In the late 1970s, biologist and geographer Jared Diamond found himself on a beach in Papua New Guinea, listening to a local politician named Yali ask a deceptively simple question: why had Europeans brought ships full of goods, while his own people had none of their own? The query stayed with him for decades, eventually forming the heart of his book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond set out to answer it not with moral judgment but with science, searching for material explanations for why some societies advanced faster than others.

He rejected racial or genetic theories of superiority, arguing instead that geography shaped the distribution of crops, animals, and technologies that allowed civilisations to form. Yet while his book brilliantly explains how the race began, it leaves another mystery unsolved: why one civilisation, Europe, turned its early advantages into a moral and scientific order that transformed the world.

Eurasia’s east–west axis, he noted, was history’s most generous laboratory. Stretching across a single latitude band, it allowed wheat, barley, cattle, and horses to thrive from the Fertile Crescent to the Atlantic, sharing similar climates and day lengths. Innovations diffused quickly along this horizontal corridor while the Americas and Africa, running north to south, remained divided by deserts and tropics that blocked the transfer of crops and ideas.

From these ecological lucky breaks came denser populations, larger armies, and the first complex states. “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments,” Diamond wrote, capturing in one sentence the material logic of civilisation.

Agriculture begat authority. Surpluses freed a minority to specialise as artisans, priests, soldiers, and scribes, the architects of what Diamond called: “farmer power.” Writing emerged to count grain and command armies; metallurgy and urbanisation followed. Centuries of close living with livestock created immunities to diseases that would later devastate the Americas.

Guns, germs, and geography delivered conquest. But none of these alone explain why Europe, rather than China or the Ottoman world, both long wealthier and more advanced, turned its material advantages into sustained innovation.

Culture, Conscience, and the Western Divergence

Here the story leaves geology and enters the realm of culture. The West’s true divergence lay in its moral and institutional DNA. Classical philosophy taught rational inquiry; Christianity added the idea of a universal moral order and the sanctity of the individual soul.

The Reformation then sanctified conscience, insisting that every believer could read and reason for himself.

The Enlightenment generalised that principle to all human affairs, fusing faith in reason with freedom of speech, contract, and experiment.

Out of that fusion came the modern rule of law and market capitalism, the only social systems in history built on voluntary exchange and self-correction.

Where geography provided the raw materials, Europe’s culture provided the operating system. China, centralised and harmonious, suppressed dissent to preserve order. The Islamic world’s early brilliance ossified under theological rigidity. Europe’s genius was its fragmentation: dozens of competing states bound by a shared intellectual tradition. Competition forced innovation; shared faith restrained totalitarianism.

The press and the pulpit, the scientist and the merchant, each strengthened the other. By the seventeenth century this cultural feedback loop had transformed surplus into science and accident into agency.

Material advantage thus became moral responsibility. The same civilisation that once built slave ships later built the movement to abolish them. Britain’s campaign against the slave trade, costing lives and treasure, showed a society capable of judging itself by universal principles rather than expediency. That capacity for reform, rooted in conscience and reason, is what separates Western civilisation from all deterministic theories, whether Marxist or racial.

It also exposes the folly of today’s Critical Race Theory, which recasts human history as an eternal contest of oppression and victimhood. Diamond proved that geography, not genetics, launched the West; the West then proved that ideas, not identity, determine progress.

To deny that moral achievement is to misunderstand history itself. Europe did not merely inherit fertile plains and domesticable animals; it built institutions that rewarded curiosity, competition, and self-restraint. Those institutions, not skin colour or climate, made the difference between the Inquisition and the Royal Society, between feudal privilege and the Bill of Rights. Geography gave Europe wheat and cattle; culture gave it Locke and Newton.

Why Ideas, Not Just Environments, Shape Civilisations

The lesson for our century is plain. Material endowments still matter, but they are inert without the moral architecture that turns luck into liberty. Diamond’s thesis explains why Europe could begin the climb; it cannot explain why Europe kept climbing. That answer lies in the cultural virtues now under attack: individual dignity, reasoned debate, property, and faith in truth itself.

Civilisations rise when they align their geography with their ideals and fall when they forget the ideals that made geography matter. Europe once transformed its landscape into a ladder; the task before the West now is to remember how it climbed.