Saturday, December 29, 2007
Jared Diamond
The spiritual yearning for Oneness has migrated into science. At the beginning of the 20th century, after James Clerk Maxwell unified fundamental forces in nature in four equations, Einstein wove reality still finer — more simply wrought. The implication was that you could keep going.
Einstein tried but his GUT, Grand Unified Theory, never worked. Now string / multiverse theorists are trudging forward despite little encouragement from experimental findings. But the unifying impulse persists in cultural affairs as well…
In this article Jared Diamond's geographical determinism, another academic, innocent, and simple formula, with an aura of scientism (which appears to speak to liberal guilt and gospel environmentalism), has unexpectedly generated criticism not only, as would be expected, from the Right, but from the Left as well.
The Left thinks the machine of the environment doesn't lay enough blame on their fave topic, the “imperialist invaders”. “Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.” And another says, “[ Dr. Diamond ] shifts all of the burden to people and their stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these things interact.”
Diamond's thesis never seemed more than frail postmodernist thinking; a concept ostensibly meant to satisfy prevailing memes, presented with smug assurance, hung callously over a teemingly interesting landscape — so as to point to the theorist; something of an intellectual insult to anyone who thinks half-seriously about the rise and fall of civilizations.
In the above linked article the writer notes that, “As Einstein put it, explanations should be as simple as possible — but no simpler.” The attempt to simplify and “make scientific” a mind-spinningly complex cultural/anthropological reality via academic uni-theory seems doomed to failure; the lens needed must be both larger and sharper — and more forgiving of the ambiguities.
As noted in an earlier post, Woody Allen said it: “Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.”