The View From 1776

In Dastardly Diversity I wrote:

“In the early decades of the 20th century, Columbia University sociologist Franz Boas and his acolytes Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead sold the modernist intellectuals in Greenwich Village the socialistic hypothesis that cultures and human behavior standards are relativistic and merely the product of their surrounding material circumstances of economy and geography." 

Mr. Anthony David has kindly shared his disagreements in a recent email:

Mr. David:

First, the obvious point, Franz Boas was not a sociologist. He was an anthropologist. Indeed, he is often credited with being the father of American anthropology (as against French or British anthropology). American anthropology differs from British anthropology and sociology in many important respects. There is the plural sense of cultures. There is also the fact that American anthropology is made up of four subfields. Linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and social or cultural anthropology (this depends a bit on which graduate program you get your PhD from). To state that Boas was a sociologist is bad scholarship.

My Reply:

Mr. David is, of course, correct.  Whether Professor Boas was an anthropologist or a sociologist, however, in no way affects the point I made.

Mr. David:

Second, Benedict and Mead--as well as Kroeber, Sapir, Lowie, Radin, Goddard, Speck, and others--were not “acolytes,” they were his students at Columbia. Each, in their own way, expanded on the research agenda of Boas. To state that they were acolytes” is misleading.

My Reply:

The American Heritage dictionary defines acolyte as both one who assists a priest in celebration of the mass, and as an attendant or follower.  Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were more than just Boas’s students.  They were his graduate student assistants who worked closely with him in their own research.

Mr. David:

Third, Boas, Benedict and Mead were not moral relativists. That is a flat out lie. Boas argued that one needed to understand a culture first on its own terms and then, then one could evaluate it. Boas wrote often against the racism of the day. He opposed racist policies that a reactionary US government attempted to pass. And long before it was fashionable, Boas was arguing against the policies of Hitler and the Nazis. Benedict and Mead were both involved in the US war effort against the Japanese and the Nazis (Boas was until he died in 1942). They understood the dangers of narrow-minded dictators who believed their view was the only view. They understood the dangers of tyrants who rid the world of diversity by killing those who were different. They understood the dangers of governments that showed no tolerance for difference, that saw difference as a negative. Boas would have none of that nonsense. And you wrote popular articles (as did Benedict) showing the dangers of the Nazis. They were not moral relativists. They saw an evil and they stood up to it. You are a liar when you claim otherwise.

My Reply:

Opposing a common enemy like the Nazis has no necessary bearing upon whether one is a moral relativist.

Moral relativism is the renunciation of a higher law of morality emanating from God, expressed in the Judeo-Christian morality that constituted Western civilization from fall of the Western Roman empire in the 5th century AD until the 19th century. 

Professor Boas was immersed in the climate of opinion prevailing after Darwin’s 1859 “On the Origin of Species,” which Boas’s fellow Columbia University professor John Dewey said proved that there are no eternal principles of morality, because everything is continually evolving.  Right and wrong are value judgments forbidden to social scientists.  All that counts is whether your actions get you what you want, in effect, Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

In “Rendezvous with Destiny,” Princeton history professor Eric F. Goldman wrote:

“In 1908, in one of his earlier generalizations. Boas argued that anthropology is important because it ‘teaches better than any other science the relativity of the values of civilization.’”

In “The End of American Innocence,” Henry F. May, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote “...the Young Intellectuals turned instead to the Boas school of anthropology.  From it they learned, with pleasure, that there was no sound reason for assuming that any one culture was superior to another.”
  

Mr. David:

Beyond that, Boas was no Marxist.

My Reply:

Nowhere did I say the he was.  However, Boas himself wrote, “The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force.” 1848 was, of course, the publication date of Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” which expressed the political ideas of that revolution.

Mr. David:

Environment did not determine cultures. The empirical evidence showed that. The Navajo are not the Hopi. Same environment, differnet cultures. Same thing for economy and geography. In fact Boas argued against that kind of reductionist view of culture. He wanted to understand cultures as products of particular moments and movements in history (what has become historical particularism). There is no point in doing anthropology if the environment or geography determines a culture. Rather, because people have agency and because there is time depth (i.e., history), we need to understand the particulars of a given culture. One way to understand that is through “the Native’s point of view.” Hence the Boasian goal to collect Native language texts.
   

You’ve lied about Franz Boas. I take that personally, he is my intellectual great-great grandfather (through Sapir) and you have just lied about him. You are a liar. No one is so stupid that they would not have done the basic research on what Boas actually wrote and what he actually said. The man left a great deal of writings. Not the least of which was Race, Language, and Culture where he was pretty clear about his condemnation of racism in all its forms. And about the dangers of racism. Anyone who would write about Boas would at least be aware of that book. You are aware of it. You lied.
   

My Reply:

Once again, condemnation of racism or Nazism has no bearing upon whether one is a moral relativist.  Professor Boas’s opposition to those views arose from his struggle to combat anti-semitism by discrediting the prevailing WASP culture.  A moral relativist would say that those aims justify any methods, that there are no standards of conduct to gainsay one or another means.

With regard to the effect of environment, Professor Boas did write in his 1912 study “Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants” that, as a result of environmental factors, skull indices of Jewish and Italian immigrants changed appreciably after the first generation.  This, among other conclusions, he used to support the generalization that there was no such thing as an Anglo-Saxon race.

In that connection, a New York Times article dated October 8, 2002, written by Nicholas Wade, reported:

“Two physical anthropologists have reanalyzed data gathered by Franz Boas, a founder of American anthropology, and report that he erred in saying environment influenced human head shape. Boas’s data, the two scientists say, show almost no such effect.....

“I have used Boas’s study to fight what I guess could be considered racist approaches to anthropology,” said Dr. David Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “I have to say I am shocked at the findings.”

A scientist willing to fudge the numbers to reach a pre-conclusion is a moral relativist, i.e., he accepts John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy that teaches the end justifies the means.

Mr. David:

As for Benedict, I agree with Sapir, cultures do not have personalities. People do. Benedict got that wrong. But she was no moral relativist either. The books she wrote for the war effort make that clear. You lied about her too.
   

My Reply:

Repeating my rejoinder above, opposing a common enemy like the Nazis has no necessary bearing upon whether one is a moral relativist.  Nor does being opposed to racism have any bearing upon whether one is a moral relativist; it is simply a viewpoint.

Ruth Benedict’s 1934 “Patterns of Culture” depicts a profusion of tribal customs and ceremonies and wide differences between societies about what elements of tribal life are most important and what sorts of behavior are taboo.  These dramatic variations between cultures were interpreted as evidence that there is no human nature, that humans are fundamentally plastic and can be made into entirely different creatures when reared within different cultures. 

To reach this conclusion, one must overlook the fact that humans are not just slightly different from the apes, but radically so.  There is undeniably something called human nature, which has changed not a whit since humans began leaving evidence of their activities, beginning with the beautiful, fluid cave painting in Altamira and elsewhere, said to be approximately 32,000 years old. 

All humans have speech, most have written languages or sign systems, all paint pictures, sing songs, and tell jokes.  In all societies (at least before today) people lived in family units to nurture their children.  The concept of fairness is universal and evidently hardwired into human nature.  All societies have moral codes, ranging from taboos to the Ten Commandments.  Moreover no society has existed anywhere at any time without a religion to explain its nature and origin.

None of this may be said of any other living creature.

In effect, Benedict went into a forest, observed many variations among maples and oaks, concluded that each tree was a unique species, that there is no such thing as an oak or a maple, and no such thing as a forest.

Cultures, she said, are neither good nor bad, just different.  Thus Judeo-Christianity had no special claim to validity.  The age-old study, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, to ascertain the best form of society is, in Benedict’s perception, meaningless.  How this squares with her purported opposition to Nazism is not explained (and must not be taken, when uttered by a social scientist, as a value judgment).

Ruth Benedict’s conclusion that one culture is as good as the next sets society on the path to suicide.

The fatal error in the relativistic line of reasoning is that all political views, no matter how vile, must be given equal time and respect, as astonishingly they are in today’s educational system.  Professor James Q. Wilson, a noted authority on questions of ethics and morality, has described his dismay with the current crop of college students who are being educated in the relativistic views of Ruth Benedict’s multi-culturalism.  When attempting to find some element of agreement in his classes, he stated that surely everyone would condemn the Holocaust, but was dumbfounded when most of his students demurred, noting that one had to consider it also from Hitler’s viewpoint.  If there are no universal truths, there is no basis for condemning anything.

Cultural relativism provides no fixed basing point, as does natural law, against which to measure the actions of a German National Socialist Party.  Dr. Benedict’s cultural relativism thus achieves the exact opposite of its intention by legitimizing the Nazi regime with the justification that Thomas Hobbes used for the Stuarts’ claim to divine right of kings:  Whoever can command sufficient force to impose social order on his terms is the legitimate ruler for the moment, and, there being no higher law inherent in human nature, the law is whatever that ruler says it is.  This was simply an earlier way of stating Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine of natural selection.

Mr. David:

As for Mead, she was in many ways the least Boasian of the Boasians. But she was no moral relativist. And you have mis-stated her position as well. Indeed, you lied about her. You lied about three scholars who are dead. Three people who worked--imperfectly to be sure--at trying to decrease the amount of hatred in this world. People who spent their lives taking a stand against racism and anti-Semitism. I’m no moral relativist either. You are a liar. That simple. You are full of crap. You can either apologize for lying about them or prove yourself a lying piece of crap.

My Reply:

Houghton Mifflin Company’s American History - Social Sciences web reference states:

“The second nontechnocratic impulse installed the social scientist in the role of public moralist previously filled by the clergy and by men and women of letters. Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928) combined an anthropologist’s report of fieldwork in the South Pacific with a social critic’s opinions concerning the basic values that ought to inform the lives of Americans.”

Mead’s major thrust in “Coming of Age in Samoa” was to downplay the role of chastity and to promote Emma Goldman’s anarchistic views that marriage is sexual slavery.  Mead’s “public morality” views about the acceptability of teen-age sexual promiscuity and of free-love, as it was then called, were standard fare for radical socialists in Europe and the United States.

Socialists, and those like Margaret Mead influenced by them, were intent upon finding some sort of anthropological support for the view that Judeo-Christian morality was just superstitious ignorance of the same sort as the practices of primitive witch doctors.  Attacking marital fidelity, a fundamental Judeo-Christian value, was a preoccupation for the social scientists at Columbia University and for the Greenwich Village intellectual community in the 1920s.

Mead’s work has since been widely discredited.  The late Dr. Derek Freeman, former director of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, began his career as a follower of Margaret Mead.  To his dismay, when he visited Samoa, he could find nothing to substantiate Mead’s reports of uncomplicated sexual freedom.  After extensive research in Samoa, Dr.Freeman concluded that her findings had been formulated to fit her preconceptions about what social customs ought to be.

Despite angry denunciations from Mead’s Columbia University friends, most anthropologists have accepted Dr. Freeman’s assessment, because no evidence to support Mead’s position has been found by anyone.

One may ask, if Mead’s actions – fabricating data to support the preconception that there in neither wrong nor right – is not moral relativism, what is?  In any case, it certainly wasn’t science of any variety.

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