A travesty of a mockery of a "sham of anti-racism?"
Mulling over the recent brouhaha in the left half of the blogosphere over Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steve Burton of Right Reason wonders if it's ever possible to be PC enough.
(Hat tip: 2 Blowhards)
(Hat tip: 2 Blowhards)
posted by Kate Marie | 5:45 PM | Permalink
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3 comments
3 Comments:
I read Diamond's book and enjoyed it, he gets points for creative synthetic thinking. It's an admirably quirky book that can weave the domestication of the almond tree and the strategy of Francisco Pizarro into a coherent narrative. I remember thinking that the racist historiography against which he was railing was a pretty flimsy straw man, the people who still take that stuff seriously are camped out on the lunatic fringe.
There are some very big holes in Diamond's thesis, but I think these are failings of logic and research rather than morality. He can never really adequately explain why both China and Europe, despite sharing the same geographically blessed land mass, end up (supposedly) on different sides of the dominator-dominated divide.
Call me irredeemably PC, but I think that the whole premise of "Western hegemony" is flawed to begin with. The effervescence of "Western" power has been a pretty diverse affair, with societies like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Britain all having their moment in the sun before giving way to stronger states and economies. The US is riding high right now, but its star seems to be on the eclipse while Asia is set to reclaim the position of superiority it held for most of recorded history.
I haven't the book, but as I said on Rose Nunez's blog, the surest way to pique my interest in a book is to suggest that its argument is some species of thoughtcrime, which is essentially what Ozma and the others of the more-P.C.-than-thou crowd seem to have done.
As for your thesis about "Western hegemony," I guess it all depends upon definitions and designations -- what counts as "Western"? I don't necessarily buy your premise that the U.S.'s star is in eclipse, but if Asia does reclaim its position of superiority, can it be argued that it has done so by adapting certain products/practices of Western culture?
You might be interested in one of Victor Davis Hanson's books -- I think it's Carnage and Culture, but I'll check -- in which he argues that the superiority of the "Western way of war" (and thus Western dominance) emerges from some aspects of Western culture that are unique and uniquely suited to the creation of lethal, highly disciplined citizen-soldiers.
Every society builds on the materials it adapts from abroad. Yes, countries like China and Japan are adapting some technologies and forms that originated in "the West," but nations like Britain and the US would not have gotten very far unless they had adapted technologies and forms invented in Asia.
Concentrations of wealth and power move about the globe in complex patterns and for diverse reasons. Persia was hegemonic until the rise of Athens, Athens was hegemonic until the rise of Macedon, Macedon was hegemonic prior to the rise of Rome, and Rome exerted hegemony until the rise of the Vandals and Attila. The emergence of market capitalism and industrialization in Britain, France, and America under very particular historical conditions made a brief era of colonialism and imperialism possible, but now that those djinnis are out of the bottle the global field is readjusting itself again.
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