Want to stop climate change? Jared Diamond says nations need therapy

His bestselling books Guns, Germs, and Steel (for which he won the Pulitzer prize) and Collapse are works of comparative history, studying societies side by side “because there are things that you can learn and questions you pose from comparisons that you would never think of with single case studies”. His latest book is Upheaval: How nations cope with crisis and change.

In Upheaval, you’ve taken ideas from the field of personal crisis therapy as a way to analyse national crises. Is this meant as a conversation starter?

It’s more than that. I’ve lived in half a dozen countries over the last 60 years, and each one has either been coming out of or going into a crisis. My wife Marie, a clinical psychologist, was training in crisis therapy during the first year of our marriage. A personal crisis is when someone feels that some basic element in their approach to life isn’t working, and they need a new way of dealing with it, fast, because there’s a risk of suicide. There are a dozen variables indicating whether a person is more or less likely to get through the crisis and make changes. I realised that there might be equivalent predictors for the national stage.

Can you give us a flavour of these crisis-coping criteria?

First, you have to acknowledge that you’re in a crisis or you get nowhere. Second, you can’t blame other people, you have to accept responsibility for yourself. Then you have to work out which parts of you are broken, and which are working well and should be left alone. Other obvious things are being willing to ask for help, having previous experiences that give you confidence that you can get through this one, and flexibility. Then there’s what psychologists call ego strength: not being dependent on other people for your self-image. And it helps to have principles you consider important, and which you’re not going to change.

How well do these predictors map over the experiences of individual nations?

Not every one of the 12 predictors applied in every case – just as not all of them would apply to a person. You could say these outcome predictors are banal. Why do you need someone like me to say honest self-appraisal is important or that nations as well as people need to exercise responsibility and not fall into self-pity and victimisation? The reason is that we rarely apply these lessons at a national level. Today, for example, the US blames its problems on China and Mexico and refuses to acknowledge that they are home-grown. It’s worth emphasising where this can lead. Countries that fail to accept responsibility for themselves end up with millions of dead.

And yet you say that 10 out of the 12 crisis-coping criteria don’t work well at a global level?

That’s true. Quite a few of the predictors for national crises suggested by this work incline one towards pessimism about the world. We lack a world identity – people identify as citizens of the US or the UK or wherever. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the world does have some track record of dealing with really difficult crises and complicated problems over the last 50 years.

“The world does have some track record of dealing with really difficult crises and complicated problems”

Take the legal framework for mining minerals from the deep sea bottom. Naturally, landlocked countries don’t want coastal countries to scoop up all the minerals, so a framework was reached in which countries like Mongolia get 15 per cent of the revenues. Then there was the removal of chlorofluorocarbons from the atmosphere to protect the ozone layer. Every country had to sign off on that deal, and despite all the screaming, that’s what they did.

You’ve been quoted as saying there is a 49 per cent chance of the world as we know it ending by 2050. Are we going to make it?

If voters and governments make good choices, we will have a happy outcome. If they make bad choices, we will have an unhappy outcome. I have grounds for being hopeful. Five years ago, most people in the US did not believe in climate change. Now most Americans – though not our federal government – believe in climate change and believe in its human causation. That’s grounds for hope.

Where do leaders fit into your crisis model?

That is a key question. The view used to be that history is the deeds of great men. Nowadays, most historians hold the view that leaders make a difference only under certain circumstances. We need to know more about those circumstances.

So how do we deal with our very complex, non-linear world?

There needs to be much more frank conversation. We need to try everything possible – in dealing with nuclear weapons, for instance – to encourage conversations, not just between leaders, but between all levels of government. If the US and Russia are having conversations all the way down the bureaucratic chain, then presidents and prime ministers are far less likely to overreact to an erroneous early-warning message.

But in the end, isn’t it like that bit in the film The Martian when the lead character says he has to science the shit out of a problem?

In psychotherapy, there’s something called a resistance mechanism: something you invoke in order to avoid dealing with a problem. A common resistance mechanism in dealing with world problems is to say, “We need the technology and we don’t yet have the technology.” Rubbish. The technology we have today is sufficient to solve the world’s problems. Will highly complex systems and complexity theory and AI solve everything? Forget it.

Even if humanity makes it, the world will still be harder to live in and we’re all going to need a scientific infrastructure.

Compared to ten years ago, we’re already negotiating a trickier world. Rich countries are not going to be secure until standards of living are more equal around the world. One of the big factors making poor countries poor is public health. Tropical countries are dealing with the burden of AIDS, as well as malaria and other tropical diseases, yet there is much more research devoted to temperate zone diseases than to tropical ones because the rich countries are in the temperate zone. In this globalised world, poor tropical countries are the breeding place for epidemics that can spread globally. It’s in everyone’s interest to deal with this.

Do Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse and Upheaval form a trilogy?

No, every one of my books has arisen from what I was interested in at that moment. The way I develop my books is to teach the material to my undergraduates at UCLA. From the looks on their faces I can see what they find interesting, and whether I am explaining it clearly. People often ask if I began Upheaval after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election. Actually I began the book in 2013 when Trump and Brexit weren’t on the horizon. It just turned out my book is appearing at a terrible time. Isn’t that lucky?