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The Collapse Of Jared Diamond
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological
Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, Edited by Patricia A.
McAnany and Norman Yoffee, Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN
978-0-521-73366-3, 372 pages.
(Swans - April 19, 2010) There are few professors with a higher
profile than Jared Diamond, whose 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel
(referred to hereafter as G, G & S) enjoyed blockbuster bestseller
status and whose appearances on PBS have made him an instantly
recognizable figure. With his avuncular beard, Diamond is the
perfect figure to explain to middle-class television audiences why
some people are on top and others are on the bottom. As the PBS
Web site on G, G & S puts it, he will answer "Why were Europeans
the ones to conquer so much of our planet?"
The way he answers this question has convinced some people on the
left that he is "one of us" since it rejects the kind of racism
that 19th century defenders of Empire espoused. Diamond says that
it is not in the white man's genes that he rules over people of
color. Instead it is only a geographical accident that Europe and
the United States became hegemons. If, for example, the Incas had
access to horses rather than the llama, they might have become
major world powers. While it is arguably a mark of progress that
the intelligentsia no longer considers people of color to be
closer to the apes than to homo sapiens, the net effect of
Diamond's grand narrative is to relieve the privileged men and
women of the imperialist societies of any sense of responsibility
for the suffering of the system's victims. After reading G, G & S,
they might say to themselves: There, but for the grace of
geography, go I.
In 2005, Diamond came out with Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed, another ambitious book geared to a mass audience.
Long associated with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, Diamond
was finally getting around to answering another Big Question now
that he had settled the issue of why the U.S. and Western Europe
ruled the world. This time he would analyze why some societies
suffered ecological collapse, a problem that is also very much on
the mind of the PBS audience and all other solid middle-class
people worrying about their future. After all, what good would it
do to sit on top of the world when it was facing environmental
destruction?
As was the case with G, G & S, Collapse was universally regarded
as a prophetic and progressive manifesto. But unlike the earlier
book, this one was less deterministic. Geography had little to do
with, for example, the failure of the Haitians to succeed as the
Dominicans did on the very same island of Hispaniola. How could
one part of the island be an ecological disaster while the other
half was a virtual Garden of Eden? The answer could be found in
the choices made by the people themselves. While the Incas could
not be blamed for lacking horses, the Haitians could be blamed for
deforestation -- or so it would seem.
full: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/lproy60.html
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