Geography is destiny, including whether you put your pants on one leg at a time or wear no pants at all.
The lay of the land dictates everything. It explains how a small band of helmeted Spanish invaders on horseback overtook thousands of Incas in Peru in the early 1500s, according to “Guns, Germs and Steel,” a brainy but accessible three-part National Geographic production that starts tonight on PBS.
For starters, there were no horses in South America, while the Spanish had steeds from which to intimidate and spear the Indians.And Papua New Guineans couldn’t get much going beyond starch root vegetables, while the Middle Easterners in the Fertile Crescent were flush with nutritious wheat.
Geography holds the key to everything: which societies developed skyscrapers and which didn’t, who was decimated by smallpox and who wasn’t, who successfully spread latitudinally in familiar weather and who was effectively boxed in longitudinally.
Civilizations rise and fall based on the land itself. This simple, deterministic argument is the basis for Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which inspired the National Geographic special being broadcast over three straight Mondays at 9 p.m. on KRMA-Channel 6.
Working from tiny specifics (a diet full of low-protein starch) to overarching global generalities (the emergence of writing), the project sucks viewers into a grand theory of how the world works. Geography leads to history, which leads to a discussion of technology (guns), biology (germs) and economics (steel, as in railroads).
In the beginning, humankind figured out it was tougher to be a hunter than a gatherer. If you couldn’t efficiently cultivate crops, you had to subsist on the occasional animal kill. If you didn’t have domesticated farm animals, you couldn’t efficiently plow and cultivate large fields. If you didn’t have basic agriculture, you didn’t have the manpower to feed the tribe while a clever few went off and invented tools and became adept at working with fire.
If you didn’t have advanced technology from fire, like swords, you weren’t going to do so well when the invading forces showed up. If you weren’t in a place graced with a favorable environment, you were run over by the other guys.
In short, that’s how a bunch of white Europeans ended up running a big chunk of the world. If you buy the argument, there’s nothing racist about it – the power differential is all a result of environmental, geographic factors.
This big-picture view makes sense on the small screen thanks to elaborate re-creations and chats with archaeologists and biologists.
The basic question motivating Diamond’s exploration has to do with the world’s haves and have-nots. Why did some societies advance faster than others? Why did some end up conquerors while others ended up conquered? How do you explain why the visitor in the airplane has so much cargo while the jungle-dwelling islanders have so little?
The differences between rich and poor are the basis of untold “reality-TV” series; it’s fun to see each side in fish-out-of-water circumstances, an heiress on a pig farm, a mechanic posing as a landed aristocrat. Why not extend the discussion to public TV’s explanation of where the historical divide between haves and have-nots started?
Diamond, a physiologist, evolutionary biologist and biogeographer who speaks a dozen languages, has spurred a lively argument.
Sigmund Freud argued that biology – at least in terms of gender – is destiny, and we know how soundly that theory has been debunked. Freud’s sexist notion now sounds almost quaint. Future historians will continue to debate Diamond’s theory that geography is destiny (and there are lively discussions in the blogosphere for anyone interested).
For now, thanks to brilliant National Geographic nature photography and the engaging on-camera persona of Diamond himself, “Guns, Germs and Steel” shows what TV does well, no matter what you think of the premise.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
