On Grand Narratives

The first thing that struck me about the readings was the fact that Diamond seems to be unapologetically creating a master narrative of civilization. He says that his first book, Guns, Germs and Steel, is about “the different rates of buildup of human societies … over the last 13,000 years” (18). And now Collapse tells us exactly the opposite, how societies fail to "build up." Postmodernists like ourselves have been trained to be skeptical of such master narratives, to see historical events as more strongly impacted by chance and contingency. I think that the way that Diamond creates these narratives actually does have a lot to do with reducing people to populations. This is especially evident in the chapter on Rwanda. Here he reduces occurrences that have the timbre of individual dramas, such as brothers being suspicious of one another and orphans being disinherited, to population-level dynamics. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but I wonder how much is being lost in these descriptions. Just as in his account of the collapse of Easter Island, he describes how environmental and social factors lead to populations behaving in certain ways, but it strikes me that what's missing in the Rwandan case is that we actually have the means to discuss these things on the level of the individual as well. How would a Rwandan from the regions he analyzes think about his idea of "resolution by conflict?"

The other idea that interested me has to do with his master-narrative as well. To him it seems obvious that the success of a population involves "human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity" (3), and he defines collapse as the opposite of this. As someone who has always had a vague fantasy of running off to a small, sustainable agricultural commune, I wonder whether there is a possibility that "collapse" itself is a product of the belief that large, complex populations are what makes a "good" society. I don't mean to sound idealistic or hokey here, but is there a radical third option between collapse and "success?"