{"id":620,"date":"2019-05-21T14:55:34","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T07:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/ibm\/?p=620"},"modified":"2019-05-21T14:55:34","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T07:55:34","slug":"what-to-do-when-youre-a-country-in-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bbs.binus.ac.id\/ibm\/2019\/05\/what-to-do-when-youre-a-country-in-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Do When You\u2019re a Country in Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Anand Giridharadas<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

UPHEAVAL\u00a0<\/strong>
\nTurning Points for Nations in Crisis<\/strong>
\nBy Jared Diamond<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United connection from O\u2019Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It All, and you came away thinking, \u201cThat was a great experience,\u201d have I got the book for you.<\/p>\n

Jared Diamond\u2019s \u201cUpheaval\u201d belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom blurbed \u201cUpheaval\u201d) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in the air, where I\u2019ve noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.<\/p>\n

So I dug into Diamond\u2019s latest, intrigued by his thesis that the way individual humans cope with crisis might teach something to countries. Then, before long, the first mistake caught my eye; soon, the 10th. Then graver ones. Errors, along with generalizations, blind spots and oversights, that called into question the choice to publish. I began to wonder why we give some people, and only some, the platform, and burden, to theorize about everything.<\/p>\n

The theory proposed by Diamond \u2014 a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cGuns, Germs and Steel\u201d \u2014 is interesting. Human beings go through personal crises all the time. We know a lot about how people change in order to cope \u2014 or fail to. What if we applied those lessons to countries in quagmires?<\/p>\n

Drawing on the work of therapists, Diamond reports that the key for individuals coping with a crisis is \u201cselective change.\u201d People who successfully overcome a problem tend to identify and isolate it, figuring out \u201cwhich parts of their identities are already functioning well and don\u2019t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.\u201d Diamond asks, Could the same be true for countries? He believes so, and he seeks to test his theory by adapting a dozen factors known to affect the resolution of personal crises to national crises. Some factors translate easily \u2014 just as people must first accept being in crisis, nations must first come to a consensus about their woes. Other analogies feel more strained \u2014 help from your close friends translates into material and financial aid from allies. Armed with this framework, Diamond sets out to see how well it fits countries\u2019 actual histories.<\/p>\n

Diamond\u2019s method is the case study. Looking at Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia and the United States at pivotal moments in their histories, he evaluates their courses of action with reference to his 12 bullet points. Meiji-era Japan, needing to open up to the world while preserving its cultural core, found a way \u201cto adopt many Western features, but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances.\u201d After World War II, Germany worked its way to taking full responsibility for its actions and thereby successfully transformed itself. America, in part because it shrugs off the lessons of other places, struggles to resolve its issues.<\/p>\n

At the end of each chapter, each mini-history, Diamond pauses to ask some variant of: \u201cHow does Indonesia\u2019s crisis fit into our framework?\u201d And this is a tell. The Framework is driving the inquiry here, and everything stands at its service. The people we encounter are seldom richly portrayed, because only The Framework matters. The stories we learn about each country are often partial and slanted, because only The Framework matters. Countries where racism and tolerance, sexism and equality have long been in tension are portrayed as being entirely one thing before magically becoming the opposite thing, because The Framework can only process monoliths.<\/p>\n

With a focus on The Framework, facts recede in importance. The book is riddled with errors. Diamond gets wrong the year of the Brexit vote. He claims that, under President Ronald Reagan, \u201cgovernment shutdowns were nonexistent.\u201d But they occurred a number of\u00a0times<\/a>. He describes Australian-rules football as a sport \u201cinvented in Australia and played nowhere else.\u201d But it is played elsewhere \u2014 in\u00a0Nauru, where it is the national sport<\/a>, as well as in\u00a0China, Canada, France, Japan, Ireland and the United States, according to the Australian Football League<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Diamond says a 1976 terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., targeting a former Chilean official, was \u201cthe only known case of a foreign terrorist killing an American citizen on American soil \u2014 until the World Trade Towers attack of 2001.\u201d This claim wholly overlooks the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in which six people died. He refers to Lee Kuan Yew as \u201cSingapore\u2019s prime minister,\u201d even though he no longer occupies that role, not least because he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

Then the generalizations: hoo boy. At one point during World War II, Diamond says, the people of Finland, facing Soviet bellicosity, \u201cwere unanimous in refusing to compromise further.\u201d A whole nation, unanimous! We learn of another instance of 100 percent society-wide agreement down under, where \u201cAustralians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all nonwhite races from Australia.\u201d But in fact they argued about this issue, too, and one framer, Andrew Inglis Clark, the Tasmanian attorney general,\u00a0sought, unsuccessfully, to introduce an adapted version of the American 14th Amendment, which would have prohibited discrimination by race<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In claiming that Germany has become more socially liberal, Diamond claims, \u201cThere is no spanking of children; in fact, it\u2019s now forbidden by law!\u201d But how can a serious thinker confuse the passage of a law with fidelity to it?\u00a0An organization that tracks the efficacy of the law has found its enactment to have reduced, but hardly ended hitting.<\/a>\u00a0To read Diamond is also to learn, apparently, how all Chileans identify (with Europe and the United States, not Latin America); and how all \u201cIndonesians take their national identity for granted.\u201d (Except, perhaps, the separatist groups<\/a>?)<\/p>\n

Sometimes the book feels written from a drying well of lifelong research rather than from the latest facts. For example, Diamond tells us Americans have always been a highly mobile people and are \u201cunlikely\u201d to \u201cmove less often.\u201d He must be unfamiliar with the\u00a0rather<\/a>well-publicized<\/a>\u00a0new data<\/a>\u00a0declaring the opposite: \u201cFewer Americans Are Moving to Pursue Better Jobs Across the Nation,\u201d\u00a0NPR says<\/a>, citing the Census Bureau\u2019s research that the number of Americans who move in a given year has dropped by half since the 1940s.<\/p>\n

There are far more of these errors than I have space to list, too many to dismiss this calling-out as nit-picking. And they matter because of the book\u2019s nature. If we can\u2019t trust you on the little and medium things, how can we trust you where authors of 30,000-foot books really need our trust \u2014 on the big, hard-to-check claims? On how the end of the White Australia policy \u201cresulted from five considerations.\u201d (Not four, not six, and the ones you happen to name.) On how Finns\u2019 love of their language is what made them willing to fight and die for Finland. On how Tokyo is clean \u201cbecause Japanese children learn to be clean and to clean up\u201d (and not, for example, because the city spends 3.9 percent of its budget on public health and sanitation, according to a quick search, compared with the 1.9 percent of New York City\u2019s 2018 budget that went to the Department of Sanitation).<\/p>\n

While \u201cUpheaval\u201d does list sources in the back, Diamond seldom quotes books. He is far fonder of quoting his many friends. \u201cWhy does Japan pursue these stances? My Japanese friends suggest three explanations.\u201d That\u2019s what we\u2019re going with? Or he describes \u201cthe 1973 coup that many of my Chilean friends characterize as inevitable.\u201d First of all, why are we paying you to hear your friends\u2019 random theories? Second of all, how can a coup ever be inevitable? You mean to say that a plot as delicate as that could under no scenario have gone wrong?<\/p>\n

Since we\u2019re talking about our friends, I know so many younger writers, especially women and people of color, who are smart, thoughtful, buttoned up and pretty damn accurate who would kill for an opening to publish a book with a serious publisher \u2014 and who know in their bones that, if they were ever this sloppy, their career would be over before it had even begun.<\/p>\n

There is also a systemic issue here. The time has come for those of us who work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking become as inalienable from publishing as publicity, marketing and jacket design \u2014 and at the publisher\u2019s expense rather than as a cost passed on to the author, who, understandably, will often choose to spend her money on health care. In the age of tweets, it cannot be the fate of the book to become ever more tweetlike \u2014 maybe factual, maybe whatever. The book must stand apart, must stand above.<\/p>\n

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A remaining problem with \u201cUpheaval\u201d is one that cannot be fact-checked away, but, happily, is already being fixed across the world of letters. Until recently, in much of American life, and American writing, the default setting of human being was white and\/or male. Today so much writing shatters this default, complicates the point of view. And \u201cUpheaval\u201d reminds us why that matters.<\/p>\n

When Diamond describes \u201chighly egalitarian social values\u201d as an ethos that has \u201cremained unchanged\u201d in Australia, despite having written a chapter about the country\u2019s history of legalized racism, he is using a definition of egalitarian that applies only to white people. When he says, \u201cSocial status in Japan depends more on education than on heredity and family connection,\u201d he is ignoring what it means to be born a woman. \u201cOf course, my list of U.S. problems isn\u2019t exhaustive,\u201d he admits. \u201cProblems that I don\u2019t discuss include race relations and the role of women.\u201d You know, the problems affecting the vast majority of Americans.<\/p>\n

I almost felt bad for Diamond when, toward the end, he described \u201can evening with two women friends, one of them a psychologically na\u00efve optimist in her 20s, the other a perceptive person in her 70s.\u201d What made the young woman \u201cpsychologically na\u00efve\u201d to him was that she dated someone who it took her time to see was terrible. (If that\u2019s a crime, jail us all.) I felt a strange sympathy for Diamond, who is in his early 80s, because clearly he didn\u2019t realize how tone-deaf it is, in 2019, for an established male author to go around labeling a young woman making pretty normal life mistakes as \u201cpsychologically na\u00efve.\u201d But Diamond is proud to be from another time. He tells us his manuscripts are typed by someone else, he relies on his wife and secretary to use a computer, and he clings to the belief that video games are \u201csolitary,\u201d even if massively multiplayer online games are where a growing number of Americans go to be social. He also thinks phones are ruining America because people check them every four minutes. But I have to say, I was doing just that while reading his book, and I was doing it because so many things I read didn\u2019t sound accurate, and I, for one, think it\u2019s an improvement when 30,000-foot authority can be challenged by Googling from bed.<\/p>\n

On a beach some time ago, I read Jill Lepore\u2019s new history of the United States, \u201cThese Truths.\u201d It is no less ambitious than \u201cUpheaval.\u201d But it is a new kind of big book for a new age. We know so much more now. We know the stories that haven\u2019t been told, the points of view that have been neglected. Lepore manages to tell many stories, ever shifting her own perspective. She has no pat Framework, no bullet-point theory to test. She tells earthy stories about people famous and obscure, and she is confident enough to let the ideas emerge. She writes from the soil up, not the sky down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n