Maladaption is post-literate.
My recent Brussels Journal “exhumation” of Robert B. Edgerton’s remarkable study of Sick Societies(1992) provoked a variety of responses, with a good many veering fromEdgerton’s main topic (also mine) of “maladaptation” into discussionsof colonialism and the relation of the West to the so-called ThirdWorld. The sliding from one topic to another is itself of interest, butI should first like to address a number of reader-comments that focusdirectly on the “maladaptation” thesis.
The reader dubbing himself “Kapitein Andre” calls attention to thecontrast between Edgerton’s dispassionate discussion of “maladaptation”with Jared Diamond’s politically de rigueur praise for contemporary Austronesian society in the widely reviewed and much praised Guns, Germs, & Steel:“While Western European youth were playing video games and quaffingunhealthy food and beverages, the Austronesian youth were exploring thejungles, constructing shelters, hunting, etc. [Diamond] concluded thatthe latter were much more intelligent.”The commensurability of contemporary Austronesian and Western societiesis a complicated one. In a way, Diamond is right: it is probably betterto be a competent stone-age tribesman than a decadent modern person;but Diamond’s PC apology for the supposed practitioners of “PrimitiveHarmony” leaves open the question whether contemporary Papua-NewGuineans are competent stone-age tribesman or something else lesspretty just as it ignores the likelihood that Western civilization is alargely positive achievement despite the fact that overweightadolescents with twenty electronic entertainment devices and C-minusgrade-point-averages have effectively abandoned that civilization.