Remembering Communism

We live in sedate times, at least from an ideological point of view.  Such excrescences of the 20th century as Nazism and fascism have come and gone.  The greatest messianic world view of them all, Communism, if not stone cold dead, is no more than a shadow of its former self.  With its demise, its very memory is passing into oblivion.  That’s unfortunate.  Given the cost of the Communist experiment – 100 million dead and the virtual beheading of at least two countries, Russia and Cambodia – we would do well to at least learn something from it.

It seems to me that one particularly profound lesson is the degree to which vast numbers of intellectuals the world over were capable of deluding themselves about the nature of the Stalinist regime, renowned scientists among them.  Malcolm Muggeridge chronicled the phenomena in his brilliant little snapshot of the time, The Thirties.  For example,

Admiration for the Soviet regime had greatly increased since the introduction of the Five-Year Plan in 1929, though more among Liberals and the professional classes than among trade unionists, who from the beginning showed themselves to be less easily deluded by Soviet propaganda than university professors, writers and clergymen.  Professor Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed.), for instance, had no difficulty in believing that ‘while we were in Russia a German town-planning expert was travelling over the huge Siberian spaces in a special train with a staff of assistants, where cities are to arise stopping for a few days, picking out the best site, laying down the broad outlines of the future city, and passing on, leaving the details to be filled in by architects and engineers who remain’ or that ‘Stalin himself sometimes comes down to the Moscow goods sidings to help.’

 

The cost of a tour in the USSR, though moderate, was beyond the means of most manual workers, so that those who availed themselves of the exceedingly competent Intourist organization were predominantly income-tax payers.  Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of the age.

 

The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors.

 

The climax came, perhaps, with the visit to the USSR of Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor and Lord Lothian, which provided, as Mr. Eugene Lyons has put it, ‘a fortnight of clowning… The lengthening obscenity of ignorant or indifferent tourists disporting themselves cheerily on the aching body of Russia, seemed summed up in this cavorting old man, in his blanket endorsement of what he would not understand.  He was so taken up with demonstrating how youthful and agile he was that he had no attention to spare for the revolution in practice.

 

Despite such episodes the Soviet regime continued to be held in ever greater esteem by writers like Shaw and Andre Gide and Romain Rolland:  clergymen like the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, journalists like Walter Duranty and Maurice Hindus, economists like G. D. H. Cole and the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice, Fabian socialists, ed.) scientists like Professor Julian Huxley.  How could all these, so learned and to righteous, be wrong?

 

…like vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.

 

All this is doubly astounding in light of the fact that it was so obvious at the time all this was going on that the Soviet Union had become a vast charnel house.  Indeed, Muggeridge himself had sympathized with the new regime.  The scales fell from his eyes when he took an unauthorized trip to the Ukraine while visiting the Soviet Union, and saw the starvation and misery there first hand, even as Walter Duranty was denying it in the New York Times.  The Eugene Lyons Muggeridge refers to above was a journalist who spent six years in the Soviet Union and was not as easily duped as Duranty.  He wrote a damning indictment of the regime in his book, Moscow Carrousel.  In a synopsis of his findings written for the American Mercury in 1936 in the context of a review of the Webb’s ecstatic praise of the regime in their book, Soviet Communism:  A New Civilization?, he wrote,

The material out of which the Webbs have fashioned their Utopia is that theoretical USSR of governmental forms, paper freedoms, poster proletarians, stage kulaks, decrees, and charts – the immense make-believe of externals under which all governments, especially all-powerful, all-knowing and infallible super-states, function.

 

One is tempted to quote endlessly from the curious mixture of misinformation, half-truths, and naive credulity which fill these volumes.  The liquidation of the kulaks, for instance, becomes under the busy pens of the Webbs almost an act of benevolence.  These poor people, it appears, would have starved to death had not the authorities come along mercifully and transferred them free of charge to the lumber camps and canal diggings.

 

The discussion of other aspects of the terror is in the same key.  Everything that might reflect on the institution of the OGPU (secret police, ed.) is dismissed with a sneer… The whole complex of forced and convict labor involving millions of persons (hundreds of thousands are building canals and railroads at this very moment); the mass executions without public trial; the teeming concentration camps; all of this the Webbs judge on the basis of official statements, official silences, and the mendacities of ill-informed foreign parrots.

 

Lyons’ article is interesting in that it documents the fact that the truth about the mass slaughter underway in the Soviet Union was perfectly obvious to anyone who didn’t deliberately delude themselves, even in 1936, before the climax of the Great Purge Trials in 1937 and 1938.  Which begs the question, why were so many seemingly intelligent people so delusional for so long?  The question was answered by Julius Caesar over 2000 years ago:  “People willingly believe what they want to believe.”  And many intellectuals of the time dearly wanted to believe in socialism, if not Communism.  Many of them shared Maxim Gorky’s belief that democracy was impossible without it.  Ironically, they included George Orwell, certainly no Stalinist or Communist, but a lifelong socialist, who never realized his work would deal such a telling blow to socialism until it was too late.  In his essays before the war, he actually claimed that there was no moral distinction between the Nazi and British versions of capitalism.  For example, in an essay entitled “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” that appeared in the New English Weekly in 1937, he wrote,

You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”, meaning capitalism.  But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois “democracy” are Tweedledum and Tweedledee… If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war (in which Orwell was a combatant, ed.) they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated.  As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps (British icon of reaction, ed.) bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever.  And thus we are one step nearer to the great war “against Fascism” (cf 1914, “against militarism”) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

Orwell’s comment throws a great deal of light on the phenomenon of mass self-delusion noted above.  By the 1930′s more than a century of socialist philosophers and propagandists, of whom Marx, Engels and Lenin were some of the more prominent examples, had elevated socialism to a quasi-religion.  The brilliant Scotchman, Sir James MacKintosh, had already noticed the trend in the early 1800′s, long before Marx appeared on the scene, observing that the new religion was bound to fail eventually, because it promised an unachievable paradise on earth, where it could be fact-checked, instead of in heaven, where it could not.  The new religion came complete with its own morality and its own good, the proletariat, and evil, the bourgeoisie.  Speaking in terms of human nature, the bourgeoisie became an outgroup, and the system associated with it, capitalism, anathema.  Thus, it was possible, even for a man as brilliant as Orwell, to seriously maintain that the British democracy and Nazism were really just manifestations of the same evil, capitalism, and therefore as equivalent to each other as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.   This explains another remarkable phenomenon of the time; the willingness of so many seemingly sober economists, politicians, and other miscellaneous intellectuals to liquidate an entire economic system in favor of the gaudy, pie-in-the-sky theories of socialism.  By so doing, one was not merely conducting a somewhat risky economic experiment.  One was fighting evil incarnate.  Self-delusion has always been a prominent characteristic of religious zealots, and the secular religious zealots of the 1930′s were no different.

Well, the experiment has been done, the facts have been checked, and, just as Sir James MacKintosh predicted over 150 years ago, the great Communist myth evaporated like a soap bubble.  Islam, a more traditional religion, rushed in to fill the vacuum left by its demise, inspiring a grotesque love affair between the obscurantist zealots of the old faith and the former “progressive” zealots of the secular faith that had just died.  Meanwhile, these “progressives” have begun assiduously cobbling on the outlines of a new secular faith.  The most recent versions come with a new, if somewhat hackneyed and moth-eaten, morality, including a new ”good” (the 99 percent), and a new “evil” (the corporations).  We would do well to step back and consider whether we really want to go there again, before another country kills off the lion’s share of the intellectual cream of its population by way of eliminating the evil one percent.

Of Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, and Historical Narratives

Jonathan Haidt is one of the most coherent thinkers in the social sciences today. A Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, he specializes in the study of morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. He describes himself as an atheist, and embraces the notion that there is such a thing as “human nature,” in the sense that our behavior is profoundly influenced by innate predispositions. For that alone he would have suffered the anathemas of his fellow experts in the behavioral sciences a few short decades ago. Until quite recently they were still in thrall of the collective delusion that human behavior is almost entirely determined by culture and education. But Haidt doesn’t stop there. His work focuses on our moral nature, and he is of the opinion that moral reasoning is not the basis of moral judgment. Rather, he supports what he calls the social intuitionist model, according to which moral judgments are the result of quick, automatic intuitions, including moral emotions. Moral reasoning commonly only appears after moral decisions have already been made, serving to rationalize them after the fact. Innate, evolved traits play a significant role in the process. In Haidt’s words from the paper, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”

The social intuitionist model… proposes that morality, like language, is a major evolutionary adaptation for an intensely social species, built into multiple regions of the brain and body, that is better described as emergent than as learned yet that requires input and shaping from a particular culture. Moral intuitions are therefore both innate and enculturated.

Obviously, we have come a long way since the 60′s and 70′s, when the entire orthodox scientific establishment was defending the cherished but palpably absurd dogma that “human nature” was almost entirely the result of education and culture, and the effect of innate predispositions of the kind Haidt refers to on human behavior were insignificant. In one of the more remarkable paradigm shifts in scientific history, they have finally been forced by the weight of evidence to abandon that delusion. For all that, they have shown a remarkable resistance to facing the obvious implications of the truth they have finally embraced. Nowhere has that been more true than in the field of morality.

If what Haidt says is true, then human morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits. As such, it cannot be other than subjective in nature. Objective good and evil cannot exist because there is no legitimate basis for their existence. Morality has no purpose, nor does it serve any higher end. It exists purely and simply because it has increased the odds that carriers of the genes that give rise to it would survive and reproduce those genes. In spite of these seemingly elementary facts, no human illusion is as persistent and resilient as the belief in objective good.

Haidt explores some related issues in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. It’s a good read, consisting of a collection of interesting ideas, insights and recent research results and concluding with an examination of the question, “What is the meaning of life.” According to Haidt, the question, “What is the meaning of life?” really consists of two sub-questions: What is the purpose of life? and What should be our purpose within life? He does not attempt an answer to the first, but focuses on the second, noting that it refers to what we should do to have a good, happy, fulfilling and meaningful life. Haidt devotes the final portion of the book to the question. There is something rather striking about his answer. It requires acceptance of the theory of group selection.

Why is that striking? Back in the day when, as noted above, virtually the entire orthodox scientific establishment was proclaiming the dogma that “human nature” was almost exclusively the result of education and culture, the most influential and significant writer insisting that the establishment was wrong, recognized as such at the time by proponents of both points of view, was Robert Ardrey. Well, it so happens that Ardrey, a brilliant writer with a profound grasp of the big picture, was right and the establishment was wrong about the role of the innate on human behavior. Yet today his name is hardly mentioned in the same breath with Galileo, or any of the other great destroyers of false orthodoxies in the sciences for that matter. Rather, he has been almost entirely forgotten. It happens, you see, that Ardrey was outside the academic pale. He was, in fact, a playwright for much of his career, and it would be too painful for the guild of “experts” to admit that a mere playwright like Ardrey had correctly insisted on an abundantly obvious truth at a time when they were still collectively defending a cherished but palpably false delusion.

Eventually, when the delusion collapsed, resulting in one of the more remarkable paradigm shifts in the history of the sciences, the “experts” constructed an entire alternative reality, exemplified by Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, according to which, incredibly, Ardrey had been “totally and utterly wrong,” and the real hero had been the more respectable and palatable E. O. Wilson, no matter that the ideas he set forth in books like Sociobiology and On Human Nature were no more than a reformulation of Ardrey’s thought. Now the chances that Pinker ever actually read Ardrey before dismissing him as “totally and utterly wrong” are vanishingly small, but he cited Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene as the basis of his claim, as if Dawkins were as infallible as the pope. Dawkins, in turn, based his entire criticism of Ardrey on some remarks he made in his book The Social Contract about a theory that was of no particular significance whatsoever as far as the fundamental question of the role of the innate on human behavior is concerned. And what was that theory? Why, none other than the theory of group selection, without which Haidt’s “Happiness Hypothesis” evaporates in the mist. It appears that Dawkins was somewhat premature in announcing its demise. Such are the narratives that occasionally pass for “history” in the sciences. Meanwhile, Ardrey remains an unperson. I should think he deserves better.

Dawkins, Pinker, and Ardrey: The Making of an Unperson

The Blank Slate is absurd.  Consider your own behavior, the behavior of those around you, and the many observable commonalities in human behavior that are obvious if you trouble yourself to read a little history, and it is difficult to grasp how anyone could believe something so palpably ridiculous.  In spite of that, it prevailed for many years as the dominant theory of human behavior among those who passed as experts in related fields.  We have a powerful inclination to believe in comforting fallacies over jarring realities, and nothing so jarred the comforting fallacy that human behavior is so malleable that we can be “re-educated” at will to become perfect citizens of ideal fantasy worlds or systems as the reality of innate human behavioral traits.  So intertwined are our emotions with the whole subject of why we act and think the way we do that the very history of the subject has been amply adjusted to suit preferred narratives.  That is true whether one speaks of the adherents of the Blank Slate or its opponents. 

An intriguing instance of the latter is the case of Robert Ardrey.  He was arguably the most influential opponent of the Blank Slate who ever took up a pen.  He is also an unperson.  It is a remarkable fact that Steven Pinker, who wrote a book entitled The Blank Slate, purporting to describe the history and nature of a phenomenon he accurately described as a secular religion, could only bring himself to mention Ardrey’s name in a single paragraph.  Even then it was only to distance himself from the man, as if from an untouchable.  Speaking of Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression, a collection of essays by Blank Slaters directly aimed at Ardrey and, to a lesser extent, Konrad Lorenz, he wrote, apparently in the persona of Dawkins’ poodle,

Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.”)

This statement must seem remarkable to anyone who has bothered to read Ardrey and Lorenz, not to mention Dawkins.  To the best of my knowledge, Lorenz’ ideas about the “discharge of hydraulic pressure” never appeared in Ardrey’s work, and Lorenz himself only mentioned the hypothesis as an afterthought to an earlier paper.  It by no means played any central or significant role in his thought or intellectual legacy, and no role in Ardrey’s work whatsoever.  As for Dawkins’ claim that “the authors got it totally and utterly wrong,” it was based entirely on his rejection of theories of group selection proposed by Wynne-Edwards that Ardrey mentioned approvingly in The Social Contract.  It is hard to believe that Pinker ever troubled himself to actually read Ardrey’s books, not to mention those of many other thinkers whose work he freely bowdlerized to fit his narrative in The Blank Slate.  If he had, he would have noticed that the common theme of all of them was that the Blank Slate was wrong, that innate predispositions profoundly influence human behavior, with the caveat that they influence it less than in perhaps any other species, their actual expression being heavily influenced by culture and environment, and that, far from implying anything “deterministic” about either our behavior or our future, we can and should alter our behavior based on a recognition of the reality of human nature.  In a word, the basic themes of The Blank Slate appeared in Ardrey’s work more than a quarter of a century earlier, but expressed more clearly, certainly more entertainingly, and without Pinker’s regrettable tendency to pontificate about the role of thinkers whose work he has either not read or not understood. 

As for group selection, the notion that it played some kind of a central role in Ardrey’s work, or even in The Social Contract, the one of his books in which it is mentioned, is nonsense.  The phrase in Dawkins’ book to which Pinker refers reads as follows (Dawkins is speaking of claims about the significance of his subject):

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz’s On Aggression, Ardrey’s The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene.)

I haven’t read Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s book, but as far as Lorenz and Ardrey are concerned, the one who got it “totally and utterly” wrong here is Dawkins.  Neither of them “assumed that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species.”  Apparently, writing as a young man far less prominent than he is today, Dawkins completely missed the point of their work.  Both of them understood the genetic basis of evolution, and were well aware of the controversy regarding group selection, which Dawkins hardly “discovered.”  Human and animal behavior, rather than evolution, was the central theme of their work, a fact that Dawkins apparently missed completely.  It’s difficult to understand his attack on them as other than an attempt to gain notoriety and promote his book by tweaking the tails of two individuals who were both a great deal more prominent than he at the time, and who both had many enemies in the orthodox scientific community.  To get an idea of the basis for Dawkins remark, consider what he said about Ardrey a bit later in The Selfish Gene.  Speaking of the theory of group selection he writes,    

To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of ‘group selection’, long assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V. C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract.

and,

Robert Ardrey, in The Social Contract, used the group-selection theory to account for the whole of social order in general. He clearly sees man as a species that has strayed from the path of animal righteousness. Ardrey at least did his homework. His decision to disagree with orthodox theory was a conscious one, and for this he deserves credit.

Dawkins disingenuousness here is staggering.  Let’s assume that he actually read The Social Contract.  In that case, he either completely failed to comprehend what he was reading, or he is deliberately misrepresenting Ardrey’s work.  In the first place there’s the incredible arrogance of the comment that group selection was “assumed to be true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory.”  This is to completely ignore that group selection had long been a matter of scholarly debate well before Dawkins published his book, that the parties of any significance on either side were both well aware of “his” theory of the selfish gene, and they either supported or opposed it using sophisticated evolutionary arguments.  Other than that, The Social Contract was not about group selection, nor was the subject central to the theme of the book.  Ardrey brought up the subject, not as an “assumption,” but as an admittedly controversial hypothesis that might explain, for example, the prevalence of alpha males within groups from generation to generation.  Ardrey must have scratched his head at reading Dawkins nonsense to the effect that he ”used the group-selection theory to account for the whole of social order in general.”  There is no basis whatsoever for that remark in any fair reading of Ardrey.  He did not believe, nor did he ever claim, either implicitly or explicitly, that “man as a species has strayed from the path of animal righteousness.” 

Other than that, Dawkins was “completely and utterly wrong” to claim that Ardrey, Lorenz, Wynne-Edwards, or any of its other serious proponents was “completely and utterly wrong” about group selection.  That is apparent from the fact that the hypothesis of group selection hardly disappeared after Dawkins published his book.  It continues to be a contentious and controversial issue to this day.  However, the question is not whether group selection can or cannot actually occur.  The question is whether there could have been any possible basis for making the claim that the hypothesis was “completely and utterly wrong” in 1972, when Dawkins published his book.  In fact, there was insufficient knowledge of the complexity of  gene interaction and expression, not to mention a detailed physical understanding of the causes of such complex behavioral traits as altruism and moral behavior, and not to mention the lack of mathematical tools sufficiently precise to model the relevant processes, both then and now, to justify such a claim.  Thus, Dawkins implicit assertion that he was as infallible as the pope regarding group selection is ridiculous, and Pinker’s recognition of Dawkins as an infallible pope is even more absurd.

That such obscurantist versions of the “truth” can appear as easily among the supposed opponents as among the defenders of the Blank Slate is a testimony to the degree to which our emotions cloud the discussion of human nature.  Scientific detachment is difficult to achieve in studying both ourselves and our species.  We are so influenced by preferred narratives about the way things ought to be that we often can’t perceive the simplest truths about the way they really are.  And what of Ardrey?  One can only assume that, by pointing out that the ”scientific” orthodoxy of the Blank Slate was palpably absurd, he insulted the gravitas of the entire professional scientific community, whether pro- or anti.  After all, he was a mere playwright (like Shakespeare, who Darwin loved to quote).  His was an act of unforgiveable lese majeste.  Hence, it was necessary that he disappear.  He became an unperson.

To those interested in knowing the truth, I can only suggest that they read the source material.  Those who trouble themselves to actually read Ardrey will find that group selection and the “good of the species” were virtually irrelevant to the central themes of his work.  Again, those themes were that the Blank Slate is wrong, that innate predispositions profoundly influence human behavior, and that their actual expression is strongly dependent on culture and environment.  They appeared in his books long before the publication of Sociobiology, which in its essentials is a mere echo of Ardrey.  Ardrey’s own explanation of the existence of Blank Slate in African Genesis was at once more concise, more entertaining, and less philosophically flatulent than Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which appeared almost half a century later.  It would also never have occurred to Ardrey to write a long book about such a subject that studiously ignored the role of individuals who played key historical roles relevant thereto. 

One can only hope that future historians have the intelligence and probity to recognize the true significance of Ardrey’s role.  He was a man of many hypotheses, and was quick to admit it when he was wrong.  However, regarding the key theme of his work, the profound influence of the innate on human behavior, he was right, and his detractors were wrong.  None were better than he at grasping the “big picture,” in the spirit of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience.  In the intervening years since his last book was published, we have witnessed what amounts, for the most part, to a triumphant vindication of his work.    As we have seen, his reward has been relegation to the status of an unperson. 

No doubt many others who recognized important truths about the human condition consigned themselves to oblivion, or bowdlerization, in the process.  Would you like to know what Hume, or Mill, or Huxley, or Spencer, or Read, or Keith, or Lorenz, or Ardrey really had to say about the subject?  There’s only one way to find out for sure.  Read them yourself.

Langurs and Bonobos and Chimps

Bonobos are the new darlings of the noble savage crowd.  They were bitterly disappointed by the rest of the great apes that, as recently as the 1970’s, were all supposed to be peaceful, vegetarian, and inoffensive.  When Jane Goodall and others started actually observing great apes in the wild and, as chronicled in books such as Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males, found that they occasionally displayed a few less endearing traits, such as hunting and eating meat, rape, infanticide, and the use of weapons in violent border warfare and raiding, true believers in the innate “goodness” of mankind demonstrated their own nobility by subjecting the messengers to furious ad hominem attacks.  It didn’t work.  Too many observers were reporting the same thing, and the evidence was too compelling. 

Enter the Bonobo.  They supposedly possess all the “good” traits their close relatives, the chimpanzees, so notably lack.  Occasionally their halo will slip.  For example, they compete for status, just like the other great apes.  Then, too, their hagiographers will occasionally slip up.  I was at a lecture about them once at which the speaker sought to emphasize their “feminist” nature.   It seems the females in bonobo groups tend to form alliances for self-protection, and to maintain decorum among the males.  The speaker recounted how, in one of the groups, an unruly male had attempted some aggressive behavior towards one of the females.  She and her pals ganged up on the evil-doer, giving him a thorough drubbing and, in the words of the speaker, nearly tearing his scrotum completely off.  Feminism was certainly vindicated by the incident, but the bonobo’s supposedly non-violent nature less so.

Be that as it may, apart from a few such rare lapses, bonobos do seem to be a great deal less violent and generally “demonic” than their close relatives, the chimpanzees.  If estimates that they shared a common ancestor as recently as 1.5 to 3 million years ago are correct, it would seem to demonstrate a high degree of flexibility in the evolutionary toolkit pertaining to the innate behavioral traits that characterize humans as well as other animals.  On the other hand, it may be that all these observed traits are subject to greater cultural variation within species that previously imagined.  Perhaps bonobo groups can be more “demonic” than their observed behavior to date would indicate, and chimps have taken a bum rap and are really capable of more placid behavior under the right conditions. 

The inimitable Robert Ardrey drew attention to a few data points to that effect in his The Social Contract, published in 1970.  In Chapter 7 of that book he recounted a series of observations of langurs, a leaf-eating monkey widely distributed in India.  Carried out by different researchers in different locations and environments, they revealed widely divergent information about the “typical behavior” of langurs.   The first, carried out by Phyllis Jay in an area where the creatures are fairly scarce, found that troops of 25 members more or less occupied ranges of about two square miles, and rarely contacted each other.  There appeared to be no defended territories, and no evident boundaries between groups.  A rigid rank order prevailed within the groups, and serious quarrels were almost non-existent.  As Ardrey put it, they

…seemed the ideal, sunny, non-aggressive creatures of legend, and (the) study, completed in the early year of 1959, did much to reinforce the arguments of those primate students that monkeys never fight, never defend territory, never do anything but behave themselves in a fashion rarely glimpsed in human schoolyards. It was a time when we all still said that “langurs are this way.”

Then, however, an account of another study of langurs appeared, carried out this time in Ceylon by Suzanne Ripley.  Again quoting Ardrey,

Troops were of about the same size. But nowhere did there exist those infinite distances for the happy, wandering life. The troop’s two square miles of India’s central forests became an eighth of a square mile in Ceylon. And here there were not only territories, with actively defended, unchanging borders; groups sought combat. (Like chimps! Alas, Ardrey never lived to learn the truth about them or the great apes, universally believed to all be truly peaceful, vegetarian, and inoffensive at the time he wrote his books. If only he had known how thoroughly the subsequent revelations about them vindicated his hypotheses. But I digress.) Like the howler and the callicebus, the langur is a noisy monkey. Morning treetop whoops would bring defiant answers from whooping neighbors and mobilization on the border. Ritualized displays might take place, with vast leaps through the trees. But in these combats between groups true fighting could take place, too, with chasing, wrestling, biting, tail-pulling.

But wait, there’s more.  Yukimara Sugiyama of Kyoto University also went to India to study langurs, this time in the extreme of population density among the three groups, about twice that in the Ceylon study.  What he found was what has been described by others as a “behavioral sink.”  Again quoting Ardrey,

…disorder was quite nearly perfect. There were territories, but borders were obscure and ill-defended. When troops met, leaders fought unassisted. Neither were there the rigid rank orders of dominance so characteristic of Jay’s widely separated groups. Perhaps as a consequence almost all troops had only one adult male, though there might be six or ten adult females. Sugiyama speculated that without a hierarchy regulating the relationships of males, quarrels were so disruptive that only one male usually remained. The expelled males formed their own groups in the forest.

When the sexual season approached its peak, an all-male gang, …would descend on a troop containing females, kill or drive off the leader and any sub-adult males, and fight among themselves for sexual sovereignty. Far from mourning their departed overlord, the females would respond to the action with sexual stimulation which brought on an immediate peak of copulation with the conqueror. Infants were neglected. And the episode reached its climax when the conqueror bit to death all young.

Readers of Demonic Males will note the remarkable parallels between Sugiyama’s langurs and the behavior of individual “outsider” male gorillas, which will occasionally raid the troop of a silverback, seeking to kill the infants.  If successful, the mother may follow him as her new overlord! 

But the upshot of the story is that the behavior of a given species of primate can vary widely depending on environmental conditions.  Innate behavior does not imply “deterministic” behavior.  It merely constrains the potential paths it can take.  May not the same phenomena observed among langurs be possible in the great apes?  Given the right conditions, could there be peaceful chimps and violent bonobos?  What about our own species?  Often human populations that have been peaceful for generations have also become incredibly violent in a relatively short time.  Why?  We need to learn.  There is no more important study than the study of our own nature.  Our survival depends on learning who we are.

Indian Langur

The Rime of the Ancient Anarchist

People in the “Not in our Genes” school of human behavior are standing on increasingly thin ice scientifically.  The evidence, which they are generally adept at ignoring, is leaning heavily against them.  They reject hypotheses such as that set forth in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, according to which altruism and other forms of moral behavior exist as evolved traits because they promoted the survival and reproduction of the genes carried by individuals.  They tend to be people with particularly strong moral emotions themselves, and usually lean to the left of the political spectrum.  Scratch one of them, and you will generally find a hidebound ideologue.  Their tastes tend to run to ad hominem attacks on their ideological opponents.  I’ve run across many Marxists among them, who have generally based their rejection on some version of the “Blank Slate,” or nurture versus nature.  Yesterday I came across one of a different color; black not red.  This one, by the name of Steve Davis, is a devotee of Peter Kropotkin, and therefore, presumably, an anarchist.

His rationale for rejecting “the selfish gene,” set forth in an article entitled “Altruism: It’s Evolution, It’s Origin, It’s Discontents,” is quite different from that of the average Marxist, and is worth deconstructing in detail.  It starts with the following:

Life began when complex molecules came together in cooperation, to perform the functions that we now consider to be characteristics of life.

Cooperation therefore preceded evolution. We do not have to look to evolution to explain the origin of cooperation. It undoubtedly underwent further development through evolution when different forms of cooperation came into being, but cooperation as a concept is linked to life itself, not to evolution.

That’s a new one on me.  Thefreedictionary lists one of the definitions of cooperation as “beneficial but inessential interaction between two species in a community,” but I haven’t previously heard it applied in the case of molecules.  Their interactions are described rather well by Schrödinger’s equation, and I can see how the Coulomb force is relevant to the interaction, but don’t really see the point of dragging “cooperation” into it.  Be that as it may, let’s accept Davis’ definition, and agree that when atoms or molecules combine, they are “cooperating.”  Davis continues,

Cooperation is a form of goodness, but how prevalent is it in nature? Well, we see cooperation between molecules, between cells, between organs, between organisms, between groups, and between groups of groups. How much cooperation do we need to see before conceding its significance? How blind do you have to be to ignore cooperation as a factor in evolution? And it’s not hard to see that once cooperation was pulled into the evolutionary process and evolved into different forms, that it’s just one small step to altruism in the accepted meaning of the word, that is, kindness for its own sake. One small step that is, when a particular condition is satisfied.

Really?  A form of goodness?  In what way did the random combination of molecules suddenly become good?  Molecules can also combine to form poisons, or cancer cells.  Is that “good” as well?  We have accepted Davis’ definition of “cooperation,” but how is it that “cooperation” suddenly acquired the quality of “good?”  Atoms and molecules can combine in all kinds of ways, but now Davis has narrowed his definition of “cooperation” without bothering to consult us.  It is now no longer just a random combination of molecules, but a “good” combination of molecules, by which is apparently meant one that will lead to the formation of life.  If so, it begs the question of how the “goodness” was added in.  I submit that it didn’t happen because the molecules wanted to be nice to each other, but because of natural selection.  I have never before heard of a mechanism of natural selection other than via the genetic material carried by individuals.    Davis, however, has an epiphany for us.  It really happens because “cooperation” is “pulled into the evolutionary process.”  Am I being presumptuous in asking the mechanism of that “pull?”  Supposing, however, that the “pull” somehow happened, we learn that it then “evolved into different forms.”  Really?  How did it happen?  What drove the evolution?  According to Davis,

Acts of kindness occur when people (and other animals) see themselves as being part of a greater entity. It is that reality that the advocates for individualism cannot accept. If organisms see themselves as being part of a greater entity, then that’s all that’s needed for group-based trends to appear. And it doesn’t matter what their genes think about it at all!

Now I see!  “Group-based trends appeared” because animals “see themselves as being part of a greater entity.”  It may well be that some humans see themselves as being part of a greater entity, but chimpanzees?  We-e-e-l-l-l, maybe, but according to the latest observations of them in the wild, I have some reservations about the conclusion that they are “cooperative” or “kind” as a result of that world view, even by Davis’ loose definition of the terms.  Moving down the line, do buzzards see themselves as “part of a greater entity?”  What about slime mold?  If so, what is the engine of the “group-based trends?”  Evolution by acquired characteristics, because monkeys really, really want their children to be good?

Enough.  I could go on and on, but it would only become repetitious.  Needless to say, all of this is more akin to mysticism than science.  That’s never been a problem for people like Davis.  If pressed on these matters, they quickly begin striking pious poses, and accuse their opponents of all kinds of moral lapses.  It worked for a long time.  It doesn’t work anymore.  In the end, the truth doesn’t care whether the Davises of the world consider it immoral or not.

Evolutionary Psychology: Do the Psychologists really Get It?

Robert Kurzban has an interesting (and revealing) post at the blog he writes for the journal Evolutionary Psychology.  He cites the following comment that turned up on one of his earlier posts:

The criticism of social scientists for failing to accept an evolutionary explanation for many of the psychological functions they research and teach has been made many many times during the last couple of decades…this criticism usually appears in general terms and without quotations from or citations of published work…Is this criticism now a straw man?

and wonders,

So when didn’t social scientists say that evolutionary psychology was relevant? How would we show, for instance, that they always didn’t accept evolutionary explanations? How can one document being ignored, an act that more or less by definition leaves no traces?

I know! Say what!? That was my reaction, too, but you have to remember this is a relatively young professor speaking. He probably wasn’t even born when Ashley Montagu published Man and Aggression, a whole collection of essays by himself and other luminaries in the social sciences, all saying quite explicitly that what is now called evolutionary psychology was, not only irrelevant, but bunk. When Richard Lewontin published a whole book to that effect, Not in our Genes, in 1985, it is likely Robert ignored it in favor of the far more improving and enlightening comic books available at the time. In a word, he was born too late to experience all the interesting twists and turns relating to the study of human nature during the last half century, and since, to the best of my knowledge at least, no one has ever written a credible history of the relevant events, it’s a “blank slate” (to coin a phrase) as far as he’s concerned.

Alas, I can offer no guidance on how one might document the fact that one is being ignored, but I rather suspect there’s something behind the suspicion.  After all, social scientists were once quite brazen about rejecting any influence of the innate on human behavior, and it stands to reason that they would be somewhat chastened by being put to shame by, among others, a mere playwright by the name of Robert Ardrey.  In the meantime they’ve been buried by such a mountain of evidence that they can’t afford to be quite so brazen any more, but at least they can still pout.  A tendency to ignore evolutionary explanations of human behavior in their work would be an unsurprising manifestation thereof. 

My advice to Prof. Kurzban:  Don’t worry, it’s all good.  The phenomena he’s referring to are an interesting collection of data points on human behavior in their own right, and, in any case, the pouters-in-chief are growing increasingly long in the tooth, and will eventually die off.  Meanwhile, we’ve just experienced a paradigm shift in acceptance of the evolutionary wellsprings of human behavior.  Again, Prof. Kurzban was probably born a bit to late to really grasp what has just happened, but at the moment, books are pouring off the presses in rapid succession that describe the impact of the innate on morality, decision making, and many other aspects of human behavior.  Their reception today is utterly unlike that accorded to books with similar themes in the 60′s and 70′s.  Their authors are not condemned as fascists and racists by their fellow “scientists,” and in the popular media.  Glitzy documentaries do not appear on PBS demonstrating that they are right wing evildoers.  On the contrary, glitzy documentaries appear on PBS praising their conclusions.  They are not ridiculed, as they once were, as “pop ethologists.”  In a word, today’s crop of social scientists may ignore innate behavior, but they are no longer sufficiently suicidal to claim, as they once did, that it doesn’t exist.  Therein lies the paradigm shift. 

We’re hardly out of the woods yet.  Read the comments on Robert’s blog, and you will find some interesting artifacts of ingroup-outgroup behavior and territoriality, in the form of evolutionary psychologists who fondly believe that only they have the right to speak to issues that are of vast significance in philosophy, theology, political science, and, for that matter, to our very survival as a species by virtue of the fact that they have published x number of papers in peer reviewed journals and have been cited x to some exponent number of times by their peers in response.  I have a doctorate in nuclear engineering, and I have worked most of my career in physics.  I would never dare to claim that someone without a Ph.D. in either of those fields is incapable of uttering anything of relevance relating to them.  In fact, I know the contrary to be true.  The most brilliant scientists tend to be focused very narrowly on their research, and are often poor at seeing the big picture.  I find the idea that someone without a certified and approved academic pedigree should not presume to express an opinion regarding behavior dependent on an organ whose workings we are not even close to understanding, namely, the human brain, to be ridiculous.  After the abject debacle of the blank slate?  Please!  Back in the Vietnam days, there was a PFC in my unit named Douglas Littlejohn.  Whenever I made some comment that stretched his credulity to the breaking point, he had a standard reply that seems appropriate here.  “Sir, you must be trying to bullshit me!”

“Stoner” by John Williams

John Edward Williams

What’s great about Stoner?  The same thing that’s great about any great novel.  It gives you an intimate glimpse into the mind of another human being, telling you what they experienced, and how they reacted to it.  In the process, you always recognize yourself; your own thoughts and feelings.

Works like this are written with a simple clarity that’s often missing from the works of philosophy and psychology with which they have much in common.  There’s nothing obscure about them, because the author is unconcerned about impressing you with how smart he is.  Rather, he has an intense desire to make you understand.  Stoner is not only clear, but beautiful.  Many passages in the book read like poetry. 

Look and spread the word.

Darwin’s Unmentionables

Brilliant minds have always debunked prevailing orthodoxies. It’s a measure of the exceptional brilliance of Charles Darwin that he debunked the orthodoxies of religions both spiritual and secular. Of course, the comeuppance of the spiritual true believers was very much above board, punctuated by public spectacles like Clarence Darrow’s skewering of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial. The secular zealots who called the tune in the behavioral sciences through much of the 20th century were a different matter. Their beliefs touching on human nature were every bit as silly as Bishop Ussher’s claim that the earth was only 6000 years old, but they happened to control the message concerning what passed for “science” in such baliwicks as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. More astute than their spiritual brethren, they didn’t deny Darwin. They simply silenced him, or at least those of his theories they happened to find inconvenient.

Perhaps most inconvenient of all were the ideas in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 a year after The Descent of Man. As Joe Cain writes in his introduction to a recent edition of the book,

Darwin’s rhetorical strategy for both books was simple: narrow the sense of a gap between humans and animals. He did this by depicting animals as far more sophisticated (that is, endowed with increasingly human-like qualities) than most people usually acknowledged. He also did this by presenting human beings as carriers of features which were simply extensions of those found in animals.

He complained how frequently observers underrated the faculties of animals, then gave accounts of a myriad of supposedly human qualities found in some form in animals: foresight, memory, reason, imagination, love, jealousy, the ability to learn from mistakes, wonder, curiosity, attention, tool use, inarticulate language, a sense of beauty, and aesthetics.

All this was, of course, anathema to the clergy of the Blank Slate. Something less than 100 years later they were hurling anathemas at the likes of Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, who were saying what was essentially the same thing. They might shout down Ardrey and Lorenz, but it was not so easy to shout down Darwin. Instead, they studiously ignored him, or at least those of his works that touched on innate human behavioral traits.  They had good reason.  At a time (1968) when Ashley Montagu, high priest of the Blank Slaters, was writing things as phantastically silly about human nature as his spiritual counterparts ever wrote about their imaginary super beings, such as,

What is human nature? What is most important to understand in relation to that question is man’s unique evolutionary history, the manner in which an ape was gradually transformed into a man as he moved from a dimension of limited capacity for learning into an increasingly enlarging zone of adaptation in which he became entirely dependent upon learning from the man-make part of the environment, culture, for his development as a functioning human being; that his brain, far from containing any “phylogenetically programmed” determinants for behavior, is characterized by a supremely highly developed generalized capacity for learning; that this principally constitutes his innate hominid nature, and that he has to learn his human nature frofm the human environment, from the culture that humanizes him, and that therefore, given man’s unique educability, human nature is what man learns to become as a human being.

and,

In fact, I also think it very doubtful that any of the great apes have any instincts. On the contrary, it seems that as social animals they must learn from others everything they come to know and do. Their capacities for learning are simply more limited than those of Homo sapiens.

it wouldn’t do to have people repeating things from the pen of a giant like Darwin such as,

Whenever the same movements of the features or body express the same emotions in several distinct races of man, we may infer with much probability, that such expressions are true ones, -that is, are innate or instinctive.

Most of our emotions are so closely connected with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains passive – the nature of the expression depending in chief part on the nature of the actions which have been habitually performed under this particular state of mind.

We have seen that in all parts of the world persons who feel shame for some moral delinquency, are apt to avert, bend down, or hide their faces, independently of any thought about their personal appearance.

and, speaking of a caretaker of the insane,

Dr. Maudsley, after detailing various strange animal-like traits in idiots, asks whether these are not due to the reappearance of primitive instincts – ‘a faint echo from a far-distant past, testifying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown’… ‘the savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene language, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some of the insane? Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?’ The question must, as it would appear, be answered in the affirmative.

In fact, Darwin was merely stating what anyone with a modicum of common sense might infer as an obvious consequence of his theory of evolution by natural selection.  It remained for later generations of behavioral scientists to execute the intellectual contortions and double back flips necessary to deny the obvious and prop up the blank slate.  They did so, not because the blank slate was even remotely plausible or reasonable after the revelations of Darwin, but because it was necessary to conjure up an imaginary race of “human beings” amenable to existence in the Marxist and various other utopias they were concocting for us.

It’s high time that Darwin’s “unmentionable” book was rescued from obscurity.  It deserves to be read.  Anyone who has been following developments in the behavioral sciences for the last decade or so, and, in particular, those that bear on innate human behavior, will notice that it has a surprisingly modern ring to it.  Consider, for example, passages like the following in light of recent research on mirror neurons;

We feel horror if we see any one, for instance a child, exposed to some instant and crushing danger. Almost everyone would experience the same feeling in the highest degree in witnessing a man being tortured or going to be tortured. In these cases there is no danger to ourselves; but from the power of the imagination and of sympathy we put ourselves in the position of the sufferer, and feel something akin to fear.

and, with respect to the recent trend to study children and infants at ever younger ages in order to isolate the innate in human moral behavior,

I shook a pasteboard box close before the eyes of one of my infants, when 114 days old, and it did not in the least wink; but when I put a few comfits into the box, holding it in the same position as before, and rattled them, the child blinked its eyes violently every time, and started a little. It was obviously impossible that a carefully guarded infant could have learnt by experience that such a rattling sound near its eyes indicated danger to them.

There’s another interesting facet of The Expression of the Emotions that reflects the true brilliance and greatness of Darwin.  In marked contrast to the status obsessed denizens of academia in our own day, he was quite capable of admiring and learning from those who hadn’t published in the most up-to-date and approved scientific journals.  One such whom he cited repeatedly in the book as an expert on human behavior was, in fact, a playwright; William Shakespeare.  For example,

The eyes and mouth being widely open is an expression universally recognised as one of surprise or astonishment. Thus Shakespeare says, ‘I saw a smith stand with open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news’ (‘King John’, Act iv, sc. ii). And again, “They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world destroyed. (‘Winter’s Tale’, Act v. sc. ii.)

and,

Shakespeare sums up the chief characteristics of rage as follows:- “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man, As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit To his full height! On, on, you noblest English.”

Oddly enough, the blank slaters accorded the highest respect they were capable of paying to an opponent to another playwright; Robert Ardrey.  For example, writing in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression, psychologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote,

Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser of the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters.

Alas, dear reader, we live in a corrupt age.  The great Darwin felt no embarrassment in heaping even more laurels on the brow of the illustrious bard, but Ardrey, “the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature” but a few decades ago, is forgotten.  You see, he published not a single paper with more than 100 citations in an approved journal.

The Blank Slate Vindicated: Der Spiegel Unearths an Old Believer

Apropos Spiegel magazine, it would seem their team of archeologists has just turned up a fossilized Blank Slater in the person of Jon Beckwith, the Harvard professor who was the first to isolate a gene. In a Spiegel interview, Beckwith railed against studies linking the MAOA gene to asocial behavior. Let’s let Beckwith tell us where the shoe rubs in his own words:

Immediately after the isolation of the gene we called a press conference in Boston to express our concerns. At the time, I didn’t know myself exactly why I was concerned. But in considering what it was that bothered me, I found that I was most concerned about genetic determinism.

It seems to me the good professor is being a bit disingenuous here. He isolated the gene in 1969, in the very heyday of blank slate orthodoxy, when all the “experts” in the behavioral sciences were gravely informing us that there was no such thing as human nature and that, for all practical purposes, all human behavior was learned; a product of culture and environment. This ideological narrative came with distinct political overtones.  Anyone who denied the received “Not in our Genes” wisdom ran the risk of being vilified as a racist and a fascist, and was dismissed as a “genetic determinist.”

In fact, real genetic determinists are as rare as unicorns. I know of no one who can claim the name of scientist without blushing who has ever denied the profound importance of “nurture” in shaping human behavior. “Genetic determinist” was really never anything more than an epithet used to denominate a member of an ideological outgroup. Back in the day, the Blank Slate true believers used the term to demonstrate freedom from such taints.

That was then and this is now. The Blank Slaters now rest slumbering under the mountain of evidence that buried all their fond hopes about the behavioral malleability of our species, and today no one in their right mind denies the importance of innate factors on human behavior. Still, now and then one hears these faint echoes from the past. Old Blank Slaters are like old Communists, defiantly true to the faith in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Capitalist free-for-all in China.  Like them, they will remain Old Believers to the end. One can but wait for them to, as the historian Procopius always said, “Pass from among the world of men.”

As for that slippery MAOA gene, it would seem that Beckwith is a voice in the wilderness.  As he puts it,

According to a study, persons who were mistreated in childhood and also carried a certain variety of the MAOA gene were at increased risk for anti-social behavior. But in the meantime there have been ten studies that have tried to confirm these results. Most of them could not replicate the original findings.

…While no one notices, public opinion is influenced by false, long debunked ideas. In the case of the MAOA gene things went so far, that judges were asking geneticists whether genetics had now revealed that criminals don’t even have free will. The possibility arose that a single study that only investigated a single family could have influenced the outcome of court decisions – an amazing development!

Here the good professor is imposing on our credulity somewhat.  Things were never quite that cut and dried, even in the courts.  Psychiatric News, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, spoke of “mounting evidence” linking MAOA with conduct disorder in an article published in 2004.  Since then, MAOA has also been linked to violent behavior (2006), childhood sex abuse and alcoholism (2007), and even credit card debt (2010).  Evidently the conflicting studies were published in rather obscure journals.  Sadly, Spiegel does not provide us with any links. 

As to Professor Beckwith’s contention that a suitably equipped expedition might capture a genuine Genetic Determinist in the wild wastelands of the dysfunctional and debauched American legal system, one can hardly dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  Even rarer birds turn up occasionally in those realms.

The Case of Margaret Mead: Icon of the Blank Slate

Margaret Mead

I wonder how many of the people who have been furious detractors or avid supporters of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa have actually read the book. Very few, if the comments I’ve seen about it are any guide. The book is supposed to be one of the holy Gospels of the Blank Slate, or the theory that there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as innate human nature, a palpably false notion that somehow managed to mesmerize the practitioners of the sciences of human behavior through much of the 20th century. How such a seemingly innocuous little book could have risen to such prominence and been accorded such ideological significance is a subject that may well busy future generations of psychologists.

On the face of it, the book seems to be a collection of observations concerning the natives of Samoa written by a talented and intelligent young anthropologist who had visited the islands for a period of something under a year. A student of the noted psychologist Frank Boas, she was particularly interested in finding if the apparent stress and strain of adolescence for girls growing up in western societies was really unavoidable, or merely the reflection of a dysfunctional culture. I find no intent to deceive in the book, no excessive confirmation bias, and no evidence that Mead was a person easily duped by the individuals she was studying into believing something that she wanted to believe, but that was actually false.

Boas did Mead no favor by writing in a foreword to the book:

The results of the painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.

The statement is both crudely unscientific (a brief study like Mead’s could “confirm” no such sweeping conclusion one way or the other), and self-contradictory (why would human beings “react to restraints” if it is not their nature to do so?). Such inflammatory nonsense amounted to putting a target on Mead’s back. I am not familiar enough with her work to know if she ever made such a sweeping claim herself in some other work, but nothing like it appears in Coming of Age. In Dilthey’s Dream, a collection of essays by Mead’s great foe, Derek Freeman, he makes the claim,

In the thirteenth chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead went even further, claiming on the basis of her enquiries into adolescence in Samoa, that explanations other than in terms of environmental factors could not be made.

I have carefully parsed the chapter in question, and can only conclude that Freeman had a lively imagination. Mead did constantly stress the importance of culture in the book, but I find nothing, in the thirteenth chapter or elsewhere, that positively excludes other than cultural influences on human behavior. What she actually did say was consistent with a comment that appeared in a preface she wrote for the 1973 edition of the book:

But the renascence of racism among some scientists and the pleas for a harsh, manipulative behavioralism among some psychologists make me wonder whether the modern world understands much more about the significance of culture – the interplay between individual endowment and cultural style, the limits set by biology and the way in which human imagination can transcend those limits – than was known in 1928.

Here Mead is wearing her well-known political activism on her sleeve, but she clearly distances herself from the extreme versions of the Blank Slate that were prevalent in 1973 and explicitly acknowledges that there are “limits set by biology.” This statement, written near the end of her career, seems to position her closer to modern theories of human nature than to the extreme “nurture vs. nature” orthodoxy of the mid-20th century.

Freeman isn’t the only one who has transformed Coming of Age to an ideological icon in his imagination, attributing extreme claims to it that one searches for in vain in the actual book. In rounding up the usual suspects, we find that Steven Pinker, that master chef of philosopher soup, has done the same thing. In his book The Blank Slate, he cites Coming of Age as a prime example of the “noble savage” fallacy, claiming in particular that Mead portrays Samoan society as egalitarian. She does no such thing. Her book is full of descriptions of the hierarchical traditions of the culture, and the consciousness and importance of rank and status. As far as the “noble savage” is concerned, Mead explicitly rejected some aspects of Samoan culture as inimical to those values of Western civilization that she believed should be preserved.

As for Freeman, he was a strange bird. Like Sam Harris, he had the notion that his understanding of human nature was so acute that he could use it to cobble together a new morality. For example, again from Dilthey’s Dream:

One of my main conclusions then is that there is a need for a critical anthropology of human values. Human cultures being value systems are “experiments in living,” and a critical anthropology would be concerned with assessing the consequences of these “experiments in living” in the hope that we might gradually learn to select our values with greater wisdom.

He seems to have elevated Mead to the role of quintessential representative of the Blank Slate in his imagination, and was obsessed with the bizarre notion that, if he could only prove that her claims about sexuality in Samoan adolescents were wrong, he would not only debunk Mead, but single-handedly demolish the Blank Slate itself. In fact, whether adolescent Samoan girls in the 1920s were as chaste as the most straight-laced Victorians, or just as Mead described them, it would “prove” nothing at all about human nature. Factual or not, Mead’s version of Samoan sexuality was well within the parameters already observed in other societies by observers both modern and ancient.

The question remains of whether Mead’s findings about the relative sexual freedom of women and girls in Samoan society were true or, as Freeman claimed, a figment of her imagination based on the claims of Samoan girls who told her what she seemed to want to hear as something of a practical joke. It happens that there is much of relevance to this question in a book entitled An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands by an Englishman who had lived among them for many years published in 1817. Thanks to Google books, this account, a wonderful anthropological study in its own right, can be read online. In includes a section on sexual behavior, noting that married women tended to be true to their husbands, but that marriage bonds were weak, and many of them were married multiple times. Unmarried women, on the other hand, enjoyed virtually untrammeled sexual freedom. Quoting from the book (page 173):

If a man divorces his wife, which is attended with no other ceremony than just telling her that she may go, she becomes perfect mistress of her own conduct, and may marry again, which is often done a few days afterwards, without the least disparagement to her character: or if she chooses, she may remain single and admit a lover occasionally, or may cohabit with her lover for a time, and remain at his house without being considered his wife, having no particular charge of his domestic concerns, and may leave him when she pleases, and this she may also do without the least reproach or secrecy.

…once divorced, they can remain single if they please, and enjoy all the liberty that the most libertine heart can desire.

…As to those women who are not actually married, they may bestow their favours upon whomsoever they please, without any opprobrium.

Remarkably, the author claimed that, in spite of this, the women were relatively chaste, if not compared to Europe, than at least compared to other island groups in the region, including Samoa, to which the natives occasionally traveled in their ocean-going canoes. In a review of the book that appeared in the April 1817 edition of the British Quarterly Review we learn, for example:

The women are much less immodest than in the other islands, and maternal affection exists as strongly among them as among the nations where the instincts of nature are fostered and strengthened by the sense of duty.

In a word, score one for Mead. It would seem that Freeman was the one who had his leg pulled.

If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it is that, before becoming firmly convinced about what an author said, it is useful to actually read her book beforehand.  Paul Shankman has written an account of the Mead – Freeman controversy entitled The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. An interesting review of the book may be found here.