Guns, Germs, Steel and Mitt Romney

Today there's a brouhaha over the anthropological bestseller called Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Diamond's theory is that geography is destiny insofar that latitude, land fertility, access to the ocean, and quality of food have always made some civilizations possible, and some cultures more prosperous.
For an Overview: See PBS

This is about Mitt Romney relying too much on the advice of his Neocon handlers. It's about wrong-headed thinking that could lead to World War Three. It's about a candidate thinking he's really really smart when he keeps displaying stark evidence that he isn't. And it's about an author who wants to distance himself as fast as possible from Mitt Romney.

Romney mentioned Diamond's book in his Jerusalem speech this week. In an essay on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades points out that the "ultrahawkish senior foreign policy adviser Dan Senor" is probably the member of Romney's camp who gave him the literary name to drop.

From the speech:

I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries. I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel, which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.

Then later in the speech, Romney seemed to tie Guns, Germs and Steel to another book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes, and these statements put Romney in hot water with the Palestinians when he said this in Jerusalem:

He says if you can learn anything from the economic history of the world, it's this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality

Notice that Romney mentioned "several books" and implied that one book was somehow lending creedence to the other and to his hypothesis about why Palestinians are not able to make as much money as the Israelis.


Because of those remarks, Palestinian negotiator Sa'eb Erekat responded called Romney a racist.
via CNN:

This man, before he came here, he should have got some education about Israelis, Palestinians, and the region. . . . The Romney statements on Jerusalem and the racist statements about the Israeli culture being superior to the Palestinian culture reflect someone who needs to be educated, who needs knowledge. His statements are serving those extremists in the region now . . .

Romney seems to miss the rich irony that the Jews were a people without a country after World War II, and that's why they went to fight in Palestine. In Biblical times, the Jews were enslaved to the Babylonians, then the Egyptians, then Greeks and Romans, before being denounced for centuries by the Catholic Church,. By Romney's hypothesis, they were in the same position as the Palestinians throughout history, therefore all their "cultural values" were somehow inferior, which is ridiculous, since those same values are praised today as successful and part of the "Judeo-Christian" heritage of the West. I honestly don't want to know what Romney thinks of the Holocaust - good grief.

While Guns, Germs, and Steel is not my favorite book, and seems to overstate the obvious point -  that a successful culture needs location, location, location - for Romney to mention the book in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was misguided and just plain weird.

If Romney's handlers had bothered to read the introduction to the book, they would have noticed that the author was careful not making judgments about one people over another, one culture over another. He points out that all great civilizations have influences from other cultures. Hunters/Gatherers are no less "successful" than civilized peoples in Western Europe.

From page 8 of the Prologue:
"My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history."
~ author Jared Diamond

Now the author has written a OP-Ed in the New York Times in which he sounds like the Anti-Romney and makes it clear he did not approve of Romney's Israel speech, or of Romney as a candidate:

Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
. . . It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)

. . . Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?

Of course not.

. . . Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.

Here's the excerpt from Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, in which he misrepresents Diamond's thesis, via AtlanticWire. There's something rather odd the way Romney goes from "Iron Curtain" to "Weapons" of Iron Ore to describe why some cultures are thriving while some are not. It's a word association worthy of Sarah Palin for sure. (I realize the type is small to fit the page, so zoom in with CTRL+ or click the pictures to see a larger view).