The Last Americans | Harper's Magazine - June 2003

The Last Americans - Jared Diamond

It seems like our academic writers having found themselves with a book length thought build a following for said thought by publishing what amounts to a mini-version of their book as an essay in a relatively popular magazine.  Not all make it into Harper's or the New Yorker, but it is a common practice.

The problem with this, for me, is that the writing has that academic feel but the author gets to avoid the vexatious interruptions caused by having references.  Do the words flow more naturally and smoothly?  Sure.  But I find myself driven to irritation by the fact that so many facts can go unchallenged without me trying to Google every second or third sentence.

So it is with The Last Americans, where Jared Diamond warns us of the very likely possibility that we are destroying American civilization.   See Collapse for the book length treatment on this topic.

I don't even pretend to know anything about any of this.  Dr. Diamond has won awards (a Pulitzer and a National Medal of Science), he's graduated from and taught at prestigious schools (though now he is at UCLA...I kid, I kid), so his expertise won't be challenged by me.

Does this mean that I have to agree with everything he says?  Well, no.  He is driven by his own opinions and leanings on the subject.  He spins his words while trying to make his points.  And this is what bothers me most here.  He lines up the straw men for execution--I assume their straw men because of the lack of references situation.  For example, does any serious thinker really accept that human need trumps environmental preservation?  Of course this is an overly broad question, which requires some scope reduction to remove the ambiguity.  Don't most people think of a healthy environment as a critical human need?

There are the random jabs at then President Bush, which annoy me as much as the random jabs take at President Obama today.  It undermines the credibility of the writer, as if it is a ritual that must be performed in order to appease the political group within which one belongs.  It doesn't advance any arguments and just calls attention to the political leanings of the author.

Realizing that Dr. Diamond likely develops his arguments far better in a book length format, it is probably unfair of me to hammer away at the weakness in his mental gymnastics.  I'm sure any weaknesses were due to space constraints.  I hope.  I might check Collapse out of the library...a brick and mortar one.

The bottom line is this reads like a lecture.  He's at his best discussing the "facts" around the Mayan civilization.  For the rest of the lecture he basically says that optimism is for chumps...unless you're Dutch?  I'm not sure what his prescription is.  Actually, I'm one of the dumb ones who is still unsure of the disease?  Is it being human?

I get the feeling that if we manage to fall apart over the next decade or two and Dr. Diamond lives to see it, he will at least have the smug satisfaction of saying he told us so.