The 2019 book entitled: “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis” by Jared Diamond is an excellent book worth purchasing and reading. This reviewer purchased it when searching for a thought provoking read and having previously read and enjoyed his earlier books: “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. At first, a bit turned off by the slightly higher book fee, I bit the bullet and made the purchase and later decided that the book was more like 3 or 4 books in one and could have been packaged that way. Allow me to explain. He sets up a structure for assigning a dozen factors, first for getting out of any personal crisis and then later for nations extracting themselves from a crisis. Diamond then compares three pairs of nations. Any of these pairs would be an interesting book in its own right; indeed he could have written 6 interesting books about each of 6 nations. The pairs of nations are as follows: Finland and Japan; Chile and Indonesia; Germany and Australia.
The book contains a section on Praise for the Jared Diamond’s book “Upheaval” including by several well-known individuals including, for example, Bill Gates who says: “Upheaval shows that there’s a path through crisis and that we can choose to take it.”
Diamond writes this outline of the contents of this book: “Contents
Prologue: Legacies of Cocoanut Grove Two stories—What’s a crisis?—Individual and national crises—What this book is and isn’t—
Chapter 1. Personal Crises—
Chapter 2. Finland’s War with the Soviet Union—
Chapter 3. The Origins of Modern Japan…
Chapter 4. Chile until 1970—Allende—The coup and Pinochet—
Chapter 5. Indonesia, the Rise of a New Country…
Chapter 6. Germany in 1945
Chapter 7. Australia: Who Are We? —The end of White Australia—
Chapter 8. What Lies Ahead for Japan? Japan today—Economy—Advantages—debt—
Chapter 9. What Lies Ahead for the United States? Strengths, and the Biggest Problem The U.S. today—Wealth—Geography—Other advantages—Political polarization
Chapter 10. What Lies Ahead for the United States?
Chapter 11. What Lies Ahead for the World? The world today—Nuclear weapons—Climate change—Fossil fuels—Alternative energy sources—
Epilogue: Lessons, Questions… —Are crises necessary?—Roles of leaders in history—Roles of specific leaders—What next?—Lessons for the future”
Diamond writes: “At one or more times during our lives, most of us undergo a personal upheaval or crisis, which may or may not get resolved successfully through our making personal changes. Similarly, nations undergo national crises, which also may or may not get resolved successfully through national changes.”
Diamond writes: “Britain never regained its naval and economic dominance over the world, and it remains notoriously conflicted (“ Brexit”) about its role in Europe. But Britain is still among the world’s six richest nations, is still a parliamentary democracy under a figurehead monarch, is still a world leader in science and technology, and still maintains… as its currency the pound sterling rather than the euro… Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing… Hence one can think of a crisis as a moment of truth: a turning point, when conditions before and after that “moment” are “much more” different from one another than before and after “most” other moments.”
Diamond writes: “The “crisis” is a sudden realization of, or a sudden acting on, pressures that have been building up for a long time… study of individual crises has yielded a road-map of a dozen factors that help us to understand the varying outcomes. Those factors provide a useful starting point for devising a corresponding map of factors to understand the varying outcomes of national crises… Among historians, there has been a long and still on-going debate about whether unusual leaders really changed the course of history (often termed the “Great-Man” view of history), or whether history’s outcome would have been similar under any other likely leader… This is a comparative book. It doesn’t devote its pages to… discussing just one nation… Of course, the seven nations that I selected on the basis of those personal experiences aren’t a random sample of the world’s nations. Five are rich industrialized nations, one is modestly affluent, and only one is a poor developing nation.”
Diamond writes: “Now, here is a road-map to my book itself. In my first chapter I shall discuss personal crises, before devoting the rest of this book to national crises.
I found that using a dozen factors offers an acceptable compromise between those two extremes: detailed enough to explain much of reality, without being so detailed as to constitute a laundry list useful for tracking laundry but not for understanding the world.
That introductory chapter is followed by three pairs of chapters, each pair on a different kind of national crisis… (Finland and Japan)… (Chile and Indonesia)… [and] (Germany and Australia) [It appears besides these six, the seventh nation is the US]”
Diamond writes extensively about Finland and goes on to write: “Japan, whose long-held policy of isolation from the outside world was ended on July 8, 1853, when a fleet of American warships sailed into Tokyo Bay’s entrance, demanding a treaty and rights for U.S. ships and sailors”
Diamond writes: “Chapter 4 concerns Chile… On September 11, 1973, after years of political stalemate, Chile’s democratically elected government under President Allende was overturned by a military coup whose leader, General Pinochet, remained in power for almost 17 years… Today, Chile is once again a democratic outlier in South America, but selectively changed, incorporating parts of Allende’s and… parts of Pinochet’s models. To U.S. friends who commented on my book manuscript, this Chilean chapter was the most frightening chapter of my book, because of the speed and completeness with which a democracy turned into a sadistic dictatorship. [contrasted with Indonesia] … Indonesia stands in further contrast to all of the other nations discussed in this book: it is the poorest, least industrialized, and least Westernized of my seven nations; and it has the youngest national identity, cemented only during the 40 years that I have been working there.”
Diamond writes: “The next two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) discuss German and Australian national crises that seemingly unfolded gradually instead of exploding with a bang… In addition, the difference between “explosive crises” and “gradual change” is arbitrary rather than sharp: they grade into each other… I describe the crises of Chapters 6 and 7 as only “seemingly” unfolding gradually, because in fact post-war Germany’s crisis began with the most traumatic devastation experienced by any of the countries discussed in this book: Germany’s ruined condition as of the date of its surrender in World War Two on May 8, 1945. Similarly, while post-war Australia’s crisis unfolded gradually, it began with three shocking military defeats within the space of less than three months… My other example of non-explosive crises is Australia (Chapter 7), which has remodeled its national identity during the 55 years that I have been visiting it. When I first arrived in 1964, Australia seemed like a remote British outpost in the Pacific Ocean, still looking to Britain for its identity, and still practicing a White Australia policy that limited or excluded non-European.. immigrants… Today, Australia’s trade and politics are oriented towards Asia, Australian city streets and university campuses are crowded with Asians, and Australian voters only narrowly defeated a referendum to remove the Queen of England as Australia’s head of state.”
Diamond writes: “The next two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) discuss German and Australian national crises that seemingly unfolded gradually instead of exploding with a bang… In addition, the difference between “explosive crises” and “gradual change” is arbitrary rather than sharp: they grade into each other… I describe the crises of Chapters 6 and 7 as only “seemingly” unfolding gradually, because in fact post-war Germany’s crisis began with the most traumatic devastation experienced by any of the countries discussed in this book: Germany’s ruined condition as of the date of its surrender in World War Two on May 8, 1945. Similarly, while post-war Australia’s crisis unfolded gradually, it began with three shocking military defeats within the space of less than three months… My other example of non-explosive crises is Australia (Chapter 7), which has remodeled its national identity during the 55 years that I have been visiting it. When I first arrived in 1964, Australia seemed like a remote British outpost in the Pacific Ocean, still looking to Britain for its identity, and still practicing a White Australia policy that limited or excluded non-European.. immigrants… Today, Australia’s trade and politics are oriented towards Asia, Australian city streets and university campuses are crowded with Asians, and Australian voters only narrowly defeated a referendum to remove the Queen of England as Australia’s head of state.”
Diamond writes: “The last four chapters describe present and future crises, whose outcomes are still unknown… The next two chapters (Chapters 9 and 10) concern my own country, the United States. I identify four growing crises that hold the potential to undermine American democracy and American strength within the next decade, as already happened in Chile… Finally comes the whole world (Chapter 11). While one could assemble an infinite list of problems facing the world, I focus on four for which it seems to me that trends already underway will, if they continue, undermine living standards worldwide within the next several decades… This book concludes with an epilogue that examines our studies of seven nations and of the world, in the light of our dozen factors.”
After this broad overview, Diamond then goes into the extensive details and writes: “Almost all readers of this book have experienced or will experience an upheaval constituting a personal “crisis,” as I did in 1959… The resulting loss may precipitate a crisis not only because of the practical consequences of the loss itself (e.g., you no longer have a spouse), but also because of the emotional pain, and the blow to your belief that the world is fair… But, shared among all of those types of crisis, whatever their cause, is the sense that something important about one’s current approach to life isn’t working, and that one has to find a new approach… The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar idea by his quip “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!””
Diamond writes: “Basic to crisis therapy as it has evolved is that it’s short-term, consisting of only about half-a-dozen sessions spaced out at weekly intervals, spanning the approximate time course of a crisis’s acute stage… Often, a person in crisis feels relieved as soon as he or she starts to formulate the problem and to build a fence around it… The client thereby embarks on a process of selective change, which is possible, rather than remaining paralyzed by the seeming necessity of total change, which would be impossible… first session, another issue is also often addressed then: the question “Why now?” That’s short-hand for: “Why did you decide to seek help in a crisis center today, and why do you feel a sense of crisis now, rather than sometime earlier, or not at all?”… Crisis therapists have identified at least a dozen factors that make it more or less likely that an individual will succeed in resolving a personal crisis (Table 1.1)… Until someone admits, “Yes, I do have a problem”—and that admission may take a long time—there can’t be any progress towards resolving the problem.
Table 1.1. Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one’s personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups… 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience 10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints”
Diamond writes: “On the one hand, of course it’s clear at the outset that nations aren’t individuals. We’ll see that national crises raise numerous issues—issues of leadership, group decision-making, national institutions, and others—that don’t arise for individual crises… On the other hand… we expect some relationships between how individuals cope with individual problems, and how nations composed of many individuals cope with national problems… Table 1.2 lists the dozen factors that this book will discuss in relation to the outcomes of national crises. Comparison with Table 1.1, which listed the factors recognized by therapists as related to outcomes of individual crises, shows that most factors on one list have recognizable analogues on the other list. Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity… 7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints… For about seven of the dozen factors, the parallels are straightforward… Finally, for the remaining three factors, the individual factor serves just as a metaphor suggesting a factor describing nations”
Diamond writes: “Even in Lithuania and Poland and Iceland you’ll be able to recognize some words on street signs and billboards. But Finnish words will mostly be unrecognizable to you, because Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is totally unrelated to the Indo-European language family… Finland’s death toll in its war against the Soviet Union was nearly 100,000, mostly men… Finland’s death toll of just 100,000 over the course of five years may seem modest. But it represented 2.5% of Finland’s then-total population of 3,700,000, and 5% of its males. That proportion is the same as if 9,000,000 Americans were to be killed in a war today: almost 10 times the total number of American deaths in all the wars of our 240-year history.”
Diamond writes: “Like Finland, Japan exhibited outstanding honest self-appraisal, and patience at experimenting with different solutions until it found ones that worked. Unlike Finland, Japan adopted much more comprehensive selective changes and enjoyed greater freedom of action. Hence Japan in the Meiji Era offers a good case study to pair with our discussion of Finland… Japan… is a mosaic of its old self and its new self—more so than any of the other six societies discussed in this book…. Until the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s actual ruler was a hereditary military dictator called the shogun, while the emperor was a figurehead without real power. Between 1639 and 1853, the shoguns limited Japanese contact with foreigners,… In fact, since the time of Christ, Britain has been successfully invaded from the continent four times, Japan never… When the first Portuguese adventurers reaching Japan in 1542 shot ducks with their primitive guns, Japanese observers were so impressed that they avidly developed their own firearms, with the result that by 1600 Japan had more and better guns than any other country in the world. The first Christian missionaries arrived in 1549, and by 1600 Japan had 300,000 Christians… But the shoguns had reasons to be concerned about European influence in general, and about Christianity in particular… Hence after crucifying thousands of Japanese Christians, between 1636 and 1639 the shogun cut most ties between Japan and Europe. Christianity was banned… In short, until 1853 Japan’s contact with foreigners was limited, and was controlled by the Japanese government… Japan in 1853 was very unlike Japan today, and even unlike Japan in 1900, in important ways. Somewhat like medieval Europe, Japan in 1853 was still a feudal hierarchical society divided into domains, each controlled by a lord called a daimyo (Plate 3.1), whose power exceeded that of a medieval European lord. At the apex of power stood the shogun, of the Tokugawa line of shoguns that had ruled Japan since 1603, and that controlled one-quarter of Japan’s rice-growing land. Daimyo required the shogun’s permission to marry, move, or erect or repair a castle… But the Tokugawa shoguns had coped with problems and had remained in power for 250 years, and were at no imminent risk of being overthrown. Instead, the… shock that led to their overthrow was the arrival of the West.”
Diamond writes: “The Chinese government understandably responded by denouncing opium as a health hazard, banning its importation, and demanding that European smugglers surrender all the opium stored on their ships anchored off China’s coast. Britain objected to that Chinese response as an illegal restraint of trade. The result was the Opium War of 1839–1842 between Britain and China, the first serious test of military strength between… China and the West… U.S. President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan with a fleet of four ships, including two gun-bearing steam-powered warships infinitely superior to any Japanese ships at that time. (Japan had neither steamships nor even steam engines.) On July 8, 1853 Perry sailed his fleet uninvited into Edo Bay (now called Tokyo Bay), refused Japanese orders to leave, delivered President Fillmore’s letter of demands, and announced that he expected an answer when he returned the following year… The 14-year period that began in 1854, when the shogun’s government (called the bakufu) signed Perry’s treaty ending… Japan’s centuries of isolation… Ultimately, the shogun failed, because the opening triggered unstoppable changes in Japanese society and government.”
In a similar manner to comparing Finland and Japan, Diamond goes on to write in eloquent detail a comparison of Chile with Indonesia providing insightful historical detail. He then goes on to compare Germany and Australia and how that pair of nations dealt with crisis and emerged stronger. Finally, Diamond discusses What Lies Ahead for the United States? And What Lies Ahead for the World? and the roles of leaders in history with scholarly references to their impact.
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A gift to supercharge discussion
First, a suggestion. The physical copy contains photographs which I enjoyed perusing while reading. You miss that in the audio edition. Jared Diamond's book encouraged our family to look at our country and situation through a new lens, his analysis of crisis and reaction to it. It is be a difficult task to think critically about our faults. An uplifting takeaway is that acknowledgement and discussion of challenges is a step to solving them. And a look at how other countries have successfully navigated challenging dilemmas is cause for hope. Ultimately, Jared Diamond is a thought leader who has traveled the world and sees recurring themes and recurring responses to challenges. We can all learn from his experience and the conclusions he draws about where we may be headed.
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