Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Is political correctness beginning to destroy itself?

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

From The Guardian:

In the decades since, Diamond has enjoyed huge success with several “big books” – most famously, 1997’s Guns, Germs and Steel – which ask the most sweeping questions it is possible to ask about human history. For instance: why did one species of primate, unremarkable until 70,000 years ago, come to develop language, art, music, nation states and space travel? Why do some civilisations prosper, while others collapse? Why did westerners conquer the Americas, Africa and Australia, instead of the other way round? Diamond, who describes himself as a biogeographer, answers them in translucent prose that has the effect of making the world seem to click into place, each fact assuming its place in an elegant arc of pan-historical reasoning. Our interview itself provides an example: one white man arriving to interview another, in English, on the imposing main campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a landscape bearing little trace of the Native Americans who once thrived here. Why? Because 8,000 years ago – to borrow from Guns, Germs and Steel – the geography of Europe and the Middle East made it easier to farm crops and animals there than elsewhere.

Whether such satisfying explanations are in fact true is the subject of vicious jousting between Diamond and many anthropologists. They condemn him as a cultural imperialist, intent on excusing the horrors of colonialism while asserting the moral superiority of the west.

They condemn him as a cultural imperialist, intent on excusing the horrors of colonialism while asserting the moral superiority of the west. (One 2013 article, in an ecology journal, was entitled “F**k Jared Diamond”, the asterisks failing to conceal the general tone of the debate.) Diamond strikes back with equal force, calling his critics “idiots”, unscientific timewasters and purveyors of “politically correct blabber”. So it is slightly disconcerting to meet this strident propagandist for capitalism in his faculty office. In person, Diamond is a fastidiously courteous 77-year-old with a Quaker-style beard sans moustache, and archaic New England vowels: “often” becomes “orphan”, “area” becomes “eerier”. There’s no computer: despite his children’s best efforts, he admits he’s never learned to use one.

Could this all happen to nicer people?

Hope not.

See also: Why don’t Canadians spend a lot of time trying to kill each other, to get closer to the dam stove?

And Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness

Comments
OK, ya got me. I see no connection whatsoever between the title and the quotes from the Guardian. I tried reading one of Diamond's books and almost puked. I think they're some of the few books that I've actually thrown away instead of trading in at the used book store. Using just the nonsense quoted above, does ANYONE believe that farmland in Kansas and Iowa is somehow INFERIOR to farmland in, oh, Greece and Italy?? But the caption generally misses the point. Political Correctness is about American Leftists telling everyone else what they're allowed to say, and think. And Political Correctness will not "destroy itself" until the entire Left Wing establishment collapses like Russian Communism. But that ain't happenin' any time soon. The Left owns New York and Hollywood, and most of Washington, and of course all of Academia. So it's just a matter of waiting to see which new bits of public conversation are forbidden tomorrow. Resistance is futile, puny Hu-man.mahuna
October 28, 2014
October
10
Oct
28
28
2014
02:30 AM
2
02
30
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply