December 14, 2012
lawyers, god, and money
The most glaring omission from Diamond’s account is the violence involved in the imperial grab for power. As Eric R. Wolf wrote in Europe and the People Without History (1982): “Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents.” Wolf was a Marxist, writing at the dawn of the neoliberal era; his work will never be made into a PBS documentary series as National Geographic did with Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond’s bowdlerized account of empire, in contrast, left out the inconvenient history and captured the triumphalist zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. Diamond’s next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), was a fitting companion to the previous one. If Guns, Germs, and Steel played to the racial liberalism of upper-class professionals, Collapse flattered their environmental concerns. It purported to illuminate the dark side of the story told in the earlier book. If the haves acquired wealth through geographic accident, Diamond claimed, the have-nots lost it by squandering their own natural resources.more from Jackson Lears at Bookforum here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:25 PM | Permalink
Comments
You know you're reading a crackpot from the first hiss of the buzz-word "scientism."
Posted by: MikeB | Dec 14, 2012 12:46:39 PM
@MikeB: You got that right! I had the same impression. It looks more like Mr Lears is grinding an axe rather than offering interesting criticism. His reference to "scientism" cleared his position up for me...
Posted by: Bill | Dec 14, 2012 3:08:47 PM
Without commenting on the substance of this article, the use of the word scientism here is, in fact, spot on. Lears is referring to the glut of terrible pop-evolutionary psychology books on the market today, books that deserve a pejorative description. So if you're looking for an excuse to write Lears off as a "crackpot" so you can safely ignore his actual argument, you'd be better off looking for something else. I say this as a scientist.
Posted by: Chris | Dec 14, 2012 6:51:22 PM
I read "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I am not qualified to say whether it is an accurate description of why certain societies were able to dominate others, but Diamond did make a very plausible case for his theories.
Nowhere did I get from reading the book that Diamond's major aim was to placate the consciences of neoliberal elites. Lears is basically whining that Diamond has failed to prove something that Diamond never attempted to prove, i.e. that the relative shapes of continents is the only, or only major, reason for the way things are today.
Diamond concludes his book by humbling his readers, readers that Lears would label as elitist neoliberals, with a set of very striking photographs of people from various parts of the world.
These photos compel every thoughtful reader to see the humanity, the common bond, between us and those who first appear to be truly "the other".
Posted by: DAS | Dec 14, 2012 9:27:15 PM
Chris. This article is not referring to a veritable surfeit of evolutionary self-help books, and it's a little hypocritical to infer that others are writing it off in order to deflect from the broader conversation. Lears' thoughts amount to a broad attack on Jared Diamond, established on top of his academic interest in gall bladders and birds, and his alleged support from Bill Gates. The guy is respected across multiple disciplines and it doesn't warrant a broad attack on his ideas by disputing his legitimacy because he has studied birds, and is admired by the Microsoft founder. All this, from a historian that employs an ideological based analysis of Diamond's thesis and ultimately critiques Diamond's version of history on normative grounds.
Posted by: Troy | Dec 15, 2012 5:52:56 AM
poor Eric Wolf... perhaps after he earns a National Medal of Science and a Pulitzer, he could call PBS back to see if they will make a documentary about his ideas?
Posted by: melior | Dec 15, 2012 10:59:50 PM
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