A weak rebuttal of Diamond's 'Collapse' but it does raise important issues., October 25, 2009
By
Allen B. Hundley
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This review is from: Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Paperback)
I placed an order for"Questioning Collapse" as soon as I heard about it and before its release date because I expected a spirited and well reasoned challenge to Jared Diamond's best selling "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." The critique leaves something to be desired but the essays by Norman Yoffee and by Errington and Gewertz bring my rating up to 4 stars.
In the interest of full disclosure this reviewer worked as a technical consultant in a number of the countries covered in these books, and in others, many of which by any reasonable standard would be judged as either failed states or close to it. This includes three months near the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, five months working with the few journalists in Rwanda who survived the 1994 genocide, almost a year with native people in Honduras, and with farmers, both Latino and Mayan, in the Yucatan. I am neither an archaeologist nor an anthropologist but mine is more than armchair analysis. Now happily retired I have no professional reputation to defend, no books to sell, no political agenda to push, and most assuredly zero tolerance for political correctness.
Two themes dominate "Questioning Collapse": Diamond is wrong to charge that societies destroy themselves by despoiling their environment, and the whole idea of collapse is overblown because societies rarely if ever collapse. They just become more simple in their political and economic structure.
The contributors seem intent on disproving Diamond's claims regarding the role environmental impact has played in societal collapse. Their evidence may have some validity but it seems to me that they are avoiding far more important questions like the appropriate level of analysis, society or civilization, Joseph Tainter's view notwithstanding.
Diamond never claims that environmental degradation is the sole cause of a society's failure. Other factors including geography and history also play a role. Where he does point to overpopulation as a central cause, as in the Rwanda genocide of 1994, his documentation is detailed and powerful.
In contrast Christopher Taylor's essay "Rwandan Genocide: Toward an Explanation in Which History and Culture Matter" merely presents some personal narrative, historical background and points to corrupt and manipulative politicians as key culprits. But both the background and the politicians have already been covered in detail by Diamond.
(Sadly Radio Rwanda played a key role in orchestrating the genocide. That aspect of the tragedy contrasts so dramatically with the extraordinary heroism of June Keithly and Radio Veritas in the Philippines, whose broadcasts enabled General Ramos to rally dissident military elements to overthrow dictator Marcos and prevent a mass slaughter of civilians during the 1986 People Power revolution.)
Drexel Woodson, a specialist in Haiti, seeks to counter what he considers to be Diamond's misleading comparison of the two countries with a long recitation of Haitian history and politics. In the end I am at a loss to see what that adds to understanding why Haiti is a wasteland with only 1% forested while the DR is 28% forested. Both countries had foreign occupations and many dictators but at least the DR had a few leaders like Juan Balaguer who cared about more than just enriching themselves and their cronies. The same cannot be said of Haiti and that is Diamond's point.
My point is that in the modern world technology, culture, and individuals interact to alter the course of history for better or for worse. Perhaps Diamond, the contributors to this book, and your reviewer can all agree on that.
The book's editors contend that societies do not really collapse, they just adjust to new circumstances. The fact is that today's Maya are now marginalized people at the bottom of societies that generally treat them with condescension if not contempt. In their heyday the Maya were the world leaders in astronomy, capable of organizing the vast resources needed to build complex and magnificent temples. Today's pathetic remnant is not even a shadow of those glorious days. Societies may survive in a primitive condition but civilizations do indeed collapse. But of course this would represent a bias toward the values of contemporary western civilization according to Errington and Gewertz. If so, I plead guilty.
A specialist in Mesopotamia, Norman Yoffee says that while there is little evidence that environmental impact caused the collapse of ancient societies there is plenty of evidence that foolish rulers did. "Furthermore, we can demonstrate how arrogant decisions by mighty leaders led to overextension and the fall of their states. If one 'rule' of political stability/instability can be risked, it is that the more centralized the government, the larger the bureaucracy, and the larger the army in a state, the less stable is the government and the more drastic and comprehensive is the fall of the state." (p.182).
Yoffee writes, "Although Diamond declared that we can't understand why the Soviet Union collapsed by looking at the past, it is just the kind of collapse of an enormous empire that we CAN compare with what happened, for example, in the Assyrian empire in Mesopotamia." (p.178). He then describes how increasing centralization of government power by a succession of Assyrian kings led ultimately to disaster so complete for the Assyrian state that it never recovered.
I wish Yoffee had written more about the demise of the Soviet Union and how it compares with its ancient predecessors . Like Joseph Tainter's prescient observations about our current civilization in his classic "The Collapse of Complex Societies", that would make for some interesting reading.
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And besides even to the 20th century Maya movements led to the liberation of ancestral cities [The last Neo-Maya state was destroyed in the early 1900s ie].
