Interesting book COLLAPSE by Jared Diamond

I don’t know if this has been mentioned, but I just came across the book COLLAPSE by Jared Diamond.  Actually my father is reading it now and I plan to read it when he is done.

Among its premises is that increased consumption per capita (of all forms of consumption) lead to sudden and drastic collapse of civilization but delayed by about 20 years or about one generation.

It is an interesting premise and begs the question as to how much this is happening right now.

I will do a better summary after I read it.

Eric

sounds like the perfect companion to Chris hedges latest books

I read Collapse when I was transitioning from urban community garden life to a rural permaculture plan. It was very inspiring, covering topics like:

appropriate technology (Norse living roofs, Inuit fishing equipment, terra preta)
carrying capacity (the Anasazi, who allowed their population to outgrow their ability to harvest water)
responsible forestry (logging and how we came to have forests ungroomed by fire, vast expanses of ladder fuel)
anthropology (how the Norse preferred starving to death to interacting with or learning from the Inuit)
colonialism and conservationism (how the Dominican Republic's CIA-asset dictator Balaguer may have hated his people and Haitians, but he loved conservation!...this chapter was a little problematic)

and lots more! I read it a couple years ago and these topics still stick out in my mind. At the time I was so excited I bought people copies for Christmas.

It's full of information but written in a very accessible way, which I think first made Diamond famous for GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL.

I read Collapse when it first came out. Diamond predicted that Haiti was one natural disaster away from complete economic and social breakdown. Then a couple years later it happened. He attributed it to them farming their soil down to the bedrock. Societies don't survive the complete destruction of their soil.

So I read Guns, Germs and Steel.  I liked it and I found it to be an interesting answer to the question about why Europe rose to prominence around approximately 1400-1800 and why the rest of the world did not.  Or the shorter version:  why was/is the world Eurocentric?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the book and I am looking forward to *Collapse*.  However, professionally I live in a strange world.  I am a history and psychology teacher.  I have a BA in each.  Most high school psychology teachers only have a few classes, if any in psychology, and at best they minored in it.  When I did my Masters degree I did so in history, which is my passion, and not in administration or curriculum & instruction, which are both programs designed around teachers schedules and teachers in these programs almost always finish their degrees in 2 years.  As I have no interest in either administration or C&I, I did my masters in history—6 1/2 brutal years.

I consider myself a scholar, but I will not go on to teach at the collegiate level, at least not in any tenure track program.  Still, I have one foot firmly planted in that camp.  I am a public school teacher, but I have zero interest in administration and I have serious questions about pedagogy and educational psychology (I will explain later if someone really wants, it long). So I have a foot firmly in each camp.  

I think “Guns” is very thought provoking and warrants discussion.  But it is written for a general audience, NOT for historians.  On the whole, my experience is that professional historians don’t think much of it.  In one class, I remember the book being described as “academic porn”.  Meaning attractive but vacuous.  The historians I know tend to say that the book is shallow, simplistic, and ultimately a cover for justifying a Eurocentric attitude or for projecting Eurocentric norms on the world.

Much as I respect my fellow historians, I think that they are wrong, the book much more substantial than they give credit and indeed provokes serious questions.  But I am this academic weirdo with one foot in and one foot out of the higher academic world.  I can seriously recommend “Guns” and hope to be able to do the same with “Collapse”.  Just bear in mind who you are talking to if you talk about “Guns” as some will love it and some will hate it.

My long winded recommendation,

Eric

The debate on merits about pop science, which engages everyone in normally esoteric topics, and proper science which is largely the preserve of experts is never ending. If you have more than a gloss worth of knowledge on a certain topic, you'll probably take issue with Jared Diamond's style...like I said, I had reservations about the colonial angles he covers because of my understandings about Haiti, and found a good critique without trying hard at all.

And Dale, I think the discussion I just linked there about Haiti's soil is more informative than everything Diamond wrote about it. You don't go from soils fertile enough to grow 60% of the world's coffee and 40% of the world's sugar to the present denudation without some professional resource extraction going on.

But a good critique engages with its subject, rather than just dismissing or insulting it. So I like Eric's perspective. Do "proper" scientists have at Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do they take exception to Carl Sagan? Maybe they frown at Joseph Campbell, even! And I'm sure golden child Malcolm Gladwell has his detractors (he irritates me). These figures get ordinary folks interested in and talking about subjects otherwise too arcane to share, and it follows that any such introduction should be a point of departure for more research and personal inquiry, not a promontory of expertise. My $.02!

Fredy,

Thanks for your thoughts.  A problem I get exposed to with my one-foot-in-one-foot-out perspective is that modern academia does an extremely good job at being professional academics.  Collectively they research thoroughly, write extremely well, are incredibly well versed in not only their subject of expertise, but frequently and increasingly in subjects seemingly divergent (say history and physics) and are generally excellent scholars.

My greatest critique that is that in becoming extremely specialized, there is a tendency to write for a narrow and shrinking audience.  Most historians spend most of their time writing journal articles that will almost certainly never be read by someone not a professional historian (which includes anyone in graduate school).  The books that are written generally are highly specialized, again, generally aiming for that same audience.  Rarely does a historian write to a general audience.  This rarely advances his/her career and may even set it back.  A poor book review, for whatever reason, can derail an aspiring historian’s career, even blocking tenure, a real black mark on a person’s academic career.

I speak from the perspective of history, but numerous other disciplines apply as well.  In order to achieve a PhD in history, one must “discover” something new.  Sometimes this is a different perspective of a well covered topic (most any war for example, though most historians consider wars to be over taught and over researched).  Some topics are “finished” such as biographies of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, as they are extremely well documented.  If it were discovered that Dr. King was abducted by aliens or Gandhi was a bona fide Nazi, those topics would suddenly open up, but of course that is a ridiculous example.  My personal area of interest is the history of energy.  Actually this is not a well documented topic so it is both timely and ripe.

In the end, it is hard to be original so most historians time is spent researching increasingly esoteric information, the likes of which likely won’t be read by a general audience, and this is a problem.  At some point, academia should communicate its findings to the general audience.  A few academicians do this well.  Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are excellent examples.  

I am not criticizing any specific academician, but rather the academic culture that disconnects with the general audience.  There are subtle politics to navigate, both internal and electoral (be careful the would be conservative grad student!) that complicate the matter even more.

Fredy, I appreciate everything you said about my critique of “Guns”.  Not only for what it said but also the tone it took.

Eric

I really enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel, but I think he went into it with an agenda, to show that all peoples and cultures are basically the same, given the same resources and opportunities. This is a very politically correct way of looking at it. It doesn't allow for certain groups to have innate abilities that are different than that of others. I know from dealing with individuals, that some people can figure things out and come up with a reasonable way of doing things, given a certain circumstance, and some simply cannot manage to solve problems or to even get along and work well with others. There's no reason why this couldn't be true of a large group of people, except that then those people would be different at best and inferior at worst.

I think it's mostly cultural. In my wife's country of the Philippines, there is a cultural tendency to defer to older people or just to people who are more pushy. So if ideas are being kicked around on how to do something, the older voice or the loudest voice will win, even if that voice belongs to an idiot. This can be a problem. For a long time, Western societies have had some version of merit-based promotion, even within societies that have nobility and serfs. In my wife's village, which is the most primitive place I've ever been to, there are a couple people who desperately want to be in charge, and that alone has put them in charge. If anything sensible has been done in the last generation, it's not evident to me. Even within her own family, Nova is absolutely the smartest , no matter how we measure it, but she is the third child, and before I came along, her voice didn't matter much. Her older sister who doesn't demonstrate any grasp  of how money , or society works , was the de-facto leader of this family.

I think cultural things like this have a lot to do with which society succeeds and which one fails. Jared Diamond gives a huge amount of weight to natural resources and geography, without dealing much with entrenched cultural tradition that will either propel a society forward, or hold it in place.

Diamond returned quite often to his time spent in New Guinea, and a big part of it is that they didn't have certain building blocks to create anything like a modern society. This may be true, but they also developed many cultural practices that would prevent social and technical advancement. When people are afraid to travel anywhere for fear of being eaten by the neighbouring tribe, they probably won't form a nation state. In fact, New Guinea contains a huge number of languages that are as different from one another as English is from Chinese. Hundreds of little societies that communicate very little with others, do not become industrial trading nations or cultural centres.

Being not academic and having read both books confirms points being made here. I loved "Guns" but "Collapse" got repetitive.
Be careful when you're an academic, one wrong word, one wrong opinion, one wrong curiosity and you'll be discarded as a pseudo-scientist. Which is such a shame.
It restricts our brightest minds at this time. A time where we most need them to solve our multiple interconnected crises. I  don't get this culture, eternally specializing, what's the use of knowing every minutest detail when humanity is off track completely. And that is putting it mildly.
I work quite a bit with academics in their holiday homes, friendly folk, but if ever there where a collapse these friendly stumblers are not well positioned to survive.

And as well there is a culture of tremendous jealousy in academic circles. Then if someone connects some dots that where obvious, academics will find every small detail that doesn't stand up to the highest standards. Which in itself is a good thing, because people who oversee multiple disciplines tend to be not as precise as mono disciplinaries are.
But.... they like to use it as a weapon to dismiss people, put them down. Of course if your whole life consists of nothing but extremely boring sterile laboratory work, day in day out, numbers and statistics and some adventurous creative non comformist with an exciting life comes along and connects all the dots that where very obvious in hindsights. The labaratory professors get angry. It's sad, because it's not the fault of the adventurous thinker that scientist embrace the self inflicted sentence that a lab life is , still they will do everything in their power to punish him or her for daring to help humanity forward. From the privilege of high pay they exclude and smear creative minds non stop and obsessively.

I remember vividly it was laughable suggesting animals have emotions and communicate. Look now, even plants communicate.
I remember my scientist friend feared for my mental health for telling that planets must exist all over the universe and that we are not alone. Mainstream now. Don't think they'll ever mention it cause heaven forbid a scientist will stand corrected.
I remember psilocybine was a bad drug, and suggesting it should at least be seriously looked at in universities got me put in the loony fringe category, look now. They're suggesting it cures depressions, angst of death in terminal cancer patients , and helps people quit smoking. No mild feature.

I can go on and on. But it's clear for any open mind. Which a scholar life all but encourages. So they can't even see it.
So yeah, i am very thankful for the rare peeps who still dare to come out and dare to oppose the wrathful narrow-minded privilieged white scientist culture. And the immense success of these authors prove i am far from being alone, i like to think.

Hugo,

I have only a slight variation on your astute analysis, which was spot on, by the way.

Many years ago while still an undergrad I had a professor who who said there were two types of historians:  lumpers and splitters.  

He went on to say that lumpers wrote about big item issues.  Why Rome fell might be one of the ultimate lumper topic (his example).  A splitter looks at the most minute detail.  How much a Roman soldier ate on a particular day (again, his example).  Further said that the lumper topics are mostly already “finished” (my term).  He said he was the ultimate splinter.

As a grad student I understood this even better.  In history, there is a concept called historiography.  The term literally means the study of the study of history.  That sentence is correct, contains no typos or duplication.  The term is a clumsy one for a clumsy issue.  Basically, historiography is a study of how our own unintentional biases color our perception of history, how it is taught, studied, and written about.

My personal favorite example of these unintentional biases is the American concept of Western History.  Not certain how France teaches this concept, if at all, but in the US, Western History is the most common history course taught on American Universities.  Most Americans recognize it as the rise and spread of Western values arising from the ancient Greeks, and spreading west into Rome, Western Europe, and eventually the Americas (with a heavy emphasis on The United States.

The problem is that the course is in and of itself a lie, propaganda for the Cold War.  “Western History” did not emerge as a class until the early 50s and was really the story of “NATO” history!  All the nations under the western aegis were NATO nations.  Prior to WWII, American history was taught as being separate from deviant Europe, a democracy in a world of monarchy.  After WWII, and with a Russian menace on the horizon, Western History knit the histories of all NATO nations into a cohesive unit, deliberately keeping Russia out!

My point here is that there are an unstated set of rules to follow, currents to navigate in the professional study of history.  I personally think that all historians are just itching to write a grand history (a lumpers History), but as those topics are mostly well covered, they are forced to split history into tinier and tinier bites.  It’s easier, it makes a point without making waves (the bad kind).  Increasingly one can get recognized without upsetting the historians crowd and still make a valid contribution.

Generally, those that lump make waves.  They upset the status quo.  They upend work done by established authors and commonly held assumptions.  They generalize much more and leave themselves open to attack.  Jared Diamond is a lumper.  Further, he is not a historian, but s geographer.  His bold statements, appeal to the population at large and popularity all detract from the professional historians sphere, thus earning him the scorn of the historians.  This is sad, but understandable consequences of the study of history such as it is today.

Eric

Eric: I consider "Collapse" to be a very important book. I re-read it at one point concurrently with Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time" (about the Dust Bowl in the US in the 1920s and 30s) and THAT is an eye opening mix. And within a month of that, drove I-40 from NM, through Texas, Oklahoma. and Missouri, and saw what they were talking about. And realized my family had lived in NM, TX, and MO during those times, which explains some of the mindset I was raised with.

To me, the exact details of the book don't have to be perfect, the concepts are worth learning, even if it was total fiction, set on another planet, I'd consider it a very important book. One of the things I love about well written science fiction is they can make up a culture, and explore ramifications, without stepping on anyone's historical toes. I think we need a lot more historians and psychologists writing science fiction, just for that reason (HINT! :D )

I like your category of "lumpers" to me those are the more relevant ones, and seeing their biases, and reading the same thing from the point of view of other lumpers with differing biases fascinates me. Due to all the propaganda washing and focus on kings and wars and the nobility over the course of history, we will never know what really happened, what it meant to be an ordinary person in those times, but the various perspectives of the lumpers is always interesting to me. I think more far ranging vision is required for us to thrive as a species, and that narrow focus has it's place, but we need the far view much more to attempt to steer away from rocks that may have sunk the ships of past cultures. Blindly crashing through the world we do so much that is then difficult to undo. And we, as a species, are VERY good at blindly crashing through the world. Perspectives, from all sides, can only help us, and none need to be taken as dogma, but as possibles, and IF this possible is right, what do we need to do now and in the future to mitigate it being a possible again?

So yes, "Collapse" lives in an important place on my bookshelves, and I recommend it highly to anyone who might listen to it's message. I have something I say about a lot of things "If this is even HALF right, then we need to pay more attention it." Collapse is at LEAST half right, and we need to pay attention.  

Pearl,

You are exactly right about the importance of the lumpers.  In fact, the only thing I don’t like about lumpers is that I didn’t think of the term!

My opinion is that every historian inherently wants to be a lumper.  But to get tenure, and certainly a PhD, it is FAR more effective to be a splitter, a micro specialist.  I worked with a fellow teacher who I briefly taught with and attended grad school together.  He did his thesis on a former slave, freed by General Grant’s invasion near Vicksburg, got pressed into the Union Navy, was honorably discharched, settled near Murphysboro, Illinois and is burried nearby.  This was good thorough, scholarship and research.  To the best of my knowledge, he has not found a tenure position and he has been looking for about 10 years.

He is a pretty good example of a splitter, but even in doing so, it is necessary to tell the story in the context of broader events.  In the chaos around Vicksburg, white plantation owners simply up and abandoned their homes and left slaves to fend for themselves.  The North was inundated with freed slaves (freedmen) and had no clear idea of what to do with them.  Military service was seen both as a great option for freedmen and a burden to the US army who didn’t know what to do with an influx of potential soldiers who didn’t know left from right (literally) and were frequently, typically, totally illiterate.  This is in addition to the simmering northern racism.

Splitters definitely have their place, but often it is a commentary on present concepts about the past (historiography).  My particular area that I would like to further focus on is the history of energy, which is not well explored.  This makes it a topic both trendy and ripe for research yet largely undiscovered.  In particular, I have a fascination in the study of nuclear energy.

I love your thoughts on science fiction and I love the way you pointed at me to go and write a science fiction.  And for the record, I LOVE science fiction!  I grew up equally on Star Wars (saw it when I was 6 and life was never the same again!) and Star Trek.  Later I loved Babylon 5 and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.  An important note about SF, even though they almost always take place in the distant future, they are commentaries about the present.  Battlestar Galactica was devastatingly so.  An interesting history would be a history of science fiction.


Eric