{"id":3577,"date":"2013-02-08T20:47:49","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T01:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3577"},"modified":"2013-02-08T20:47:49","modified_gmt":"2013-02-09T01:47:49","slug":"jared-diamond-and-the-anthropologists-the-wrath-of-razib-khan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/08\/morality\/jared-diamond-and-the-anthropologists-the-wrath-of-razib-khan\/","title":{"rendered":"Jared Diamond and the Anthropologists: The Wrath of Razib Khan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Razib Khan<\/a>, who writes Discover Magazine’s Gene Expression <\/a>blog, has been a bit testy lately about some unusually vile ad hominem<\/em> attacks being directed at Jared Diamond <\/a>by some of the usual suspects among the pathologically pious faction of cultural anthropologists and miscellaneous self-appointed saviors of indigenous peoples.\u00a0 It seems that Diamond, author of such bestsellers as Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/em><\/a>, and by all accounts safely on the left of the ideological spectrum, has been unmasked <\/a>as a closet colonialist, imperialist, admirer of Cecil Rhodes, and pawn of evil global corporations.\u00a0 Razib’s response to all this:<\/p>\n

\u00a0I want to be clear that I think Jared Diamond is wrong<\/b> on a lot of details, and many cultural anthropologists are rightly calling him out on that. But, they do a disservice to their message by politicizing their critique, and ascribing malevolence to all those who disagree with their normative presuppositions. Scholarship is hard enough without personalized politicization, and I stand by Jared Diamond\u2019s right to be sincerely wrong without having his character assassinated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I grant that some anthropologists are responding to Jared Diamond in more measured tones, and occasionally even clear sentences. But by and large the reason that the discipline is properly thought of as an obscure, if vociferous, form of politics rather than a politicized form of analysis is that professional character assassins are thick on the ground in cultural anthropology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and, more poetically,<\/p>\n

Many cultural anthropologists\u00a0 believe that they have deep normative disagreements with Jared Diamond. In reality I think the chasm isn\u2019t quite that large. But the repeated blows ups with Diamond gets to the reality that cultural anthropology has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wouldn’t go quite that far, and, in fact, the people at Survival International <\/a>who were responsible for giving Razib the final nudge over the top don’t actually claim to be cultural anthropologists, but I must admit it’s a nice turn of phrase.\u00a0 You can read the rest of what he had to say here<\/a> and here<\/a>.\u00a0 While I, too, have taken a rather dim view of Diamond’s books, I can only heartily agree with Razib when he says,<\/p>\n

Jared Diamond may be wrong on facts, but he has the right enemies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And with that lengthy preamble, let me finally get to the point of this post.\u00a0 It has to do with something else Razib wrote in the articles linked above, namely,<\/p>\n

As the vehemence of my post suggests the only solution I can see to this ingrained tick among many cultural anthropologists is to drop the pretense of genteel discourse, and blast back at them with all the means at our disposal. Telling them to stick to facts nicely won\u2019t do any good, these are trenchant critics of Social Darwinism who engage in the most bare-knuckle war of all-against-all when given any quarter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To this, a\u00a0commenter replied,<\/p>\n

There’s always room for polemic, but in general it’s not the right tactic. Calm refutation is more scientific, and after all that’s what counts in the end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I side with Razib on this one.\u00a0 Appeasement has never worked against self-righteous ideological zealots of any stripe.\u00a0 To this, an insightful reader who’s been following my blog for a while might reply, “But how can you favor responding to morally based attacks with morally based attacks?\u00a0 You don’t believe in morality!”\u00a0 Of course, that’s not quite accurate.\u00a0 I do believe in morality as the expression of subjective emotions whose existence ultimately depends on evolved behavioral traits.\u00a0 I don’t believe in transcendental morality, e.g., the existence of Good and Evil as objects, or things in themselves.\u00a0 For that reason I see the morally loaded attacks on Diamond that Khan objects to for what they really are; a self-righteous and self-interested display of moral emotions that have become disconnected from the “purpose” those emotions evolved to serve; the propagation and survival of the genes of the phenotypes from which the attacks are emanating.\u00a0 Or, to put it in the vernacular, they are absurd.\u00a0 They are being mounted by people who have convinced themselves that they are the noble defenders of something that doesn’t exist; objective Good.\u00a0 They are not mounted because they are really likely to save anyone, but because they give pleasure to those who pose as saviors.<\/p>\n

In spite of that, they are potentially very effective, are demonstrably very destructive, and are certainly not to be defeated by calm, scientific refutation.\u00a0 One must fight fire with fire, or accept defeat.\u00a0 Call it doublethink if you will.\u00a0 Essentially, I am advocating the use of a weapon whose existence is based on the premise that there is such a thing as objective Good, when there quite clearly is not.\u00a0 However, we are a moral species, and these battles are carried out in the realm of moral emotions, not reason.\u00a0 Jonathan Haidt even goes so far as to suggest that our rational minds themselves only exist to serve as advocates for those emotions.\u00a0 This is not a question of moral “shoulds,” but of mere practicality.\u00a0 Those who have convinced themselves that they are the noble defenders of the\u00a0Good in itself are not to be dissuaded by calm\u00a0logic.\u00a0 Let history judge.\u00a0 How often were the fanatical zealots of such spiritual religions as Christianity and Islam, or such secular religions as Communism and Nazism, persuaded they were wrong by patient, reasoned argument?\u00a0 All of them were extremely effective at exploiting moral emotions as a weapon.\u00a0 One can either pick up that weapon and fight back, or sit back and await the pleasure of one’s enemies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Razib Khan, who writes Discover Magazine’s Gene Expression blog, has been a bit testy lately about some unusually vile ad hominem attacks being directed at Jared Diamond by some of the usual suspects among the pathologically pious faction of cultural anthropologists and miscellaneous self-appointed saviors of indigenous peoples.\u00a0 It seems that Diamond, author of such … Continue reading “Jared Diamond and the Anthropologists: The Wrath of Razib Khan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,48,105,6,28,135,5],"tags":[120,186],"class_list":["post-3577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-evolution","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-ingroups-and-outgroups","category-morality","tag-morality-2","tag-reason-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-VH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3577"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3579,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions\/3579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}