Victor Davis Hanson vs Jarod Diamond

Today, Jeff at "Beautiful Atrocities" linked to Victor Davis Hanson's critique of Jarod Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is a fantastic critique, and pretty much a lay-up for Hanson:

Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel argued that geography trumped culture, and that the current privileged position of the West was therefore mostly attributable to the advantageous resources in, and location of, Western countries, rather than to Europe’s singular values. Despite the allure of such a politically correct exegesis — President Clinton endorsed the book wholeheartedly — there were numerous criticisms of this determinist idea of natural accidents resulting in the present-day dominance of the West. At some point a Cleisthenes, Plato, Augustine, Magna Carta, Sistine Chapel, Thomas Edison, or Albert Einstein — and the thinking and substructure that produced them — is worth more than long, indented coastlines and concentrations of iron ore. Diamond seemed to be terribly confused about the course of 2,500 years of Western history: Environment, far from being a precondition for Western success, was often almost irrelevant to it.

I had a long discussion in a bar with some lefty friends about Diamond's book, which even they found difficult to defend after they popped off a few intial drive-by comments. Looking at objective history, there are few things one can stand on to critique Western Civilization in comparison to the other world civilizations.

I find the belief and the hope in uptopianism to be the primary culprit. The greater the desire for said fantasy, the more the disconnect from reality. Utopians seeing the great, fecal stain that is human history are inevitably filled with self-loathing over the inability reconcile themselves to the cruel harsh world that is far too complex to fit within the confines of a non-judgmental, post-modern "neutrality." This worldview causes them to demonize those heretics who believe that cultures who embrace a common law, private property, democracy, capitalism, and free speech are objectively superior to those that don't. Each time there is a terrible occurrence within a Western country's borders, these critics are ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater (unless of course the event happened in France), instead of digging into human history to find the real root cause of such inequities.

Hanson's argument over a "weathly and bored elite class" is such a truism. Little do the West's critics know (on the left and the right) that Western Civilization, and specifically the idea of America itself, is rooted in the fundamental understanding that human nature is flawed and far from perfect. Human history isn't neccessarily redeemed by such an acknowledgement, but if taken as axiomatic, is capable of building the basis of a society that is more capable of getting along in the world than any competing, transcendent views of history.

UPDATE: Penraker comments:

I have always considered Jared Diamond's work suspect. There seems to be an almost childlike belief among liberals that all of history can be explained by the "secret key" and usually, this secret key is an awfully simplistic one. Diamond's secret key is Guns, Germs and Steel.

Yes, the "secret key"/hyperpole argument is ripe pickings for substantive historians such as VDH. History is such a complicated mess, and for one to paint a theory with such a wide brush like, "It's all about Oil!" or "It's all about Geography!" is not only fallacy, it's not even remotely interesting. I'd feel sorry for the guy, but he seems to have sold an awful lot of his books.