Jared Diamond
"The Rise and Fall of Civilization"
Wednesday, February 05, 2003, 11:30 AM
Dr. Jared Diamond, Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. Dr. Diamond is also the author of two other trade books: The Third Chimpanzee and Why is Sex Fun? Dr. Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; research prizes of the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego
As a conservationist, Dr. Diamond devised a comprehensive plan for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system. He has also spearheaded numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund, is a founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology, and a member of the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA.
Jared Diamond makes a compelling case for global responsibility as we learn from comparative methodologies and natural expreiments of behavior dating back 13,000 years. He writes: "World history is fascinating, challenging, and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past's lessons for our future."
LECTURE SUMMARY
Jared Diamond began his talk by observing that most of the audience was of European descent – on a continent where Europeans did not exist 500 years ago. Imagine the reverse…giving a talk to an audience in London or Munich where most of the audience is North American (and most native Europeans have been relocated to reservations in the Alps or Scotland or whereever invading North Americans thought it convenient.)
Dr. Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel posits that geographic circumstances were a key factor leading to extra food production so that Eurasian cultures could more fully develop technologies like metallurgy and writing. And that these same circumstances provided more domestic animals which immunized these cultures to diseases like smallpox and measles. The ultimate result – guns, germs, and steel – gave the edge to Europeans as they explored and conquered most of the world over the past half millennium.
Diamond talked about two extensions that he has added to a new edition of Guns, Germs and Steel. First, he considers how technology spreads. Why did alphabets, gunpowder, transistors, and nuclear power spread rapidly, and other things like supersonic transports, battleships, expanding bullets, and poison gas languish? In many cases the latter were banned or discouraged, even though some of the former have equally negative attributes.
Second, why did European cultures do most of the conquering over the past few hundred years rather than their Chinese or South Asian or near eastern counterparts, which were as sophisticated (or more so) than European societies? One class of explanations could be called historical accidents: universities, coal, Christianity, capitalism. Another explanation might be geographic diversity. Christopher Columbus approached seven patrons before he finally received support to find a new route to the orient. A Chinese Christopher Columbus would not have had this luxury; if he struck out with the Emperor, there was no one else to approach. The European model of many small competing states allowed for experimentation and creativity. If an idea or technology flopped in one place it could be tried elsewhere. A large, unified political entity like China could spread technology rapidly, but it could also stifle it quickly, as happened with clocks and the Chinese imperial fleet.
Diamond elaborated on this idea of many small units competing in a marketplace of ideas and innovation. Diamond used the example of German Beer makers, many small units to be sure, but all local monopolies. They’ve lost out to the more market oriented American beer companies that have competed more openly (and which ironically are now headed for unification and monopoly as versus the hundreds of small superior German breweries which will still be there when all we’re drinking is Bud Lite).
Another hypothesis that Diamond has been exploring is that some countries are orders of magnitude richer than others because of “good institutions.” There are cases that support this good institutions idea, like South versus North Korea, and the Dominican Republic versus Haiti. Wealthy countries have tried to transfer these institutions to poorer countries, but for the most part this has failed. Why did this strategy work in South Korea in the mid 20th century but not China or the Philippines? Diamond maintains that Korea had a continuous history of complex institutions whereas the other two either lacked institutional richness or institutional continuity. So countries with complex institutions through history have a head start.
Are we entering an era when geography matters less? Will the internet and globalization change all this? Will inherent competitive disadvantages such as disease, lower agricultural productivity, being land-locked, etc. no longer hold less developed countries back? Will regional civilizations rise and fall as they have in the past, largely as a consequence of “inadvertent ecological suicide?”
Diamond left this last question, (essentially the title of his talk) unanswered. He identified twelve problems (e.g., climate change, toxins, food systems, water resources) that will either be solved in the next fifty years, or, if not, will lead to the decline of regional societies and even global civilization. His brief mention of our civilization’s prospects suggests he’s not as far along with this topic as he’d like to be.
Dr. Diamond is currently teaching an environmental history course at UCLA in which he is reviewing the fates of various civilizations. The same question nags both him and his students: Why didn’t these civilizations – from Mesopotamia to Rome to the Anasazi – see environmental catastrophes as they were unfolding? He’s still searching for the answer.
