Illustration by Ana Kova

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Jared Diamond Little, Brown (2019)

The geographer Jared Diamond is the bestselling author of a number of books on the vicissitudes of civilizations. His anchoring perspective, argued across such works as Collapse (2005) and The World Until Yesterday (2012), is geographic determinism. He sees the environment as fundamentally shaping the founding, development and challenges of nations and civilizations. “History,” he argued in the 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel, “followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” His perspective has been both celebrated for clarifying historical complexities and criticized as oversimplified and dated, but he has defended it vigorously.

Upheaval, then, is something of a curiosity. Diamond says that his wife, psychologist Marie Cohen, suggested the idea: compare nations in upheaval with individuals in crisis. Do nations go through similar stages of challenge, disturbance and even breakdown to emerge, if successful, selectively changed? What factors influence that failure or success?

Normally confident of his methodology, Diamond proposes this comparison with caution. He writes that he set out to investigate seven modern nations — Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia and the United States — because he happens to have “much personal experience” of them. He acknowledges, however, that a sample of seven is inadequate for drawing statistically significant conclusions, and so proposes a “narrative exploration” that he hopes will “stimulate quantitative testing”.

Diamond’s caveats limit him to an informed but speculative discussion of how his seven nations struggle, or struggled, with crises profound or wide-ranging enough to potentially destroy them. These range from climate-change impacts and advanced technology to geopolitical pressures and nuclear weaponry.

Thus, Finland fought the Soviet Union in 1939–40 and aligned with Germany against the common foe in 1941–44, sacrificing some 100,000 soldiers, rather than allow itself to be absorbed into the Soviet Union as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia had been. It then found accommodation with its Eastern neighbour by treating it with respect and hewing close to its economic and foreign policies, despite the resulting dissonance. Finland is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example; nor was it part of the European Union until 1995, after the Soviet Union was dissolved.

In looking at Japan, Diamond harks back to 1853, when US Navy commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed his warships into Edo Bay, demanding that the country open itself to Western trade. Japan maintained independence, in part, Diamond argues, by acquiring a Westernized facade, while maintaining its traditional values. (In one respect, this may have backfired: Japan’s severe restrictions on immigration have left it struggling to sustain a labour force while the population ages and birth rates stay well below replacement levels.)

Comparisons with psychology soon fall by the wayside as Diamond explores crises in Indonesia, Chile, Germany and Australia. The model is, in any case, a poor fit.

My country, the United States, is also Diamond’s. I find his assessment of its challenges partly acute and partly eccentric. Diamond acknowledges the country’s great natural advantages in climate, geography, population and form of government. He judges its current troubles to be consequences, predominantly, of the venality of US politicians and of a “politically uncompromising” population. He attributes this polarization mostly to the rise in digital communications. A persistent focus on screens, he argues, is producing people who “no longer experience one another as live humans”.

Attributing social change one dislikes to new technology is a familiar moral panic. In my house, we call it hell-in-a-handbasket syndrome. Certainly, smartphones and their ilk expose their users to an artificial environment much more pervasively than older communication technologies did. But whether this distributed consciousness is good, bad or simply different remains to be seen, in my view.

More to the point is Diamond’s identification of inequality as a serious problem in the United States. Emmanuel Todd — the French demographer who was almost alone in predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union on the basis of an unprecedented rise in infant mortality — commented more than a decade ago that he saw “the possibility in the medium term of a real Soviet-style crisis in the United States”. Increasing financial inequality, and the despair of unmet expectations that it has induced in many white Americans, is almost certainly behind the opioid crisis in small towns and rural areas. There, life expectancy is declining much as it did in the final years of the Soviet Union, where rising alcohol addiction took a grim toll.

Inequality is even more serious for African Americans, for whom neglect and mistreatment in medical care, education, housing and criminal remand have resulted in an average lifespan half a decade shorter than that of white people in the United States, although the gap is closing.

Among the biggest global problems Diamond mentions are the risk of nuclear war and the fact of climate change. Here, his answers are conventional. No one knows what to do about nuclear weapons, maintained as they are under the pretence that they deter the very disaster they are designed to produce. On climate change, Diamond recognizes the double challenge of reducing greenhouse-gas production while meeting the rising expectations of the developing world. But he fails to recognize that substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels without a major expansion of nuclear power will merely decarbonize the existing supply. Without nuclear power, the doubling of demand projected for the developing world in the next 30 years will be met mainly through coal — or, at best, natural gas, which produces fully half as much carbon dioxide as coal when it burns.

Diamond’s historical analyses hold up better than do his contemporary assessments. Energy from fossil fuels supported the West’s transformation from subsistence to long-term prosperity; today, it threatens to cook our goose. The nation-state system, embedded in international anarchy, has never dealt well with global threats. So far, the response has mostly been denial and timidity: tragedy of the commons indeed.

I read Upheaval with appreciation for its historical sweep and its generally informed speculation. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Diamond has not given up hope that we can change course.