Thanks. Just call me Bob or Robert.

The interesting writer on the cultural/religious asspects of group suicide is pseudonymous Spengler. Read his most recent article Here and check the online colection Here.

Diamond is a much more conventional and pedestrian thinker who is recycling old junk.

P.S. I confounded Jay Forrester who was one of the founders of the Club of Rome, and his pupil Dennis Meadows who was the author of Limits to Growth.

What strikes me is that he seems to see groups as committing a kind of communal sacrifice. That might well fit cultures today that see their cultures as meaningless and choose neither reproduction nor defense. That doesn’t, however, seem to be where he was going.

At some point in this exercise an epiphany occured, Diamond was reincarnating the eco-catastrophies of the Club of Rome, Dennis Forrester and Paul Erlich. Julian Simon, zt’l, who is enshrined above, punked Erlich with his famous wager, and you should read, and rely on, Simon’s The Ultimate Resource. More recently, Danish Economist Bjorn Lomborg has advanced Simon’s case with his book: The Skeptical Environmentalist.

What I saw of Diamond’s anecdotal evidence does nothing to lessen my suspicion that his book is fashionable eco-trash. Take the Vikings in Greenland. Diamond claims that they starved because they would not eat the abundent fish in the waters there around. Modern Scandanavians are famous for eating fermented herring, lutefisk and whale blubber. Are we to believe that this is a recently acquired tatse. Matt Ygelesias was skeptical and was able round up primary evidence casting doubt on this thesis in a few minutes of research using Google.

The other anecdotes are not much better. The Maya “Classic Period,” as modern archeologists call it, did come to an end. The causation for the end of that period is not well documented nor well understood. It was not the end of Maya Civilization, Chichen Itza belongs to a later time, nor was it the end of the Maya People who have surrvived to this day in large numbers. Easter Island was a more complete catsatrophe, but even there we lack sufficent evidence to do more than conjecture. The ecological horror story told by Diamond is entertaining, but it is entirely circumstantial and conjectural.

The claim that the Rawandan genocide was caused by ecological degradation simply enrages me. Are the Rawandans, sock puppets who have no moral agency? Were they simply bombs wired to go off at a certain temperature and pressure. It is one thing to organize political action or even to begin a revolutionary movement to redress an unjust distribution of property and power in a society. To hack a million men, women and children to death without descrimination or mercy is not a result of a cause but a willed act of the deepest evil. The next step in that type of argument would be to claim that the Holocaust was a result of the Great Depression. Germany was forced to conquer Europe, round up the Jews and slaughter them. The Nazis had no choice. Like I said, the argument enrages me.

Overall, nothing I have seen about the book makes me want to read it.

By the way, how did that Club of Roma’s predictions turn out? Billions starving by the 1990s, or something like that. Catastrophes are great if you put them far enough into the future so that most people conveniently forget about your predictions when they don’t come true.

And if you can get politicians and the gullible to fall for it and press for your political agenda, all the better. The “truth” is secondary, or as a post-modernist might say: “not only is the truth irrelevant, but it doesn’t even exist.”

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/diamond.html