On May 8, 2009, at 3:46 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
So brutal and inhumane were the Papuan tribesmen to each other that
when the European colonizers arrived, they submitted to their own
“pacification” happily. Finally, the blood feuds would be eliminated
by the more civilized representatives of modern state societies.
Despite Diamond’s carefully crafted image of himself as an
enlightened “multiculturalist”, this analysis is not that different
from the ones put forward during the Victorian era. The bloody
natives had to be rescued from themselves.
I do not find this surprising at all, for at least two reasons:
1. Western leftists/liberals still apply Western mechanisms to analyse
other people. So there is discussion of "master narrative"s (and the
natives subscribing to such narratives) and all that sort of thing
(how else are we going to use all this terminology we came up with?).
We saw some of that here or on LBO when everyone other than the brown
(me), red (John) and black guy (CB) was waxing on about the "racism"
of the claim that random dudes from Saudi Arabia might have some
difficulty flying a large jet into tall buildings.
2. Between Sokal and Summers/Wilson/Pinker, and their predecessors,
and the fear they inspire, the lesson learnt has been: rigour == hard
science == reductionist assumptions == the opposite of woolly-headed
feel-good beliefs. Working in reverse, anything that sounds counter to
feel good liberalism also sounds like hard science. Summers,
summarised: I am a liberal, and I sincerely wish the following is not
true, but we *have* to accept what the data tells us, and they tell us
that men are indeed better at the really, really, really hard stuff.
Doesn't mean we should stop helping women. Just that let us not
entertain romantic notions. Heck, some of my best friends are women.
The new great white father is scientific/materialism.
--ravi
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