and had developed many of the concomitants of food production (dense populations, disease resistance, more advanced technology and so on).
Northern and western Europe has been spared this fate (of ecological suicide), not because its inhabitants have been wiser but because they have have good luck to live in a more robust environment with higher rainfall, in which vegetation regrows quickly. Much of northern and western Europe is still able to support productive intensive agriculture today, 7,000 years after the arrival of food production. In effect Europe received its crops, livestock, technology, and writing systems from the Fertile Crescent, which then gradually eliminated itself as a major center of power and innovation.
Optimal Fragmentation Principle: innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation: a too-unified society is at a disadvantage, and so is a too-fragmented society…Instead, you want your country, industry, industrial belt, or company to be broken up into groups that compete with one another while maintaining relatively free communication – like the U.S. federal government system, with its built-in competition between our 50 states.