Crops, Towns, Government
18th November 2013
James C. Scott (‘He teaches anthropology and political science at Yale’) reviews Jared Diamond’s new book, The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Like many Voices of the Crust, he is a ‘progressive’ and so has no use for tradition.
It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live.
I’d hardly call Jared Diamond a ‘best known intellectual’, nor would I accept the suggestion that ‘ransackign the cultural inventory of its ancestors’ is quite so widespread as Scott seems to think. (Of course, with ‘progressives’ any trace or remnant of anti-progressive thinking is Cause for Alarm and calls for beating to quarters to repel boarders.)