Diamond, unlike Foucault, is damn near airport departure lounge fodder; historians and sociologists generally encounter general members of the public who are uncritically fans of Diamond and near venerate the GG&S book for radically changing their world view, etc.
It's that association that grates after a while .. it can be as relentless as those who approach mathematicians with their novel proofs for squaring a circle.
If you believe that critiquing the prison-industrial complex is fashionable non-sense, then I think I know where you lie politically.
Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and Derrida are The 4 horsemen of the epistemological apocalypse.
We should probably just go back to Rhene Thom and Morphogenesis, except that even that theory has lost face. A hundred years of denying the importance of Hegel's Logic has led to a significant loss in the progress of human civilization.
To apply that to Foucault and and Diamond, Foucault explored complex ideas obtusely and Diamond explores dumb ideas simply.
Sure, the academy has a bias towards complexity. It is slightly self-justifying. But let's not be black and white thinkers and assume that the opposite is true, and that airport reading by somebody with no historical credentials must be some secret truth the academy doesn't want you to now. It might just be popular bunk.
I haven't read Diamond, but I could understand, if you're a liberal academic and you see a text, almost like Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals, that just says that the strong always conquer the weak because of totally contingent conditions, it will seem horrifying because, as a liberal, you genuinely believe in personal agency and social justice and all that fun stuff. But go back and actually read Marx, go and read all your favorite Frankfurt school thinkers: they will say, the conditions that we have been placed in are a real illusion of nature: even if the so-called nature of things is a construction, it is one where the reality of it is undeniable for us. Therefore, the goal of critique, even in that Marxian, Kantian sense, is to raise consciousness to shatter that real illusion precisely by illuminating this so-called "natural" process.
For Marx, revolution is a natural result of the development of Capitalism, but Capitalism also dissolved history, and temporality, so the naturality of revolution must be immanent in every moment of its development: its like Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe, as opposed to the constant "accidents" of human suffering under the system that come about with almost mechanical regularity.
In any case, I don't remember Marx ever being either an academic, or particularly hard to read in most cases, even if a thorough familiarity with German Idealism is a great help to understanding him more deeply. Even Foucault was technically an academic, but only because he helped organize a nearly successful revolutionary movement that managed to extract the concession of an entire university (Paris VIII) out of the government which he then ran, and is still being run by his students and colleagues to this day.
In general, if you want an actual "start" to studying any modern philosophy, you've got to go with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (go with the NK Smith or Guyer-Woods translations, though I prefer the former). Then you can start reading forward, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, then, of course, Marx's Capital, vol 1. Then from there, I think you would do well to read Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals and/or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and after that really you should read Freud, at the very least the Interpretation of Dreams, and Heidegger, either the Origin of the Work of Art or The Question Concerning Technology. And from there, you can basically just read whatever you want and you'll understand it.
My only further advice is to study all those texts first, before trying anything else, otherwise you'll end up like the people in this comments section.
[0]https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html [1]https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
On the first point in particular: there's a general thesis of anthropology which is properly termed unilineal model (and in more colloquial terms, Civilization-style tech tree), which views civilizations as existing on a spectrum from less to more advanced. In essence, GG&S reduces the question of "why did Europe conquer the New World and not the other way around" as "because Europe was more advanced" (and then go on to try to explore why Europe was more advanced), but never trying that hard to justify why "was more advanced" was the answer to the first question. By contrast, the consensus view of modern anthropology is that technological development is heavily adapted to the context of its culture, so that (for example) the Incans don't develop carts because carts are useless in their mountainous environment.
Once you go beyond the idea that "more advanced" is a qualitatively useful metric of comparison and actually start demanding to see the causal links in how specific technologies are necessary to achieve the claimed outcomes, it starts to become clear just how badly Diamond whiffs it. Literacy is a fun example: Diamond has to work around the fact that the conquistadors were largely illiterate, and they were facing bureaucratic, administrative imperial states that ran on record keeping, requiring at least proto-writing [1]; really, how different were the two empires in terms of literacy? Another fun example I like to bring up is comparing Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital) to Toledo (the Spanish one). Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums; the Spaniards had... none of that.
[1] And there's a case to be made that Incan quipu were an honest-to-god writing system.
If technological development is "heavily adapted to the context of its culture", and that context is mostly geography ("mountainous environments") then isn't Diamond right?
Seems like the alternative is, "That's just the way it turned out," which is not very satisfying.
And I'm pretty sure that's just the way it turned out.
They went at least as far as the Roman Empire and Africa.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
> The difference between the experiences of Europe and China were economic and cultural rather than technological. As the voyages of Cheng Ho demonstrate, the Chinese certainly possessed the maritime technology and expertise to undertake long voyages of discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
> In 1435, when the Xuande Emperor died, the civil officials started to gain power as the new emperor, the Zhengtong Emperor, was only eight years old when he ascended the throne and could be influenced.[186] They seized this opportunity to permanently dismantle the voyages.
By his telling, Chinese bureaucrats buried the knowledge of large fleets because it was a more expensive way to project power than simply going over land.
To give up counterfactuals is to surrender causality and to truly make the past "one damn thing after another," i.e. chronicle rather than history. The historical profession as we know it is all about making arguments, not merely cataloging events, so it would cease to exist without counterfactuals.
This chapter is preceded, though, by 800 pages of detailed history. You have to earn your big conclusions. And the bigger your conclusion is (say, here is why/how Europe colonized the world) you'd better have a lot of evidence.
Sure, but I feel many academic historians have a bit of a double standard here. Did Foucault muster up mounds of evidence for his totalizing theories of power and social structure? Not really, he gestured at a few facts and then built an elaborate structure of theory on that very wobbly foundation. Yet he continues to be taken seriously in academia, whereas Diamond never has been.
I think that's partly because he was a "serious thinker" and Diamond is an "airport read," and also partly because theories like Focuault's are so flexible that it becomes a fun hammer you can apply to any nail ("social media is a panopticon!"), whereas Diamond's argument is specific to a particular historical arc, and partly because Foucault accords with the prejudices of the academy (there are hidden structures of power woven throughout society that oppress the weak) and Diamond doesn't (X determinism is bad, everything is "contingent.").
Plenty of academics hate Foucault. Ask an analytic philosopher what they think of him. And yet, those people still get to be part of the academy. Are some people shut out unfairly? Sure. Are many people shut out fairly because they aren't interested in rigor, they are only interested in exposure? Well, ok, academia has a lot of those. But at least it doesn't have Jared Diamond.
That seems like a weird (pointless?) thing to say when a lot of what we know about the conquest comes from letters Cortez constantly sent to Charles V to inform him on his progress. Yes, some Conquistadors were illiterate, so what?
> how different were the two empires in terms of literacy?
Massively. Usage on of writing for bookkeeping specifically (though pretty much everything else as well) in Europe by 1500 was on a whole other level. It’s not even comparable. Are you really saying there was hardly any difference between quipu/etc. and double entry bookkeeping? Based on what we know bureaucratically/administratively European states were much more complex at the time than the Aztec empire (which was more like a hegemonic confederation, possibly because they did not have the administrative capacity to administer the areas they subjugated directly).
> Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums;
Rome and Constantinople had most of those things too. Doesn’t mean that Spain ~1500 AD wasn’t more advanced technologically than Rome in ~100 AD in almost every way. Also what are your sources on on universal education? And I don’t really think that most houses had direct access to running water (and many Medieval cities, albeit usually on a much smaller scale had functioning water distribution systems*, e.g Barcelona still had a functioning systems from the Roman period).
Bronze and pre-Bronze ages civilizations in the old world also had very complex societies, large cities (and from what we can tell) more advanced writing systems. The most advanced American civilizations were overall about on the same (or slightly below) level technologically. So yeah in that sense they were about 3000-4000 years behind the Spanish and other Europeans.
* https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2023/07/29/list-of-medieval-to...
Which I guess is reasonable, if you’re a real historian deeply specialized in a specific field seeing someone gloss over or outright ignore very important details and/or new findings/theories might be hard to stomach.
Do economists hate Freakonomics? I know some who liked it. I think the objection is not to popular content but to misleading popular content.
Do they? Still? Color me skeptical.