Slashdot Mirror
On The Collapse of Complex Societies
One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.
One butterfly flapping its wings cannot lead to the destruction of the sun. Nature has built in redundancy. So do human societies. Diamond's book (Guns Germ and Steel) is a hodgepodge of deterministic gibberish.
I go to UCLA and had the unique opportunity to study Guns, Germs, and Steel among other books with Jeffery Miller, pre-eminent microbiologist. A highlight was a guest discussion with Jared. The depth and breadth of his knowledge is amazing, and he is, in my professors words "a national treasure."
Jared Diamond was the speaker at my graduation & I've heard a few of his talks at UCLA. He pointed out that the factor that caused the collapse of both the Easter Island civilization and (probably) the Mayan civilization is now thought to be the same: Logging. Both civilizations overlogged the surrounding forest ecosystems which sustained them, resulting ultimately in a collapse of agriculture. Diamond wondered what might have been going through the mind of the Easter Islander who felled the last tree on the island. He guessed that it might just have been thoughts that would resonate today: "Hey, keeping my job is more important than preserving the environment".
An intriguing essay and one that most of us ought to ponder as we sit in the here and now, as groups, making decisions, watching things happen, recogizing or ignoring problems.
One thing is that many members of a group don't like to confront problems or issues. Frankly, it's too damn uncomfortable for many people to come face problems whose evident solution may well demand of them that they endure change or discomfort. We're creatures of habit and we don't like change (shoot, some people won't make a change for the better even if you lead them to water), even if events suggest that change might be in our better long-term interest.
Second, groups are composed of individuals with greater and lesser abilities to influence group decision making. For example, decisions by one typical homeless person are less likely to impact the group's overall decisions than are decisions by a large stockholder of Exxon-Mobil, just to take an illustrative example. It turns out that decision makers at EXOM may well perceive threats and benefits differently than the average homeless person, and even differently than an average cross-section of individuals in the group we call society.
From an environmental perspective, beneficiaries of extractive industries don't necessarily feel a balanced level of pain for their actions: some of the consequences won't be felt for a lifetime. (Same deferred consequence problems applies to political decisions in general).
Easter Island's environmental demise probably wasn't accelerated due a few powerful individuals benefitting out of proportion to the changes made to their environment.
But it's certain in our modern industrialized society that some points of view are going to be affected because some individuals will perceive current benefits to outweigh possible long-term adverse consequences. Those individuals have more influence than an average person. They may even be right sometimes in their views. But it's important to know the frame of mind where those views are born.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Wrong: the National Museum drew scholars from all around the world, and in a free society, would be a major tourist attraction. All that money coming in feeds people.
Studies have shown, for example, that New York's art museums contribute far more to New York's economy than all its sports teams combined.
I'd say that millenia-old artifacts which are our only link to the beginnings of civilization are a little more important than you make them out to be.
You are aware that by saying that, you are claiming that they are more important then the lives saved by both the troops not guarding the museum but doing something more important, and by the oil revenues that will be the salvation of the millions who live in that country?
It's just plain selfish to demand that people give their welfare, food, or even lives for artifacts that you think are important, and I have no respect for people like you, who demand sacrifice (for baubles no less!) from others while you live in comfort, far, far away from the conflict.
Oh, and let's not let the facts about who actually did it, when they did it, and the unlikelihood that anything could have stopped it get in the way. Ironic that the theft of artifacts is the only thing the left is willing to criticize Saddam's administration about, and they still lay the blame on the US, instead of the people who actually did the looting.
In conclusion, you and your misplaced priorities disgust me. People rate over museum collections anyday and it takes a diseased mind to miss that.
The depletion of fish stock is an excellent example. 6 billion people catching and eating fish every day without regard to the existing fish supplies would deplete the oceans of fish. Even as we speak, several varieties of fish are on the verge of distinction.
The world is overpopulated.
i am adding this because you made specific reference to the Maritime Provinces of Canada.
to be factual, the resident inshore fishery had identified the problem and made moves to restrict THEIR fishing patterns.
however, our federal gov't. did not see fit (or maybe they simply couldn't) to impose the same restrictions on foreign factory vessels, sitting just outside canadian waters, but still on the Grand Banks.
the effect of this was to make any efforts by the residents to manage their resource of no consequence.
the way this ties into the parent topic is to illustrate that often there is a hierarchy of groups (resident fishers, federal govt's, international institutions) making decisions, often with distinctly different powers and objectives.
so it is entirely possible that the group most affected by a decision will choose the correct course of action and be submarined (pun intended) or over-ruled by a group further up the chain.
I think that points to the conclusion that Humans are social and selfish in nature. We need a social environment or we all kinda go crazy, yet individually we are extremely selfish looking only at what is good for ourselves and not anyone else.
Personally I don't think it is necesarily technology that has amplified this, but the increased number of people. We are much more crowded today than in years past, and in many areas it isn't going to get any better. People need space from each other, but more and more we can't find it. This helps lead to the whole increase in assholes around the world.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
The author complains that history isn't treated as a science, but offers nothing more than anecdotes. What he's groping for is a theory of economic externalities. But he doesn't have one.
Externalities involve unloading some of your costs onto someone else. Pollution is the classic example, as is spam. Windows bugs are another; the costs are borne by users, not Microsoft. A major social question is the extent to which externalities should be accounted for and billed back to the source. Most of the political arguments over "litigation reform" and "deregulation" involve this issue.
Classically, the problem with externalities was that accounting for them was technically difficult and expensive, more expensive than the value of tracking them. In the computer era, this is less of an issue than it used to be. Measuring and tracking things is now a cheap operation. We're seeing some of this, in the form of "road-usage fees". It's still possible for tracking to cost more than the value of the thing being tracked; long-distance phone billing costs more than long-distance call transmission, for example. There's a legitimate economic tradeoff argument.
But mostly, externality issues are resolved by power, not accounting. Understanding this gives one insight into how societies function.
We can study the U.S. society for clues to why societies become self-destructive:
History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories
In the case of the U.S. government, the self-destruction seems to be due to government secrecy and to the availability of easy money by fostering corruption.
Question: Shouldn't U.S. vice president Dick Cheney be investigated for using his government influence to make money? Pre-arranged no-bid contracts were given to his former company, Halliburton. In the past such conflict of interest would have resulted in a prison term.
It was a good read, but I noticed his examples did not touch on many of the more taboo subjects the US faces. For instance I think society should start to think about population control. But that would upset a lot of religious groups, and it will be a huge hurdle to coax society to turn around a system that is currently very skewed towards pro-creation (tax cuts, free schooling, most corporate health plans are by law forced to charge the same for 1 child vs 10 children, etc).
I can think of a bunch of stuff our society currently seems to be heading for trouble in the next 100 years, but I'm fearful to publically express those views, since I would be lynched by political correctness and corporate america(and I'm not even talking about race relations).
But I'm not very worried, since when the going gets bad, society tends to do a hard 180 without many complaints. Look to the history of China and India relating to population control. When the US has 1 billion people, we'll do a sudden 180 as well. Of course, we could soften the blow on many of these issues if we started to tackle them now-- but I do not consider humans as a whole to be that far above the apes on the intelligence chain to claim rational and logical tought.
Then that becomes an act of war.
And with Canada only having an Armored Brigade and half of thier F/A-18s operational right now that would be problematic.
According to the laws governing the sea, a nation has a 12 mile zone of complete control and then psuedo-control over Exclusive Economic Zones, Law Enforcement Interdiction Zones and Fishing Zones and Sea Lanes.
The United States got alot of milage out of sailing into an extended zone Libya claimed and then shooting down planes and sinking ships that came out to shoot at the Navy.
The P-3 Orion the Chinese had a fender-bender with two years ago was out in open sea/air that China claimed was an EEZ. But then China pretty much claims everything down to Singapore as an EEZ.