Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? by Jared Diamond; Mariner Books, 288 pp., $32
Watchers of HBO’s House of the Dragon encountered a surprise in this season’s third episode. Having won a civil war, Rhaenyra Targaryen ascends the throne of a country scorched by clashing armies and dragon fire. The victorious queen is “awash” not in the blood that sometimes spatters her but, as she explains to one of many petitioners, “in dilemmas and deficiencies.” The capital is in chaos: Someone has stolen the treasury, the granaries are empty, local livestock have been fed to dragons, rats infest the castle, the queen lacks council and bodyguard, and the chief cleric refuses to anoint her.
Even for a fearsome dragon rider, governance proves a quotidian grind. Hindered by the confused loyalties and competing personal agendas of her subjects, Rhaenyra, whose leadership has been animated by what passes for virtue in Westeros, must rely on a combination of justice, trickery, and violence. Her effectiveness depends not merely on her own abilities but on other people, events, and chance.
The study of leadership, like the thing itself, is a complicated, confusing affair involving considerations of personal aptitude as well as circumstance. In his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, geographer and UCLA professor emeritus Jared Diamond promises to explore this complexity by rejecting the “simplistic question, ‘Do leaders make a difference?’ ”—“sometimes,” he answers—in favor of determining when and under what conditions they might. The promise goes largely unfulfilled.
Diamond claims to be intervening in an ongoing historians’ “debate” defined by two extremes: the Great Man theory associated with Thomas Carlyle against the determinism espoused by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. Carlyle and Tolstoy turn out to be convenient straw men. Carlyle’s reactionary turn in the 1840s made his lectures on heroes an easy mark. Diamond distills On Heroes to a single line (partly paraphrased and slightly misquoted in the book): “The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.” Diamond ignores Carlyle’s serious engagement with historical forces as well as his project’s moral underpinnings: to alleviate spiritual crisis in a mechanistic age. Likewise, Diamond is silent about Tolstoy’s portrayals of leaders such as the Russian General Kutuzov, who is effective precisely because unlike Napoleon, who believes himself master of events, Kutuzov understands his relative powerlessness.
Occupying what he describes as “the middle ground,” Diamond applies the “new approach” of natural experiments to the phenomenon of ubiquitous leaders in modern society. He also relies on historical counterfactuals—Hitler’s 1931 auto accident is the opening gambit—and biography. Use of the latter is surprising given Diamond’s dismissal of the genre as an expression of the Great Man theory: All biographers of political leaders, he insists, assert that their subjects are unique and therefore “change the course of history.” Bad biographers do this, sure, but Diamond caricatures the craft. He acknowledges—and clearly hopes to capitalize on—the genre’s popularity, yet he says nothing about the deep psychological and social significance of our enduring hunger for stories of the Great.
Diamond focuses on an eclectic set of figures, including Botswanan president Seretse Khama; environmental writer Rachel Carson; Lynda Resnick, a founder of POM juice; UCLA basketball coach John Wooden; and Jim Jones, the notorious cult leader. This is an intriguing array of subjects, but Diamond’s treatments lack depth. His portrait of Wooden, for example, ends with the implausible proposition that the coach was unique in the profession for having a “broad philosophy of life.” In a 2010 Sports Illustrated profile of comparable length, Alexander Wolff offers a far more nuanced assessment charting the evolution of Wooden’s career and the concatenation of personality, culture, and luck that defined it.
Natural experiments involving measurable data provide the chastening counterpoint to what Diamond calls “heart-warming” biographies by muting the role of the individual. Here, too, conclusions tend to leave a reader wanting more: “CEOs have the most effect on company earnings in industries in which CEOs have the most discretion.” But biography remains acceptable for those figures who pass Diamond’s “Hamlet test,” which determines when a leader has “a unique effect on outcomes.” The test derives from a counterfactual that imagines Shakespeare dying prematurely of smallpox. Diamond asserts “with confidence” that no other contemporary playwright—not Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster—did or ever could have been able to write “a play as great as Hamlet.” Diamond’s sole criterion of greatness is frequency of modern-day performance.
None of this makes much sense to a humanist. Judging the relative greatness of literary works is a parlor game. Furthermore, as Stephen Greenblatt writes in Hamlet in Purgatory, a study of the play’s religious context, “Nothing comes of nothing, not even in Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare’s case, context also includes Marlowe’s electric transformation of English drama. No Marlowe, in other words, no Shakespeare as we know him. Shakespeare was about 36 when he wrote Hamlet. Rather than asking what would not have happened had he died of smallpox, we might just as fruitfully imagine what might have happened had the ferociously brilliant Marlowe not been murdered at age 29. Would his work have ultimately eclipsed that of his contemporary? Who knows? Who cares?
Diamond’s 1998 book Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction; ever since, his work has provoked lively debate and a good deal of criticism. Historians and anthropologists in particular have taken issue with Diamond’s geographical determinism and corresponding dismissal of the influence of culture and human agency—except when it suits his purposes. Lacking both the abundant curiosity and the generative provocations of his earlier books, Profits demonstrates Diamond’s newfound capacity for being seduced by notions about human agency that would make Carlyle blush.
To prove that “factors other than the coach’s leadership seem likely to affect outcomes,” Diamond tells a misremembered story of a fight between Boston Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek and New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez during a 2004 game. After Rodriguez was hit by a pitch and began cursing his opponents, Varitek confronted him. He pushed his mitt into Rodriguez’s face, and the two wrestled while a general brawl ensued. Diamond turns Varitek into a comic-book hero—“Varitek punched Rodriguez in the face so hard as to lift Rodriguez off the ground”—before crediting the phantom punch with ending years of humiliation by the Yankees and transforming the “re-energized Red Sox” into World Series champions.
One of the most peculiar things about this anecdote is Diamond’s untroubled equation of “the thrilling moment of the punch” with transformational leadership. It is typical of the book’s cavalier treatment of the physical, psychological, economic, and other harms inflicted by leaders: The Crusades and the Inquisition are blithely omitted from a cursory discussion of Christianity’s sometimes violent development; Mao Zedong is passingly credited with “a mixed legacy.” Assessments of contemporary tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk neglect a consideration of the deleterious effects of innovation on human beings and the environment. Whether leaders are taking our sheep to feed their dragons or harvesting our data to fill their pockets, their success almost always inflicts collateral damage on the rest of us.
