Reddit reviews Civilization: The West and the Rest

I mostly found Diamond to be overly fatalistic. he seems to be of the opinion that human civilization is inherently not just a delicate system in need of care and maintenance but irrevocably and inexorably doomed and doomed within our lifetime. (a common theme among the aging boomers I know and read)

he's also focusing hard on the things that prove his points and not so much on the stuff that doesn't, a forgivable sin in a pop-sci author.

I recommend instead Dirt: the erosion of civilizations which is a bit more of a history/geology/geography/anthropology type of book and when it's speculative it's both a lot more hopeful, and a lot more helpful.

I'm also currently reading Niall Ferguson's civilization the west and the rest which is essentially a defense of the classic western-centric historical education in addition to a defense of a western-centric modernist mindset. it's good, it's dense, it's meaty, I'm not sure if I agree with it's conclusions, but you could do worse and he's very much a historian first.

I know that Niall Ferguson is a somewhat controversial historian, but I really enjoyed his book and BBC television series Civilization: The West and the Rest.

He talks about "6 killer apps" that made the West the civilization that conquered the rest of the world. He discusses the exploration of Zheng He, and the fact that China chose to end it's exploration program at that time. The characteristic of Western civilization that made them different, according to Ferguson, is competition. China was, and is, one of the largest land empires in the history of the world. China didn't need to explore new lands in order to consolidate it's wealth. The seafaring nations of Europe (mostly the Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese) were all small countries in direct competition with one another for wealth and military dominance. In that climate of competition, it was cruicial for each of the countries I listed to build overseas empires as quickly as possible.