I've got time to kill, while I wait for advisees to come in and ask for advice.
Louis writes: >As the PBS Web site on [Guns, Germs, and Steel] puts it, [Jared Diamond] will >answer "Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?" > The way he answers this question has convinced some people on the left that > he is "one of us" since it rejects the kind of racism that 19th century > defenders of Empire espoused. Diamond says that it is not in the white man's > genes that he rules over people of color. Instead it is only a geographical > accident that Europe and the United States became hegemons. If, for example, > the Incas had access to horses rather than the llama, they might have become > major world powers. < This simplifies his theory, which involves, among other things, the nature of geographical barriers on the main continents. The reason why the Euros had horses is (according to Diamond) that the Eurasian landmass, including N. Africa, was so large and relatively unobstructed that there was in effect a wide variety of different beasts of burden to choose from. On the other hand, the Incas had only llamas because they were almost completely cut off from N. America (not to mention the rest of the world), so there were many fewer beasts of burden to choose from. Of course, that still doesn't capture Diamond's theory, but it's true that it leans heavily toward geographical determinism. That of course, doesn't mean that readers have to accept the deterministic part of his story. Nobody's book should be accepted completely, with both the wheat and the chaff, in an uncritical way. Similarly, just because he may have had an interesting theory does not mean that Diamond is automatically a good person, to be made an honorary "one of us." And just because someone's a creep or a fool on some or even many issues (e.g., Papua New Guinea) doesn't mean that all of his work should be rejected out of hand. (However, anyone who wrote a book titled "Why Is Sex Fun?" can't be all bad.) > While it is arguably a mark of progress that the intelligentsia no longer > considers people of color to be closer to the apes than to homo sapiens, the > net effect of Diamond's grand narrative is to relieve the privileged men and > women of the imperialist societies of any sense of responsibility for the > suffering of the system's victims.< I don't get this logic. Just because the Euros had the tools that allowed them to conquer the Incas doesn't mean they were _forced_ to use them to do so. They could have chosen not to do so. So they -- we -- can't avoid the issue of moral responsibility. If it's not geography which privileged the Euros, allowing them to conquer the Incas, what was it? do Euros have a greater genetically-based proclivity to conquer other peoples? do Euros have an inherently more expansionist culture? or was it due to an over-determined combination of a bunch of causes? Or what? Didn't the Incas also conquer other peoples? -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
