I suppose — to be charitable for a moment — this is what used to be called planning, getting ahead of the problem. But futurists take all this to quite another level. They are usually highly serious, geeky overgrown teenagers, generally men, who have been brought up on way too much science fiction. And they have turned what is basically a sucked finger raised into the air into a highly technical sounding art form. As the old Yiddish proverb has it: “Man plans and God laughs.”

Even so, all this MIT-meets-end-of-the-pier stuff does sometimes have interesting things to say. And the American futurist Jordan Hall’s “Civium Project” is a case in point.

Civium is a way of looking at cities, and specifically what a post-city world might look like. It imagines an alliance between technology and the countryside replacing the city as the focus of creativity and wealth-creation. It is the idea that there is no longer much point living in the middle of a large conurbation when you can now move out, look at fields through your window, breathe clean air, and do all your meetings with video conferencing. Covid has accelerated this fantasy. Rightmove has just announced that August has been one of the busiest months ever for buying and selling houses, with many moving to places such as Cornwall and Devon.

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“Cities are to people like stars are to atoms,” explains Hall. Like stars, cities have this inward gravitational pull. The more people that pack into an area, the more ideas it buzzes with and the greater its capacity to make money. The bigger the city, the more money (on average) that one can make there — so he argues. It’s all about the economies of scale. But just as there is a centripetal force that sucks in people, so too there is a centrifugal force that pushes them out. Because people have bodies, they take up physical space, and have physical needs like food. Thus the dynamic of the city is created by the intense inward pressure of the economic pull to the centre, and the resistance to this constant pull that our physicality engenders. People can only be packed in a small space so much before they want to break out of it.

But can technology — always the futurists’ deus ex machina — really square this circle? The Civium project imagines that the density of people that has made the city so much of a money spinner can now be recreated online. Indeed, when people can be translated into digital images, they can be packed together even more tightly, with even greater creativity and prosperity being created. The “gallery view” of Zoom, for example, allows many people to cram into the tiniest of spaces. And if density of people = creativity = prosperity, then the city as we have known it is doomed — because in the digital realm, the thing that attracted people together, what Hall calls “minds in relationship” can be de-coupled from the negative consequences of being physically piled up on top of each other.

The Civium imagines that we can have it both ways. We can live by the River Tamar, soothed by gentle music, without a neighbour for miles — yet we can also, and without commuting, instantly become a member of the sort of community that has made cities the economic hubs of civilisation for centuries. Yes, online conferencing has its own unique ennui to contend with. But that’s why we are moving to the Tamar. With all that time saved not commuting, there will be ample opportunity to chill out in your hammock and work off that disturbing feeling of existential dislocation with some good, old fashioned, country walks.

“It’s because minds are embodied that we have cities. Up until very recently the only way for minds to interact was to have bodies close to each other,” Hall says.

In other words, cities were an unfortunate consequence of the fact that minds have to carry around with them their physical bodies. Today, however, the virtual world allows us to jettison those bodies when we want to be “minds in relationship” and then relax by the river when we want to put body and soul back together again. This will not be an “adjunct to civilisation” Hall argues, but “a fully symmetric basis to civilisation with the physical side”.

He even imagines the virtual, the Civium, could represent a “single city” with the kind of scale to be maximally generative in terms of wealth creation. This is Capitalism 2.0.

What most interests me most about Hall’s proposal is that it recreates in such sharp focus our old friend the mind/body dualism and of a sort very similar to that imagined by the philosopher René Descartes, he of “I think therefore I am” fame. Hall’s idea of “minds in relationship”, and minds that have jettisoned their troublesome physicality, would inscribe into the very basis of civilisation the division that has created so much philosophical trouble since Descartes.

Perhaps the best way to critique the Civium project would be to argue that minds do not have relationships: only people do. And people are an indivisible unity of mind and body.

Yes, it is unfair to suggest that Hall neglects the body — after all, his vision of the bucolic life freed from the crowded, polluting, traffic rammed city is in many ways a return to our one-ness with the natural world. But this is achieved by pulling us apart — the creative, innovative mental part of ourselves making money in the virtual world and the bodily part being soothed in the physical.

And I am highly suspicious of this split. Physicality has a much greater role in innovation and creativity than Hall allows. In many disciplines, creativity is a very tactile business. My wife, for example, teaches weaving at university. She researches innovation in weaving technology. But it’s almost impossible to imagine what this could mean as simply “minds in relationship”.

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Likewise, to pick another example among many, the sort of trust that is necessary for creative and economic collaboration requires a much stronger sense of the face to face encounter than made possible over a screen. Morality is a remarkably physical business, I find. The obligations we have to other people make much more sense when we can see and touch them.

I began this piece being rather rude about futurists. I called them geeks — which is partly a way of talking about physical awkwardness, I suppose. Now I know that, these days, geeks are people with extraordinary power. They are the algorithm creators that shape so much of our lives.

And what terrifies me about the Civium project is that it is a way of imagining the world in which all this geeky awkwardness about physical bodies is turned into a civilisational principle.

Take food, for example. When we made a FutureProofing episode on the future of food, I drew the line at eating insects. Not because I’m squeamish: I eat pretty much anything except beetroot. My repugnance was not for the crunchy or squishy experience of invertebrate dining. It was the gleeful Schadenfreude of the “In future humans will all have to eat bugs because there will be too many of us and we won’t be able to eat meat or fish any more” brigade that made me sick.

Also, I simply didn’t believe it. We have defied repeated Malthusian warnings of human population outstripping the earth’s capacity to feed us, and are now feeding more people than ever, on less of the planet’s surface than before. Why are bug farms more likely than other improvements to the kind of agriculture that produces food people enjoy? Norman Borlaug didn’t try to persuade the population of India to switch to bugs, he engineered different forms of wheat.

But what about the meatless meat, the lab-grown animal cells, the Petri-Dish of The Day? Is that a dystopian punishment or a brilliant techno-solution that will put a steak on every plate with minimal impact on animals or planet?

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Jenny Kleeman’s book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, makes a refreshing change from the utopia/dystopia dyad. Steak-loving Kleeman is serially disappointed in her quest to taste the lab-grown meat of the future. Sometimes it’s a tiny snippet of ‘disgusting’ mush, sometimes it doesn’t exist at all except in the minds of potential investors. She brings her journalistic scepticism to San Francisco’s hipster Mission District, but she is sympathetic to the political or moral mission of veganism that underlies the vision of a world without factory farming.

I warmed to Mike, the scientist  and New York Communist, reluctantly relocated to the Bay Area, the vegan who doesn’t want to be associated with Vegans. He calls them “the most self-absorbed group of people… incredibly white… incredibly wealthy, incredibly privileged,” but he hopes “to make everybody vegan without changing their habits.”

Mike wants to replace the food we’re used to with something that looks, smells and tastes just as good, but comes from a lab, not the farm or the ocean. And, while lab-grown protein is some way off the industrial-scale production of appetising food, there’s nothing in principle to say we won’t get there.

So is Kleeman happy? Is she looking forward to technology squaring the circle — or the burger?

No. She thinks “the problem isn’t really animal agriculture, it’s human appetites”. And this is a recurring theme of the book: a deep ambivalence about technology rooted in ambivalence about human beings. Is the problem that technology promises to meet humans needs and desires, but doesn’t deliver — or is the problem that technology might, in fact, fulfil our desires?

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Kleeman’s book begins with sex robots, the pouty, silicon face of the hi-tech future, in a factory where the CEO gives his own face to male sex dolls, and his nephew enthusiastically demonstrates the superhuman flexibility of the RealDolls’ pelvic joints. But the ambitions of Abyss Creations go beyond “high-end masturbation” to a sex doll with integrated AI. Harmony is an artificial companion who will recognise your face, remember your sexual preferences, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare, be gloomy if you’re nasty to her, and simulate orgasm.

Kleeman raises many issues with sex robots, from the reinforcement of impossible, pornographic expectations of female anatomy to the data privacy implications of remotely-controlled sex tech. “Butt plugs gone rogue” is a phrase I will never forget. But a sex robot designed to give you the illusion of autonomy, of choosing to be with you and respond to your desires, opens a door to much bigger issues.

The market for sex robots is primarily male, and it’s about more than sexual curiosity, or frustration. It’s often driven by loneliness, and the perception that a relationship with a real human being is either unattainable, or too messy and complicated, or too risky emotionally. “It’s never just been about sex,” says DaveCat, an Abyss customer, of his sex doll companions: “70% of the relationship that I have with all the synthetic women in my life is about being able to come home to a non-empty home, to be able to share my life… It’s always been about companionship for me.”

I am reminded of my surreal encounter, at a robotics conference in Moscow, with the Russian roboticist who proudly announced that his robots were completely lifelike, with face, arms, legs and ‘wedding vegetables’ (the translators’ words, not his). He asserted that women would obviously prefer a robot husband to a real man who wanted to drink beer and watch football.

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I am baffled and dismayed by the idea that an object, however cleverly engineered, could replace a relationship with another human being. Yes, even one who wants to drink beer and watch football. We might want to drink beer and watch football together. Or I might be able to tolerate somebody who is not merely a mirror to myself, who has their own life, their own thoughts and desires and insecurities.

Of course, other humans have as many flaws as I do myself. That’s one of the ways we learn about ourselves, and change for the better, to see ourselves reflected in another’s eyes and feelings, to feel empathy and realise we need to extend the same compassion to others that we want from them.

And of course we risk emotional pain whenever we open up to another person emotionally. That is, in fact, my main objection to sex robots, not that they are too dangerous, but that they’re not dangerous enough.

We learn to live with people by living with people. A simulacrum of a relationship with a companion who is “just there for your pleasure”, is nothing like a relationship with a person who exists in their own right, as an end in themselves, not as a means to your getting your end away.

*

The other two elements of the human condition that Kleeman explores are birth and death, our entry into this world, and our departure. How much do we want technology to insulate us from biology, from the uncaring laws of Nature?

Birth has already been changed. The introduction of IVF separated conception from sex, and genetic motherhood from carrying a foetus to birth as a baby. There is one stronghold of biology that resists replacement by machines, the womb in which a woman’s body gestates every human that has ever lived. But for how long?

The Biobag is one of several attempts to replace the uterus as a place of sustenance and protection for gestating lambs, now, and one day, human babies. Ectogenesis, as portrayed in Brave New World, is the separation of human reproduction from the female body.

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The hope it offers for very premature babies is one of the most emotional points in the book. And it’s already a lightning rod for some very strange reactions: from the angry men who see it as a chance to render women obsolete, or from the bioethicist Anna Smajdor who argues that ectogenesis is a moral imperative to achieve full sexual equality, but then opines “that to create another human being is the height of hubris”.

To do what all our forebears have done, deliberately or accidentally, fulfilling social expectation or consciously putting a stake in the future, is now “the height of hubris”. I’m not sure whether it’s the arrogance of imposing another person on the long-suffering planet, or of assuming that the hoped-for child will want to exist, that so offends Smajdor’s 21^st-century sensibilities. Non-consensual conception may soon be added to a list of new crimes committed by parents against their offspring.

*

The fourth, and most disturbing, section of the book is about the desire to control death. Not by chasing immortality, but by planning and executing your own exit from the world, with some hi- or low-tech kit to remove another person from the consequences of killing you.

Kleeman meets people eager to use technology to this end, who are mostly, but not exclusively, suffering from degenerative or terminal conditions. Some regard it as an insurance policy that “takes away the fear of the future”. Others want to die because they are consuming resources, saying “I’ve come to my natural end of life, and I don’t want to be a burden on the planet.”

She is clearly saddened by many of the individual stories she hears, and troubled by the gap between shiny technology and its purpose. Kleeman doesn’t think we need a death machine and argues for a culture that accepts illness and death as part of life, for better palliative care, for support, dignity and reassurance, not death.

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But she also wants to legalise assisted dying. She never seeks out, or offers, a challenge to the desirability of hastening towards death. In earlier parts of the book, she finds critical voices, and does not flinch from the deeper social, philosophical and moral dimensions of birth, sex and even food. The anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing, and Not Dead Yet, “a British alliance of disabled people opposed to the right to die”, get a single sentence between them.

After her eloquent defence of the human aspects of intimacy, of bearing children, of compassion for animals as we feed ourselves, I had hoped for a defence of human life as something with intrinsic value, right to the final breath.

Kleeman is right that technology is too often portrayed as a clean, simple solution to messy problems. Sex robots will not fix the atomisation of society, the growing avoidance of emotional pain, or the disruption of traditional gender roles that has left men, especially, feeling redundant, resentful and that whatever they do is wrong.

But a future that harnesses technology to meet human needs and, yes, desires, isn’t a dystopia. We already use contraception to sever the natural link between heterosexual sex and procreation. Without that, straight women would be forced to choose between active sex lives and careers. We use medicine and sanitation to prevent nature killing us in droves from infancy onwards. We use science and engineering to produce more food from less land, with side benefits for the natural environment.

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And yet, somehow Kleeman blames these applications of technology for the problems in her book. Industrial agriculture for making meat unsustainable, medicines for making disease and death more terrifying and pregnancy more medicalised, and the contraceptive pill for female independence that has left men lonely and frustrated.

Kleeman’s epilogue is not fatalistic. “We can use the time we still have, before these inventions go on the market, to examine why we think we need them in the first place. Then we can make the changes and sacrifices necessary to solve fundamental human problems, instead of turning to technology to paper over them.” But there’s the ambivalence again. “We will have to make sacrifices… we can’t have everything we want without any consequences, no matter what scientists and entrepreneurs may say.”

Is this a recognition of the imperfection of the world, and the hard choices humans always face? Or is it a masochistic version of the same schadenfreude that wants us all to eat insects because we deserve to be punished?

In Kleeman’s analysis, humans are the problem, with our appetites, our selfishness, and our unwillingness to be content with things as they are. She’s right, of course, that technology can’t resolve social, emotional or moral problems. But technology is merely a tool, designed and used by humans.

It doesn’t have to dehumanise and isolate us. It can connect us, free us from the constant life-or-death struggle with nature, and bring the benefits of civilisation within the reach of everyone. It can widen our horizons and the aspiration to keep pushing those horizons ever wider is a very human trait, and one worth celebrating.

Firstly, there’s the author. He’s a leading light of Novara Media – and thus a general in Jeremy Corbyn’s online army. He helped lead the social media insurgency that seized control of the Labour Party from the centre-Left establishment and that must rankle.

Secondly, there’s the title: Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It’s a huge, expansive, outrageous idea. Does it come with fully automated luxury gulags and fully automated luxury famines? The put-downs write themselves (appropriately enough).

Thirdly, there’s the subtitle: A manifesto. Yes, this is a polemical work, written in a breezy, accessible style. It is a work of pop political economy – full of sweeping statements and broad brush summaries. And why not? Why should big ideas be confined to dry and dusty tomes? Why should the cut-and-thrust of public debate be limited to small ideas – like Trump’s latest tweet or what a Tory leadership contender might have stuffed up his left nostril?

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Of course, the fact that I welcome this book doesn’t mean that I agree with it. To a large extent, I don’t. Bastani’s arguments are thought-provoking – and, often, the thought they provoked in my mind was “this is completely wrong”. He is, however, wrong in an interesting way – which is more than can be said for a lot of his critics.

*

Let’s start with what makes up the bulk of the book: an exploration of the 21st-century technologies that are expanding the possibilities of human endeavour – and therefore politics, which is, of course, “the art of the possible”.

Bastani looks at AI, robotics, renewable energy, bio-tech, high-tech food production and, er, mining asteroids. Don’t expect too much caution here. He very much accentuates the positive – in support of his contention that we are moving towards an economic situation of “extreme supply” across a range of resources.

On some of these fronts (especially the asteroids) he’s far too optimistic about the pace of change. Overall, however, it’s a pretty good introduction to the potential of existing technology to bring about a “third disruption” (the first disruption being the agricultural revolution, starting 12,000 years ago; and the second the industrial revolution, starting 200 years ago).

The author is not a complete techno-Pollyanna: he acknowledges some of the pitfalls and setbacks of our age, such as the climate crisis and the faltering of Moore’s Law. But that still leaves a lot of complication unexamined.

For instance, Bastani quite rightly talks about the rapid progress being made on the renewable power front. Costs have come tumbling down. But when it comes to an “extreme supply” of energy, we had that decades ago. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap and concentrated liquid energy – oil – made the modern world possible. Then, bit-by-bit, we lost it: OPEC embargoes, the exhaustion of oilfields, air pollution, the dawning reality of the greenhouse effect. The true costs of fossil fuels are mounting up – and if we’re lucky renewables might just get us back to where we thought we were 50 years ago.

It’s not the only example of our uncertain progress. Antibiotic resistance, collapsing biodiversity, the diminishing productivity of scientific research: if you look, there is plenty of evidence against the idea that “things can only better” (as an anti-Blairite like Bastani probably wouldn’t say).

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What he does say, however, is that the “rate of historical change is accelerating”. Whether that’s true rather depends on the timeframe. Zoom in on recent decades and a powerful case can be made for a technological slowdown. Economists such as Tyler Cowen write powerfully about a “great stagnation“. Even if one concentrates on digital tech, there’s a pretty good case that the development of the internet has been a lot less exciting over this decade than in the 1990s or 2000s.

However, these may be bumps in the road, not a dead-end – and it’s not unreasonable for Bastani to concentrate on where the road may be taking us.

*

The non-fantastical prospect of an end to scarcity is what brings his two most important arguments into play. Firstly, that technological abundance will make communism possible for the first time in history; and, secondly, that while the “logic of market demand means that capitalists must produce goods and services as cheaply as they can”, there comes a point at which supply becomes so extreme that capitalism can’t work anymore.

Let’s take a look at these propositions in greater detail.

By “communism” Bastani doesn’t mean the communist regimes of the past (and present), but “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another”. The excuse of the latter-day Marxist that ‘real communism hasn’t been tried yet’ has become something of a cliche. But going by Bastani’s definition, it’s clear that real communism hasn’t been possible so far and won’t be possible until work has been largely automated and shortages of key resources rendered a thing of the past.

Therefore this book is not a defence of totalitarianism. It could, however, have done without an aside like: the “seven-decade survival” of the USSR “remains one of the great political achievements of the last century”. When a regime doesn’t have to bother with democracy and can murder dissidents at will, it’s amazing how long it can survive.

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Still, let’s get back to the future. If we are indeed on the road to full automation and luxury, why do we need communism of any kind? Reviewing the catalogue of wonders that makes up the middle section of the book, one can’t help but notice that most are the achievement of capitalist companies and capitalist countries. Yes, the state does play a supporting role by funding basic research and shared infrastructure, but the change-makers are the innovators and entrepreneurs who define capitalism at its best.

Even Bastani admits that “capitalism has a number of useful features”.

But then comes the big claim that it can’t cope with extreme supply:

“…none of its shortcomings match its inability to accept natural abundance. Facing such conditions for resources – as with information, energy and labour – production for profit begins to malfunction.”

Even the briefest consideration of economic history shows this isn’t true. Across a vast range of commodities, goods and services, the unfolding of the industrial revolution turned extreme scarcity into extreme supply.

The classic example is lighting. In 1800, the cost of an hour of artificial light (equivalent in brightness to a 100 watt filament bulb) was prohibitively high – about $150 in today’s prices. That meant that even the rich couldn’t afford more than the dimmest candlelight (which was also smelly, dirty and dangerous). But with industrialisation and invention, costs plummeted to $5 in 1900 and, then, with the electric light bulb, all the way down to 5 cents by the end of the 20th century. CFL followed by LED technology means that it continues to get cheaper – and greener.

In the space of two centuries, lighting has became thousands of times cheaper. Compared to its original cost, it is very nearly free. (It is has become so abundant in our lives that we even speak of light pollution – an unwanted excess of light.) And yet ‘big light’ has coped – capitalist enterprises continue to manufacture lighting products at a profit and to reinvest some of those profits to make light even cheaper (with some prodding from the state in the form of efficiency standards).

It’s the same with just about anything else that’s become massively cheaper. Computer processing capacity, for instance. More than merely coping, capitalism thrives on extreme supply – using it to create previously undreamt of applications – and selling them to an eager public. Of course, abundance can be disruptive. Technological breakthroughs can render products, companies and entire industries obsolete. But capitalism as a whole adapts – there are new products, new companies, new industries.

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So why the contemporary crisis of capitalism? You don’t have to be a socialist to realise that there’s a deep rot in the system, especially its neoliberal incarnation. Bastani discusses various examples and you can consult the UnHerd archives for many more.

But when you look for the root cause of the corruption, it strikes me that the essential problem isn’t extreme supply at all – it’s that businesses are protected from disruption or allowed to exploit monopoly control over resources that remain scarce in an otherwise abundant economy (above all, land.) These are the twin evils of crony capitalism and rentier capitalism. They are real, they are powerful and they must be defeated. But what this requires is for government to take back control of naturally scarce resources, not the increasingly abundant ones.

*

Ah, but what about when capitalism creates artificial scarcity by using intellectual property rights to constrain the supply of informational goods?

This is an age-old issue that predates the capitalist system. From the cook’s secret recipe to the playwright’s manuscript, access to original information has always been contested – and the right of the originators to profit from their creative efforts always asserted.

Over time, governments have come to recognise and protect intellectual property because it is in the common interest that people should be incentivised to create more of it. In this respect, the most relevant figure in Bastani’s book is the cover price. Presumably, the text could be made available for free online. But wouldn’t the author agree with me that he should see some return on his hard work?

Of course, IP rights can be exploited to the general detriment – for instance through the practice of patent trolling. But that can be reformed. Moreover, the state (which, after all, controls the law) always has the option of abolishing IP protections altogether – dealing with the issue through deregulation rather than assuming control of industries.

However, Bastani wants us to consider the future, not just the present. In the increasingly automated economy of the decades ahead, the means of production won’t so much be the robots, but the artificially intelligent systems that control them. The automated economy will therefore be an algorithmic economy – revolving around instructions that can be copied and made ubiquitous or protected and made artificially scarce

With so much power and control at stake, isn’t it incumbent on the state to take ownership in the name of the people? Well, if we were talking about the code behind an all-powerful general intelligence that directs all productive activity, then yes – nationalise the singularity!

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But it won’t be like that. AI systems will be specific and multiple, not general and singular. They will enhance, not replace, workers’ productivity – and the know-how that will make the most difference won’t be reducible to reproducible code, but uniquely (and unequally) embodied within living, breathing human beings.

*

The economic system will be more complicated than ever before, and less centrally plannable. So, contra-Bastani, I believe that the conditions under which communism could actually work are further away than ever before.

Then again, anyone who thinks they can predict the course of a technological revolution – or how society will react to it – is bound to be confounded.

All we can do from the clouded vantage point of the present is envisage scenarios and debate the implications. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a passionate contribution to that debate and I hope it provokes many others.

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Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A manifesto, Aaron Bastani, Verso, £16.99

If we analysed historical moments in Japan, Germany, and other countries through the lens of ‘crisis therapy’ of the kind offered to individuals, we might get a better idea of how countries can respond to challenging events in future, and so draw up a kind of geopolitical playbook or 12-step program for leaders around the world.

So, at least, runs the programme of Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, in which Diamond, having become famous for applying geography and ecology to the history of human civilisation in his bestselling books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, now turns for a framing discipline to therapy. When an individual is in a personal crisis, he explains, there are a dozen factors (yes, 12 steps) that predict how successful he or she will be at emerging from it, the first being “acknowledgment that one is in crisis”, and other being things such as “individual core values”, “ego strength”, “flexibility”, and so forth. 

The way in which Diamond translates these into qualities of nations near the start of the book is already telling. Britain refused to negotiate with Hitler in 1940, he says, because of a “core value” which was “We shall never surrender”. It’s not clear why this is defined as a core value rather than as an example of splendid obstinacy, except that his scheme requires “flexibility” always to be a virtue, and this is an example where flexibility would have been bad.

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So far, then, an arbitrary framework filled with vague bromides has been imposed upon international politics. The next stage of the book is to examine some historical moments in detail and then read off some vague bromides from them in order to validate the imposed framework.

So Diamond proceeds to do. Happily for the reader, the series of historical stories that follow are brilliantly told and may be read with pleasure and profit regardless of the uses to which they are put. Diamond narrates Finland’s war with the Soviet Union and its subsequent clever accommodation with it; the modernisation of Japan after the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century; how Chile recovered democratic norms after the Pinochet dictatorship; the troubled birth of Indonesian independence and nation-building; the rebuilding of post-war Germany; and Australia’s post-war abandonment of its “white Australia” immigration policy.

All these discussions are masterpieces of narrative synthesis; at the end of each, however, we are told how the stories “illustrate” aspects of the therapeutic scheme, which rarely adds much. In particular, some of Diamond’s keys to successful crisis management are so vague as to fit every possible case. It’s very important, he stresses, that a nation be able to make “selective change”, but no government in history, even Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s, has ever changed absolutely everything about a nation’s culture as well as foreign policy: all possible change is necessarily selective.

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Diamond is not a writer burdened by excessive modesty. He reminisces here about how he “became a very successful physiologist”, and remarks fondly that “I’ve learned to recognise important scientific questions that can be addressed with simple technologies”. He has allowed his author’s biography to describe him as “a noted polymath”, and his introduction explains that “this is a book expected to remain in print for many decades”. That is by way of warning the reader that there will be nothing in his book about Trump and Brexit, for he will soar above the merely topical. And yet the last two-fifths of the book is devoted to forecasting the future for (some of) the nations under his microscope, beginning with what he views as their problems today. 

So, for example, he argues that Japan has an ageing population and not enough immigration, but one can be cautiously optimistic because of its “history of success in resolving crises”. Of course, the Japanese people of the 21st century are not the Japanese people of the 19th, and so a pedant might argue that this history counts for much less on a national scale than it does on the personal scale of a patient in therapy, but never mind that now.

The United States, meanwhile, has excellent geography and good immigration but an “accelerating deterioration of political compromise”, a gerrymandered voting system, underfunded public education, and a wildly expensive and inefficient healthcare system. Plus, wouldn’t you know, people use their phones too much.

“Most Americans no longer experience one another as live humans whose faces and body movements we see, whose voices we hear, and whom we get to understand,” Diamond laments, which is surely important if true. There follows a section confidently asking “What Lies Ahead for the World?”, which discusses global warming, water, war, and so forth.

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Listen to Japan's military aspirations. They are an echo of 150 years ago

By Allan Mallinson

As the quantum physicist Niels Bohr said, prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. When Diamond turns pundit, he is as erratic (as well as grumpy) as any other non-expert, and there are some highly eccentric claims on display here: that, for instance, the US and Russia are now closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Whatever you think of Putin and Trump’s relationship now, it is well documented that the countries came much closer to a nuclear exchange in the 1980s.) In the mean time, on the global rise in nationalism Diamond has nothing to say, as he is constrained by his own framework to treat “national identity” as an uncomplicated good that should be built up when lacking.

Perhaps most naively, Diamond at the end expresses the hope that his concepts such as “successful crisis resolution” and “honest self-appraisal”, in what he grandly calls the “data-set” of his examples, can one day be translated into numerical measures for objective data-driven analysis. We can be certain that they won’t be, because the noticeable void in Diamond’s analysis is politics itself. And this is a problem because politics is precisely how the differences between individuals and nation states are managed.

Further reading

The West is one crash from chaos

By Henry Olsen

Much as liberal readers may agree heartily with his analysis of the US, for instance, as endangered by inequality of wealth, conservatives would take the opposite view. In general, different people will always disagree on what kind of national self-appraisal counts as an honest one, just as they will disagree on which other nations and periods to use as models, or what counts as the proper amount of flexibility. And as long as people can’t agree on such things, they can’t be magically turned into hard data.

Diamond’s ambition that his scheme can, even so, be “operationalised” is effectively a dream of realising psychohistory, the science at the centre of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of novels that combines history, sociology, and statistics to enable predictions of the future actions of large numbers of people. This was a fascinating and provocative sci-fi idea in the 1950s; to think it achievable now represents a triumph of hope over experience, of the kind an unrealistic patient in therapy might be gently advised to reconsider.

Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, by Jared Diamond, Allen Lane, £25