Jared Diamond

[Pangur Bán]

Societies and social processes are not mystical processes controlled by demons and gods and 'objective morality'; they are describable forces that can be analysed in terms of things that actually exist and can be understood with the insights of modern civilization. Heroes and villains are fine for entertaining storytelling, but not as the kind of explanation that will give you any insight.

 

[Crezth]

It's all well-and-good to say everything can be defined in terms of laws and patterns, but quite another thing to produce those laws and patterns. And the evidence that human behavior has cut and dry rules, much less is deterministic, is scant. Short a universal theory of human behavior - which you are unscientifically assuming a priori - then we can't do any better than qualitative judgements when it comes to describing such a fuzzy thing as human history!

 

[Pangur Bán]

It's all well-and-good to say everything can be defined in terms of laws and patterns, but quite another thing to produce those laws and patterns. And the evidence that human behavior has cut and dry rules, much less is deterministic, is scant. Short a universal theory of human behavior - which you are unscientifically assuming a priori - then we can't do any better than qualitative judgements when it comes to describing such a fuzzy thing as human history!

This criticism is very vague, and of course you don't really know what I am assuming.

Humans are very adaptive creatures capable of a wide range of cultural positions and behaviours, but we're not as special as we like to believe. Humans and human societies actually do tend to function along very similar and quite predictable patterns. People who specialize in sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics (not to mention zoology) know this, and indeed base their careers on this principle.

But I know your view is widely shared among many people. Hence annoyance with guys like Diamond and a thread like this.

 

[Crezth]

Yes, I understand what you mean. I just think it's a very Skinnerian (and appropriately unsubstantiated) point of view. It has nothing to do with believing humans are special. It has everything to do with seeing that there is no law of human behavior, or anything close, and that attempts by behaviorists to define and prove their assertions have not yet born fruit.

They may, someday. I certainly don't pretend to see the future. But as it stands, Diamond and people like him make a lot of claims for a sample size of one, and as Masada demonstrated earlier in this thread, they aren't even airtight within the one sample size.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Yes, I understand what you mean. I just think it's a very Skinnerian (and appropriately unsubstantiated) point of view. It has nothing to do with believing humans are special. It has everything to do with seeing that there is no law of human behavior, or anything close, and that attempts by behaviorists to define and prove their assertions have not yet born fruit.

They may, someday. I certainly don't pretend to see the future. But as it stands, Diamond and people like him make a lot of claims for a sample size of one, and as Masada demonstrated earlier in this thread, they aren't even airtight within the one sample size.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. No-one is saying there is one law of human behaviour. No-one would ever say that as it's patently absurd.

Human beings like lots of other natural phenomenon are very complicated and understanding all the things they do all of the time is a long way off, but you can still understand most of what they do most of the time over long periods. As glorious as we are, every human being is still a naturally occurring biological machine ultimately reducible to some biological coding. Just because we can't yet process the info does not mean it is not there ... and in the mean time generalized heuristics derived from social sciences do much of the job in terms of how societies (if not individuals) work.

 

[Dachs]

Societies and social processes are not mystical processes controlled by demons and gods and 'objective morality'; they are describable forces that can be analysed in terms of things that actually exist and can be understood with the insights of modern civilization. Heroes and villains are fine for entertaining storytelling, but not as the kind of explanation that will give you any insight.

You seem to be of the mindset that one must be religious to have some sort of objective ethical framework, which is emphatically not the case.

You also seem to think that one can make objective determinations of fact in history, but that belief was seriously undermined decades ago. Ranke is dead.

 

[Crezth]

Human beings like lots of other natural phenomenon are very complicated and understanding all the things they do all of the time is a long way off, but you can still understand most of what they do most of the time over long periods. As glorious as we are, every human being is still a naturally occurring biological machine ultimately reducible to some biological coding. Just because we can't yet process the info does not mean it is not there ... and in the mean time generalized heuristics derived from social sciences do much of the job in terms of how societies (if not individuals) work.

Yes, this would be the Skinnerist balderdash to which I was referring.

 

[Pangur Bán]

You seem to be of the mindset that one must be religious to have some sort of objective ethical framework, which is emphatically not the case.

You also seem to think that one can make objective determinations of fact in history, but that belief was seriously undermined decades ago. Ranke is dead.

As humans we all need to have an 'ethical framework', sets of rules we advocate and internalize that help us cooperate and live in successful societies. But to go from that and say that such human beliefs are part of the cosmos, were 'created' at the Big Bang along with strong nuclear force and energy (the logic of the position).... well, that's not singing psalms at a church to a paternal God or vowing to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, but it is definitely 'religious' in its broadest sense ... though I'm not sure 'religious' is a good word to use in light of its use elsewhere in our language. Outside Western Eurasia moral systems are more obviously synonymous with religion than they are in the West and Islamic world, that's why it is important to familiarize ourselves with as many cultures as we can before claiming to understand one particular culture.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Yes, this would be the Skinnerist balderdash to which I was referring.

I don't know what you want me to say? All I can suggest is that you extend your view to modern civilization's many insights rather than try to lump such things into one straw man paradigm of marginal significance.

 

[Mouthwash]

"Ethical judgements" have no place in serious history. The task of the historian is not to judge, that's the philosopher's. If he wants to fill both roles then they should be separated. This is especially required in Holocaust studies.

 

[sophie]

"Ethical judgements" have no place in serious history. The task of the historian is not to judge, that's the philosopher's. If he wants to fill both roles then they should be separated. This is especially required in Holocaust studies.

No. The task of the historian absolutely is to judge. In fact that's arguably his/her only job.

 

[Traitorfish]

Pangur's Annales-y approach has its shortcomings, and his insistence that humans are reducible to their biological machinery seems to suggest that he was in the lavvie when the cultural turn came about, but his basic argument that human behaviour follows logics bounded by their material condition, and that certain aspects of that condition are general enough that we can describe them as "laws", can't simply be dismissed out of hand as Crezth wants to do. This a serious, legitimate position taken by some of the most important historians of the 20th century, and it needs to be properly engaged with, at least in its sophisticated form, if not the vulgarised one advanced by Diamond.

"Ethical judgements" have no place in serious history. The task of the historian is not to judge, that's the philosopher's. If he wants to fill both roles then they should be separated. This is especially required in Holocaust studies.

There's an argument that the very act of investigating and presenting a given history assumes certain ethical judgements to begin with, that by picking out certain aspects of the past and saying "this matters", we are making and declaring an ethical position on the past and on human society. Probably the most famous example is E.P.Thompson's concern for rescuing the poor form the "enormous condescension of posterity", but there are of course others, in Holocaust studies no less than any other field. For these historians, methodological neutrality is a consequence of their ethical concerns, an imperative to do justice to the past, rather than a posture of ethical agnosticism sitting apart from and in tension with their ethical concerns.



Basically, we're looking at this,


Link to video.

In which Butch represents the modern historian, Zed represents Rankeanism, the motorcycle represents the empirical method, and the French lady represents the spirit of postmodern criticism. Y'know, probably.

 

[Dachs]

As humans we all need to have an 'ethical framework', sets of rules we advocate and internalize that help us cooperate and live in successful societies. But to go from that and say that such human beliefs are part of the cosmos, were 'created' at the Big Bang along with strong nuclear force and energy (the logic of the position).... well, that's not singing psalms at a church to a paternal God or vowing to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, but it is definitely 'religious' in its broadest sense ... though I'm not sure 'religious' is a good word to use in light of its use elsewhere in our language. Outside Western Eurasia moral systems are more obviously synonymous with religion than they are in the West and Islamic world, that's why it is important to familiarize ourselves with as many cultures as we can before claiming to understand one particular culture.

You're making a humongous leap there.

Ethical systems might be objective in the same sense that mathematical ones might. They both have the potential to be closed logical systems that, while they do not reflect a Truth Given From On High, do a reasonably good job of describing situations that arise in practical experience. There is nothing in nature that defines mathematical logic, but we accept it as generally true nonetheless. What prevents morality from falling into the same category? In that sense, moral truths might be 'discovered', much like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was 'discovered', but that does not mean that God created these objective ethical systems any more than God created Andrew Wiles's proof.

Now, this isn't an endorsement of such a view. I don't have a rigorous enough understanding of ethics, let alone philosophy in general, to be able to do that with any confidence. But it is a recognition that a belief in objective moral truths is certainly possible, and without reference to any sort of religion or anything like that. There are plenty of modern moral-realist philosophers, good academic ones. To simply dogmatically state that ethical judgments have no place in history because there are no objective moral truths to use as grounds on which to judge the past is therefore flawed. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that such truths exist.

And furthermore, since history is not simply an exercise in reeling off Objective Facts and constructing Objective Theses with them in order to Determine Truth, I think it would also be reasonable to make ethical judgments of the past even if there were no objective moral truths.

 

[Crezth]

I don't know what you want me to say? All I can suggest is that you extend your view to modern civilization's many insights rather than try to lump such things into one straw man paradigm of marginal significance.

You should read Verbal Behavior. You might find a lot to agree with.

The essential problem is that you're acting like there's a body of absolute uncontested evidence which supports an absolute and uncontested assertion vis a vis human behavior's origins in "biological machinery." I want to be absolutely clear I do not deny it is quite possible to reduce all of the human experience to a single equation - at least, in a matter of speaking. But you have all of your work ahead of you when it comes to demonstrating it, and Jared Diamond's work doesn't advance the cause of behaviorism one iota. So defending him, even as a behaviorist, is pointless. It's basically the kind of absurd thing Skinner did, which is why I brought him up.

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Wrymouth3]

"Ethical judgements" have no place in serious history. The task of the historian is not to judge, that's the philosopher's. If he wants to fill both roles then they should be separated. This is especially required in Holocaust studies.

I urge you to read any sort of unbiased and righteous feminist historiography on the Holocaust, you will be beyond mortified.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Honestly, the field of Holocaust Studies in itself seems to be a moral statement.

Of course, I think History is totally incomprehensible as a field without some ethical grounding, so what do I know?

 

[Lord Baal]

delete

 

[Mouthwash]

There's an argument that the very act of investigating and presenting a given history assumes certain ethical judgements to begin with, that by picking out certain aspects of the past and saying "this matters", we are making and declaring an ethical position on the past and on human society. Probably the most famous example is E.P. Thompson's concern for rescuing the poor from the "enormous condescension of posterity", but there are of course others, in Holocaust studies no less than any other field. For these historians, methodological neutrality is a consequence of their ethical concerns, an imperative to do justice to the past, rather than a posture of ethical agnosticism sitting apart from and in tension with their ethical concerns.

Honestly, the field of Holocaust Studies in itself seems to be a moral statement.

Of course, I think History is totally incomprehensible as a field without some ethical grounding, so what do I know?

Nice lawyering, but I'm referring to those historians that go out of their way to write "OMG poor Palestinians got massacred" or "the Jews in the Holocaust died with dignity." It's annoying, and some historians dedicate their entire careers to it. The real historian should never become an advocate or a propagandist such as Chomsky.

Lolwut?

The historian is not a chronicler. By all means, he should strive to objectively present the facts, but a subjective judgement is a necessity of all but the most limited historiography.

There's also the simple matter that historians are, by their very nature, casting value judgements on every piece of information they discuss; you mention the Holocaust, but not the Seven Years War. Why? Because the former is more important to you. You are making a value judgement in your post. I make them in my historical discussions all the time. So does everyone. Hell, Ranke, who Dachs mentions, has a reputation for not making value judgements or claiming historians shouldn't make them, when he never made that claim in the first place, and his works are riddled with value judgements.

Actually, I referred to the Holocaust because few historians (in my experience, although sampling bias is possible) seem to want to give unemotional accounts of what happened instead of telling us about the heroes of Auschwitz. I like how Peter Novick pointed that it doesn't actually seem like a very Jewish thing to do, but is more akin to Christian martyr stories.

Too tired to respond now.

 

[Lord Baal]

delete