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In order to survive and to thrive, communities must balance openness with closeness; openness is a willingness to face the challenges of the outside world (rival nations, the environment, etc). But it's also badly organized and badly written, and I found it extremely difficult to traverse through the lush terrain, which was so overloaded I found it much of a swamp than a meadow. While all five may be relevant I don't think they are all equally weighed.
Too much openness, and the community will end up like Canada -- but too much closeness, and the community will also fail. Every society faces crises, and ultimately it's a society's response (whether it is willing to confront the challenge, and whether it is an open and dynamic enough of society to formulate an effective, united response) that's the deciding factor. and the conflicts within, and closeness is a stubborn blind faith in tradition, custom, and direction that ties the community together.
The author believes the environment to be the deciding factor, but I disagree. This is the main thesis of Jared Diamond's "Collapse," although he doesn't frame it this way. According to Professor Diamond, societies fail or succeed because of five factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and society's responses to environmental problems.
Professor Diamond's book is lush with concrete examples, and it is an informative guide to world cultures. Consider this: if Professor Diamond had his way he would have called his book "Societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses." Enough said.
Jared is truly talented at taking complex, multi-factorial issues and making them understandable in a simple form. A great read, and under $13. Highly recommended.
The author shows us what makes societies succeed or fail and is full of lessons for our time too.There are warnings and hope in this book. This book came in perfect shape. It is full of important and interesting facts about some of the most fascinating cultures of the past and present, like Easter Island, the Norse Vikings, the Mayan civilization, and more. It's a bit difficult because it's so full of information. I would recommend it.
I really enjoyed this book. It's my second Jared Diamond book (after Guns, Germs, and Steel) so I knewthat the book would be dense and slow-reading. However, like the previous book, I found the vast amountof information fascinating and the "moral" of the different tales that he tells to be one well worthpaying attention to today. Diamond is not a great writer but a great synthesizer of information.
As usual, Jared has produced a work of almost unimaginable drivel.On page 285 he describes New Guineans as "more curious and experimental than any other people." As proof, he offers a story of how they did not know the use of pencils and instead had used them as "a plug through the pierced nasal septum." In other words, as a bone through their noses.These stone aged people, who have no written language and wear no clothes, are only described as being "primitive" with quotation marks, and only as seeming so to Europeans. Since their civilization did not collapse, they are seemingly only included in the tale to demonstrate that Europeans are "horrified" (page 281), "don't understand" (page 280), "innovations failed" (page 281) and "come to appreciate" (page 282).In short, New Guineans are the golden example that Europeans fail to meet.He then claims that terrain ruggedness had confined European explorers to the coast for 400 years, when a far more likely explanation is that the people of New Guinea are well known to be the world's most notorious cannibals.When discussing the marvelous examples that they set, Jared makes no mention of how they bless their new homes with blood by decapitating a victim and dragging the headless body around the perimeter, or how they cover the skulls of those they have eaten with black bee's wax and cowry shells.Although I am sure that the Ivy League loony liberal bigots for whom these works are written have taken it all as gospel.
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