Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [260]
Education is a process involving two sets of participants who supposedly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students, and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers’ assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn’t previously thought of. I recently repeated that discovery when I taught a course, on how societies cope with environmental problems, to highly motivated undergraduates at my institution, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In effect, the course was a trial run-through of this book’s material, at a time when I had drafted some chapters, was planning other chapters, and could still make extensive changes.
My first lecture after the class’s introductory meeting was on the collapse of Easter Island society, the subject of this book’s Chapter 2. In the class discussion after I had finished my presentation, the apparently simple question that most puzzled my students was one whose actual complexity hadn’t sunk into me before: how on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which it depended? One of the students asked what I thought the islander who cut down the last palm tree said as he was doing it. For every other society that I treated in subsequent lectures, my students raised essentially the same question. They also asked the related question: how often did people wreak ecological damage intentionally, or at least while aware of the likely consequences? How often did people instead do it without meaning to, or out of ignorance? My students wondered whether—if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now—those people of the next century will be as astonished about our blindness today as we are about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.
This question of why societies end up destroying themselves through disastrous decisions astonishes not only my UCLA undergraduates but also professional historians and archaeologists. For example, perhaps the most cited book on societal collapses is The Collapse of Complex Societies, by the archaeologist Joseph Tainter. In assessing competing explanations for ancient collapses, Tainter remained skeptical of even the possibility that they might have been due to depletion of environmental resources, because that outcome seemed a priori so unlikely to him. Here is his reasoning: “One supposition of this view must be that these societies sit by and watch the encroaching weakness without taking corrective actions. Here is a major difficulty. Complex societies are characterized by centralized decision-making, high information flow, great coordination of parts, formal channels of command, and pooling of resources. Much of this structure seems to have the capability, if not the designed purpose, of countering fluctuations and deficiencies in productivity. With their administrative structure, and capacity to allocate both labor and resources, dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best (see, for example, Isbell [1978]). It is curious that they would collapse when faced with precisely those conditions they are equipped to circumvent.... As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may rightly hesitate.”
That is, Tainter’s reasoning suggested to him that complex societies are not likely to allow themselves to collapse through failure to manage their environmental resources. Yet it is clear from all the cases discussed in this book that precisely such a failure