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

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul quotes someone from off the list:
> > Also, it's [Diamond's book is] 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.

and adds:
> 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.

Diamond's geographic determinism -- which is not a biological determinism
really -- is not totally deterministic except at a very abstract level over
long periods of time. Further, it doesn't apply to the era after 1500 or so.

> There is only one race, the human race

For what it's worth, Diamond would agree that there's only one race. Though
genetic variation plays a role in his theory (mostly, it's a matter of
resistance to disease), for him the most important differences are cultural
and technological.

> 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.

Diamond would agree.

> I can not believe that any socialist could take socio-biology seriously
> given this context.

Diamond is not a sociobiologist. This is especially true because he
recognizes that cultural and technological change have replaced genetic
change as the main dynamics of human "evolution" (something that
anthropologists have known for decades). Sociobiologists think that
analogies between ants and people are somehow revealing. Diamond does not.

It seems to me that if one is interested in filling the gaps in historical
materialism (say, in Engels' book on the origins of the state, etc.), one
has to avoid an instinctual repugnance for non-Marxian research. (I guess
Louis Proyect sees Engels' book and the like as complete, so that such
research is "banal.") That doesn't mean that one should accept Diamond's
work (or any other) uncritically, though. That's why my review was not only
adulatory but critical. Look, Diamond is a liberal, not a radical, Marxist,
or socialist. But that doesn't mean we should reject his research _tout
court_. If so, we'd have to reject Keynes and the Canadian nationalists, too.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine/JDevine.html