Cautionary tales & historical theory: 2 by Diamond

Having been greatly stimulated by Jared Diamond's earlier book, Guns, Germs and Steel (see below), I was eager to read this newer one -- Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin Books, 2005. But, as you'll see from my notes, I found it disappointing .

In Collapse, Diamond relates cautionary tales of societies that thrived and then collapsed, contrasted to some that still survive, to identify recurrent causes of collapse. In all the cases selected, the main cause (according to him) was the society's misuse and exhaustion of material resources, esp. forests, aggravated in some cases by aggression from other societies -- which is hardly surprising. And he warns us of comparable dangers (but are they really comparable?) to our new, global ecosystem. Stories include Easter Island, the contrasting experiences of 3 dissimilar S. Pacific islands, the Anasazi, Maya, Viking settlements (Greenland, a failure; Iceland still going strong), Japan (Tokugawa success in forest management), Rwanda (Diamond blames environmental stress more than ancient enmities for the genocide of 1994), Haiti's poverty v. the Dominican Republic's much better management of resources (he credits Joaquín Balaguer especially), China, and Australia (still functioning, but precarious because overexploiting poor soil and little water). These tales are all more or less interesting (China less, Greenland more, because the information is less well known), but they don't add up to anything much beyond a reminder that the prosperity of global society requires much better husbanding of resources.

After his "Guns, Germs and Steel," which presented a coherent and audacious theory explaining Europe's rise to preeminence, this is a pious hodgepodge. Here are my notes on the earlier, stronger book:

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Random House, 1997. 1999 Norton paperback.

The reasons why European whites acquired the "guns, germs and steel" with which they decimated and subdued all other peoples are (according to Diamond) due entirely to accidental geographical advantages: a wider variety of minerals in Eurasia, including the rocks necessary for an efficient stone-age technology necessary as a first stage of development; the availability of easy-to domesticate, highly productive plants and animals enabling people in Mesopotamia to become farmers and produce enough of a surplus to build cities, long before anybody else; and the east-west orientation of the Eurasian continent, with a wide swath in the same latitude with a long growing season and plenty of rain, so that crops developed in Mesopotamia could also be grown as far as western India, all across northern Africa and across southern Europe to its western edge; the absence of major physical barriers also facilitated transfers of inventions (whether in agriculture or devices such as the wheel, practices such as weaving, etc.).

The book's great success ("over 1 million copies sold," the cover proclaims) is mainly because Diamond weaves a coherent story through a huge subject, all human history, that is a plausible alternative to the naïve race theories still current. The problem for many scholars is that the coherence seems too facile, neglecting the complexities of many developments over the millennia and (according to some of those scholars) getting many particulars wrong.

The other reason for both the book's popularity and many scholars' impatience is that Diamond repeats his essential points over and over. This makes it hard to miss them, which must be convenient for the distracted undergraduate, but is wearisome for the attentive reader, especially one who is already familiar with many of the arguments.

European v. American political consciousness: II

Here's another response to my friend Don Monkerud's query, about differences in political awareness and attitudes between Europeans and people in the U.S. This from Dan Bessie, in France:

Without doing a long sociological study, I believe that greater European political sophistication (and less idiocy - though there is certainly plenty to go around, witness Le Pen in France, right wing quasi-fascist nationalism in the Serbian countries, etc) has to do with a number of factors:

1. They have a longer and more recent association with working class struggles than do Americans. Though much weaker than they once were, socialist and communist parties are both in power in several places (socialists in Spain), communists in a few hundred cities throughout France, Italy and in other countries, and most European countries have unions that still exert far greater influence on economic events than is true in America.

2. Europe has seen two world wars rage across it. Hardly anyone here, including the British, who were bombed extensively, has been untouched by it. Fascism never touched America in the same way, in spite of the number of American deaths during WW II.

3. Large numbers of Europeans travel internally, speak more than one language (several in some cases), and thus have developed a much broader international outlook than that developed by the more or less continuing provincialism of the vast majority of Americans.

4. European media is much more open to being critical of leaders than is American media. American media fears not having access to a candidate. If, for example, the corporate owners of American media conglomerates should let too many of their reporters and commentators really nail McCain-Palin on the issues and on their lies, and, heaven forbid, they should get ELECTED, they might not have ACCESS. So their motto is, I believe, "don't bite the hand that might feed." (Since access is their bread and butter.) Most European commentators are fairly open in their political views (not all, but many more than in the States. During the last election I was in the UK when the results were coming in, and commentators on almost every station were saying substantially the same thing - "What's going on with the Americans? They must be nuts to vote for that guy Bush again.")

5. And yes, far fewer Americas travel than Europeans (though again, a lot of Europeans travel internally).


Europe is not without problems. TV watching is big and addictive here just like there. There are almost as many dumb programs (but a much higher number of quality programs as well). This (France) is also very much a consumer society. But it's someone less focused on big splashy cars and huge TVs (though there are those as well) and more on things like family vacations, seeing that the kids are well prepared for college and careers, etc.

Most Europeans are aghast that America doesn't have a national health plan in place. Here (in France and most of Europe) it's taken as a national RIGHT. Most also know that in terms of overall quality of life - health care, education, environment, standard of living, all the other things that go into making up "the good life," that America (contrary to what most Americans believe) is not #1 (Actually, France is). America, depending on which report one reads, is either #3, 4, 5 or 6 in line).

Are we happier living in Europe? On the whole, yes. But neither Jeanne nor I were unhappy in America.

Our greater happiness, I guess, comes more from what we do than from the actual conditions of life. Because the conditions of our lives here are more or less the same as they were in the States, in terms of standard of living. Some things are much less expensive (health care, for example: Jeanne had to pay about $6000 per year for an "ex-pat" policy for major medical in California. And that one had a $5000 deductible PER INCIDENT. Since she's a member of the EU (as are all Brits), she gets the same health benefits she'd get in the UK - which is about 80% (like Medicare), and spouses, even if they're not EU citizens, get the same benefits. To make up the difference we pay an annual "top up" policy of about $1500 for the BOTH of us. When we go for a doctor visit (GP) we pay a flat 23 Euros. (about $32). More for specialists We get about 75% of that back from the top up plan. Except for a very few things, all medication is included in the top up plan, so it's virtually free.

Food in restaurants are more expensive in general. Food in supermarkets is about the same, but there are a lot of items that the French consider "essential" that are very low in cost (bread, wine of course, canned veggies, etc). Gas is very high (about $7.00 a gallon).

We left the U.S. for a number of very specific reasons:

1. Why do the same thing all our lives? (That's one thing that was very important for us.)

2. Jeanne has family in the UK and she can see them more often. (You can literally fly from here to the UK for as little as about $2.00 sometimes - plus taxes, bringing it to about $25.), because a low cost Irish airline, RyanAir, would rather fill seats in the off season than have an empty airplane, since they fly back and forth to several French airports several times a day.

3. We are central to lots of places to drive to. Barcelona, about 7 hours, Paris about 6, etc, etc. (We've been to Spain once since we've been here, are going again in October, and have also been to Paris and Berlin. Aside from about three trips to the UK and two back to the States - which is getting very expensive now for air fare).

4. We like France a good deal. We live in an area of gently rolling hills, farms, small quaint villages, very friendly people for the most part, and etc. Lots of nature (France is more than 40% forest land).

Unsophisticated Europeans

One of my American friends has the impression that Europeans are much more "politically sophisticated" than Americans, and he has been asking me and other European residents why. So after pondering and writing up a response, I decided to post it here, because other people may be interested in joining the discussion.

Voters in Rome salute their victorious mayor, Gianni Alemanno, in April.

I don't think Europeans generally are more sophisticated politically than Americans, though they are more aware and respectful of other countries -- for pretty obvious reasons. Countries are smaller, the foreigner is much closer. "Respect" doesn't mean "like" -- but it's a starting point. Every family in Carboneras (the southern Spanish town I live in) has at least one member who worked for years in France, or Germany, or Holland or some other country. A surprising number of barely educated people are bi- or even trilingual, just because of life experience. Those people tend to be tolerant and open-minded toward all other cultures, which is good.

But they are no more likely than ordinary Americans to have any coherent, critical understanding of the Big Issues that they are always being asked to vote on. Global warming, nuclear energy, national immigration policy (even people who have been emigrants themselves are likely to panic about "too many immigrants", esp. when the economy tightens), national economic policy, religion in schools (as hot an issue in Spain as in the U.S., with the difference being that here the Church -- which still has a big hold -- is on the defensive while in the U.S. the churches are on the offensive, trying to gain privileges like those the Catholic Church enjoys in Spain). The irrational right has been able to mobilize huge demonstrations to demand, among other things, the repeal of the law to teach basic citizenship (mainly tolerance of religious, racial and sexual differences) in the public schools, because only the Church has the right to discuss morality (and the Church's teachers should be paid by the State, i.e., all the taxpayers, whether religious or not). In the last legislature (2004-2008), they accused Zapatero of "destroying the family" because of laws recognizing homosexual marriage, abortion, etc. Now those same people -- a very large minority -- are outraged because a judge (Baltasar Garzón) is requiring ecclesiastical, state and military authorities to open their records so that families can find out when and how their loved ones were murdered during the civil war and Franco-ist postwar years, and where they are buried. None of this is sophisticated.

Before you overpraise the sophistication of European voters, it would be good to analyze the recent votes in Italy. Show business trumps argument. Berlusconi & Co. have blamed all the country's problems on the Gypsies, and now that they've forced a census, they are surprised to find that there aren't that many of them. But no matter, it just feels good to send your cops out to beat up a couple of Gypsy kids or to egg on the crowds to burn down a Gypsy homestead.

Legislating history: Holocaust denial ban

Prison sentences for those who deny the Holocaust of 1939-45 or Armenian genocide, 1915-17, are among the worst imaginable ways to "combat racism and xenophobia," their supposed purpose. For one thing, such laws probably won't work where they are proposed--they go against hard-won conquests of free speech in western Europe, as well as the commercial interests of a lot of mass media delighted to stir up a storm about anything. But the greater threat is that they might work, at least somewhat, not to make people feel more tolerant toward other races, but to shut up about their unofficial, unsanctioned opinions. And then where will we be? In something like Putin's Russia, where only the official story gets expressed, or maybe Iran, with its deep and complex apparatus for control of opinion.

Curiously, last year the then-leading candidate for president of that country (he lost, though) argued that censorship wasn't working. The man who did win, Ahmadinejad, has not dismantled the censorship apparatus, but has come up with imaginative ways to test the West's tolerance for dissent: a cartoon contest lampooning the Israels leaders' supposed Holocaust-complex.

History should be left to the historians, to debate and argue out their interpretations. The evidence for the so-called "Holocaust" (the real event, or series of events, was far worse than any real holocaust) is overwhelming, it appears to me and should appear to most people. So those who claim it didn't happen can be refuted by evidence. Denying those "deniers" a voice is denying ourselves a chance to debate and clarify many details of a very complex history, in which vast parts of European society--not only in Germany--were complicit. As for the Armenians, the debate is not over whether tens of thousands or more died, but over whether (a) their death was deliberate policy by the Ottoman leadership and if so, (b) what responsibility modern Turkey, the secular nation-state created by Attaturk, has for its imperial predecessors. We should do everything we can to get Turkey to acknowledge the issue and join an open search for the historical truth; punishing in France those who denied that it happened is as obnoxious to free speech as punishing in Turkey those who argue that it did.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Push for EU Holocaust denial ban

See also The fight against Holocaust denial by Raffi Berg (BBC)

But most of all, see Index on Censorship

Galicia: An underreported disaster

My usual accomplice and I were in Spain as the thick "black tide" of petroleum oozed over the world's richest seafood beds, on the coast of Galicia. We were on the opposite coast, the Costa del Sol facing the Mediterranean, but reading of the battle against the disaster by fishermen, women's brigades, foreign volunteers and far too few Spanish navy and army personnel (the Spanish government's response was late and inadequate, stirring the usually quiescent Gallegos to angry demonstrations). Here are photos taken by some of the "galegos" involved in the struggle. For more images and a note on the coverage, see Eva Domínguez's story from Poynteronline.