History and Advancements

Diamond, J.  1997.  Chapter 4 – Farmer Power (pg. 85-92), Chapter 5 – History’s Haves and Have-Nots (pg. 93-103), Chapter 6 – To Farm or Not to Farm (pg. 104-113), and Chapter 8 – Apples or Indians (pg. 131-156) in Guns, Germs and Steel.  W. W. Norton & Company, New York, New York.

History.  Human history is a compilation of stories.  For the past year I have been editing my own family history, which my mother assembled using literature and many ancestors’ personal stories.  I was initially shocked at how little I actually knew before I started this.  I knew that my mom’s side of the family were Mennonite in origin, but I didn’t know that they (for instance) would cut branches of mulberry leaves – just as the young leaves were beginning to unfurl – to lay crosswise over brown paper that had silkworm butterfly eggs on it from the previous year.  I had absolutely no clue that my ancestors grew silk worms, or that to obtain the silk they had to place the cocooned silk worms in boiling water before fishing out the loose ends of the silk and attaching up to 100 threads to the spindle of a spinning wheel to put the silk on a spool.  This I found to be fascinating (along with other things I learned about my history), and I think this is why I found how Diamond wrote, with personal or example stories, interesting;  for instance, Diamond mentioned how the pioneer farmer, Fred Hirschy, helped to change the American West from hunter-gatherer tendencies to farming (p. 85).  History affects us personally;  but, as Diamond pointed out, it also has affected what we eat today. 

Diamond stated that “Plant and animal domestication … [was] a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies” (p. 92).  A “sedentary lifestyle” (p. 89) allowed for individuals to specialize in areas other than food gathering, leading to such positions as kings, bureaucrats, soldiers, priests, metalworkers, and scribes (p. 90).  However, the thing that struck me was that this also caused a lot of wars:  killing, subjugating, and thus decreasing many populations of people throughout the world.  I find it really upsetting that such an ‘advancement’ lead to such pain and suffering.  Yeah, it’s amazing and great that people became able to do more things, but I don’t appreciate how Diamond almost seemed to be praising the wars and conquests of the past when a lot of them were caused by power hungry people trying to wipe out and control others.  Something else that I hadn’t considered before was that a lot of disease epidemics were caused by domesticating animals due to infected animals passing their germs onto humans (p. 92).  I can’t say plant and animal domestication is all bad though, as domesticating animals and producing such items as cotton, flax, hemp, wool, silk, leather, gourds, wagons, etc., has improved human societies drastically (p. 90);  these, and other, inventions have dramatically changed our existence time and time again throughout history. 

While I was reading Diamond’s discussion of the extensive knowledge of hunter-gatherers concerning their local wild plants and animals, I thought again (as I quite often have) about how totally screwed us people in the technologically advanced world would be if all our technology was suddenly taken away from us.  Even me, whose mother is quite knowledgeable in her garden, would be totally useless if I had to suddenly start growing my own food instead of picking it up from the supermarket.  And there are many people far worse off.