Jared Diamond

"Jared Diamond is back at it, once again trading in the familiar determinist tropesthat earned him a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book Guns, Germs and Steel, That dullbook was chockfull of the bad and the worse, the random and the racist. At best it is just silly, as when he offers unsupported, and unsupportable, assertions such as hisget-off-my-lawn grouse that children today are not as smart as in the recent past and television is to blame. At worst, it develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic that reduces social relations such as poverty, stateviolence, and persistent social domination, to inexorable outcomes of geography and environment. Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, whohave grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims.They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain thebourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in
Guns, Germs and Steel..."