The health of nations

Upheaval

By Jared Diamond Allen Lane £25

There has been a spate of one-word book titles recently, suggesting that publishers credit today’s readers with the attentionspan of a gnat.

Upheaval is a Big Book with a big promise: how nations solve crises, no less. It all starts with the author’s wife: a psychotherapist with a list of 12 factors essential to treating any individual’s personal crisis. This list includes: acknowledging that you’re having a crisis; getting help; awareness of your self-identity; knowing your core values. And eight other such meaningfuls.

And then Upheaval boldly goes to show how nations in crisis apply the same 12 psychotherapeutic solutions. We speed through seven relatively brief examples: Finland’s 1939 relationship with the Russian behemoth next door; Japan’s centuries of isolation, ended by Commodore Perry’s 19th-century intrusion; Chile and the Pinochet coup; Indonesia and independence; Germany and 1960s terrorism; the end of White Australia; and recent political polarisation in the US.

Now we’re into the meat of the book, it must be said that it’s a good read. The style is engaging. Not many other authors could say, ‘There are 15 reasons for this,’ and then list them all, in mind-boggling

detail, and get away with it. But this one does. And the tons of data are meticulous and well-researched.

The seven national analyses are followed by an examination of crises lying ahead for Japan and the US. Why these – and not Finland, Chile, Germany, Indonesia or Australia (or anywhere else) – is left unsaid.

And while I’m into nit-picking, there are a number of nits to be picked. If you’re doing (as the publisher says about the author) ‘epic’, what about the other 199 countries who don’t get a mention? And if we’re getting into stuff such as national self-awareness and core values, but the author isn’t mother-tongue fluent in four of the relevant languages, how close are we getting to understanding those cultures and their reasons for handling the crisis the way they did (in the case of Indonesia alone, that’s more than 300 sub-cultures)? Could space have been found for at least some in-depth remarks by a local-language speaker from each country?

To be really nit-picky about this Big Book: given the fact that there are more than six billion of us humans, each one with a brain containing 82 billion neurons linked several quintillion ways, and each brain contributing in some tiny and unknown manner to local culture and sense of ‘nationality’, shouldn’t this Big Book have been Much Bigger?

Back in pre-statistics 19th-century France, science types such as Auguste Comte came up with a way to deal with such complex human issues. At the time, we called his idea ‘social physics’. The aim was to find natural laws governing human behaviour.