Re: [Pen-l] Diamond's Question [was: complexity of society

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:
> In fact, D's implication that European (and Japanese) supremacy was
> the "luck of the environmental draw" takes a lot of racist wind out of
> the colonialist sails. How can one justify the "White Man's Burden" by
> luck??

But nobody talks in terms of Rudyard Kipling today. In fact, Diamond is 
a much more useful ideologist for the status quo since he is 
"multicultural". That being said, he wrote in his disgusting New Yorker 
article that the British were welcomed by the PNG tribesmen because they 
finally put an end to tribal violence--in other words, the same bullshit 
that was advanced on behalf of British rule in India.

> In any event, the theory can and should be separated from the person
> who developed it. Newton was an astrologer and worse. Do we thus
> reject Newtonian physics? Even though Einstein developed a much better
> theory, that does not mean that Newtonian physics should be flushed
> down the toilet.

Are you comparing the guy who theorizes art and taking drugs as a way of 
propagating one's genes to Newton? I think a better comparison would be 
with Robert Ardrey.

> Suppose that the authors are totally right about D's methodological
> problems, his reductionism and determinism. Well, though I value
> methodological critiques (if done well), one thing I've learned is
> that such critiques amount to little if the critic does not present a
> serious alternative. Do Errington and Gewertz have a better theory --
> or do they simply give us one fact after another?

They do have a theory. They are radical critics of capitalism. Their 
books is a study of the role of sugar production in Papua New Guinea 
influenced by Sidney Mintz's "Sweetness and Power".

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