Should We Put Nations into Therapy?

Apparently, famed geologist Jared Diamond has written a new book. You recall that Diamond famously argued in a previous book that if some civilizations outcompete others, the reason does not reside in culture or in intelligence, but in environmental factors. So, forget culture. Forget policy. What really matters is access to open waters and the presence of certain natural resources. Not to mention the weather.

Of course, this is nonsense. It does not explain why, as Joel Kotkin showed in his book Tribes—which has nothing to do with current tribalism—certain peoples from certain cultures enjoy great success no matter where they migrate to. Nor does Diamond explain why some peoples from some cultures can succeed in a territory where others have failed. The contemporary example of Israel comes to mind.

Now, Diamond has gotten in a bit over his head. In his new book he suggested that we ought to pretend that nations are like individual people and that we need therapy. Reviewing the book in The Times Literary Supplement, NiallFerguson suggests that Diamond is indulging in an advance case of pop psychology. Naively, Diamond accepts that therapy is great at crisis management. The statistics about American mental health tell a different story. The suicide rate suggests that we are not managing personal crises very well. And the prevalence of psychiatric medication suggests that our ultimate resource is a pill. If we were really good at crisis management, the nation would not be afloat on medication.

Ferguson summarizes the argument:

“Nations undergo national crises, which … may or may not get resolved successfully through national changes”, he writes. “There is a large body of research and anecdotal information, built up by therapists, about the resolution of personal crises. Could the resulting conclusions help us understand the resolution of national crises?” Diamond believes that they can. Here is the final twist to an extraordinarily eclectic academic career, which began with physiology and seems to be concluding with pop psychology: Diamond has reinvented himself once again, this time as shrink to the nations.

Funnily enough, in the English language, we do not say that we resolve a crisis. It makes very little semantic sense. We do not even resolve personal crises. We solve problems and we manage crises.

As Ferguson sees it, Diamond's book fails because he confuses nations and people. Nations are not individuals. They do not function like individuals. To pretend that they do is sophistry:

But there is a fundamental, inescapable problem with this book, which is that it runs counter to the obvious reality that nation states are not that much like individual people. It would be much more accurate to say that they, like any large-scale polity, are complex systems. As such, they are not governed by the same broadly Gaussian rules as individual members of our species.

Ferguson continues:

At best, Diamond’s book is a sustained metaphor. But precisely because complex polities are not subject to the same constraints as individual people, it is a misleading one. It is even more misleading when, in a final chapter, Diamond attempts to apply his framework to the entire human race and planet.

As Ferguson sees it, Diamond’s argument falls apart when he starts applying his rule to the United States:

… Diamond seeks to compare the US case with others. But the first rule of comparative history is not to liken apples to lemons, and this is what Diamond proceeds to do by repeatedly likening the US to Chile on the eve of the military dictatorship established in 1973. This analogy overlooks so many differences – not least in terms of the distribution of wealth, especially but not only land – that it is impossible to take seriously. Although Diamond knows that a military coup in the United States is far less likely today than it seemed to some observers in the 1960s, he nevertheless “foresee[s] one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking ‘law enforcement’ and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition”. This is the kind of febrile thinking that these days pervades American campuses, where professors seem collectively incapable of assessing the politics of their own country in a sober way and predictions of the imminent collapse of the republic are made on a weekly basis.

Allow me a couple of additional discouraging words.

We should also question the value of studying human beings as unique, autonomous individuals. All human beings exist within social groups. They belong to networks, from families to communities to states. A human being that does not belong to any group will not long survive.

As the poet said:

No man is an island, entire of itself….