Men aren't only good for fucking

I can come off as sexist from time to time because of my belief that the only thing that seperates us from other primates is the rhythm of female life, featuring as it does menopause - the cessation of childbirthing duties and the transformation of Woman into the repository of her group's acquired knowledge and artistic consciousness - and of my belief that if you segregated men from women, putting each group on an island by themselves, the men would universally revert to pan trog behaviours within a month, and women would carry on basically as usual except with a great deal more complaining about how there's no cock to be had.

So maybe I am sexist. Fine. But. From time to time boys say things that surprise me with my own stunning lack of insight. For example, about six years ago Bluebird and I were sitting around eating rösti and smoking his cigarettes, talking about nuclear holocaust, and I sez to Bluebird, I sez, 'nuclear armament is too dangerous because you saw how the Americans flew off the handle and blew up those Japanese cities to end that war quicker and that wasn't good, was it?' And he sez no, the Japanese had already lost, and the Americans blew up those Japanese cities to show the Soviets they could and would, and that was the rather hot beginning of the cold war.

'Oh,' I sez. Bluebird and I never saw eye to eye about much in terms of how the world works but trust a broken Swiss to tell the right time at least twice a day.

I'm far more accustomed to agreeing with the F-word about almost everything, but nonetheless I was a little shocked this weekend when we were talking about the upcoming American presidentials and the global economic downturn. 'I don't know if the Democrats can lose,' I sez to the F-word, I sez, 'they always win when them yanks are more paranoid about the economy than about the hostile world around them.'

'Yeah,' he sez, 'well, last May, when we listened to that show about Georgia, you said you never thought a teeny tiny country like that would risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO. And now four months before the presidentials, something made Georgians think it was okay to risk pissing off Russia by trying to reclaim a breakaway territory before getting into NATO. What made them think it'd be okay? I don't know, but they had 2,000 troops in Iraq. Their military is supplied through American contracts. They're a big recipient of American foreign aid. Why would they be stupid enough to risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO unless their biggest partner had told them it was okay? And why would their biggest partner have told them it was okay, when it so obviously wasn't, four months before an American presidential election wherein heretofore the main preoccupation of the electorate has been the economy?'

'Oh,' I sez. The F-word is probably about 4 more degrees paranoid than I am but let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened, would it?

Anyways, if the American media wants a break from breathlessly waiting for that lousy pork barrel fiend from Alaska with the fuckable husband to talk to them about her 'positions', and if it wants a break from desperately basing the slant of its reporting on unscientific opinion polling about how much people want to fuck each of the candidates, maybe they can look into why this bullshit is happening now. But any mention of how maybe, possibly, there was some American complicity in all this is always tied to some idea of Russians being conspiracy theorists - even in an article about how America is dumping a billion dollars on Georgia in the middle of its own economic meltdown. Fucking tossers. The fourth column has erectile dysfunction.

Reading television

Last night I finished reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then I watched most of it, after Hilts let me know it existed in television form. I know that points to an obsession with the book or with Jared Diamond, but nobody has replaced Steven Mithen in my pop-science affections. The thing is that the F-word is on a huge Russia kick at the moment and about to wade into the Gulag Archipelago, and he reads slowly so he'll be in there forever, but he was jealous that I was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, so I figured if the documentary was halfway decent it'd get the points across to him without him having to break his Russia run.

Also, I was curious to see how it had been televised. The last documentary vs. pop science book thing I'd experienced was The Root of All Evil? vs. The God Delusion, and while I found a great deal to dislike about both it was interesting to see that the book looked like it had been lifted from the documentary. The book had all the same interviews and subjective Dawkinsian experiences, with a few absolutely unsatisfactory caveats inserted about how pantheistic and polytheistic religions were basically the same as Judeo-Christianity so it was alright that he ignored them - the documentary went to no such trouble. The book was just a tarted-up version of the documentary - a bit counter intuitive, but interesting.

Guns, Germs, and Steel was the more expected opposite; the documentary was certainly a dumbed-down version of the book, to the degree that even though I wasn't crazy about the book I'll still advise the F-word to read it when he gets out of the Gulag. The book was interesting and a little annoying, and the documentary was less interesting and more annoying. The thing is, I have a hard time with the concept of cultural evolution (I think I came to Guns, Germs, and Steel too fast after reading the way way better Full House, by Stephen Gould, a man who was convincingly hostile to applying evolutionary terms to culture) and I think Diamond equated technological advancement with cultural evolution. And I think his eagerness to make that equation made him make mistakes like unnecessarily glossing over things that weakened, though didn't contradict, his big picture, such as the fact that syphilis almost certainly spread from the Americas to Eurasia.

It just wasn't necessary for him to put his arguments in terms of cultural evolution, though I imagine it made the book easier to write, and probably read. It's a simpler, more graspable version of the world, simpler to structure an argument around the central pillar that we're all in a race towards one semi-inevitable destination that any given group of humans would have got to first giving the right tools, but it's also kind of bullshit. All post-modernism aside. It just doesn't make any sense unless you're somehow religious.

The second problem I had with Guns, Germs, and Steel is perhaps a personal failing, but the thing is no pop science writer has ever convinced me that modern hunter gatherers are so easily comparable to prehistoric hunter gatherers. Come on, they're honestly not going to think up any new stories in 60,000 years? Or a different, increasingly useful spirituality? Eat a wider range of foods as they build up social knowledge about what doesn't make you die? Treat each other differently? Can we really compare prehistoric hunter gatherers so unhesitatingly with modern-ish ones just because their technology was similar? I think about the Tasmanians a lot in this context because back in the mists of undergrad anthropology time I studied the tiny bit Europeans wrote down about their religious beliefs before their extinction. The religion was fascinating, and different from the other hunter-gathering populations I was comparing them to. And then there's the massive headfuck of Dreamtime in mainland Australia. I don't know. I just find it hard to believe that the people the Europeans found there were culturally similar to people 60,000 years ago. It just seems like a way to simplify matters and permit yourself to read waaaaay too much into the archaeological record.

Anyhoo. The most interesting thing about watching the documentary back to back with reading the book is the sudden realization that complaints about Jared Diamond and GG&S, as explained in this typically craptastic New York Times article Hilts drew my attention to, are in great part based on the documentary rather than book (that Eurocentricism thing especially), or indirectly based on the sort of notions of innate racial superiority whose debunking was the best part of GG&S - frankly, you can't imply that European choices, rather than geographic determinism, are what let Europeans be so internationally dominant without also implying that innate European superiority is what let Europeans be so dominant. Calling them assholes while you make that connection doesn't make it any less racist.

Also, I agree that he oversimplifies unnescessarily - see above. But at the same time, dude, it's pop science. Yuppies like me read it to relax in the evening, and maybe teenagers read it and it makes them interested enough in anthropology that they study it in university. Great - you've got another enrollment, more funding for your department, and now you can spend the next four years convincing the kid how boring and finicky real anthropology is. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth, for fuck's sake. But that touches on some future post about what I feel like the role of pop science is and now I have to go meet deadline for an industry magazine that is not pop or science-y at all.

Oh, and by the way:

"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."

Yes they do, you stupid American fuck. Holy shit, what's wrong with these people? She's a fucking associate professor, for god's sake, and she trots out a fucking moronicity like that for an international newspaper. Jeebus. Fucking. Fuck.