Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, evolutionary biologist and physiologist, delivered the inaugural Jay I. Kislak Lecture at the Library of Congress on Sept. 20. The Kislak Lecture is one component of the Kislak Fellowship in American Studies established in the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress in 2004 by the Jay I. Kislak Foundation. A generous endowment from John W. Kluge enabled the Library of Congress to establish the Kluge Center in 2000. Its mission is to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate and energize scholarly discussion, distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources and interact with policymakers in Washington.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond discussed the causes for the rise and fall of societies during a Library speech on Sept. 20.
The Kislak gift also includes an important collection of books, manuscripts, historic documents, maps and art of the Americas. Some of the treasures of the Kislak Collection were recently on display at the Library in an exhibition titled The Cultures & History of the Americas." The exhibition can be viewed online at www.loc.gov/exhibits/.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond told a capacity crowd at the Library of Congress why some civilizations in the past have collapsed or prospered and what we might learn from their fates.
Diamond, who based his lecture on his latest book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," (Viking, 2005), said we need to pay attention to one important history lesson from the study of failed societies: The ruling elite often insulated themselves from the problems affecting their societies, failing to solve them and contributing to the collapse of the society.
It's a lesson that's important today, according to Diamond. He said in the United States there is an affluent segment of society that lives in gated communities, drinks bottled water, uses private health insurance and retires on private pensions. Hence, they are not concerned with crime, the quality of water, Social Security or universal health care.
"The insulation of the elite is something that concerns me increasingly in the United States. When the elite is insulated against the problems of society, they are not invested personally in solving those problems," said Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies."
"A concrete example of a society that spectacularly failed to recognize and solve its problems was the Polynesian society of Easter Island," he said.
In 800 A.D., when Polynesians settled Easter Island, there were dozens of species of trees in a land of mostly forest. During hundreds of years, the inhabitants constructed large stone statutes, some standing up to 33 feet tall and weighing up to 90 tons. They would transport the statutes up to a dozen miles and erect them into upright positions.
The society needed wood for the sleds and levers used in constructing and moving the statutes. It also needed wood for their fires, fishing canoes, harpoons and other domestic equipment. Trees were chopped down for hundreds of years to supply the wood, and in 1680, the inhabitants chopped down the last tree. Eventually, with no canoes or harpoons to catch tuna or dolphin, the island collapsed into an epidemic of cannibalism.
"The society did itself in, inadvertently, by its own action," Diamond said.
Japan, too, in the late 1500s, had a wood crisis. The society had been building enormous wooden palaces and wooden cities, which many times burned down and had to be rebuilt. Yet, this society recognized and solved the problems of wood management. It instituted wood rationing and restricted the ways wood could be used. It fostered development of more fuel-efficient stoves and heaters and used solar heat. Most importantly, it planted trees and replenished its forests. Japan carried out these policies throughout the 1600s, 1700s, and by the early 1800s the wood crisis was resolved, and the society survived.
Another example of a society whose elite was motivated to solve its problem is the Netherlands, where one-third of the country is below sea level. In February 1953, floods drowned nearly 2,000 Dutch members of society—both rich and poor. Because the elite were directly affected and were not insulated, they were motivated to solve the flooding problems. Diamond said, "In 1953, this small country of 10 million people invested $6 billion into constructing a fantastic system of levees and sea walls."
Diamond said he uses a five-point checklist to determine and understand the success or failure of a society:
- Human and environmental impact on the society. Are the environmental resources being destroyed? Are the forests, fisheries or water supplies depleted or the soil eroded?
- Climate changes. Are climate changes—warmer, colder, wetter or dryer—making it difficult for people to cope.
- Enemies. Are there enemies who will attack the society when it's weakened by its declining environmental resources?
- Friendly neighbors. Does a weakened society have a friendly neighbor or two with whom it can trade and receive essential resources?
- A society's response. When the environmental problems exist, are they recognized and solved?
Diamond told the audience that his students at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches geography, often ask him, 'Why on earth do people do seemingly dumb things? Over hunt. Over fish. Not manage the water supply.' It seems like a simple question, but it turns out the reasons why societies make fatal mistakes are complicated and interesting."
One reason is that a society may not anticipate a problem, because it is unprecedented. For instance, 30 years ago, no one dreamed of the possibility of global warming. It's not that scientists were stupid, it's just that there was no previous experience of it," he said.
Also, a problem may be imperceptible in its initial stages. "Take global warming, again, as an example," he said. It was common for the earth's temperatures to fluctuate and it took 30 years to see, buried in the fluctuations, a long-term trend of global warming.
Even when a society's problems are acknowledged, according to Diamond, they are not always confronted and solved.
The reasons for inaction are numerous: Conflicts of interest could exist between one group and another, between a leader's short term interest vs. long term interest, or between religious values and pragmatic values.
Often, in order to succeed, societies need to change core values. "The United States has two core values that served us well in the past but need to be reconsidered: isolationism and consumerism," he said.
With globalization, isolationism doesn't work. The oceans no longer protect the country. The United States is vulnerable to terrorists, diseases and waves of illegal immigration, and it needs to address those concerns.
The United States also needs to change its belief in consumerism. "The United States is the richest country in the world and it became the richest by a dedication to the consumer ideal that every American can achieve a high standard of living and consume. That worked as long as there were relatively few Americans and as long as the world resources were infinite. Today world resources are finite and the population of the United States and the whole world has outstripped the capacity of those resources to sustain us. So we face a painful reappraisal of our core value of consumerism," Diamond said.
Despite the dire problems here and elsewhere, Diamond remains optimistic about the future. Unlike the societies of the past, the United States today has two unique advantages.
"We have the television media, and we can see what is happening. We can learn instantly about the mess made by another society. We also have archeologists, who teach us about the failures of past societies," Diamond said. "My hope is we choose to make use of our unique advantages."
