# A Critique of a Critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel > I read an article titled A Critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think its criticism stems from misunderstandings of Guns, germs and steel (GGS). The first is confusing explanation with justification. The second is overlooking the complexity of causation and dismissing GGS as simple environmental determinism. I read an article titled [A Critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel](https://blog.naver.com/epalflcl/220179265176), and I think its criticism stems from misunderstandings of [Guns, germs and steel](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Guns,%20germs%20and%20steel.txt) (GGS). The first is confusing explanation with justification. The second is overlooking the complexity of causation and dismissing GGS as simple environmental determinism. ## Confusing explanation with justification The following passage is from the critique: > What does cultural development even mean? Technological development? Making guns? No: in terms of social structure and agriculture, the Inca built the civilization best suited to their region. They even learned how to get along quite well with their neighbors to the north, the Aztecs—a skill Europe never acquired. Yet Diamond speaks as though the gap between the two civilizations had descended from prehistory. This assumes there was an enormous gap between them. > > It is not much different from a gun-toting thug entering a well-designed house suited to its environment, shooting everyone dead, and shouting, "Oh, these barbarians—they have no guns!" Diamond then says, "My goodness, how could they not have guns?" examines the ground beneath the house, and declares, "This is not the same soil as under our house! That explains why they have no guns!" Even though the thug got his gun from somewhere else too. For this criticism to hold, GGS would have to claim that modern European civilization is superior to hunter-gatherer civilizations. Reading the prologue alone makes clear that it does not. The following passages are from that prologue, which I translated into Korean in the original article: > This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification of acceptance of results. … > > Far from glorifying peoples of western European origin, we shall see that most basic elements of their civilization were developed by other peoples living elsewhere and were then imported to western Europe. … > > I do not assume that industrialized states are "better" than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents "progress," or that is has led to an increase in human happiness. Diamond's message is closer to this: > Even if European civilization has the upper hand, that is not because Europeans are inherently superior. Nor is it clear that European civilization offers a better way of life. Yet misunderstandings persist. Avoiding the confusion of explanation with justification, and factual propositions with value propositions, seems very difficult. That is understandable, because explanations are often used as a means of defense. For example, someone who commits a crime may be defended by invoking causes: alcohol impaired their judgment, or an unhappy childhood prevented healthy character development. That makes it all the more necessary to distinguish the two carefully. Reading without doing so leads to misreadings like this, again from the critique: > His argument, on inspection, says: "Eurasia was superior to other continents because it was better suited to agriculture and diffusion. That is why we could make guns and you could not." … He uses "Eurasia" in a very peculiar way. … When explaining Eurasia's environmental advantages, he mentions Mesopotamia and China, particularly Mesopotamia and the Middle East: what crops they had, which livestock originated there, and so on. Reading GGS as an attempt to justify Eurasian civilization's superiority produces these misunderstandings and misplaced criticisms. The claim that Eurasia's environment favored the beginning of agriculture is, of course, not a justification of Eurasian civilization's superiority. As the prologue makes clear, justifying European domination of the world is not the book's purpose in the first place. The critique repeatedly faults the author for failing to address what matters and talking about something else. That happens because the critic has misunderstood the author's intention from the outset. ## The charge of determinism From the critique: > He never brings "culture" into the argument. Every cultural difference comes from the environment. The environment is the ultimate cause. … > > He says that the environment, rather than culture, determines the development of civilization. This necessarily amounts to determinism. The moment he admits that different civilizations can develop in the same environment, the environment becomes merely incidental. Ultimately, the claim is that "the environment is the ultimate cause of everything." I often encounter the charge that some argument is deterministic. Most of these criticisms—all of those I have encountered—commit a . For example, is my drinking coffee right now due to environment or culture? Why am I drinking coffee? - I live in a coffee-drinking culture. (A cultural reason.) - Drinking this liquid does not threaten my life. (A biological reason.) - I feel like having coffee → mild caffeine dependence → having lived in a coffee-drinking culture for a long time. (Biology, culture, contingent personal history, …) But why does coffee as a drink exist at all? - Coffee beans exist. (A biological or environmental reason.) - A culture of drinking coffee emerged somewhere at some time. (A cultural reason.) Why do coffee beans exist? - The environment was suitable for those plants to grow. (A biological or environmental reason.) - The many varieties that exist today result from human selective breeding. (Cultural, biological, and environmental reasons.) Why did humans breed coffee varieties and spread them around the world? - Humans had already come to prefer coffee drinks. (Cultural and biological reasons.) - They knew how to breed plants. (Mainly a cultural reason.) - They could keep coffee beans relatively fresh. (Environmental, cultural, and biological reasons.) - They wanted to make money (biological and cultural reasons), and capitalist market economies were dominant (cultural and biological reasons). Is the "most important cause" of my drinking coffee environmental, biological, or cultural? No outcome in the world is specified by a single cause. Causal relations interlock with one another. Strictly speaking, causal relations cannot actually form cycles. The result of something cannot in turn cause that same thing, because time flows in one direction. But the moment we _classify and group_ causes, the causal chains become enormously entangled. Imagine drawing a complex chain of causation flowing from left to right—a . Older events lie on the left and more recent events on the right. Now color the events classified as "culture" red and those classified as "environment" blue. If all red events cluster on the left and all blue events on the right, cultural or environmental determinism could be said to hold. But as the coffee example shows, that is hardly going to happen. How, then, should we interpret GGS's claim that the environment was a very important cause? Let us add a little imagination to the causal graph. Give each arrow from a cause to its effect a thickness: a weighted DAG. That thickness indicates how strongly the cause influenced the effect. Let the leftmost circle be the Big Bang, the cause of everything, and the rightmost circle be the outcome "New Guinea is poorer than European countries." If anything here can uniquely be labeled "determinism," it is "Big Bang determinism." Everything else is simply a question such as… - Are the circles that contributed relatively strongly to the rightmost outcome mostly red or mostly blue? - What other circles commonly influenced the circles that directly influenced the rightmost outcome? In other words, what were the more ultimate causes? …rather than determinism. GGS does **not** claim that a circle labeled "environment" somewhere in the middle connects directly to the rightmost outcome with a thick arrow. Its argument would look more like this: ![GGS DAG.png](https://wiki.g15e.com/data/GGS%20DAG.webp) Many factors influence the rightmost circle. The claim is that many of those factors are related to a particular circle in the middle and to circles derived from it—the circles marked with red dots. It is not a claim that the environment is the ultimate cause of everything, that environmental differences directly produced the outcome, or that no other causes exist. ## The importance of reading the prologue A book's prologue often explains what it intends to argue and how its overall structure unfolds. Understanding that larger framework helps us grasp the role of individual chapters, paragraphs, and sentences: whether the author is explaining or defending something, what a particular word means, and why a point appears where it does. Only with that understanding can we distinguish central material from side issues. Then we can ask whether important points have been omitted and assess whether errors in the book are minor or serious.