From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 21:02:18 MDT
Mike Lorrey had written
> [gts wrote:]
> >> I'm not a fan of behaviorism but I can understand Diamond in those
> >> terms.
> >
> > I don't think that behaviorism is necessarily required to
> > understand what he is getting at. Animals naturally eat and
> > reproduce to fill their habitat niche to capacity. If their
> > food source cannot replenish fast enough, there are die offs
> > and food sources are eventually made extinct. Look at goats
> > and sheep that infest so many islands denuded of trees,
> > bushes, and much of everything else.
>
> That is also a behaviorist view of animal psychology. "It doesn't matter
> that they might think," say the behaviorists, "It only matters what they do.
> Animal nature is defined by what they do in and to their environments,
> regardless of their conscious subjective intentions."
I have no argument whether or not Jared Diamond ought to be viewed
as having behaviorist tendencies. His tremendous book, "Guns,
Germs, and Steel" is, of course, the pre-eminent geographical
determinist treatise of our times.
In a sense, that's obvious: animals on different continents
evolve to different ends, and so did people. In the shorter
term, culture behaves as *identity*: even if the ultimate
causes of culture and genes are geographic, for the short
term, culture possesses a kind of inertia and provides identity.
Here is an excerpt from http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long1.html
(which is mostly about Iceland).
Diamond is best known for his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and
Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which argues that
history is determined primarily by geographical rather
than cultural factors; he applies a similar analysis here,
maintaining that the Icelanders' radically decentralized
political system was forced on them by Iceland's scanty
supply of natural resources, leaving them "too poor even
to afford a government." (Oh, for such poverty!) In short,
the law of Iceland was not the product of its inhabitants'
own ideas and values, but was in effect selected for them
by the nature of their physical environment.
See the identity tie-in?
But didn't the Icelanders choose that environment because
they were hostile to centralized power back home? And
doesn't the structure of their legal system reflect that
very hostility? Diamond can hardly ignore these facts,
but he minimizes their importance:
"Having emigrated to Iceland in order to be independent
of the growing power of the Norwegian king, Icelanders
wanted minimal government anyway, and that attitude let
them make a virtue of the necessity imposed by their poverty."
In other words, Icelandic cultural attitudes were causally
irrelevant to the outcome; although the system the Icelanders
ended up with was to their liking, they would have ended up
with much the same system whether they liked it or not.
Then he says a little later
Diamond's geography-is-destiny approach to history deserves
our skepticism in any case. The world is full of bleak,
inhospitable, resource-poor regions whose inhabitants scratch
out a meager living; but how many such regions have left us
a cultural legacy comparable to medieval Iceland's? Diamond
would do well to heed philosopher R. G. Collingwood's dictum
that history is ultimately determined not by nature, but by
what human beings make of nature.
And suddenly we're right back (IMO) to free will vs. determinism.
To those who are well informed, however, I would suggest that what
is at issue here is the length of the causal chain.
(To illustrate, consider the following example: the Israelis are
far less successful than the people around them in terms of birthrate
and piety, but more successful in economics, agriculture, and warfare.
How far back does the actual determinism reach? One generation, if
you asked Skinner, perhaps ten if you asked me, and perhaps fifty
if you asked someone who believed that the genes determine *everything*.)
Lee
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