Collapse, and V.S. Naipul

[sub_divided]

Summary: I read Guerillas by V. S. Naipul, and then I read Collapse by Jared Diamond. And now I'm going to attempt to talk about things that I don't really know how to talk about. Great...

Guerilla has all of the sexual hangups and resentment that were the only things I knew about V.S. Naipul before reading this book, as well as a truly baffling main character, as if Naipul could not imagine any likely reasons for a rich, well-adjusted white colonialist to have taken a political stance on behalf of the oppressed majority, particularly one he would suffer for.

At the same time, I was really struck by his description of Jane, the white Londoner who is the object of "Guerilla" Jimmy's sexual fixation. She's described as outwardly an interesting person - traveled, sophisticated, flippant, blase - who is actually much less than the sum of the resources that were expended to produce her. She makes careless comments, wears smock dresses (showing how little she cares about the magazine-approved body she was born with), and in general is not as engaged as she "should" be. The Caribbean elites she interacts with are puzzled and alarmed by her, especially by her casually dismissive attitude toward her own culture, when they are working so hard to establish their own.

I've been thinking about this, and about what it says about the general tendency in rich societies for people to mark their social status by how much they can waste. I wonder whether there is a basic human urge to squander what you don't value: like Caligula in I, Claudius, who inherits the Empire at the height of its military and financial powers and proceeds to spend every cent in the treasury. Caligula was "insane" but modern conspicuous consumption is equally as insane.

Or maybe I'm just affected by Jane because she's a character I can recognize, and I should be paying more attention to the brown-skinned people in Naipul's book. Ahaha...

Together with Collapse this made me wonder, for a long moment, about the value of cultural consumption for the sake of cultural consumption, when there are much more pressing issues to consider. But you can't learn critical thinking by reading statistics, whereas you can learn it by examining culture, so maybe there is some point... anyway, I better get to Collapse before I get totally sidetracked by existentialist questions.


The first half of Collapse is dedicated to a lot of premodern societies that depleted their environmental resources and collapsed, and a few that came close but survived. It's funny that the author uses Iceland as an example of a country that was able to totally reverse its fortunes, given what we now know about the role of speculative investment in Iceland's miracle economy.

Otherwise, the earlier Pacific Island and New World societies are marked by their descent into starvation and cannibalism... which possibly has the effect of making their collapses seem even darker, since the taboo against cannibalism is stronger in modern, Western readers than it would have been in the societies themselves. I wondered, when we got to the Greenland Norse, whether their Christianity would prevent them from becoming cannibals, and indeed it did, though they ate their animals (used for milk) down to the hooves and split their bones open for marrow.

The second half of the book examines modern societies. It's clear that despite his environmental message, Diamond is NOT a liberal. This is obvious from his sympathy for Montanan ranchers, oil drillers, and miners, and his views on illegal immigration ("citizens of rich societies are naturally worried about floods of people from poor societies coming in using up all the resources"). I hate to sound like a cliche but we need more pro-business people to write about environmental problems.

Diamond concludes that environmental stewardship is possible in societies where every member can see the all of the effects of environmental destruction, and not possible in societies where people - especially the leaders - are removed from these effects. But he is nevertheless able to be somewhat positive about our society...

Diamond's main failing a non-fiction writer is probably that he draws speculative conclusions supposedly on the basis of his case studies, but actually poorly supported by the contents of the studies themselves - conclusions based on gut feelings and only weakly linked to evidence. But I believe his conclusions about environmental stewardship - namely his conclusion that we have a problem with environmental stewardship - more than I believed conclusions about the sources of innovation**. However, as in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it's the take-away lessons for the corporate world that will make this book required reading in b-school, and anything that gets future business leaders to read a book about environmental collapse is a good thing, probably. So I'm not sure whether this is really weakness.

Or as R keeps saying, after our civilization collapses we will not be able to build another one, because all of the easily extracted resources used to construct civilization will have already been extracted.

** I could have sworn I bookblogged Guns, Germs, and Steel, but apparently I didn't. o_O Anyway, what I am talking about here is the fact that Diamond concludes that the most innovative societies are the ones that aren't so cohesive that innovation can be stopped by direct order from the top, like classic China, and yet are united enough that wars and factionalism do not prevent innovation, like classic India. But he has barely anything on the development of agriculture in China, and NOTHING about its development in India, to support this b-school takeaway, despite having many other case studies to draw conclusions from. Analysis fail!