I make no brief for Jared Diamond (except that he writes more clearly than most social scientists) nor do I know enough about his research to reject him (since I haven't had the time to read Lou's posts on this subject).
The question I have is this: suppose that Diamond is guilty as charged (of misrepresenting what happens on Papua New Guinea, etc.) Does that mean that the major thesis of GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL (which also shows up in Diamond's collection of articles called THE THIRD CHIMPANZEE) is totally wrong, flawed, incomplete, or what? After all, bad people have developed useful understandings of the world in the past (cf. Werner Heisenberg). I know that his geographical/ecological determinism is one-sided (as are all deterministic theories) but sometimes deterministic theories have important things to say, even as we must be conscious of their limitations.[*] In order to simplify the discussion, assume that the GGS hypothesis was developed by someone else besides Diamond himself. -- Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine [*] For example, in the 1867 Preface to the First German edition of his CAPITAL, Marx made extremely deterministic assertions when he wrote that: "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." Even though these assertions have not worked out very well in practice, they do say a lot about the world: isn't China (like a bunch of other countries) currently going through a process like the "industrial revolution" that Marx described, complete with the development of social antagonisms. The problem is that Marx's analysis was one-sided, leaving out much important stuff. For example, he missed the impact of imperialism on the way in which the "advanced" countries developed after 1867. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
