Beware the popularity of Jared Diamond

Well blog followers and advertisement clickers, soon we will be back in full swing. As the semester approaches, I can report that the higher educators of Salem State will be trying to do more with less: an increase of 25% in my insurance premiums (IE I will pay not 20 but now 25% of the premium for my family) and an increase of 10 to 20% in class sizes. All the more reason for you to click those ads because every fraction of every penny (and that's what it is worth) keeps food on the table.

I'm now preparing two different World History I classes, what we now call a F2F (face to face) and a hybrid class (half the class time but online work). It should be amusing and much better than last year when I used a textbook. I will be lecturing, but since it's the 21st century my lectures will all be 5 minutes long and be available to students pretty much whenever they want by Youtube, Screencast, and other sources. As some of you know, I'm a technophile at heart so I enjoy having to write my own html embeds and search the web for swf to flv converters. But it sure takes time.

Now what about this Jared Diamond fellow? I'm laying out the scope of big arguments about human history as existing between polls of environmental and cultural determinism. Diamond is the environmental guy, one step away from those that insist we're all just DNA slaves out to propogate. The complaint here isn't about his turgid prose or the fact that he gets so much wrong (see the lastest research on Easter Island, for example). In fact, the complaint isn't about him at all as much as it is about his popularity. (Yes, you can discount this all to jealousy -- as long as you click those ads!) He is popular because he writes what are essentially "Just so" stories. The world is as it is because this is the way it had to be thanks to geography, climate, and biology. It is interesting to note, however, that he is attacked from the right for being to presentist in his approach: that is for writing environmental jeremiads rather than well-researched histories.

I don't question the man's integrity or motivation. It's just that he's not a historian. Perhaps arcanely I still believe that the humanities professor is obligated to speak inconvenient truth to power in a way that is empowering. The scientist Diamond is not so missionary.