If you decide to read this editorial attacking Jared Diamond’s work from a Marxist perspective, you might want to learn from my mistake and just revisit the classic SMBC cartoon first. (For best results, switch the words “false” and “true”, with “P” standing for “environmental determinism”.)
November 1, 2013 @ 4:59 pm
Coincidentally, this is trending on reddit right now.
tl;dr: Africa was wrecked by colonials.
It's silly to pretend that environmental factors would be mutually exclusive of political ones. Westerners are who have not been there are likely to underestimate the effect of disease.
November 1, 2013 @ 9:14 pm
What, this editorial? Well, I guess I'm not surprised; it's a splenetic rant excoriating all the Internet's favorite sociopolitical sins.
Ironically, I remember how Diamond wrote Guns, Germs and Steel specifically to refute the "intuitive" notion that white people must be superior because they took over the world, after all. In any event, I don't recall him ever asserting that environmental factors were the only important things about cultural development.
November 2, 2013 @ 6:50 pm
Whoops – there was supposed to be a link. It was an answer to the question "Why is Africa so fucked up?" (or something like that). It mentioned Guns, germs and Steel, but mostly was about how badly the colonial powers wrecked everything African so completely that they really had little chance of success.
November 2, 2013 @ 7:05 pm
What.I meant about disease is that, if most of your children die, you don't invest much in education, and if you are not likely to live long yourself, and there is little political stability, it doesn't even pay to plan for your family's future anyway. So you live for today and appear callow and irresponsible to Westerners.
Our famously generous foreign aid goes to support corrupt rulers, allowing little chance for real democracy to form. It's really a bribe for friendly trade deals (corporate resource extraction.)
Okay, I'll step off the soapbox now.