Book: Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Krishna
The core of the book is a very interesting research. It managed to hold me spellbound for the first few pages but then it falls apart, unfortunately, due to several reasons.
He investigates why, over a period of time, seemingly invincible, rich and prosperous and very successful societies collapse and disappear from view altogether. Is the collapse sudden or gradual? What factors contribute to it? From that point of view, the title is great, because it tells you exactly what you can expect in this book.
In the preface, he lists several categories and reasons for collapse of industries. This makes interesting reading.
Jared talks about modern Montana – it was a prosperous place once but now in decline and he traces the causes to the mines and the resultant poisoning, environmental issues, the job losses when the mines closed etc and he convincingly shows how a modern society for which records are very much available show the decline in modern times.
He switches gears and goes to the Easter Islands – he talks about the Ahu (platforms) and Moai (statues) which became such a status symbol that this became an obsession with the rich folks, accelerating the trend already prevalent denuding of the forests. He alludes to the rich lifestyle which could not be maintained when the forests were all gone and boats or canoes could not be made for trading. (They had severe tooth problems as sugarcane and sugary stuff made from them were eaten to excess by the populace). He talks about internal rivalry, battles and even cannibalism; they took to eating rats before vanishing due to starvation when these too became unavailable. All fascinating stuff so far.
It is when he moves to Mangareva, Pitcairn and Henderson Isles that we start to see the repetitions – he talks about deforestation to cultivate, the plant and its sugary roots as staple food and tooth decay. You wonder if you just finished reading about this as a part of another place.
When you start reading about Anasazi and how they disappeared when their trade collapsed and they could not get essential supplies, you start noticing two other irritating things in the book. The first is – the author, like a professor proving a hypothesis, insists on taking his laundry list in the preface of the reasons for collapse and waves it insistently in your face, checking off all the causes he had listed that holds true for the current narration. He does this for every story and you feel like shouting ‘I get it. I get it. Can you now stop?’. But of course he does not. Till the end. The second even more irritating thing is that you notice the extreme left preaching that runs insistently along all storylines. “Look at what they did to the environment? Have we now stopped? No! We are still destroying our precious earth! We are still deforesting! We are still polluting! What do you think will happen to our entire world if we continue this practice?” On and on. Yes, I am concerned about mankind’s disregard for the earth but don’t want to be lectured to in a book by a disgruntled-uncle like figure while I am trying to focus on why societies collapse.
And so it goes on and on. You meet the same causes, similar causes, and others all carefully recorded in the laundry list ahead of time to prove that the author has got them all and waved in front of our faces and many of the stories read exactly like the ones you have read before. The book is not a small one and the investment you make in reading it starts to produce diminishing returns.
I know that it adds to the evidence and makes us understand that many societies had similar causes of collapse but wonder if this could have been grouped in some way to make us understand that very similar causes resulted in the destruction of multiple societies, instead of reading about each as a separate story and finding out that it is the same story as before with the names and places substituted with new ones. The tedium would have been less or absent.
There are some interesting facts that still come out. For instance, you are surprised to learn that even while starving, the Norse who populated Greenland did not eat fish! The animals they had imported from Scandinavia did not survive and when they could not import more, they died of lack of food! With the sea and abundant fish all around them!
One example of irritating preaching is this – I thought I’d just add one for sample : “We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx”.
A lot of conjectures, how casurina trees were adopted by New Guinea – “I saw some of the New Guineans were curious when I took the samples abroad to them. That is how they must have done it all those years ago!” Come on, Jared…really? Since they were curious about what you personally carried, they must have gotten curious when an ancient trader took them and must have adopted to using the casurina trees? Is this one of your scientific research results?
To be fair, not all of Jared’s narration is so pokey. His description on how New Gunea and Tikopea survived by bottom up management is interesting. In Tikopea they even resorted to infanticide to control population explosion and resorted to voluntary suicides and virtual suicides by boat rides into sea in hazardous boats. This is very interesting. He contrasts this bottom up management well with Japan with top down management of shoguns – delay of childbirth, change food intake etc. Another interesting observation is that the caste system in India sprung up to provide sustainable living.
But he cannot be serious for long, apparently. He seems to support the alarmist theory of Malthus in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary! He attributes the Rwanda and Burundi massacres to seven factors, which is a surprise to us who thought, especially in the former case, as an ethnic conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis.
He also seems to jump to other conclusions. Sample: “Dominican republic has a large diaspora in US, Canada etc so the country will be influenced by what happens there” Really?
China next. But no new insights into the Chinese conditions except the regular lament about growth induced issues and problems due to aspirations to “First World Comforts”.
An interesting tidbit is how Australia became a penal colony (US, which was the main penal colony of UK was shut off by its declaration of independence). Salination as a unique Australian problem is described well.
Finally more preaching on why people are blind to their problems. He claims that economists preach that we should use the resource today even if it leads to depletion tomorrow! Where? I have not seen an economic theory that supports unsustainable consumption. In fact they are calling for politically unpalatable things like the carbon tax.
He calls Chinese leaders as “having great foresight” to ban large families “before population explosion could become a problem”? Wow.
In the final “lessons learned” section, there is high praise for Chevron’s environmental management in its Kutubu oil field operations in Papua New Guinea.
There is an interesting discussion on the differences between oil industry and mining industry and resulting difference in attitudes for pollution cleanup. A very pessimistic assessment of the mankind’s future – does not give any credence to the ingenuity of man, a bit like Malthusian alarmist predictions, really.
His assertion that economy should balance environmental benefits against costs makes sense. But his rebuttal of ‘technology would find a way around current problems’ is very weak and is disputed even by the example of modern technology he himself quotes: horses being replaced by the motor cars.
On top of this overweening pessimism, beyond a token acknowledgement that corporations sometimes indeed do good, there is this specious arguments marshalled in defence of his statements. For instance, get this! Rich people are increasingly infertile because they eat polluted food! You start doubting whether the author is unbiased enough to do pure research.
Motherhood and pie statements irritate. Globalization is not first world people selling goods to third world people? It is about communication and trade? There is hope for us which is why we had children? You start feeling sick at this point.
Or look at this: “First World countries export machinery, food aid etc to Third World countries. Third World countries also export to First World Countries: cholera, SARS, Bird Flu etc”.
The book has a good subject matter but really bad organization and management. And it looks like a scolding from a disapproving uncle about something totally different from what you wanted to learn. Sadly, at the end, it feels the reader very disappointed.
I think this book deserves a 2/10
— Krishna