Sectors of the intelligentsia developed an infatuation for Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. A controversy about Jared Diamond’s sourcing a New Yorker essay is generating criticism, however.
Richard Smith says Jared Diamond opens a fruitful discussion on class, but misses key issues in Collapse:
In the last part of the book, Diamond turns to our current crisis and lists a dozen critical environmental problems that, he says, will doom our own society unless we solve them. We all know what the problems are, and we also all know, at least in broad terms, what we must do to solve them. So why aren’t we doing it? Why aren’t we “choosing to succeed?”
The short answer is that under capitalism, the choices we need to make are not up to “society” – and the ruling classes are incapable of making sustainable choices. Diamond relates some success stories — mostly those of small Pacific Island societies — where economic and environmental decisions were up to “society.”
But ours is not a “bottom-up” democratic society. In our capitalist society, ownership and control of the economy are largely in the hands of private corporations who pursue their own ends and don’t answer to society. So it seems curious, even perverse, that when Diamond turns to address our contemporary environmental crisis, he forgets his own lesson and presents no comparable exploration of contradictory (class) interests and (class) conflict in modern capitalist society. This is unfortunate because Diamond’s reluctance to discard his own pro-market “core values” prevents him from applying the same critical analysis to our own society that he so effectively deploys to analyze pre-modern societies.
This makes his book weakest in its concluding “What-do-we-do-now?” chapters on big business and the environment. For after stressing the need for urgent radical change to avert collapse, Diamond ignores the systemic problems of capitalism that stand in the way of that needed radical change and falls back on the standard tried-and-failed strategy of lobbying, consumer boycotts, eco labeling, green marketing, asking corporations to adopt benign “best practices,” and so on — the stock-in-trade strategy of the environmental lobbying industry that has proven so impotent to date against the global capitalist juggernaut of eco-destruction.
The latest controversy involves whether Jared Diamond misrepresented an indigenous culture’s system of controls in the New Yorker, which has generated a lawsuit. Matthijs Krul says this is too common for Diamond:
How come Diamond is so blind to these issues? First of all, he is of course no political economist, and one could say that therefore it is all too easy for a company with a sensible public relations department to fool and/or flatter an unsuspecting scientist into supporting their activities. But Diamond himelf has seen fit to use his scientific background to make quite expansive and speculative pronunciations about political economic development in the past, most notably in his best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel. So he cannot be acquitted on these grounds. It must then be his involvement with the World Wildlife Foundation and a pro-capitalist environmental group called Conservation International. The former of these has been happy to take money from multinational companies in return for good press regarding their environmental activities, under the reasoning that this way at least the money would go to good causes. Something similar applies to the latter organization. But this particular case of Diamond folly makes clear the dangers of such an approach. Capitalist firms are all too aware of the costs of environmental regulation on their profit margins: Chevron and similar companies as a result attempt to stave them off by making a good impression on the green-minded sections of the ruling class, so that they will not draw the public ire.
Wikipedia notes James Blaut has criticized Diamond in Eight Eurocentric Historians for his loose use of the terms “Eurasia” and “innovative,” which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that actually arose in the Middle East and Asia.
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