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Originally Posted by creekster
Does that mean you are suggesting that if the compelling arguments from natrual science are inadequate that one should simply ignore possible culture-based explnantions becasue they are convoluted and difficult?
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Amen. What explains Western Europe's and the United States' highly developed republican forms of government, economic freedoms, prosperity, etc. compared to other countries with equal or greater access to the fruits of the fertile crescent? Diamond simply doesn't go there. He sticks with comparing aboriginies to Eurasians. I agree with his book as far as it goes. It's brilliant; very illuminating. But it ignores the harder question.
I have read a number of extended reviews of Collapse. And while I haven't read the observation I am about to make stated as such, it seems to me that this book has a similar problem with oversimplification. The communities that Diamond studies are quite small and isolated, and sometimes in extreme environments. For example, the primary one is a Danish (I believe) settlement in Greenland that, for example, obliterated its timber supply to duplicate European buildings including churches, etc. The relevancy of that to the United States' super consumptive but super rich and hyper ecologically self-aware culture is hard for me to follow (apparently this is the extrapolation that Diamond suggests). The evironment is cleaner in the United States than in most third-world countries.
I agree that the "Protestant work ethic" explanation for the rise of the West is a stretch. But not because I reject those kinds of value judgments wholesale. I think that Protestantism actually--in its aim--was a counter force against the Rennaisance, which was a force in the direcation of the Enlightenment. And it's the Enlightenment that explains the West's dominance. On the other hand, the Protestant Reformation broke Catholic Christianity's hammerlock on European institutions. Still, accelerating progress toward the Enlightenment was an unintended byproduct of the Reformation, and "protestant work ethic" per se was not of overriding significance. This is my opinion, anyway. More on this another time.