Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (Viking, 592 pp., $29.95) Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel argued that geography trumped culture, and that the current privileged position of the West was therefore mostly attributable to the advantageous resources in, and location of, Western countries, rather than to Europe’s singular values. Despite the allure of such a politically correct exegesis — President Clinton endorsed the book wholeheartedly — there were numerous criticisms of this determinist idea of natural accidents resulting in the present-day dominance of the West. At some point a Cleisthenes, Plato, Augustine, Magna...