It is hard to imagine that the renowned environmental historian Jared Diamond’s new book Upheaval could have arrived in the UK at a more timely moment. The subtitle screams its urgent relevance: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. If that advice isn’t needed by our political class right now, you wouldn’t want to see when it was.
The book is made up of a number of case studies looking at how different nations have dealt with crises. Diamond examines Finland after its war with the Soviet Union, Chile and the legacy of General Pinochet’s rule, Japan’s response to foreign superiority in the 19th century, Indonesia after the Suharto massacres, Germany’s postwar rebuilding and Australia’s search for a postcolonial identity.
If that seems a random selection, then the unifying theme is that Diamond has spent a lot of time in all the countries he discusses, and speaks the languages of several of them. For Diamond, who gained a global reputation with his Pulitzer prize-winning 1997 breakthrough blockbuster Guns, Germs, and Steel the role of linguist is just one of many in this polymath’s portfolio.
Diamond studied physiology at Harvard and Cambridge and became a leading expert on the gall bladder. He is also an ornithologist, anthropologist, sociologist, evolutionary biologist, ecologist and environmental historian with a working knowledge of archaeology, genetics and the epidemiology of human diseases, as well as professor of geography at UCLA.
Upheaval is his most overtly political book, although he says that is just a function of its subject matter. “These modern crises are primarily political crises,” he says when we meet at his hotel in Bloomsbury in central London. “I don’t view myself as a political animal but as someone who’s interested in a lot of things.”
For all his varied interests, Diamond emphasises that he is no authority on the political fracture that divides the UK. He deliberately avoided mention of both Brexit and Donald Trump in the book because the speed of events would render any discussion out of date before publication. Yet as far as he can see, Britain has created a crisis that it had already resolved.
“It would seem that the long-term solution for Britain is not to get out of the EU and you already dealt with this issue in the 1950s and 1960s,” he says.
In Upheaval, Diamond compares national crises with the kinds of personal crises that most of us undergo – divorce, death of a loved one, loss of employment – at some stage. The way we deal with a crisis is by changing ourselves in some respects. Recovery is a balance between retaining those aspects of our outlook that have proved helpful and then forging new ways of dealing with the changed circumstances.
But the first objective is to recognise that you are in a crisis, because there is no solution if you cannot diagnose the problem. Nevertheless it is striking in these case studies how often denial seems a preferable option to confronting the issue at hand. Parochial party concerns frequently trump national ones as leaders look inwards rather than outwards. Sound familiar?
Diamond suggests that the UK should remain within the EU but, as he puts it, “talk some sense into the immigration policy”.
One of the factors that Diamond cites as important in dealing with crises is a strong national identity. The book is a forceful if rather old-fashioned argument for the continuing importance of nationhood. “Nation states are here now and they are here for the foreseeable future.”
Nor is he much interested in the intersectional approach to politics, in which struggles are delineated along gender, ethnic and cultural lines. They don’t feature in a chapter on the future of the United States. And he is not sure they should feature in the next presidential election.
“The Democrats will not win by emphasising LGBTQ issues, and similarly the best thing for members of the LGBTQ groups would be a Democratic victory, and the best way to assure a Democratic victory will be to appeal to mainstream Americans and not strong-pedal the LGBTQ issues.”
He says his editor questioned this decision to avoid minority rights, but his rationale is that “while there’s still a lot to be done, the role of women and race issues have gotten better rather than worse. Whereas the issues that I discuss are the things that are still getting worse.”
And among these issues Diamond believes is the rise of mass migration. He argues that it is a growing problem for the developed world that is widely recognised by politicians but seldom admitted publicly.
“There are about a billion Africans in Africa and almost all of them would be better off economically and politically and in terms of personal safety in Europe,” he says. “The cruel reality is that it’s impossible for Europe to admit a billion Africans but Europeans will not acknowledge this conflict between ideals and reality.”
He concedes that this stance puts him on the same side of the argument as people such as the populist Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. “It’s unfortunate that people can come to a common conclusion for sensible reasons and for vile reasons,” he says. “But because of the relative lack of honest discussion, the issue has gotten hijacked by the racists, just as in the United States.”
Diamond himself has been accused of racism, particularly by anthropologists, who have questioned his work with indigenous people in New Guinea, where he has conducted extensive field research. It is ironic because in Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond explicitly sets out to refute racial readings of history, arguing that the reason Europe became globally dominant was to do with geographical advantages.
One anthropologist published an academic paper entitled F**k Jared Diamond, in which he accused the genteel American of disguised “racism” and “environmental determinism” which served to normalise colonialism. Why, I ask him, is he so resented? Diamond puts it down to his success and the popular style in which he writes. What about his politics? Although he refuses to be drawn on the subject, it is clear that he resides somewhere on the conservative wing of liberalism.
“I don’t think that’s the reason because the reality is that I’m a mixed bag. My views about immigration do not coincide at all with extreme liberal American views about immigration, but I would be praised by anthropologists for my views on the intelligence of New Guineans compared to the intelligence of Europeans.”
Diamond is a lively 81-year-old who wears an Amish-style beard without a moustache and speaks with an authoritative Bostonian drawl. It is not easy to envisage him as a figure of hate, but he expresses his ideas with a clarity that makes few concessions to academic popularity.
However, he is opposed to Trump’s wall-building on the Mexican border, mostly, it seems, because it doesn’t address the reality of illegal immigration – 95% of which stems from overstaying travel visas. Similarly, he doesn’t believe a “fortress Europe” approach is a practical policy.
“The only long-term solution is for you to do what is the only long-term solution for us in Latin America – namely, to do our best to improve conditions in Latin America and for you to do your best to improve conditions in Africa. It’s estimated that it would cost something like $30bn a year to solve the problems of malaria and Aids for the entire world. That’s a tiny fraction of the money the European Union has, so it would be perfectly feasible for the EU to devote modest sums to addressing a primary problem of Africa – public health problems.”
Diamond is indeed a mixed bag. He is against nationalism but in favour of national identity; he thinks immigrants are a great energising addition to any nation but is against large-scale migration; he is worried about climate change and is opposed to environmental destruction but he has worked with oil and mining companies and is not unsympathetic to their cause; and he is a stalwart supporter of capitalism who is opposed to growing economic inequality.
Perhaps that is the reason he is often misrepresented, as he is sure he will be with Upheaval. Or perhaps it is just the mixture of core values and flexibility that, our politicians may be interested to learn, is essential for dealing with both personal and national crises.
Upheaval by Jared Diamond (Penguin, £25) is published on 7 May. To order a copy for £22, go to guardianbookshop.com
Diamond’s five key books
The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
The book was Jared Diamond’s first venture into the popular market. In it he traces human evolution and why we developed differently from other primates, while also looking at the talents and behaviours that are thought of as human that have their origins in our primate relations.
Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
Diamond’s most successful book is a multi-disciplinary exploration of human history that seeks to explain how different environments shaped varying outcomes for different populations. It won a Pulitzer prize and its influence can be seen in work such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.
Collapse (2005)
This time Diamond sought to answer another far-reaching question: why did some well-established societies collapse while others survive and thrive? It is a big, bold book but one that has drawn criticism from experts who dispute his theory, for example, of the demise of the indigenous people of Easter Island.
The World Until Yesterday (2012)
In this book Diamond looks at what traditional societies have to offer today’s western societies, and what lessons a developed world audience can learn from hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers in terms of social organisation and how they deal with universal human problems.
Upheaval (2019)
This is a series of case studies of nations in crisis and how political leadership finds ways to cope. Diamond looks at such varied cases as Finland, and how it dealt with its threatening neighbour the Soviet Union after the countries had fought a war, and Chile during and after General Pinochet’s sadistic rule.
