Re: Good review of "guns, germs, steel"

[phillp2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

You wrote:

 Also, it's so grand in its ambition
> that historically specific moments come off looking merely like
> manifestations of general, immutable laws.  So much for agency,
> responsibility, and finally politics, or the notion that anything could
> have been (could be) different.

It has always seemed to me to be a socialist fundamental that
people make themselves, as Marx says, not necessarily in
conditions of their own making.  This kind of biological/geographic
determinism I find to be contrary to human agency and human will
and therefore of the genus of Eugenics and fascism.  There is only
one race, the human race.  Ethnic divisions within it are cultural,
not genetic.  Human experience is conditioned by geography,
climate, the availability of resources, the social and economic
institutions both within and without the local cultures -- ie. by
conditions not of our making.  I can not believe that any socialist
could take socio-biology seriously given this context.

Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba