"big-idea books" are not intended by the authors to be the secret to the universe. Books like "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "The Black Swan" and "The Tipping Point" are not about somehow unravelling the mysteries of life, they're about framing the discussion in order to present a perspective that hasn't been presented before. They invariably have their detractors, and they invariably lead to discussion. This, really, is the whole reason to write a book such as this: provide an insight as to how a large and disparate grouping of data can be regarded as a whole so that others may springboard off of (or against) one's ideas. Hell, that's the reason we were forced to write book reports as a kid: "what did you get out of 'Treasure Island,' Junior?" It's the "executive summary" of a research report or scholarly paper. What the author is confessing to here is that he spent six months researching Wikipedia and didn't learn enough about it to be able to elucidate his findings in any digestible way to an audience. And apparently, he's the only one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A283155%... This is not some sort of "cultural honesty" as to the way the world works. Any fool can point out that ours is a universe of irreducible complexity. This is couching failure as purity, a hipsterish "I was into complexity before it was cool" apologia in which the failure of one to live up to the standards of ones publisher is somehow worn as a badge of courage. I'm not buying it. If you can't look at Wikipedia and see broad cultural implications, you're blind. And if you can't illuminate those broad cultural implications for a larger audience, you're a bad writer.
He wasn't sure that was what he wanted to do, but he tried, and, sure enough, instead of a big-idea book, he ended up with a book of ideas, which the publisher wouldn't publish. The days of books weaving together multiple ideas into nuanced understandings of the world we live in are gone. They've been replaced by days of entire books going on and on about one idea, which by itself, really can't provide much of an understanding of anything.
Exactly. He fooled you. It takes a remarkable amount of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that his examples aren't exactly the same books coming out now. "One Dimensional Man" is the exact same sort of book as "Guns, Germs and Steel." "The Lonely Crowd" is "You Are Not A Gadget" 50 years ago. "The End of Ideology" is the exact same sort of book as "The End of Food" or "Eaarth." He's attempting to say "books used to be cool, man, but now, like, publishers are all like laaame and stuff." He's a liar and a failure. Lorenz's "On Aggression" can be summed up in one sentence: "People behave a lot like animals, let us study the ways." It's a "big idea" book. So, for that matter, was Darwin's "On The Origin of the Species." Or, fuck that, Galileo's "Siderius Nuncius." "Big idea" books are nothing new - they are works that have a point. This is not intellectually dishonest. It's intellectually rigorous. Saying that somehow "Guns, Germs and Steel" goes "on and on about one big idea" is to completely miss the point of "Guns, Germs and Steel." Yali's question was "how come white folks have so much cargo, and New Guinians have so little?" The flip answer is "guns, germs and steel" but the real answer is "because civilization is a complex and fragile beast that takes many forms, here let me spend 480 pages exploring the reasons." Pretending that this is "one idea" is ridiculous. Further, pretending that it's somehow dishonest to come up with a few theories about Wikipedia based on studying it for six months, rather than acknowledging that it's bloody dishonest to write a book proposal that you're nowhere near ready to work on, is bloody craven.
No offense, but you might want to re-read One Dimensional Man and Guns, Germs, and Steel. (You also might want to calm down a little.)
However, there's nothing intellectually dishonest about saying that, for instance, One Dimensional Man and Guns, Germs, and Steel are very different types of books. As the essay said, one is a book filled with ideas, and the other is a book about an idea. They're both good books, but there's a big difference in range, depth, nuance, scope, and insight. One Dimensional Man takes the ideas of institutional agenda-setting, commodity fetishism, hierarchical organization, mass-media influence, the concentration of resources, the sociological need to fit in, the profit motive, industrialization, false consciousness, and social marginalization and weaves them into an insightful description of a society which appears to offer freedom, but really exercises an almost totalitarian amount of control over it members, their lives, and even their thoughts. It's generally seen as a seminal text in Critical Theory, or the Frankfurt school of philosophy, and it sparked and guided the counter-cultural movement of the 60s. Guns, Germs, and Steel posits that material wealth is the end result of living on a continent that is oriented horizontally, giving the people who inhabited its biomes a greater number of resources to make use of. It's generally seen as an interesting essay, that attempted to revive the debunked theory of geographical determinism, which was unnecessarily expanded into a book. Again, they're both good books, but there's nothing remotely dishonest about saying that they're different types of books. One weaves together many ideas, the other (over) explains only one idea.
How keenly condescending of you. One Dimensional Man is a Cold War polemic against both sides of the Berlin Wall. More than that, it's a necessarily myopic interpretation of the facts on the ground for half of its subject matter, having been written less than 20 years after the Kennan Long Telegram. Guns, Germs and Steel is a post-Cold War rumination on the impacts of geography, timing and biology as it relates to anthropology. "It's generally seen as an interesting essay" is academic-speak for "it's good enough for the proles, but smart people like myself generally don't bother to discredit it because people in-the-know already know better." To say that "one weaves many ideas" while the other "explains one idea" is perspective, and flawed perspective at that. More than that, you initially started out trying to say that, somehow, a book about one idea (presuming this is one) "really can't provide much of an understanding of anything" and that this was somehow the fault of the publishing industry. I've seen nothing that defends either point, just an attempt to discredit my arguments through condescension. Which I don't deserve, and I'd hoped you'd be above. And now, thoroughly embarrassed by your scathing critique, I retire, cowed, and promise to never open my mouth again, massa.
Actually, it's just English for "an essay which was interesting." > I've seen nothing that defends either point, just an attempt to discredit my arguments through condescension. What you've seen is someone trying to explain the point the author was trying to make while someone else was ranting at him. And your arguments were: if someone failed to get his book published, it could only be because he's a failure and bad writer; the publishing industry couldn't possibly be uninterested in multiple-idea books, because single-idea books have been around for a long time; and, the multiple-idea books of the past and single-idea books of the present are exactly the same thing. At the risk of sounding condescending, I really didn't think the best thing to do, at that point, was point out the flaws in your arguments. Instead, I thought it would be more helpful to explain what the author was trying to say, since you didn't seem to get it. > I retire, cowed, and promise to never open my mouth again, massa. Or, you could just try posting while calm, instead of spewing venom everywhere.