#2549 - Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s book on leaders asks whether individuals alter history or merely occupy positions created by circumstance. His answer is that leadership can do good, cause harm, or make little difference, and that success often requires both a capable person and a rare opening. Bill Gates saw the opportunity created by Intel’s 8080 chip and moved to build a microcomputer; Winston Churchill was prepared for leadership but needed Germany’s invasion of France to create the occasion. Tree-ring research found the Mongolian steppe’s wettest decade in 2,000 years around Genghis Khan’s birth, producing hay to support livestock and military campaigns—an advantage the leader could not have anticipated.

Diamond’s examples of destructive leadership include Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where about one quarter of the population died and children were encouraged to kill their parents. He said Pinochet’s takeover surprised fellow generals and that, although Pinochet’s death toll was far below Hitler’s, the regime’s torture was worse than anything the Nazis did. He also argued that religions spread through organization and social conditions as well as doctrine. Christianity benefited from Paul’s organizing, women’s greater role, care for the sick, and encouragement to have children; Christian literacy later made believers useful to Constantine as bureaucrats. Islam’s spread, he said, owed more to organization, motivation, military spirit, and social connections than theology.

Diamond also credited individual judgment in business and technology. Jeff Bezos recognized the opportunity in an internet whose use had multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the previous year, beginning with books because each copy was uniform before expanding toward an online “everything store.” Steve Jobs did not invent the possibility of cell phones, Diamond said, but gave them a distinctive focus on appearance and simplicity. After returning to Apple, Jobs pushed to reduce a lineup of about 100 products to four and argued for ease of use rather than complexity, invoking a television remote with 49 buttons. Diamond himself remains a technophobe, writing books by hand with a 0.7-millimeter pencil because he says slow drafting helps organize thought and compress prose.

Diamond traced writing from cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent, dated to roughly 3500 BC, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, around 3000 BC, to later alphabets. He said Egyptians likely adopted the idea of writing from the Fertile Crescent but devised their own system. Greek writing returned around 800 BC in an alphabet adapted from Phoenician, with added vowel symbols; Greek writing had disappeared for several centuries after the Bronze Age collapse. The collapse affected a broad Eastern Mediterranean region, including Crete, Greece, Cyprus, the Levant, Anatolia, and the Hittite Empire, and its cause remains unknown. Diamond said Japanese combines two syllabaries, Chinese-derived kanji, and Roman script, while he considers Korean the best-designed system because its syllable-shaped letter blocks support fast reading.

Language can preserve distinctions that translation obscures, Diamond argued. Greek logos can mean both “word” and “rational system,” while Italian distinguishes amo from voglio bene in different expressions of love. He said the Iliad’s opening, “wrath, sing, goddess,” loses force in English because the Greek is so compressed. New Guinea has about 1,000 distinct languages; among the Fawaii Yao, a linguist identified 12 tones and suspected a 13th, with the meaning of “bae” changing by tone. Diamond described Tok Pisin as a full Creole that developed when children expanded stripped-down contact speech into a language with grammar, tenses, and plurals, potentially within about a decade. Papua New Guinea’s Parliament uses English or Tok Pisin, and officials are usually more fluent in Tok Pisin.

Diamond recounted his work among the Fore, distinguishing exocannibalism—eating enemies killed in war—from endocannibalism, eating deceased relatives according to customary rules. He arrived in 1964, when kuru was mysterious and confined to the Fore. One theory holds that the disease began when a person with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was consumed at a funeral feast around 1910, with exposure possibly reaching women and babies through handling brain tissue. The last Fore funeral feast was in 1959 after authorities banned the practice, but the last kuru death came in 2009, after an infection dating to 1959. Diamond said ordinary cooking was not established as a reliable way to destroy prions.

Botswana’s first president, Seretse Khama, showed how leadership can make natural resources serve a wider population. About six months after independence, diamonds were discovered on land belonging to his tribe. Khama declared underground resources throughout the country national property, preventing the wealth from accruing only to the tribe whose land held the deposits. Diamond said Botswana, with about three million people, invests diamond revenue for the long term rather than spending it as it arrives, comparing the approach with Norway’s. He contrasted it with Equatorial Guinea, where he said average income obscures extreme inequality. Diamond also noted that military service can strengthen national identity, as in Israel and Korea, but is not essential: Finland’s language helped anchor its identity after independence in 1918.