Ostensibly, the\u00a0“triumph” Cravens’ title refers to is the demise of\u00a0what he calls the\u00a0“extreme hereditarian” interpretations of human behavior that prevailed in the late 19th and early 20th century in favor of a more “balanced” approach that recognized the importance of culture, as revealed by a systematic application of the scientific method.\u00a0 One certainly can’t fault him for being superficial.\u00a0 He introduces us to most of the key movers and shakers in the behavioral sciences in the period in question.\u00a0 There are\u00a0minutiae\u00a0about the contents of papers in old scientific journals, comments gleaned from personal correspondence, who said what at long forgotten scientific conferences, which colleges and universities had strong programs in psychology, sociology and anthropology more than 100 years ago, and who supported them, etc., etc.\u00a0 He guides us into his narrative so gently that we hardly realize we’re being led by the nose.\u00a0 Gradually, however, the picture comes into focus.<\/p>\n
It goes something like this.\u00a0 In\u00a0bygone days before the “triumph of evolution,” the existence of human “instincts” was taken for granted.\u00a0 Their importance seemed even more obvious in light of the rediscovery of Mendel’s work.\u00a0 As Cravens put it,<\/p>\n
While it would be inaccurate to say that most American experimentalists concluded as\u00a0 the result of the general acceptance of Mendelism by 1910 or so that heredity was all powerful and environment of no consequence, it was nevertheless true that heredity occupied a much more prominent place than environment in their writings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This sort of “subtlety” is characteristic of Cravens’ writing.\u00a0 Here, he\u00a0doesn’t accuse the scientists he’s referring to of being outright genetic determinists.\u00a0 They just have an “undue” tendency to overemphasize heredity.\u00a0 It is only gradually, and by dint of occasional reading between the lines that we learn the “true” nature of these believers in human “instinct.”\u00a0 Without ever seeing anything as blatant\u00a0as a mention of\u00a0Marxism, we learn that their “science” was really just a reflection of their “class.”\u00a0 For example,<\/p>\n
But there were other reasons why so many American psychologists emphasized heredity over environment.\u00a0 They shared the same general ethnocultural and class background as did the biologists.\u00a0 Like the biologists, they grew up in middle class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant homes, in a subculture where the individual was the focal point of social explanation and comment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As we read on, we find Cravens is obsessed with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, noting that the “wrong” kind of scientists belong to that “class” scores of times.\u00a0 Among other things, they dominate the eugenics movement, and are innocently referred to as Social Darwinists, as if these terms had never been used in a pejorative sense.\u00a0 In general they are supposed to\u00a0oppose immigration from other than “Nordic” countries, and tend to support “neo-Lamarckian” doctrines, and believe blindly that intelligence test results are independent of “social circumstances and milieu.”\u00a0 As we read further into\u00a0Section I\u00a0of the book, we are introduced to a whole swarm of these instinct-believing WASPs.<\/p>\n
In Section II, however, we begin to see the first glimmerings of a new,\u00a0critical and truly scientific\u00a0approach to the question of human instincts.\u00a0 Men like Franz Boas, Robert Lowie, and Alfred Kroeber, began to insist on the importance of culture.\u00a0 Furthermore, they believed that their “culture idea” could be studied in isolation in such disciplines as sociology and anthropology, insisting on sharp, “territorial” boundaries\u00a0that would protect\u00a0their favored disciplines from the defiling influence of instincts.\u00a0 As one might expect,<\/p>\n
The Boasians were separated from WASP culture; several were immigrants, of Jewish background, or both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A bit later they were joined by joined by John Watson and his behaviorists who, after performing some experiments on animals and human infants, apparently experienced an epiphany.\u00a0 As Cravens puts it,<\/p>\n
To his amazement, Watson concluded that the James-McDougall human instinct theory had no demonstrable experimental basis.\u00a0 He found the instinct theorists had greatly overestimated the number of original emotional reactions in infants.\u00a0 For all practical purposes, he realized that there were no human instincts determining the behavior of adults or even of children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Perhaps more amazing is the fact that Cravens suspected not a hint of a tendency to replace science with dogma in all this.\u00a0 As Leibniz might have put it, everything was for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds.\u00a0 Everything pointed to the “triumph of evolution.”\u00a0 According to Cravens, the “triumph” came with astonishing speed:<\/p>\n
By the early 1920s the controversy was over.\u00a0 Subsequently, psychologists and sociologists joined hands to work out a new interdisciplinary model of the sources of human conduct and emotion stressing the interaction of heredity and environment, of innate and acquired characters – in short, the balance of man’s nature and his culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Alas, my dear Cravens, the controversy was just beginning.\u00a0 In what follows, he allows us a glimpse at just what kind of “balance” he’s referring to.\u00a0 As we read on into Section 3 of the book, he finally gets around to setting the hook:<\/p>\n
Within two years of the Nazi collapse in Europe Science<\/em> published an article symptomatic of a profound theoretical reorientation in the American natural and social sciences.\u00a0 In that article Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist, and M. F. Ashley-Montagu, an anthropologist, summarized and synthesized what the last quarter century’s work in their respective fields implied for extreme hereditarian explanations of human nature and conduct.\u00a0 Their overarching thesis was that man was the product of biological and social evolution.\u00a0 Even though man in his biological aspects was as subject to natural processes as any other species, in certain critical respects he was unique in nature, for the specific system of genes that created an identifiably human mentality also permitted man to experience cultural evolution… Dobzhansky and Ashley-Montagu continued, “Instead of having his responses genetically fixed as in other animal species, man is a species that invents its own responses, and it is out of this unique ability to invent…\u00a0 his responses that his cultures are born.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and, finally, in the conclusions, after assuring us that,<\/p>\n
By the early 1940s the nature-nurture controversy had run its course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Cravens leaves us with some closing sentences that epitomize his “triumph of evolution:”<\/p>\n
The long-range, historical function of the new evolutionary science was to resolve the basic questions about human nature in a secular and scientific way, and thus provide the possibilities for social order and control in an entirely new kind of society.\u00a0 Apparently this was a most successful and enduring campaign in American culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
At this point, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.\u00a0 Apparently Cravens, who has just supplied us with arcane details\u00a0about who said what at obscure scientific conferences half a century and more before he published his book was completely unawares\u00a0of exactly what\u00a0Ashley Montagu, his herald of the new world order, meant when he referred to “extreme hereditarian explanations,” in spite of the fact that he spelled it out ten years earlier in an invaluable little pocket guide for the followers of the “new science” entitled Man and Aggression<\/em>.\u00a0 There Montagu describes\u00a0the sort of “balance of man’s nature and his culture” he intended as follows:<\/p>\n
Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
and,<\/p>\n
There is, in fact, not the slightest evidence or ground for assuming that the alleged “phylogenetically adapted instinctive” behavior of other animals is in any way relevant to the discussion of the motive-forces of human behavior.\u00a0 The fact is, that with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So much for Cravens’ “balance.”\u00a0 He spills a great deal of ink in his book assuring us that the Blank Slate orthodoxy he defends was the product of “science,” little influenced by\u00a0any political or ideological bias.\u00a0 Apparently he also didn’t notice that, not only in Man and Aggression<\/em>, but ubiquitously in the Blank Slate literature, the “new science” is defended over and over and over again with the “argument” that anyone who opposes it is a racist and a\u00a0fascist, not to mention far right wing.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, Cravens didn’t completely lapse into a coma following the publication of Ashley Montagu’s\u00a01947\u00a0pronunciamiento<\/em> in Science<\/em>.\u00a0 In his “Conclusion” we discover that, after all, he had a vague presentiment of the avalanche that would soon make a shambles of his “new evolutionary science.”\u00a0 In his words,<\/p>\n
Of course in recent years something approximating at least a minor revival of the old nature-nurture controversy seems to have arisen in American science and politics.\u00a0 It is certainly quite possible that this will lead to a full scale nature-nurture controversy in time, not simply because of the potential for a new model of nature that would permit a new debate, but also, as one historian has pointed out, because our own time, like the 1920s, has been a period of racial and ethnic polarization.\u00a0 Obviously any further comment would be premature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Obviously, my dear Cravens.\u00a0 What’s the moral of the story, dear reader?\u00a0\u00a0 Well, among other things, that if you really want to learn something about the Blank Slate, you’d better not be shy of wading through the source literature yourself.\u00a0 It’s still out there, waiting to be discovered.\u00a0 One particularly rich source of historical nuggets is H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury<\/a>, which Ron Unz has been so kind as to post online.\u00a0 Mencken took a personal interest in the “nature vs. nurture” controversy, and took care to publish articles by heavy hitters on both sides.\u00a0 For a rather different take than Cravens on the motivations of the early Blank Slaters, see for example, Heredity and the Uplift<\/a>, by H. M. Parshley.\u00a0 Parshley was an interesting character who took on no less an opponent than Clarence Darrow in a debate over eugenics, and later translated Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist manifesto\u00a0The Second Sex<\/em><\/a> into English.<\/p>\n
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