'Collapse': How the World Ends

New York Times ^ | January 30, 2005 | Gregg Easterbrook

[Tom D.]

A New York Times article that recognizes political correctness as well as the inherent flaws in the thinking that has produced environmental extremists.

There is a lot to disagree with here, but Easterbrook makes some good points.

[bitt]

thanks, that's interesting...

[alnitak]

Also, as the ice age ended, Eurasia was home to large mammals that could be domesticated, while most parts of the globe were notSigh...Eurasia is most parts of the globe.

[jolie560]

..."...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.

[billorites]

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[VeritatisSplendor]

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.

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

[Tom D.]

Yesterday [Saturday] on Townhall.com Rich Tucker had an interesting column. It began:

"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.

[JasonC]

Sometimes PC is shallow revisionist BS, and all of this is. There isn't a thought in it that is sound as a matter of history. It is just a geologist who knows precise little wishing he didn't have to know any history. Which incidentally was silly nonsense in the hands of a Toynbee, or even an actual thinker like Montesquieu. In the hands of this garden variety PC spin doctor, exasperating is the right word.

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."

[dhuffman@awod.com]

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.

[VeritatisSplendor]

And besides, glacial soil isn't rich right away - no organic matter.

Mrs VS

[TalBlack]

"Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about. "

I would guess that his absolute belief in the truth of the last seven words in the quote above is what drove Diamond to write his revelation to the rest of the race that is too stupid to JUST KNOW what he does.

The idiocies in his argument are too numerous to catalog. Sticking to the above: "Chance" potentially has a place in anything; "Brain power" is about equal between peoples; That leaves "Culture". Culture is ALL. Culture is the manufactory of the individual. The individual is the common denominator in a society. The type and quality of the individual, his motivations and impulses decides the fundamental thrust and direction of the society.


To use Diamonds comparison of African and Western societies: As late as the early/middle 20th century it was impossible to teach some seed planting tribes to PLANT IN A STRAIGHT LINE. This simple expedient is the FIRST way to dramatically increase yields. Culture was why they refused. Not stupidity and not the chance that they never realized a better way.

To use another comparison: The American Indian tribes did not invent the wheel or care much for it even AFTER they saw its utility. Culture.

[AntiGuv]

Technically, no. Eurasia is about 37.4% of the total land surface of the globe (and Europe alone is just 7.1% of the total - Asia comprises the 30.3% remaining).

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.

[Wonder Warthog]

"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."

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.

[vbmoneyspender]

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.

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.

[MissAmericanPie]

"Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about."

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.

[Montfort]

Well said!

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.

[dennisw]

bttttttttttttt

[IronJack]

The argument that Europe is more advanced than Africa because of its food production is no defense for the primitive state of much of the latter continent. It may explain the problem, but it doesn't suggest much of a solution, except to argue subtly that the civilized world somehow owes something to its less fortunate neighbors.

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.

[DoctorMichael]

........he specialized in conservation biology.........Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history...........

Already speculated about by Asimov, except his 'Historian' was a Mathematician.

[Marano NYC]

The books Guns Germs and Steel was intended by some to be an antithesis to the Bell Curve. The original book is fascinating reading that one must read to get a grasp on . There were some radicals who were upset with his use of linguistics in the chapter " How Africa became Black".
I am reading Collapse now but am early into the book. This is no PC reader as some have claimed. He has a brilliant pages 8 - 10 where he deftly tackles the noble savage and global warming. He also is critical of extreme environmentalism. This is a thought provoking book and more interesting than one would assume. It is a bargain at Costco for $18.00