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| A column in this newspaper not long ago reported on a new book, "The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature," by Steven Pinker. It "challenges the foundational principle of modem liberalism:" that human life is determined by environment, not heredity, "nurture," not "nature"; that human ills are the results of "ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease," not some biologically immutable "human nature," with a built-in propensity for evil; and that thus "education, legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods." | |
| By coincidence, I was reading another book about one key chapter in that "modem denial of human nature": "Margaret Mead and the Heretic," by Derek Freeman. | "The liberal belief that violence is learned from our environment is wrong," according to Pinker. "We are all innately aggressive." Freeman, for his part, exposes an example of just how that fallacious liberal article of faith came to be foisted off on us. |
| As the twentieth century dawned, anthropology, thanks to Darwin, was dominated by biology. Human development was believed to be determined by nature, not nurture. | This didn't sit well with all those dissatisfied with the status quo and anxious to change it. If human nature was a biological given, scant room was left for radically "improving" the world. But if it could be shown that nurture was more important than nature, environment than heredity, marvelous possibilities for social tinkering were opened up. |
| Most influential in spreading the idea was Franz Boas, a German radical who in America became the leader, virtually the founder, of cultural anthropology as a discipline independent of biology. An admirer of the Soviet experiment in remolding (in effect disproving) human nature, Boas was anxious to find an exception to seemingly prevalent worldwide cultural patterns, since one exception would prove that culture was socially, not naturally determined. | |
| He chose the South Seas, likeliest place for the kind of utopia, home to "noble savages," he was looking for. And he sent out one of his students, Margaret Mead, a naive 23-year-old girl who couldn't've been more ill-equipped for the job. She knew little about Samoa, including the language, and spent her few months in the islands living with a white family. Worse, she utterly worshipped Boas, fervently shared his ideas about nurture-over-nature (and about Soviet Russia), and sought above all to please him by bringing back the evidence he wanted. And pleased he was. He ignored the fact that Mead's findings contradicted all of the previous century's studies of Samoa, which she hadn't bothered to consult. | |
| Published as "Coming of Age in Samoa," her work became a bestseller, and continued to be reprinted for decades. Even today its conclusions are the underpinning of much of contemporary cultural anthropology, though they were all wrong, the very opposite of the truth. | |
| Samoans, she said, were peaceloving. Aggression, jealousy, guilt, all the flaws of people in the West, were simply unknown among them. They had no notion of private property, even in sexual relations. Their love-lives were riots of promiscuity, yet never led to tensions or quarrels. Samoan adolescents were blissfully happy. Children were communally reared. Religion was of no importance, and there was no class system, no authoritarianism. | |
| Mead and Boas and their ilk lost no time taking all this as proof that culture had no basis in nature. The storms and stresses of Western culture, above all where sex was concerned, were simply the consequence of faults in Western society. Make our society over from the ground up and Westerners would be just as happy and carefree as the Samoans. The hitch was, it was all pure bunk. | As time passed, word got back to the Samoans of just what was being written about them, and they were outraged. They pointed out they'd been Protestant Christians for over a century, probably more devout than most Westerners. They placed higher value on chastity and virginity than contemporary Americans. Their society was as stratified, class-ridden, and authoritarian as any other -- competitive and violent. Not so long before, they'd fought wars among themelves, even resorting to cannibalism. Margaret Mead's visit came in a time of particular ferocity among factions carrying on old feuds or jockeying for political power; but she never noticed, or chose not to. |
| Some of the young girls she'd interviewed, as the basis of her findings, made affidavits in later life telling what had really happened. Like most such tribal groups Samoans are modest and even prudish. When this little foreign girl came along asking embarrassing questions about taboo subjects, their response was either to tell her what she seemed to want to hear or to "pull her leg" by telling whopping lies, an old Samoan custom. Why, sure, they told her, they spent every night out carousing with the boys! It was every girl's wish to have as many affairs as possible. And no problems ever resulted, no jealousies, no quarrels. All was love! It was paradise, in other words, the very utopia liberals expected their own reforming ideas to establish. | |
| It seems incredible that Margaret Mead could have swallowed it all, just in itself, without checking it against the mountains of existing literature on Samoa. Incredible, too, that Boas and the anthropological "establishment" so uncritically accepted it. But they did. To her dying day, Margaret Mead was a celebrity and an authority. Her popular critiques of Western society, such as "Male and Female," based themselves on her Samoan "findings." | |
| They accepted it because it was what they wanted to hear, evidence to back up their political doctrine that there's no such thing as human nature, culture is all; thus humans are infinitely malleable and manipulable. To liberals, the idea is exhilarating, liberating. | |
| And recently it was revealed that Boas faked the data for his own famous study "proving" environment is more important than heredity. How depressing (at least to conservatives, who all along have had their doubts) to think that the whole thrust of modern social thinking (and action) is based on such mendacious, ideological "scholarship!" |
As Lionel Trilling puts it, somewhere in each of us, "there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, which culture cannot reach and which reserves the right to judge the culture and resist and revise it."
"We must be glad and not sorry that some part of our fate comes from outside the culture."
