His latest book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” posits that creeping environmental collapse will occur over time (and not all that long a time) as a result of modern societies (esp the US’) ethos of “unbridled consumerism”, and as a result those societies will fail.
In Diamond’s discussion of this topic with Bill Gates (see Salon article) Gates said essentially “Technology got us into this mess, and I have faith technology will get us out”. Diamond quite adamantly disagrees with this point of view, and warns us that if we do not quickly begin to “clean up our act” both metaphorically and environmentally, civilizational collapse is not that far away.
I’ve always thought that GGS was overly hyped because it seemed so deterministic. It seemed to be saying that, no matter the persons involved, western civilization would have become dominant.
As for the new one…I haven’t read it but it’ll probably be an interesting read.
Yes it did, and aside from the analytical issues, that was part of the reason it was embraced with both arms by many. It robbed western civilization of the moral imperative of the assumption that it was it’s moral right and destiny to succeed over less virtuous and capable civilizations.
Yeah, but wasn’t that fighting a battle long over? I’m in my late 30s are remembering reading Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ with scorn in elementary school. I didn’t need Diamond to come along and resell the concept.
Um, I believe that wasthe point of the book, yes… I don’t see what that has to do with it being overly hyped, unless you are suggesting that western civilization succeeded because it is genetically superior to other civilizations? I think he made a pretty strong case for his point, though a rebuttal would be interesting.
Anyway, Dr. Diamond may be very intelligent, but he isn’t an all-knowing expert. He has pretty limited first hand experience with social evolution, which was a boon for GGS, and The Third Chimpanzee is interesting, but I don’t think he is exactly qualified to enter into plotting (plotting as in predicting, not as in conspiracy) the demise of western civilization. Then again, neither is Bill Gates. Frankly, it is always a matter of time until “something” happens that will change balance. I would be interested in reading his take on it, though.
Is there a word for this attitude. It seems like I encounter it a lot, the idea that some undetermined future technology will solve whatever problem is being looked at. Sort of Dues ex machina with technology taking the place of God, (we could call it machina ex machina perhaps). Certainly it would be cool if technology does step in and save the day, but it seems like poor planning to count on it.
I also don’t think much of the idea proposed by astro that Guns, Germs and Steel somehow tried to justify western imperialism by explaining why it happend. I though it was trying to do the opposite, explain why a mistake in geography led to western dominence, and not some divine right for europeans to rule over the world.
Yeah, I kind of got off the Diamond bandwagon after reading The Third Chimpanzee, which, IMHO, was just not very good. Or insightful. Color me unimpressed.
I think if you re-read the OP, you’ll see that **astro **actually says the same thing you did. I didn’t see any attempt to justify imperialism.
Haven’t read the new Diamond book yet, but I’ve thumbed thru it at the bookstore. I liked GGS and TTC, so I’ll probably read C as well. The idea that a lot of past civilizations collapsed due to environmental issues is not new nor particularly surprising. It’ll be interested to see his argument about the iminent collapse of western civ…
I encounter a similar attitude repeatedly in discussions with free marketers. They seem to feel that any economic recession can only be temporary and mild in a free market economy because some new industry/technology/etc. will come along to Solve Everything. Like you said, seems like poor planning. but the impression I have of free market types is that they are against planning.
Isn’t the situation different now? In the past societies were more isolated. Today with a global market if we run out of a resource we can trade for it or if need be we can steal it. Sure we can use up all the resources, but this will hurt every society not just ours. We have a new modern military that can strike any place in the world in a few hours.
If we wanted to we could crush and control any other society we wanted. The reason we don’t now is because the cost are too high for the benefit. But as the numbers change we will find it is in our interest to take tighter control. The only way we are going down is if we take everyone else with us.
I too don’t find Diamond all that profound-mostly he rehashes arguments that have been around for a long time. His scholarship is pretty sloppy too…most of his referneces are outdated. Mostly, he starts out with a thesis and tries to justify it. Why was Europe different from civilizations like China, India, the Caliphate, etc.? The most cogent explanation I have is that Western Europe was pragmatic and profit-driven. None of the other civilizations developed trade to the extent of Europe…and that is the main difference. As for the end of Wesytern Civilization, the “Club of Rome” has been predicting that (unsuccessfully) for decades.
Guns, Germs and Steel raised some interesting new ideas I hadn’t seen anywhere before. But there was always something of a just-so story about the explanations, not to speak of the lack of a smoking gun – in that it is better classified together with Desmond Morris than Darwin.
And surely it landed far short of the immense hype surrounding it. It now seems clear that its popularity is fuelled more by ideological and political concerns rather than scientific. Also attested by the preface of the book. One of the worst I’ve ever had the misfortune to slug through. “Genetic & intellectual superiority of New Guineans over westerners”? bah… and that in a book which purports to explain why white Europeans have more “cargo” than native New Guineans without resorting to racist explanations – which he calls “loathsome”, perhaps so – though his opinion on this would have been more trustworthy had he not himself just a paragraph above made such prodigious use of racist theories himself, but his emotional response is of little interest to anyone but himself, and hardly an ideal place to start an unbiased investigation. Nor is his repeated assertions that his is not a book of European history, that European history is of only marginal interests, etc. Yes, uneuropean history can be interesting and educational, but why does it have to be done at the expense of demeaning Europe?
And then it was badly written, but I’ve only gotten halfway before I had to put it aside for awhile (for the immensely more rewarding Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) so perhaps I’m being unfair.
I agree with Diamond. I am not optimistic for the future. As I understand it we already have depleted 90% of the oceans usable biomass, and continue like smokers to devastate the lungs of our earth, the tropical rainforests.Never mind that CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions continue, even escalate, sure to wreak havoc on the global food supply. And one other thing. The increasing prosperity in the world is putting pressure on the global oil supply.
If we had a one world democratic government with a respect for dissident opinion I might agree with Bill Gates . Unfortunately,
The advanced technology that Gates relies on is still at the moment heavily dependant on fuel resources, and I’m not sure any of us have a handle on how long that will last or if we have enough time to develop reliable alternatives. This problem is severely complicated by the lack of concern by and or control on non democratic developing nations.
With ever expanding universal entitlements for citizens, non-citizens, and casual visitors to our shores, unbridled concumerism will be considered last to be the cause of collapse.
Huh? Thats not a thesis at all, thats the question he answered.
Which is flat out wrong. Differences in enviroment explain the difference is different societies wealth.
It seems like you read the book without understanding it.
I don’t have my book with me at the moment but wasn’t he in the midst of refuting the intelligence argument when he said that? I.E. he was playing a devil’s advocate of sort and showing in the framework of an intelligence argument that the intelligence argument is wrong. Not to mention this is all in the sort of background chapter before he gets into proving his thesis.
I don’t remember anything specifically demeaning Europe. I think his point is that to discover why societies across the world have different levels of wealth you need to examine each society carefully. His analysis wouldn’t have the same weight if he spent 200 pages talking about Europe and only 20 about the rest of the world.
I agree its a horrible horrible book to have to read but then again how many people find grass seed weight an interesting topic.
I realize its a video game but if you have ever played the Civilization series you can see exactly what Diamond is talking about. If you start on a small island with no resources and I start on an large island with a different resource for each square its not surprising that I will reach motorization while you are still slogging through horseback riding. This is basically a simplification of what Diamond argues. If in Civilization I have horses, gunpowder, iron and a bunch of fertile grassland and you have a small bit of grassland in the midst of a desert with no resources to speak of we can predict that even though we are equal skill I will win nearly every game that we play. To extend this analogy back into the real world Eurasia has the pack animals, right crops, fertile land and a plethora of other things while the New Guinians are stuck on a little island with none of the aforementioned resources. Even if the humans are relatively equal we can predict that if we played out our history over and over again the Eurasians will dominate the New Guinians every time.
Without having read the book, so this is kinda off topic, I don’t see a rapid collapse of Western civilization as much as I see a gradual advancement of Eastern/“Other” civilizations to eclipse the West (much like how Japan did).
That appears to square with what Diamond thinks about Gates’s technological solution. In the Salon article, Diamond cites an example of how refigerants replaced toxic ammonia with CFCs, which were considered clean and healthy at the time. It took 20 years to recognize the harmful ozone damage as a result of CFCs. Diamond’s point is that technological solutions can have lots of unforseen side effects.