Almost makes you feel sorry for Jared Diamond ...

The NYT features an article by George Johnson called "A Question of Blame When Societies Fall" on cultural anthropologists' criticisms of Jared Diamond's last two bestsellers: Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. It says a lot about why cultural anthropologists, who were so fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, are almost universally ignored these days:

In an e-mail message, [Diamond] said that progress in any field depends on syntheses and individual studies. “In both chemistry and physics, the need for both approaches has been recognized for a long time,” he wrote. “One no longer finds specialists on molybdenum decrying the periodic table’s sweeping superficiality, nor advocates of the periodic table scorning mere descriptive studies of individual elements.”

For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to “contextualize,” “complexify,” “relativize,” “particularize” and even “problematize,” a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin. At some moments, the seminar seemed less like a scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language Association.

Robin Fox, who wrote the book on Kinship and Marriage in 1967 during cultural anthropology's golden age, pointed out in 1989 that the field remains addicted to "ethnographic dazzle" -- overemphasizing cultural differences.

One reason is simple job protection -- just as English professors make familiarity with jargon-encrusted "theory" (i.e., bad writing) a prerequisite for being an English professor in order to keep out most of the people who love good writing -- cultural anthropologists hope to discourage outsiders like Diamond from writing about their field of study. Unfortunately, the public, rather than learning the vast heapings of minutia that cultural anthropologists emphasize, has just lost interest in cultural anthropology in general.

But there's another reason cultural anthropologists love ethnographic dazzle: political correctness. PC is essentially a fear of knowledge. The cultural anthropologists wallow in data and despise generalization and reductionism for fear that somebody might turn data into information, knowledge, and, God forbid, wisdom.

Ultimately, the anthropologists' annoyance comes down to Diamond not being politically correct enough:

Dr. Errington and Dr. Gewertz, who are husband and wife, work in Papua New Guinea, a treasure trove of ethnic groups speaking more than 700 languages. Dr. Diamond has also spent time on the island, where he first went to study birds.

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and seeing that it had been framed around what was called “Yali’s question.”

Yali was a political leader and a member of a “cargo cult” that sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets, islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food, weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Thus began Dr. Diamond’s tale about the combination of geographical factors that led to Europeans’ colonizing Papua New Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans’ colonizing Europe.

“We think he gets Yali’s question wrong,” Dr. Gewertz said. “Yali was not asking about nifty Western stuff.”

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted, the islanders would have been able to trade with them as equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the world through others’ eyes.

Actually, cargo cultists really were into nifty Western stuff. Some of the niftiest Western stuff is modern weaponry, which, if you own it and know how to use it, can keep you from being subjugated. Yet, the golden age of cargo cults in the Pacific came after the end of American occupations during WWII, when the American troops left and cargo stopped falling from the sky in parachute drops.

Of course, the real problem with Diamond's 2005 bestseller Collapse about how societies fall due to poor environmental management is the opposite of what the anthropologists are criticizing him for. What's noteworthy are the triviality of his examples. As I wrote in VDARE in 2005:

But "ecocide," while significant, is less important than Diamond implies. That's why he spends so much time on trivial edge-of-the-world doomed cultures, like the Vikings in Greenland and the Polynesians on Easter Island, rather than on more important collapses such as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Generally, homicide, not suicide, is the main cause of collapse. Societies get invaded and overwhelmed.

Diamond cites the disappearance of the Maya—but what about the Aztecs and the Incas, still going strong when the Spanish arrived? He points to the Anasazi Indians—but there were also the Cherokee, the Sioux, and countless others. He notes the Easter Islanders—but I counter with the Maoris, the Tasmanians, the Australian Aborigines, the Chatham Islanders (exterminated by the Maori), and so forth. He cites the Vikings in Greenland—but how about the Saxons in Britain and the Arabs in Sicily, both conquered by descendents of the Vikings?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer