Quote:
|
I loved "Guns, Germs and Steel," as I've said before (it's one of those books that alters the way you look at the world forever), but this book just hasn't grabbed me. I've felt no impulse to pick it up. I think Diamond's weakness is that he's kind of a polemicist, very politically motivated. For example, "Guns, Germs" makes a convincing case (in my view) for why Europeans ended up the way they were, and aborigines in the Americas and elsewhere ended up the way they were, when they came face to face beginning in the late Fifteenth Century. But he artfully dodges the harder question--i.e., why is, say, Afghanistan or Russia or Bolivia the way it is, and America or Western Europe the way it is? This is because such an analysis would probably require him to make the kinds of value judgments comparing one culture to the other which apparently he is not comfortable making.
|
IMO, introducing culture in his argument would weaken explanatory power. When you have a compelling argument from the natural sciences why convolute it with culture?
Cultural explanations aren't only politically incorrect, they're metholodologically problematic. Cultural theories that explain wealth disparities, like the so-called "Protestant Work Ethic," are now mostly considered invalid.
Culture is hard to model (let alone quantify), it changes all the time, there's the problem of subcultures, etc. It's no wonder in many disciplines, like political science, it's shrinking as a methodological school, and in others, like economics, it's almost non-existent.