Bakker Bugle Blog

During a few rainy, cold days in June, I devoured two books: Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and John Waters’s Jiving at the Crossroads. It’s been years since I read an entire book in a day or two, so this was sheer joy for me. Plus, the fact that both of them were non-fiction makes the books themselves even more remarkable.

I read Waters’s book on Irish politics in the 1980s in one sitting. I was completely absorbed by it because it spoke to my experience and then it offered so much depth and insight beyond my own awareness. Here’s a passage that resonated with my exposure to Irish society so far (pages 31 and 32):

The nature of our political ‘beliefs’ was always difficult to explain to outsiders. Your ‘politics’ were a bit like the colour of your eyes: you picked them up from one or both parents, you did not question or even think about them very much, and yet they became part of what other people perceived you to be.

…The process is complex to the outsider, but second nature to the individual member of the community in question. When two of the town’s inhabitants meet in the street, a process occurs in which both are able to flash up in some part of their brains a ‘description’, a social image, of the other. This unwritten description will include such data as the person’s address, occupation, … their mode of dress, speech and general physical demeanour, and of course, the person’s political ‘persuasion’. This information will enable both of them to define the nature of their relationship.

…Both the individual in question, in that instant, will have come to the same conclusion as to their relationship. Other than by leaving, it is almost impossible, within the ordinary activity of one’s life, significantly to alter one’ own position in the pecking order.

…If one were to take, say, five people from various part and backgrounds in such a town and, having dosed them with some form of truth serum, ask each of them to draw up a list placing themselves and the other four in the correct order of their ‘importance’ in the town, all five lists would be the same. Deep down, everybody knows where they stand.

Waters was a columnist for the Irish Times, and I have the impression that he was a bit of an outsider to the world of Irish journalism. For me, he filled many of the gaps in my conception of Ireland that persisted after reading thousands of newspaper articles. I’d like to share more of his work with you, and I believe his book is currently out-of-print in the US. I’ll look into the copyright issues, etc, involved in sharing more of Jiving at the Crossroads with you.

I couldn’t read the other book, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, in one sitting. It is a much longer book! The massive popularity of this book a few years ago means that I have little new to say about it. It is very well-written and presents fair-minded analyses of the collapses of societies from pre-history to the present day.

I was enthralled by his vivid descriptions of civilizations that I’ve heard about in snippets about throughout my life: Anasazi, Maya, Easter Island, Greenland Vikings. The book’s arguments are unsettling when he turns to present-day societies, but he is not scare-mongering in any way. In fact, I found him unduly optimistic!