me: >> Right. I was only talking about Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL book. >> His later stuff seems inferior to me. COLLAPSE, for example, was >> interesting but not very illuminating.
> Didn't you notice what I wrote? The PBS series was on "Guns, Germs and > Steel", not "Collapse". Furthermore, Diamond wrote the script. But that series was after the book. me: >> BTW, I see no point in choosing among scholars, deciding that Diamond >> is better or worse than some other thinker who addresses this or any >> other question. Rather than a focus on individual thinkers, I think >> that we should choose between individual theories (and even those we >> choose should be treated critically) Thus, we might choose Diamond's >> GGS theory as being better than some other theory (and perhaps >> inferior to a third) even if he's an axe murderer or whatever. > Diamond is not as bad as Niall Ferguson, for example, but basically his > message is one of fatalism. That doesn't address the issue I brought up. To state it another way: even if Diamond went on TV and advocated nuking Iran (which he might have done, for all I know) doesn't mean that his theory in GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL is automatically wrong. It should be judged on its own merits (at least if the purpose is to understand the world). me: >> An emphasis on individual personalities encourages the sectarianism >> that infects much of academia (of all political stripes) and political >> groups. (I discovered a long time ago that sectarianism was encouraged >> when personal differences interacted with and reinforced political >> differences -- and vice-versa -- forming a vicious circle.) > Sorry, Jim. I plan to continue to critique Jared Diamond or Robert > Brenner as the mood hits me. If it makes you happy, go for it. To my mind, however, embracing the sectarian style undermines the seriousness of your critiques. -- Jim Devine / This space for rent. ;-) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
