Already speculated about by Asimov, except his 'Historian' was a Mathematician.
Posted on 01/30/2005 5:22:16 AM PST by Tom D.
'Collapse': How the World Ends
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
Published: January 30, 2005
EIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy -- he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, ''Collapse,'' which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' and ''Collapse'' represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong.
''Guns'' asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern. Now ''Collapse'' posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. Because this view, too, is exactly what postmodernism longs to hear, ''Collapse'' may prove influential as well.
Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur ''genius grants.'' Gradually he began to wonder why societies of the western Pacific islands never developed the metallurgy, farming techniques or industrial production of Eurasia. Diamond also studied the application of natural-selection theory to physiology, and in 1999 received a National Medal of Science for that work, which is partly reflected in his book ''Why Is Sex Fun?'' (Sex is fun; the book is serious.) Today Diamond often returns to the Pacific rim, especially Australia, where in the outback one may still hear the rustle of distant animal cries just as our forebears heard them in the far past.
''Collapse'' may be read alone, but begins where ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' ended: essentially the two form a single 1,000-page book. The thesis of the first part is that environmental coincidences are the principal factor in human history. Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about.
Many arguments in ''Guns'' were dazzling. Diamond showed, for example, that as the last ice age ended, by chance Eurasia held many plants that could be bred for controlled farming. The Americas had few edible plants suitable for cross-breeding, while Africa had poor soil owing to the millions of years since it had been glaciated. Thus large-scale food production began first in the Fertile Crescent, China and Europe. Population in those places rose, and that meant lots of people living close together, which accelerated invention; in other locations the low-population hunter-gatherer lifestyle of antiquity remained in place. ''Guns'' contends the fundamental reason Europe of the middle period could send sailing ships to explore the Americas and Africa, rather than these areas sending sailing ships to explore Europe, is that ancient happenstance involving plants gave Europe a food edge that translated into a head start on technology. Then, the moment European societies forged steel and fashioned guns, they acquired a runaway advantage no hunter-gatherer society could possibly counter.
Also, as the ice age ended, Eurasia was home to large mammals that could be domesticated, while most parts of the globe were not. In early history, animals were power: huge advantages were granted by having cattle for meat and milk, horses and elephants for war. Horses -- snarling devil-monsters to the Inca -- were a reason 169 Spaniards could kill thousands of Incas at the battle of Cajamarca in 1532, for example. ''Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire,'' Diamond speculates, but the rhino and other large mammals of Africa defied domestication, leaving that continent at a competitive disadvantage.
Large populations and the fact that Eurasians lived among domesticated animals meant Europe was rife with sicknesses to which the survivors acquired immunity. When Europeans began to explore other lands, their microbes wiped out indigenous populations, easing conquest. Almost all variations in societies, Diamond concludes, are caused not by societies themselves but by ''differences in their environments''; the last 500 years of rising power for the West ''has its ultimate roots in developments between about 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1,'' the deck always stacked in Europe's favor.
In this respect, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' is pure political correctness, and its P.C. quotient was a reason the book won praise. But the book must not be dismissed because it is P.C.: sometimes politically correct is, after all, correct. The flaws of the work are more subtle, and they set the stage for ''Collapse.'' One flaw was that Diamond argued mainly from the archaeological record -- a record that is a haphazard artifact of items that just happened to survive. We know precious little about what was going on in 11,000 B.C., and much of what we think we know is inferential. It may be decades or centuries until we understand human prehistory, if we ever do.
Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines.
Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history. Such attempts hold innate appeal -- wouldn't it be great if there were a single explanation! -- but have a poor track record. My guess is that despite its conspicuous brilliance, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' will eventually be viewed as a drastic oversimplification. Its arguments come perilously close to determinism, and it is hard to believe that the world is as it is because it had to be that way.
Diamond ended his 1997 book by supposing, ''The challenge now is to develop human history as a science.'' That is what ''Collapse'' attempts -- to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans. He must have put enormous effort into ''Collapse,'' and his willingness to do so after achieving wealth and literary celebrity -- surely publishers would have taken anything he dashed off -- speaks well of his dedication.
''Collapse'' spends considerable pages contemplating past life on Easter Island, as well as on Pitcairn and Henderson islands, and on Greenland, an island. Deforestation, the book shows, was a greater factor in the breakdown of societies in these places than commonly understood. Because trees take so long to regrow, deforestation has more severe consequences than crop failure, and can trigger disastrous erosion. Centuries ago, the deforestation of Easter Island allowed wind to blow off the island's thin topsoil: ''starvation, a population crash and a descent into cannibalism'' followed, leaving those haunting statues for Europeans to find. Climate change and deforestation that set off soil loss, Diamond shows, were leading causes of the Anasazi and Mayan declines. ''Collapse'' reminds us that like fossil fuels, soil is a resource that took millions of years to accumulate and that humanity now races through: Diamond estimates current global soil loss at 10 to 40 times the rate of soil formation. Deforestation ''was a or the major factor'' in all the collapsed societies he describes, while climate change was a recurring menace.
How much do Diamond's case studies bear on current events? He writes mainly about isolated islands and pretechnology populations. Imagine the conditions when Erik the Red founded his colony on frigid Greenland in 984 -- if something went wrong, the jig was up. As isolated systems, islands are more vulnerable than continents. Most dire warnings about species extinction, for example, are estimates drawn from studies of island ecologies, where a stressed species may have no place to retreat to. ''Collapse'' declares that ''a large fraction'' of the world's species may fall extinct in the next 50 years, which is the kind of conclusion favored by biologists who base their research on islands. But most species don't live on islands. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the leading authority on biodiversity, estimates that about 9 percent of the world's vertebrate species are imperiled. That's plenty bad enough, but does not support the idea that a ''large fraction'' of species are poised to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet ''Collapse'' tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated islands to environmental threats to society as a whole.
Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: ''Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.'' The West, especially, is in peril: ''The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.'' Calamity could come quickly: ''A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.''
Because population pressure played a prominent role in the collapses of some past societies, Diamond especially fears population growth. Owing to sheer numbers it is an ''impossibility'' that the developing world will ever reach Western living standards. Some projections suggest the globe's population, now about 6 billion, may peak at about 8.5 billion. To Diamond, this is a nightmare scenario: defenders of population growth ''nonchalantly'' mention ''adding 'only' 2.5 billion more people . . . as if that were acceptable.'' Population growth has made Los Angeles ''less appealing,'' especially owing to traffic: ''I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased population.'' About the only nonaboriginal society Diamond has kind words for is pre-Meiji Japan, where population control was strictly enforced. But wait -- pre-Meiji Japan collapsed!
If 2.5 billion more people are not ''acceptable,'' how, exactly, would Diamond prevent their births? He does not say. Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced mass sterilizations seem the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak. Everyone dislikes traffic jams and other aspects of population density, but people are here and cannot be wished away; the challenge is to manage social pressure and create enough jobs until the population peak arrives. And is it really an ''impossibility'' for developing-world living standards to reach the Western level? A century ago, rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure.
If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged. For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue uninterrupted.
Though Diamond endorses ''cautious optimism,'' ''Collapse'' comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.
Gregg Easterbrook is an editor of The New Republic, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and the author, most recently, of ''The Progress Paradox.''
There is a lot to disagree with here, but Easterbrook makes some good points.
thanks, that's interesting...
..."...Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history. Such attempts hold innate appeal -- wouldn't it be great if there were a single explanation! "Guns, Germs, and Steel" will eventually be viewed as a drastic oversimplification. Its arguments come perilously close to determinism..."...
..."...a "large fraction" of species are poised to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet "Collapse" tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated islands to environmental threats to society as a whole."...
Proving once again that a single idea can drive a theory. It has throughout technology.
Well, horse pucky. Africa and India are full of diseases that killed Europeans. There was a fever coast of Africa called "the white man's grave."
America lacked draft animals, and the natives did fall before Old World plagues. But corn is crossable - the natives did improve it and it has been more improved since.
The warm areas may not have rich glacial soil but they do have year-round growing seasons. Which is better for food production? Depends how you do it.
Sure there is luck and chance but people and cultures vary enormously in how they deal with that.
Mrs VS
"There’s nothing easier than predicting the past.
"For example, after the Patriots win the Super Bowl next week -- even if they again win on a late field goal -- a billion viewers will listen to experts explain exactly why they won, and why it was sure to happen all along. As author Lee Simonson put it, 'Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.'"
I thought about this quote when I read your reply. Apparently Tucker's and Simonson's ideas have wide applicability.
Aztecs did not lose because of horses. They lost because of tyranny. They were overthrown by their subjects, the neighboring peoples they used for captives to sacrifice, who were merely led by the Spanish. Animals are not power. Hannibal had elephants, and they didn't help him. He was also a great captain and won battle after battle, but couldn't beat Rome. Scipio won one battle, and Carthage was history. The difference was in politics and mobilization, how each society reacted to defeat, not in access to bigger animals.
If grains made population and it made everything else, world civilization would always have been centered on China and east Asia. It wasn't.
If a favorable environment and an early start were key, the world would be ruled by Iraq, where civilization started. Or Egypt. Or Iran. Or Pakistan. Gee, these places are in the news aren't they, but don't exactly run the world. They were the highest civilizations on earth when the inhabitants of Europe were still naked savages. And the inhabitants of the actual leaders of the world - in North America - were naked savages a thousand years after that.
Europe did not dominate the oceans because of prior population or a lead. It was a backwater compared to medieval Islam, which has huge fleets in the Med and monopolized trade with India and the east. But then there were litte things like the battle of Lepanto, the compass, the voyages of discovery, invention of the corporation in the form of East India companies (Dutch and British), etc.
History is unsurprisingly made by actual human beings and the sequence of their modes of thought and ways of life. It is not reducible to geography. The longing to do so is not a desire to simplify nor simply overreaching by a specialist playing up the facts he thinks he knows because they occur in his own field. It is a naive materialist desire to deny the importance of anything that happens inside human heads or hearts. As Chesterton put it nearly a century earlier, "there are men in the modern world who would think anything and do anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual product."
To find this in the second 'graph, "Its conclusion,..., has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern." was a stroke of fortune that saved my time reading more MSM blather.
'Quintessentially postmodern' means uninformative at best and dis-information at worst.
And besides, glacial soil isn't rich right away - no organic matter.
Mrs VS
It's worth noting that relatively useless (certainly in premodern times) Siberia covers 14m sq km of that - or 9.4% of the globe's land surface. Minus Siberia, Eurasia provides just 28% of the globe's land area and that is where the near entirety of premodern human innovation and progress originated.
What crap! A great many of today's food cultivars have SOUTH AMERICAN roots. If this is the kind of "scholarship" that Diamond comes up with, then the rest of the books are probably tripe.
The difference between China and Europe is that no single nation came to dominate Europe (although plenty tried) in the way that China was dominated by the emperors. The reason for that is Britain. Britain's overriding foreign policy objective for hundreds of years (and even into the present) has been to prevent a single nation from dominating Europe. That balance of power, which Britain was principally responsible for attaining, allowed competition to flourish among the many nation-states of Europe while at the same time preventing a single power from arising (e.g. Napoleon or Hitler) which would have destroyed any competing power sources -- as happened in China with the rise of the emperors.
So what made Britain special? A good argument can be made that it was geography that made Britain special. After all Britain is in the almost unique position of being a large island located nearby to a continent. This location made Britain in effect a large fortress surrounded by an even larger moat. At the same time, Britain's location drew its inhabitants into seafaring activities which in turn led to seafaring trade becoming an important economic activity of its inhabitants. What this meant was that from early in its history, Britain had more of an interest in maintaining trade relations with other nations than in conquering them or in seeing them conquered by other, bigger nations.
The only other areas where a similar dynamic could have taken place is with respect to China and Japan. However, Japan, perhaps because it is not nearly as close to China as Britain is to Europe, chose to turn inward and become the Hermit Kingdom rather than turning outward and becoming a seafaring nation as the British did.
But the geography of Britain only explains so much. The other crucual component which allowed Britain to play a special role in Europe was Britain's long held belief that it could only prosper if a balance of power was maintained on the European continent. This approach to foreign affairs in turn apparently led to the same balance of power approach being applied to such internal sources of power as the crown. Although, one could certainly make an argument that the reverse was true -- that Britain's foreign policy of maintaining a balance of power grew directly out of Britain's approach to its internal affairs where early on the British acted to check the unbridled use of power by their leaders (e.g. King John's signing of the Magna Carta).
In any event, Britain made one of the key contributions to Europe by recognizing early on what a threat it was to a nation's well-being to have a single nation or a single person gather unbridled power unto themselves. That approach to how men govern themselves is the key inheritance that the United States in turn derived from Britain and that is why Western Civilization has outstripped every other civilization on the face of the earth. To sum it up, Western Civilization rests upon the principle that competition is good and monopoly is bad.
So no one group of people have more ambition and spirit than another. I have always wondered how some of these fellows get tagged with labels like, genius, scholar, when they are as dull spirited as fence posts.
I agree. It is about the way people think, innovate, approach their world. It is about systems with proper incentives.
Hong Kong has zilch in the way of natural resouces (okay, it has harbors), yet it is blessed with hard-working residents and an economic system that works (things could change, but China has not killed Hong Kong yet).
Mexico is a basket case, yet Mexicans who come here work hard and prosper.
Uraguay is a socialist country filled with college-educated people who are unemployed or underemployed, so education by itself is not the answer. (I could be wrong here, as the source of my impressions about Uruguay could be outdated).
It is about systems and philosophy and freedom and limited corruption.
bttttttttttttt
If we are not responsible for our own success, then we are also not accountable for others' failures. If we got where we are through sheer dumb luck, then less successful cultures got where they are through sheer dumb BAD luck. We didn't succeed at their expense.
Already speculated about by Asimov, except his 'Historian' was a Mathematician.
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