Collapse

Gregg Easterbrook has up a new review of Jared Diamonds "Collapse." He is fulsome in his praise but wants to reject the conclusions. Unfortunately for Greggie, his example merely documents his own confusion.
Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation

Diamond's theme, though, is that geography is destiny, and he is very clear about how Europe's fragmented geography dictated its fragmented polity, which gave rise to an environment where competing ideas could be tried. Easterbrook's example actually illustrates Diamond's point, though of course chance (and perhaps culture) plays a role as well. China had enormous advantages in opportunity to discover the new world, and it only failed because the accident of its geography made centralized rule all but inevitable.

That is the argument he needs to (but fails to) counter.

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