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Originally Posted by ChinoCoug
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Has anyone read Jared Diamond's Collapse? I heard him speak last night and got an autographed copy. His basic thesis was that societies that fall are ones that destroy their surroundings. I haven't read it yet, but I wanted to see if I can start a discussion.
I realize that environmental arguments differ in validity.
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I loved "Guns, Germs and Steel," as I've said before (it's one of those books that alters the way you look at the world forever), but this book just hasn't grabbed me. I've felt no impulse to pick it up. I think Diamond's weakness is that he's kind of a polemicist, very politically motivated. For example, "Guns, Germs" makes a convincing case (in my view) for why Europeans ended up the way they were, and aborigines in the Americas and elsewhere ended up the way they were, when they came face to face beginning in the late Fifteenth Century. But he artfully dodges the harder question--i.e., why is, say, Afghanistan or Russia or Bolivia the way it is, and America or Western Europe the way it is? This is because such an analysis would probably require him to make the kinds of value judgments comparing one culture to the other which apparently he is not comfortable making.