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.

Thinking about space

Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. London, New York: Verso.

2 lectures & an essay presented at Heidelberg in 2004.

“Neo-liberalism and the restoration of class power” is about how Reagan & Thatcher led the neo-con or neo-liberal counterrevolution, so that “Freedom” (as in “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) means freedom for the likes of Haliburton, Bechtel, BP et al. Not new information, but coherently assembled.

“Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development” is just that, notes and rather rough ones, where he is exploring how “several overlapping ways of thinking about” uneven development (why some places are so much richer than others) can be harnessed to a common theory. He lists these more conventional approaches as
1) Historicist/diffusionist interpretations (the poorer places just haven’t caught up yet)
2) “Development of underdevelopment” (poverty and political weakness in poor areas are deliberately constructed by corporations & governments wanting to exploit their resources at the cheapest possible price)
3) Environmentalist explanations, such as Jared Diamond’s (some places were just luckier with their climates and other natural resources)
Harvey thinks all three approaches have merit, i.e., explain parts of the phenomena, and wants to integrate them into one theory. But, as he acknowledges, he still has work to do.



Most interesting (to me) was the essay he calls “Space as a key word,” as a proposed addition to Raymond Williams’ famous book.

Just what is “space”? It has to be something entirely different to a building contractor or to Stephen Hawking, and neither of them (usually) means the same thing as an artist or poet who talks about “conceptual space.” As a geographer, Harvey is professionally interested in space, and wants to consider all its types and how they impinge on one another. He is most impressed by (a) a three-fold typology he himself came up with in a book more than 30 years ago, & (b) Lefebvre’s 3-fold distinction (see below), which he combines in a three-by-three matrix (nine cells) which don’t prove anything, but do generate some interesting new possibilities for thinking about space.

Harvey’s 1973 classification was “absolute space” as “a ‘thing in itself’ with an existence independent of matter” ; “relative space” or how real, materially existing objects relate to one another; and finally “relational space… regarded in the manner of Leibniz, as being contained in objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects.”

I think I get that last one, but that surely is not the clearest possible way to describe it (and I hope we don’t have to buy into Leibniz’s “monad” theory). In political thought, “the left” is such a relational space. It has no real, material existence, and has no meaning except in relation to the political “right.” The second one, relative space, is no problem either: we are talking about real things, like mountains of hard rock or the jumble of objects on my desk, where one thing may be on top of, or under, or behind, etc. some other thing (especially when I’m trying to find it). I’m having a little more trouble with “absolute space” but maybe he’s thinking of something like (as though there were anything like) the universe. Space as conceived by physicists, I suppose.

Harvey paraphrases Lefebvre’s categories as (1) the space of experience and of perception open to physical touch and sensation (what the building contractor or the guys in the storage depot mean by “space,” how many real physical things will fit and how); (2) the representation of space (e.g., paintings, photographs or diagrams, or the hand-signals you make when telling somebody how to get to the Angelika Movie Theater); and (3) spaces of representations, or “the lived space of sensations, the imagination, emotions, and meanings incorporated into how we live day by day.”
I’m not sure that Lefebvre’s categories are all that different from Harvey’s other set, especially Lefebvre’s “spaces of representations” and “meanings” vs. Harvey’s (or Leibniz’s) “relational space.” And if they are not very different, then setting them up as a three-by-three matrix is not likely to yield much new information. But it is a mind-stretching exercise that architects, who must deal with all 9 cells, probably use without thinking about it.

Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

About David Harvey

Images: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Wikipedia; Solar Earths from the BBC.