More important than a person's point of view is how he thinks.
Text丨Zeng Menglong
Editor丨Qian Yang
Since the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Jared Diamond's public image is like that of a "wise old man". The media asked him about the big questions related to the evolution of human society, and wanted to get insights and predictions about history, reality and the future, such as war, inequality, the pandemic, climate change, political polarization, the headwinds of globalization, and the response to national crises.
Because the whole world is changing drastically, and history can be witnessed every day. In times of increasing uncertainty, there is a greater willingness to find certainty and a sense of direction – people need "wise old men", and Diamond happens to be a thinker, an encyclopedic erudite.
Diamond, a physiologist and ornithologist by training, has spotted the long-extinct Yellow-fronted Gardner Bowerbird on a deserted hilltop, and he would say that he is "the most knowledgeable person in the world about the mechanism by which the gallbladder transports salt and water", and that he is also a respected evolutionary biologist and biogeographer, but his greater fame comes from his big history writing, and his masterpiece "Guns, Germs and Steel" has become a classic. Bill Gates said, "I was a big reader of all of Jared's books," Charlie Munger praised him for his "brilliant synthesis of great models from many disciplines," and Yuval Harari, author of A Brief History of Mankind, recalled that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" made him "a historian of medieval warfare to a student of man."
However, what really matters is never the specific ideas, but how the people who put them think, how those ideas are formed – this is the source of wisdom.
The 86-year-old Diamond is not retired and teaches undergraduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles. He leads a very regular life, waking up at about 6 o'clock every day and leaving home for bird watching, practicing the piano for an hour a day, reading Italian books for half an hour a day, practicing spoken Italian Xi for two hours a week, spending a lot of time chatting with his wife every day, eating with his son two days a week, going to the gym three days a week, and doing weight training on eight machines.
Beyond that, Diamond spends most of his day reading, writing, and visiting friends. He has no social media and writes with a 0.9mm mechanical pencil. He has a gray, regular beard and speaks slowly, with a deep voice and a Boston accent. This accent is characterized by vowel sounds, such as "often" sounds like "orphan" and "area" sounds like "eerier". He likes to joke and is a funny person. The same is true of his writings, which have a sense of humor in serious discussions, especially with parentheses and exclamation points.
"I have a sense of humor like a 13-year-old. Diamond said.
In October of this year, LatePost asked Diamond why he always likes to play the piano, bird watching, and learn foreign languages. He corrected, "The day I was born, or on my second birthday, I wasn't interested in any of that! I became interested in these activities when I was 6, 7, and 11 years old." ”
Jared Diamond, image credit: University of California, Los Angeles.
Diamond's way of thinking is unique. He was always interested in many things and asked himself a hundred thousand whys. In order to find explanations, he synthesizes knowledge from genetics, linguistics, archaeology, psychology, epidemiology, molecular biology, biogeography and other disciplines (with geographical and biological roots) and is committed to using a comparative scientific approach to explore the evolution of human society.
Diamond's thinking trait is both rational and emotional. On a rational dimension, he said that traditional historians study history by reading written documents from ancient times to the present day, but that writing only appeared in a handful of parts of the world about 5,000 years ago. In many large areas, including New Guinea, the introduction of writing is only a few decades old.
Therefore, in order to understand the history of any place more than 5,000 years ago, or the history of a place where writing was produced later, historians must resort to methods other than writing, such as biology, linguistics, and archaeology, all of which provide powerful tools for studying the history of the absence of writing.
"If a historian only studies the history of a country, he or she will not be able to understand the history of any country in the end. He said. In other words, historians who study only the history of a country cannot realize what makes the country special and cannot ask the most important questions about the country.
So almost all of Diamond's books are the product of comparison: "The Third Chimpanzee" compares humans to chimpanzees, "Guns, Germs and Steel" compares the history of Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, "Collapse" compares how countries around the world have responded to environmental problems, and "The World Before Yesterday" compares traditional societies represented by New Guinea with modern industrial societies such as the United States.
Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, translated by Wang Daohuan and Liao Yuejuan, CITIC Press, January 2022.
His latest work, Upheaval, compares how the United States, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and other countries have solved modern crises. "I'm interested in this topic because there have been crises in almost every country I've lived in. (No, these crises are not caused by living in these countries!) ）”
On an emotional level, this trait of thinking is related to his life experiences. Diamond's mother was a pianist, linguist, and teacher. With her education and help, Diamond began literacy at the age of 3, Xi playing the piano at the age of 6, English grammar and prose composition at Xi age 10, Latin at Xi age 11, and Xi German at the age of 16. By the time Diamond was in his 60s, he was still learning Xi Italian. This is the 11th foreign language he Xi.
Diamond's father, a medical scientist, helped create the Department of Pediatric Hematology (a blood disorder in children) and helped establish the U.S. Blood Bank System. Under the influence of his father, Diamond became interested in science and decided to pursue a career in medicine.
Diamond received a liberal arts education from a good school. After he was admitted to Harvard Medical School at the age of 17, he Xi studied Russian language, German literature, composition, oral epic, motivational psychology, and astronomy in addition to medical courses. During his PhD at Cambridge University, he spent his free time playing the piano, teaching himself the organ, and singing in the university choir.
Diamond recalls that his childhood and school experiences deepened his understanding of the impact of geography and history on human life. He was born in 1937, before World War II ended.
"At that time, my father had two maps on the wall of my bedroom, one of Europe and the other of the Pacific and East Asia. My father used pins on maps to represent the European and Pacific fronts in World War II, and as the front shifted, he changed positions for the pins every night. ”
From 1958 to 1962, Diamond lived in Europe, with friends who were born around 1937. Due to geographical and historical factors, his European friends had a very different childhood than his. "The hardships they have experienced vary from losing their parents, watching their parents' house be blown down from afar, and losing their education. None of these things have ever happened to me – it was entirely by geography that I was born in Boston, not in London, Munich or Belgrade. ”
Why has human society developed so differently on different continents over the past 13,000 years?
Published in 1997, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society is Diamond's most famous book, but it is also the most misunderstood. The book asks the question: Why have human societies developed so differently on different continents over the past 13,000 years?
Contrary to the racist interpretations that prevailed at the time, Diamond argued that the different historical trajectories of human societies on different continents were due to different natural environments on each continent: first, differences in wildlife species suitable for domestication, and second, differences in continental axes and degrees of isolation between continents.
In his book, he explains this process in detail: agriculture originated independently in only some parts of the world (including China but not Europe), and agriculture brought about the development of writing, metal tools, central government, etc., which enabled some ethnic groups to conquer others.
Many people have simplified and criticized the ideas of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" as "geographical determinism". Diamond once posted an article on his official website, "What is the real meaning of "geographical determinism"?", to respond to this misunderstanding. THIS ARTICLE IS EVEN SET UP AS A WEBSITE CATEGORY AT THE SAME LEVEL AS WELCOME, ABOUT ME, AND MY BOOKS, WHICH IS CALLED GEOGRAPHIC DETERMINISM. This is enough to show the prevalence of the misunderstanding and the degree to which he attaches importance to it or dislike it.
Diamond felt that he was labeled "geographical determinism" for emphasizing the important role of geographical factors in the evolution of human society, which is very unfair. Those that emphasize the important role of culture, history, and individual choices in the evolution of human society are not condemned as "cultural determinism", "historical determinism", or "individual determinism". At the end of the day, this is a reflection of the long-standing neglect and prejudice that many people have had about geography.
Not everyone will carefully read Diamond's writings and articles. Until recent years, journalists would ask him what he thought of "geographical determinism". When he is impatient, he replies, "If you think that the evolution of human society is not influenced by geography, then try next January, stand in the North Pole wearing only a vest and shorts, and try to develop a world-class civilization there", or frantically emphasize geography - the three reasons why it is easier for China to achieve unity than Europe are, "geography, geography and geography".
For example, the vast area and relatively gentle terrain between the east and west of China finally allowed the water system of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River to be connected by canals, promoting the exchange and unification between the north and the south of China. But the rivers of Europe flow radially from the Alps, like the spokes of a bicycle, the Rhine to the northwest, the Rhône to the southwest, and the Danube to the east. The people of the different river basins of Europe formed different political entities, which exist to this day.
Diamond reasoned that the fragmentation of Europe and the unification of China had very different results. For example, it was precisely because Europe was divided that Columbus had the opportunity to convince one of the hundreds of monarchs to finance his voyage after four failed attempts. Because China is a unified country, a decision of the Ming Dynasty can bring the national fleet to a halt and the docks to be abandoned. There are many similar examples of the concentration of power that led to a halt in development, such as the Chinese court's "14th century abandonment of the development of an elaborate water-powered textile machine and its abrupt retreat from the brink of the Industrial Revolution."
Diamond in New Guinea, image from: Screenshot from the documentary "Guns, Germs and Steel" (2005).
For those who advocate "geographical determinism", Diamond also reminds them that he has come to the conclusion that geographical factors are important only in the context of limited problems, and that the scope of application cannot be blindly expanded. For example, "Guns, Germs and Steel" discusses the time node of 13,000 years of human social diversion, because the agricultural revolution is the most important division, and geography as the foundation and support becomes the most important explanatory factor.
If we want to explain the evolution of different human societies over the years 1300, 130, and 13, the most important explanatory factor may not be geography. Because geography is a slow variable, the shorter the time, the greater the role that serendipitous and personal factors favored by many historians may play in the evolution of human society.
Diamond believed that the role of geography, culture, history, individuals, etc., in the evolution of human society depends entirely on the nature of the object to be studied and explained. It makes no sense to criticize or support a certain determinism in general, regardless of the specific object of study.
In 2012, economists Deron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson published the best-selling book, Why Nations Fail: Power, Wealth, and Poverty. The book refutes the geographical interpretation of Guns, Germs, and Steel, emphasizing the importance of institutional factors.
They believe that the key to a country's wealth and poverty lies in the political and economic systems adopted by the society. An "inclusive system" refers to a society that opens up economic opportunities and benefits to a wider audience, is committed to protecting individual rights, and politically distributes power, establishes checks and balances, and encourages pluralistic thinking, while "extractive system" refers to a society in which its economic interests and political power are held by only a privileged elite.
If a "broad system" is adopted, the country will become richer, and if an "extractive system" is adopted, the country will not be able to sustain its economic growth in the short term, but it will inevitably decline and decline. Because the privileged class, in order to maintain its own interests, will use political power to hinder competition, not only at the expense of the interests of the majority, but also to discourage innovation and hinder the progress of society as a whole. Thousands of years of global history have shown that state institutions can move in a more inclusive direction, or they can regress to a state of exploitation. This is a dynamic process.
In 2017, the 20th anniversary edition of Guns, Germs and Steel was published, with a new postscript titled "Rich and Poor Countries from the Perspective of < Guns, Germs and Steel> in response to the argument "Why Nations Fail".
Diamond said that the use of institutions to explain the wealth and poverty of the country cannot be said to be wrong, but at least it is incomplete. First, in addition to good institutions, there are other factors that affect national wealth, especially geography. For example, there are 48 countries in Africa, 38 in the tropics and 10 in the temperate zone. With the exception of Gabon, the remaining 37 tropical countries are poorer than all temperate countries. On a coastal and inland basis, the wealth of coastal countries is on average 50% higher than that of landlocked countries.
Second, "we have to figure out how good institutions come about." We cannot be content to accept good institutions as mere facts, that they can fall from the sky at will and fall on some countries and not others. In order to understand how good institutions come about, we must explore the deep historical origins of the complex institutions that human societies have built, whether they are good or bad."
Exploring the "deep historical roots of complex institutions" brings us back to "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which traces human history 13,000 years ago. According to Diamond, the most important ultimate cause of complex institutions is agriculture, followed by densely populated sedentary societies and the food surpluses that agriculture brings. The surplus food can feed the population in other industries that are not engaged in food production, such as kings, bankers, writers, and professors. Therefore, agriculture is a prerequisite for the development of all complex institutions in modern society.
"All in all, some countries are much richer than others, and the reasons for this are numerous and complex. If you insist that there is only one simple reason for this important issue, then you have to leave Earth and live on another planet, because the reality of life here is so complicated. Diamond wrote.
Why can humans become different from other animals in such a short period of time?
To the surprise of many, of the eight books for the general public, Diamond felt that The Third Chimpanzee: The Life and Future of Humanity was the one he wrote the best and most interesting, and the one his mother loved to read.
The Third Chimpanzee was published in 1991 and was Diamond's first book. This book discusses how humans have become so different from other animals in such a short period of time. Genetically, the human genome differs from that of chimpanzees by less than 2%. It wasn't until about 6 million years ago that the ancestors of humans separated from the ancestors of the other two species of chimpanzees, so Diamond called humans the "third chimpanzee."
Diamond discusses the evolution of human features such as art over the last 10 million years. These traits seem to separate humans from "animals" with an unbridgeable chasm. They include human art, language, agriculture, genocide, ecological destruction, endemic sexuality.
The book is derived from articles he wrote on different topics at different times. In contrast, the books he wrote after that were pre-planned, with a unified theme, and important works. "Writing my own article initially meant that I was more light-hearted and humorous when I wrote The Third Chimpanzee. Diamond said.
The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, translated by Wang Dao, CITIC Press, June 2022. Collapse, by Jared Diamond, translated by Liao Yuejuan, CITIC Press, January 2022.
For example, he said, four chapters of the book are about human sexuality. In addition to being the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain of human beings, there is much more interesting about human sexuality. For example, if you have a pet dog that can talk, you can ask him what he thinks about your sex life. You will be surprised to learn that the behavior that you take for granted can be very bizarre and disgusting to the dog.
It might say, "These humans are sick and crazy! In order to mate, they have to go to the bedroom and close the door, instead of mating in front of a crowd like a self-respecting dog." They can mate any day of the month, not just when the woman is fertile and can do so. The most disgusting thing is that humans have sex even after a woman is old and unable to have children. Most of these people's sexual behavior is a huge waste of energy, because most of the sexual behavior does not lead to conception!"
"Why do we subconsciously value our partner's earlobe and middle finger when choosing a husband, wife, and sexual partner?" (Tonight, compare you and your partner's earlobe, and you'll see why!)" Diamond asked.
"We're going to marry people who are similar to us," he explained. Because humans rely on "image-hunting" to choose mates and sexual partners. The so-called search image refers to the fact that we constantly compare the people and objects around us with that mental impression in the process of searching, so that we can quickly identify what we want. Our "search impression" of our future sexual partner develops from an early age, and this impression is deeply influenced by the opposite sex around us. For most people, parents, siblings, and childhood friends are the ones we interact with most in our daily lives.
One factor in "searching for imagery" is "physical traits". Most people know that we have a special preference for obvious physical traits such as height, body shape, and hair color. But we don't usually feel like we care about features like nose width, earlobe length, middle finger length, wrist circumference, eye distance, etc. However, as soon as we see the object of love at first sight, we are immediately amazed and embarrassed, and our hearts are filled with "surprises", and all those other characteristics subconsciously contribute to our decision.
Diamond said that scholars have found similar results in various places. The correlation coefficient for "physical characteristics" was 0.2 on average, which was not as high as "personality" (0.4) and "religious affiliation" (0.9), but significantly greater than zero. The most surprising of these is the middle finger length, which has a correlation coefficient of 0.61. "At least subconsciously, people seem to care a lot about the length of their middle finger, not so much about hair color or IQ. ”
In Chapter 12 of this book, for example, he asks the question: Does intelligent life, or any form of life, exist elsewhere in the universe other than the Earth, and the argument he gives is a biological "convergent evolution". The term "convergent evolution" refers to the independent evolution of many different groups of organisms to use the same location or to evolve the same physiological adaptations. For example, birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects have evolved their own ability to fly, many animals have evolved their own eyes, and the same proteolytic enzymes have evolved independently over and over again in different groups of organisms.
Diamond argues that "convergent evolution" makes sense, but there are exceptions. For example, the woodpecker's "woodpecker" adaptation has evolved only once, and none of the other birds have evolved the ability to take advantage of the woodpecker's location, only a few insects in the animal kingdom have evolved the ability to cultivate food, such as leafcutter ants, and no higher animal has evolved cellulosic digestion enzymes.
This is a positive argument that perhaps no aliens exist. On the contrary, Diamond said that if there were aliens, they would definitely kill humans when they found them. This is the cannibalistic nature of the "human" species. For example, when we meet a close relative chimpanzee, we don't want to sit down and have a good conversation with them.
"On the contrary, we shoot them with guns, we dissect them with knives, we destroy or forcibly occupy their ecosystems. That reaction was predictable, as human explorers often shot human communities when they encountered technologically backward human communities, wiped out their populations with new diseases, and destroyed or forcibly occupied their homes. Any technologically advanced aliens who discovered us would do the same. Diamond believes.
Thus, "there may be no one else in our galaxy, and certainly not within a few hundred light-years of our surroundings," he argues, "we are unique and lonely in this crowded universe".
In addition to its light-hearted humor, "The Third Chimpanzee" is more about focusing on Diamond's way of thinking about problems as a biologist. This thinking is the foundation of all his work, and biological examples can be found throughout his writings. At the time of the book's publication, Diamond was 54 years old and a well-respected evolutionary biologist and biogeographer.
Some of the most important questions he first explored in The Third Chimpanzee have been explored in more depth in subsequent books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel, Where Does Sexual Pleasure Come From?, and Collapse: How Society Chooses to Rise or Fall.
For example, Diamond believed that human beings have a tendency to destroy the environment in their nature. "Collapse" explores the fact that although human society has suffered many ecological and environmental disasters in history, not every society has collapsed. Why are some societies fragile and others standing?
He has a chapter in "Collapse" that discusses China's environmental problems. These problems include air pollution, loss of biodiversity, loss of cultivated land, desertification, loss of wetlands, degradation of grasslands, invasion of alien species, overgrazing, broken rivers, soil salinization, soil erosion, garbage accumulation, water pollution, water shortage, and natural disasters caused by man-made destruction are becoming more and more frequent and frequent.
Because Collapse cites pre-2005 sources, 18 years later, Diamond adds: "Since 2005, China's environmental problems have grown, and so have most countries, including the United States." ”
He himself suffered the consequences of environmental degradation. Climate change involves not only an increase in the average global temperature, but also extreme climate fluctuations. Los Angeles, where Diamond lives, experienced a drought last year and another year with record-breaking rainfall. "The street in front of my house has become a river! Our electricity, telephone and internet systems have been flooded and disrupted. The basement of my house is constantly filling up with water, and my wife and I have installed 7 pumps to pump water. ”
But he noted that "since 2005, young people around the world, including China and the United States, have become more concerned and eager to solve environmental problems. So there's both bad news and good news."
Why were smart New Guinea Islanders still using stone tools in the 1960s?
In 1964, at the age of 26, Diamond set foot on the island of New Guinea for the first time. He was amazed by the appearance of the New Guineans: they did not look like Americans at all, they spoke different languages, they dressed and behaved very differently.
Looking back now, Diamond feels that the trip was decisive for his life. This both kicked off his ornithological research and inspired him to take a "comparative" view of the evolution of human society.
For more than 50 years, Diamond traveled to New Guinea every year or two, staying for 1 to 5 months at a time. He described the island of New Guinea as being near the equator, but the island's mountains are up to 5,000 meters above sea level. There are only three places in the world where you can see snow and glaciers from the summits of mountains near the equator, and the island of New Guinea is one of them. The birds on the island of New Guinea are some of the most fascinating and beautiful in the world.
He said the island of New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse place in the world. There are thousands of different tribes on the island, and the islanders speak thousands of different languages. Even in modern times, the island of New Guinea is one of the last places in the world to change the traditional way of life. People still traditionally use stone tools instead of metal tools, there is still no writing, and there is still no central government. In ancient times, this was the case all over the world.
Diamond's most famous biological discovery in New Guinea was the sighting of the long-extinct yellow-fronted gardener bird. At that time, he jumped off a helicopter and spotted the bird on the inaccessible summit of Mount Foggia. Previously, only four specimens of this species had been seen in a hat shop in Paris in 1895. The discovery was not only published in the authoritative academic journal Science, but also on the front page of the mass media New York Times.
黄额园丁鸟。 图片来自：Animal Database。
In his dealings with the New Guineans, Diamond wondered why the clever New Guinea islanders were still using stone tools instead of metal tools, while I, a dull American who couldn't find my way in the jungle and couldn't make a fire, came here as a representative of the European society that brought metal tools and writing and conquered the island of New Guinea? This is also the confusion of the local Yali: why did the white people make so many goods and bring them here? Why didn't we blacks make a name for themselves?
"After 25 years, I wrote 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' precisely to answer Arri's question. Diamond said.
New Guinea is so different from European and American societies that it stimulates Diamond's thinking and research. In the following books, he advocated and adopted a "comparative" "scientific" approach to the exploration of the evolution of human society. This is also the skill of biologists (think of Darwin's On the Origin of Species).
Diamond said that history is often regarded as the humanities, and at most the social sciences, but he felt that history could be studied in the way of the natural sciences. There are two kinds of natural sciences: chemistry, physics, and molecular biology, which can be experimented with in the laboratory, and astronomy, climatology, ecology, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, which can only do "natural experiments" and are biased towards history. The historical study of human society can learn from the latter, and the core method is comparison, or natural experimentation.
A natural experiment is one that compares the historical trajectory of a variable (with or without it; strong or weak effect) when other conditions are similar. For example, during the Napoleonic period, Germany had dozens of independent states, some of which were invaded by Napoleon and completed reforms, some of which were invaded by Napoleon but were later overthrown by the Kingdom of Prussia, and some of which were never reformed by Napoleon. By comparing the situation of these states, we can answer some of the great questions that historians debate: Was Napoleon's role in the economic development of Europe positive or negative?
Diamond cites the natural experiments of other scholars to explore the big question of "how leaders influence history." For example, the researchers collected 57 cases of state leaders who died of natural causes during their tenure from 1945 to 2000, and 298 assassinations of state leaders between 1875 and 2005, of which 59 were successful and 239 failed.
The former study showed that the natural death of a national leader during his or her tenure was indeed more likely to lead to changes in the country's economic growth rate than in a period when a randomly selected national leader did not die of natural causes during his or her tenure, and the latter study showed that a country's political system was more likely to change after a successful assassination attempt than in the case of an assassination attempt.
Together, the two studies show that the death of a leader in an autocracy has a greater impact than the death of a leader in a democracy, and that the more unconstrained the leader's power is in an autocracy or political party, the greater the impact of his or her death.
"Leaders can sometimes have a decisive impact on history. However, it depends on the type of leader and the specific areas of impact. Diamond concluded.
The comparison also allowed Diamond to learn a lot of the wisdom of traditional society from the New Guineans. He even wrote a book called "The World Before Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Society?" to share his thoughts.
According to Diamond, "Traditional societies actually embody thousands of natural experiments that have constructed human societies." People in traditional societies have come up with thousands of different solutions to the problem, which are very different from those adopted by modern Western societies." For example, how to maintain lifelong friendships, how to raise children, how to identify dangers, how to provide a meaningful life for the elderly, and so on.
Specifically, New Guineans often live in the forest, but never sleep under large trees. Because although the probability of falling down a tree and killing people is very low, if you sleep under a tree every day, the probability of being stoned to death will be greatly increased. Diamond summed up this wisdom of identifying danger as "constructive paranoia." He realized that the greatest danger of living in the United States was slipping in the shower, tripping over uneven paving stones or getting into a car accident, not plane crashes and terrorist attacks.
In 2019, Diamond made his last trip to New Guinea. New Guinea has changed dramatically in 55 years. Nowadays, they are using metal tools and mobile phones, tribal warfare has decreased, and the central government has it. "But in just over 50 years, it's hard to completely change a way of life that's been around for 50,000 years. Until recently, New Guinea was divided into 1000 feuding tribes, and a much more number of feuding clans. He sighed.
Why does the future of human society depend on whether China and the United States and other countries can work together?
In 2019, Diamond published the closest book to reality, Upheaval: A Turning Point in Human Society and National Crisis. In this book and related sharing, he highlights three other characteristics of his thinking: cosmopolitanism, cautious optimism, and learning from others Xi
Despite the competition between China and the United States, he feels that the most serious long-term problems facing China are the same as the most serious long-term problems facing the United States: nuclear weapons, climate change, the depletion of critical resources on a global scale, the consequences of inequality around the world, and the dangers that new diseases will pose to the world in the wake of the coronavirus. Each of these issues is a thorny problem that can only be solved with the concerted efforts of China, the United States, and other world powers.
Diamond still vividly remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment humanity came closest to nuclear war, just after his 25th birthday. At the moment, he believes that humanity is once again at risk of nuclear war. Because the overall situation of relations and communication between Russia, the United States, and China has deteriorated, it is not clear what each has intentions. In such a situation, the state may make the wrong decision, resulting in catastrophe.
Diamond is "cautiously optimistic" about the future of human society, believing that humanity has a 51% chance that humanity will solve the major problems it faces today, not 95 percent, nor 2 percent. He has a vision of "crisis" as "opportunity", such as the new crown epidemic and the headwinds of globalization, which have just illustrated the importance of global cooperation. At the end of the day, to solve the problem, he feels that humanity needs to realize that all people in this world live and die together.
Puncak Jaya in New Guinea. According to Diamond, there are only three places in the world where you can see snow and glaciers on the summits of mountains near the equator, and the island of New Guinea is one of them (the other two are the Andes Mountains and the East African Mountains). Image credit: Enda Kaban on Wikipedia.
As an American, he was sharp in his criticism of his country. Diamond said the current crises facing the United States include political polarization, low voter turnout and barriers to voter registration, inequality and declining socioeconomic mobility, and reduced government investment in education and the public sphere, to name a few.
Since 2019, Diamond has felt that political polarization in the United States has not improved, but has intensified. He speculates that the root cause of political polarization is the decline in traditional face-to-face communication between people, while non-face-to-face electronic communication such as cell phones, text messages, and emails increases. He argues that the United States enjoys a huge advantage, but that a country can also squander its advantage, as is Argentina.
Diamond explains that Argentina has a beautiful and fertile environment: the pampas and temperate regions, ideal for cattle and wheat growth. Argentina was a rich country and can still be a rich country. However, Argentina has squandered its natural advantages thanks to a terrible government that has been almost uninterrupted for decades. Argentina has also taught the United States and other countries a lesson: bad government can destroy good natural advantages. ”
Diamond said that "Upheaval" has received the help of nearly 100 friends from different fields. Some of them read all or most of his manuscripts and helped him improve his ideas and presentations, some commented on the first drafts of individual chapters, and others shared their experiences with him and provided him with articles or references. He wrote their names one by one in the "Acknowledgments".
"In order to be able to write, I had to talk to a lot of people. My writing is a collaborative style of writing, and I love learning Xi from other people. I found that people were generous in explaining their profession to me. Diamond said.
This learning Xi is also open. Diamond, for example, said that he often discussed and debated with Delon and James (authors of Why Nations Fail) about the role of geography, culture, and chance in human history.
Not only does he like to learn Xi from others, but he also likes to invite readers to learn Xi further. Unlike many books, Upheaval is not accompanied by "references" at the end, but by "extended reading". He is careful to provide only those documents that are likely to be of value to the reader and that are easily accessible to the reader, and that articles from more specialized academic journals are not listed in the book.
When asked questions that were unclear, Diamond sometimes invited readers to answer them. For example, when discussing the role of culture in the evolution of human society, he asks many questions in the book: Why is missionary (Christianity and Islam) the driving force of colonization and conquest by Europeans and West Asian ethnic groups, but not by Chinese? Are there any inducements in Chinese geography that make Chinese society choose homophone-rich languages? What factors in Chinese geography have contributed to Confucian philosophy and current cultural mentality?
LatePost asked Diamond the above question. He speculated that there might be a connection between nomads and religious forms. As for why the Chinese language is known for its tonality (the same syllable can be pronounced in different tones has different meanings), and why English and most Indo-European languages are non-tonal languages? Include "Why is Cantonese (9 tones) more toned than Mandarin (4 tones?Why is there even more Faui Iyau (12 or 13 tones) in New Guinea than Cantonese!"
A tribe in New Guinea. Image by Bob Brewer on Unsplash.
Diamond is working on his next book, and he expects to be 90 years old by the time it is published. This book is about leadership. This time, his question is whether the leaders play an important role in the course of history, and whether the course of history would have changed if the leaders had been different? Like in 1930, when Hitler was almost killed in a car accident. If he had died, would there have been World War II in Europe? Would there have been a Nazi Holocaust in the world that killed at least millions of people?
"Historically, it's been true in business, religion, and so on. If it weren't for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn't computers and social media be any different? If Jesus and Muhammad hadn't been born, would anyone else have founded a world religion?" Diamond asked.
In 1987, at the age of 50, Diamond welcomed the birth of twin sons, Max and Joshua. Previously, he had never thought about the post-2050 world, and the catastrophe that might happen to the Earth after that had nothing to do with him. The birth of his sons made him worry about the future of human society.
It was also the source of his motivation to move from academic writing to public writing. "I want to make the world a better place for children, so I need to start bringing the world's most important and deserving issues to the masses. He said.
The title image is from Wikimedia, and from left to right, the skeletons of gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans are illustrated.