Pangur Bán;12867276 said:
Rockets and gene therapy are hard to make and they work. We know they do. If you believe history is just some moralizing game or meditation that won't matter, but if you think the past can be an object of genuine understanding then you care about whether your methods work.
I'm afraid I don't follow. All you seem to be observing here is that worthwhile output requires effective methods, not making a case for any particular set of methods over another, let alone why we should accept the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie it.
(I mean, if we can even say that anthropology, sociology and psychology all work with a single set of methods and assumptions, which I'm not given to believe is the case? Otherwise it would hard to make sense of, e.g. the long-running rivalry between cultural anthropology and social anthropology.)
I'm not sure that follows. I might say 'Jack leaves his door open every night; it was inevitable that someone would break in' without saying 'I believe that John was justified in breaking into Jack's house'.
Perhaps not John's action, no. But the fact that Jack's house was broken into? I think it does, or at least good be very easily read that way amid a host of other voices claiming that the fact is justified, and not few even saying that Jack deserved it anyway. It certainly discourages us from thinking critically about the fact that John's house was broken into, or about a world in which John's house has been broken into, and that's all the more troubling if Jack happens to be the local chief of police.
It's like that thread about genocide, in which Demonic Apple Guy did everything he could to distance himself from individual
genocidaires and from individual acts of genocide, while remaining deeply attached to the fact of those genocides, deeply unwilling to look critically at the world in which those genocides took place. That's what Diamond does, I think, in however pessimistic and long-faced a manner, and while Park may be right that it's unfair to characterise that as "justification", it's still deeply troubling.
I don't really see the apoligism in it. There is agency, and people acted. But a great deal that happened did so outside of the deliberate intent to make it happen on anyone's part. And while a great deal of it was deliberate acts by various individuals and groups, the net effect was often a side effect of other things, or a cumulative effect of centuries of things, rather than any form of a 'great man' narrative. And so where you look at the cumulative effect of generations and centuries of human endeavor, the agency of individuals gets lost in the bigger picture.
You can argue as much. But I'm not sure Diamond does. He seems pretty dedicated to an antihumanist and structural history, not that human agency is merely abstracted out for methodology's sake, but in which it simply doesn't figure. That people don't have a real say in their history at anything beyond a trivial level. Which is certainly one way of looking at things, and a respectable one even if you don't like Diamond's way of going about it, but trying to defend it as individualist history written from a great distance is a dead-end. Pick a side, y'know?
The question that Diamond starts with, the question that was his motivation in writing GG&S, was not who survived, but why did some groups end up with so much more than others. He calls it Yali's Question: "Why is that you white people developed much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" Now if you read the book and keep that premise in mind as the question he is attempting to answer, I think you come away from it with a much more favorable opinion of the thesis as a whole. Diamond does not say, goes out of his way to not say, that whites or Europeans are in any sense better. But rather that they are the heirs of a legacy that fell out in their favor. A legacy only in small part of their, deliberate, making.
So saying Indians survived, that they created new and prosperous cultures on the wreckage of the old. While that may be true, it's outside the scope of the thesis.
It's very much part of the thesis. Indians didn't fall out of history in 1492, so we can't write the history of the post-Columbian world in reference only to that which preceded it. You can't stack up a certain set of premises some time in the ancient past and just assume that they necessarily lead to the present.That's just teleology. Indians and Europeans get interacting, kept engaging, kept deciding their own history until the present, and still do, however limited the terms in which they do so.
