The Past
Our most common tool for thinking about the future is extrapolations from the past. There are certainly dangers in relying too much on the past for thinking about the future, but there is also wisdom in George Santayana’s oft-mangled quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For those who don’t know history well, it is useful to have at least some readings just about the past itself.
The New History of the World - 2002
More current and much shorter than Will and Ariel Durant’s classic Story of Civilization, this is still a monumental work (nearly 1200 pages) starting from Homo erectus and running up through the 9/11 attacks. As Roberts says in the preface, he “wished to avoid detail and to set out instead the major historical processes which affected the largest numbers of human beings, leaving substantial legacies to the future, and to show their comparative scale and relations with one another.” While he admits “none but the most general statements about likely futures could ever be made from such facts as history provides”, he also says “[d]istant history still clutters our lives.” If there is a dominant theme, it is the role that two forces – the nation and Christianity – have played in creating and shaping the modern world (and how each is losing its grip in what is now a “truly unified world history”).
Guns, Germs, and Steel - 1999
As Diamond writes, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book “attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.” It’s main argument is that environmental and geographical factors had more to do with the development of human societies than genetic or cultural factors. Diamond argues that food production was “critical for the accumulation of food surpluses that could feed non-food-producing specialists, and for the buildup of large populations enjoying a military advantage through mere numbers.” Further, he argues that food production was strongly influenced by the domesticability of early animals and plants and that Eurasia had by far the best of these raw materials. Third, because plants and animals are more affected by changes in longitude than latitude, Eurasia was again favored in the spread of civilization by its long stretches of contiguous east-west land. These large areas of land also favored large populations of societies that grew in technological sophistication through competition with one another and, when, travel between continents became commonplace, their dominance over less-advanced societies affected the evolution of human societies down through today.
But what of the future? Clearly, environmental and geographical factors play a much smaller role in evolving societies today. Yet today’s evolution is still strongly influenced by the previous evolution of societies and it makes a difference in thinking about the future if one believes that that evolution was more an accident of environment and geography than the result of inherent advantage.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - 2005
Diamond’s most recent book is another cautionary tale in thinking about the future. By looking at past societies that have collapsed (including societies on Easter Island and Greenland and in the American Southwest and Mexico) he speaks to a couple of issues of great interest to futurists: 1) Not all primitive societies have been good stewards of their environment (a cherished misconception in some circles) and 2) if we mismanage our environment and other factors that led to past collapses, it is not difficult to imagine the collapse of today’s global society.
The book discusses past collapses in light of five main factors: a) what the society was doing to its environment, b) what longer-range climatic trends were occurring, c) what the society’s enemies were doing (though war is specifically excluded as a primary factor in a society’s collapse), d) what the society’s friends (i.e., those the society depended on) were doing, and e) how adaptive the society’s culture was to changes that took place. Through these five factors, Diamond describes not only societal collapse, but some societal successes as well. Perhaps the most fascinating example comes from Hispaniola. Though both the Dominican Republic and Haiti were ruled by horrific despots, one did a much better job of protecting the environment than the other. Today Haiti is much closer to societal collapse than is the Dominican Republic because of that. Given that each started out with basically identical environments and geography (and Haiti actually had the advantage in colonial times), the contrast today is striking and informative.
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