30 | New Scientist | 8 June 2019
Views Culture
JARED DIAMOND is a professor
of geography at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He started
out working in electrophysiology
and became a professor of
physiology at UCLA medical
school in 1968. After developing
a second career in ornithology
and ecology, he then moved on
to environmental history in the
1980s. His bestselling books Guns,
Germs, and Steel (for which he
won the Pulitzer prize) and
Collapse are works of comparative
history, studying societies side by
side “because there are things that
you can learn and questions you
pose from comparisons that you
would never think of with single
case studies”. His latest book is
Upheaval: How nations cope with
crisis and change.In Upheaval, you’ve taken ideas
from the field of personal crisis
therapy as a way to analyse
national crises. Is this meant
as a conversation starter?
It’s more than that. I’ve lived in
half a dozen countries over the
last 60 years, and each one has
either been coming out of or
going into a crisis. My wife
Marie, a clinical psychologist, was
training in crisis therapy during
the first year of our marriage. A
personal crisis is when someone
feels that some basic element
in their approach to life isn’t
working, and they need a new way
of dealing with it, fast, because
there’s a risk of suicide. There
are a dozen variables indicating
whether a person is more or less
likely to get through the crisis
and make changes. I realised
that there might be equivalent
predictors for the national stage.Can you give us a flavour of these
crisis-coping criteria?
First, you have to acknowledgeworld. We lack a world identity –
people identify as citizens of the
US or the UK or wherever. So it
was a pleasant surprise to discover
that the world does have some
track record of dealing with really
difficult crises and complicated
problems over the last 50 years.
Take the legal framework for
mining minerals from the deep
sea bottom. Naturally, landlocked
countries don’t want coastal
countries to scoop up all the
minerals, so a framework was
reached in which countries like
Mongolia get 15 per cent of the
revenues. Then there was the
removal of chlorofluorocarbons
from the atmosphere to protect
the ozone layer. Every country
had to sign off on that deal, and
despite all the screaming, that’s
what they did.You’ve been quoted as saying there
is a 49 per cent chance of the world
as we know it ending by 2050. Are
we going to make it?
If voters and governments make
good choices, we will have a
happy outcome. If they make
bad choices, we will have an
unhappy outcome. I have grounds
for being hopeful. Five years ago,
most people in the US did not
believe in climate change. Now
most Americans – though not
our federal government – believe
in climate change and believe
in its human causation. That’s
grounds for hope.Where do leaders fit into your
crisis model?
That is a key question. The view
used to be that history is the
deeds of great men. Nowadays,
most historians hold the view
that leaders make a difference
only under certain circumstances.
We need to know more about
those circumstances.Book
Upheaval: How nations cope
with crisis and change
Jared Diamond
Allen Lanethat you’re in a crisis or you get
nowhere. Second, you can’t blame
other people, you have to accept
responsibility for yourself. Then
you have to work out which parts
of you are broken, and which are
working well and should be left
alone. Other obvious things are
being willing to ask for help,
having previous experiences
that give you confidence that you
can get through this one, and
flexibility. Then there’s what
psychologists call ego strength:
not being dependent on other
people for your self-image. And
it helps to have principles you
consider important, and which
you’re not going to change.How well do these predictors
map over the experiences of
individual nations?
Not every one of the 12 predictors
applied in every case – just as
not all of them would apply to
a person. You could say these
outcome predictors are banal.
Why do you need someone like
me to say honest self-appraisal
is important or that nations as
well as people need to exercise
responsibility and not fall into
self-pity and victimisation? The
reason is that we rarely apply
these lessons at a national level.
Today, for example, the US blames
its problems on China and Mexico
and refuses to acknowledge that
they are home-grown. It’s worth
emphasising where this can
lead. Countries that fail to accept
responsibility for themselves
end up with millions of dead.And yet you say that 10 out of the
12 crisis-coping criteria don’t work
well at a global level?
That’s true. Quite a few of the
predictors for national crises
suggested by this work incline
one towards pessimism about theLE
O-
PA
UL
RIDET
/CONT
OUR^ BY^ GET
TY
IM
AGES“ The world does
have some track
record of dealing
with really
difficult crises
and complicated
problems”Do nations need personal therapy?
Jared Diamond certainly thinks they do. Liz Else asks him about this and other
controversial claims in his new book, Upheaval