Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [322]
Having lived for five years in Europe shortly after World War II, and then having married into a Polish family with a Japanese branch, I saw at first hand what can happen when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children’s future world. The parents of my Polish, German, Japanese, Russian, British, and Yugoslav friends also bought life insurance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children, as my wife and I have been doing more recently. Some of them were rich and would have had valuable property to will to their children. But they did not take good care of their children’s world, and they blundered into the disaster of World War II. As a result, most of my European and Japanese friends born in the same year as I had their lives blighted in various ways, such as being orphaned, separated from one or both parents during their childhood, bombed out of their houses, deprived of schooling opportunities, deprived of their family estates, or raised by parents burdened with memories of war and concentration camps. The worst-case scenarios that today’s children face if we too blunder about their world are different, but equally unpleasant.
This leaves us with two other common one-liners that we have not considered: “There are big differences between modern societies and those past societies of Easter Islanders, Maya, and Anasazi who collapsed, so that we can’t straightforwardly apply lessons from the past.” And: “What can I, as an individual, do, when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful juggernauts of governments and big businesses?” In contrast to the previous one-liners, which upon examination can be quickly dismissed, these two concerns are valid and cannot be dismissed. I shall devote the remainder of this chapter to the former question, and a section of the Further Readings (pp. 555-59) to the latter question.
Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the collapses of the Easter Islanders, Henderson Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world? At first, a critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object, “It’s ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all those ancient peoples could have broad relevance today, especially to the modern U.S. Those ancients didn’t enjoy the wonders of modern technology, which benefits us and which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly technologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild animal sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish leaders who didn’t have books and so couldn’t learn from history, and who embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about staying in power, and didn’t pay attention to problems at home. They got overwhelmed by desperate starving immigrants, as one society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the societies that weren’t collapsing. In all those respects, we moderns are fundamentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing that we could learn from them. Especially we in the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in the world today, with the most productive environment and wise leaders and strong loyal allies and only weak insignificant enemies—none of those bad things could possibly apply to us.”
Yes, it’s true that there are big differences