On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Jared Diamond was cited:
> Jared Diamond who has dedicated much of his work to studying how societies
> tend to follow their established patterns of behavior right to the bitter end
> - <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond03/diamond_index.html >
I don't know about other people, but I found this analysis maddeningly dilatory and confused. Diamond starts by saying he wants to study how societies destroy themselves. But he spends most of his time studying problems that didn't destroy societies.
And in the end, he misses the forest for the trees.
What his few societies that self destructed had in common was that they were isolated and stuck in place -- island societies. The innumerable other societies that didn't self-destruct weren't necessarily any smarter -- they just didn't run out of resources. In part because they had room to run.
Given this, there's a simple answer to the answer of why these few societies self-destructed. And it's not an obscure answer. It was the founding argument of modern ecology, namely the collective action problem, originally termed "the tragedy of the commons." In a situation of finite resources, short term, rational action will *always* lead to long-term collectively irrational results *unless an overarching institution is created that changes the short term calculus.*
Diamond treats this in passing as if it were the exception rather than the rule. If you reverse that perspective, the whole puzzle he is trying to solve vanishes and is replaced by its opposite. Without a solution to the collective action problem, all societies will destroy themselves if they are faced with finite necessary resources.
So it's not a puzzle why they were destroyed. It's a puzzle how their destruction could have been stopped. And it's a puzzle he doesn't address. Which is kind of frustrating consider how long he goes on.
In our present situation, where society is global society and we're stuck on a rock in space, we can be fairly said to be in the situation of the Easter Islanders. And we have the same problem they (most likely) had: no central authority, but rather a competition among subgroups. It's not realizing the problem that's the nub. It's creating an authority that could solve it -- a place where effectively binding collective decisions could be made for the globe as a whole. It's a political problem, not a scientific problem. And one that he doesn't address. All the knowledge problems he discusses are interesting but secondary. They could all be solved and we could still perish.
And global warming, which I perceive as the constant background to this entire essay, is so far is furnishing a perfect example of how that could concievably happen -- of how you could solve all the knowledge problems he spends his time with and still be stuck at square one and a half.
So if that was his target, IMHO he missed it entirely.
Michael