JARED DIAMOND: Collapse
"The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate."
Literature lost part of its appeal from the moment writers allowed publishers to write the titles of their books. A long way back, readers had the advantage of knowing that good books very rarely followed from horrendous names (two notable exceptions being “A Tale of a Tub” and “The Waste Books”). Nowadays, we have been left with no other option but to dig deeper, and approach some notable essays despite their unappealing titles. Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, like Hobsbawm’s more recent “How to Change the World”, rank very high in that infamous list of disguise.
Diamond’s book addresses three main questions: what are the causes behind the collapse (or success) of a handful of past societies, and what lessons can we extract from them. The third and most important point, namely, what can we do today to avoid the same destiny as those who failed (or increase our chances of success), is conveniently left aside by Diamond and succinctly treated in the appendix of each chapter. For those of us who struggle between the necessity of doing something and the futility of doing anything, this hasn’t provided us with a great deal of help.
At the very least, it exemplifies how our capacity to understand the facts, whatever those facts may be, has greatly exceeded our capacity to act based on those same facts. We can afford to have an expert in the study of debris from birds eaten by pre-industrialized Eastern Polynesians, someone who dedicates his entire academic life to distinguish between the radius and the carpus of fossilized blue petrels; but our global food corporations, and our long-standing dietary habits, will never be able to afford the implementation of any of the recommendations that may follow from any such interesting archeological study, no matter how compelling those conclusions may be.
Globalization, at least the cooperative side of it, has come at a very high cost: by increasing systemic complexity and the subsequent loss of intrinsic differentiation, we have become less resilient, less prone to react to external threats, and by consequence, more perversely inertial, either due to the difficulties associated with change and adaptation in complex scenarios or by the more common trend of mass psychological denial.
If we continue in this dynamic of depletion of non-renewable natural resources and business-as-usual policies based on short-term maximization of profit, we are almost certainly not going to pass away by not knowing the facts, i.e. by primitive ignorance. We are going to be as conscious of the situation as it is possible to be for any rational agent at the moment of truth. Unfortunately, that is not going to help us much when that time arrives (as it will surely do, with the mathematical certainty of a simple exponential function, the only remaining question is when), unless we can match that knowledge with some preventive action at a global scale. Easter islanders didn’t have the advantage of a detailed account of events and scientific warnings, but they had at least the late fortune of knowing that some guys arrived from the outside world to hear their pitiful story. We may be denied even that.
Sadly, Diamond does not reply to the only question that is worth asking these days (as a matter of fact, he does not even ask it): Can a complex global system be functionally reorganized before it reaches a point where collapse (Omega event) becomes the best or more cost-effective alternative to change? Obviously, no archeologist will be able to come up with an answer to this question, as we are the first such system, but some hints have been made and the reply is not very encouraging. If one of the main drivers for functional change comes from external inputs, in the form of investment or political influence or, in the case of living organisms, by close interaction with the environment, then it is difficult to imagine how a global system can reach the necessary resources to kick-off that process.
We have found this beautiful and delicate rock floating in the vacuum of infinite space, our curious and inquisitive nature has made us play with it and unintentionally push it from its initial state of perfect equilibrium. Before we realize it, we have something in our hands which is behaving in a strange and peculiar way, like all things when they start to move away from balance. We are entering an uncharted territory. The question of what comes next does not have an answer, and that is precisely the worst thing that can be said about it.
Adrian Icazuriaga
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"The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate."
(G.C. Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, A.4)
Literature lost part of its appeal from the moment writers allowed publishers to write the titles of their books. A long way back, readers had the advantage of knowing that good books very rarely followed from horrendous names (two notable exceptions being “A Tale of a Tub” and “The Waste Books”). Nowadays, we have been left with no other option but to dig deeper, and approach some notable essays despite their unappealing titles. Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, like Hobsbawm’s more recent “How to Change the World”, rank very high in that infamous list of disguise.
Diamond’s book addresses three main questions: what are the causes behind the collapse (or success) of a handful of past societies, and what lessons can we extract from them. The third and most important point, namely, what can we do today to avoid the same destiny as those who failed (or increase our chances of success), is conveniently left aside by Diamond and succinctly treated in the appendix of each chapter. For those of us who struggle between the necessity of doing something and the futility of doing anything, this hasn’t provided us with a great deal of help.
At the very least, it exemplifies how our capacity to understand the facts, whatever those facts may be, has greatly exceeded our capacity to act based on those same facts. We can afford to have an expert in the study of debris from birds eaten by pre-industrialized Eastern Polynesians, someone who dedicates his entire academic life to distinguish between the radius and the carpus of fossilized blue petrels; but our global food corporations, and our long-standing dietary habits, will never be able to afford the implementation of any of the recommendations that may follow from any such interesting archeological study, no matter how compelling those conclusions may be.
Globalization, at least the cooperative side of it, has come at a very high cost: by increasing systemic complexity and the subsequent loss of intrinsic differentiation, we have become less resilient, less prone to react to external threats, and by consequence, more perversely inertial, either due to the difficulties associated with change and adaptation in complex scenarios or by the more common trend of mass psychological denial.
If we continue in this dynamic of depletion of non-renewable natural resources and business-as-usual policies based on short-term maximization of profit, we are almost certainly not going to pass away by not knowing the facts, i.e. by primitive ignorance. We are going to be as conscious of the situation as it is possible to be for any rational agent at the moment of truth. Unfortunately, that is not going to help us much when that time arrives (as it will surely do, with the mathematical certainty of a simple exponential function, the only remaining question is when), unless we can match that knowledge with some preventive action at a global scale. Easter islanders didn’t have the advantage of a detailed account of events and scientific warnings, but they had at least the late fortune of knowing that some guys arrived from the outside world to hear their pitiful story. We may be denied even that.
Sadly, Diamond does not reply to the only question that is worth asking these days (as a matter of fact, he does not even ask it): Can a complex global system be functionally reorganized before it reaches a point where collapse (Omega event) becomes the best or more cost-effective alternative to change? Obviously, no archeologist will be able to come up with an answer to this question, as we are the first such system, but some hints have been made and the reply is not very encouraging. If one of the main drivers for functional change comes from external inputs, in the form of investment or political influence or, in the case of living organisms, by close interaction with the environment, then it is difficult to imagine how a global system can reach the necessary resources to kick-off that process.
We have found this beautiful and delicate rock floating in the vacuum of infinite space, our curious and inquisitive nature has made us play with it and unintentionally push it from its initial state of perfect equilibrium. Before we realize it, we have something in our hands which is behaving in a strange and peculiar way, like all things when they start to move away from balance. We are entering an uncharted territory. The question of what comes next does not have an answer, and that is precisely the worst thing that can be said about it.
Adrian Icazuriaga
