Gods of the Higher Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Intercourse, and Gender within the Twentieth Century
Charles King
Doubleday, 2019
The outline of Charles King at Amazon:
CHARLES KING is the creator of seven books, together with Midnight on the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a Nationwide Jewish Guide Award. His essays and articles have appeared within the The New York Occasions, The Washington Put up, Overseas Affairs, and The New Republic. He’s a professor of worldwide affairs and authorities at Georgetown College.
Everyone knows the state of affairs. We see a terrific cultural shift occurring earlier than our eyes and search to ascribe a purpose. It’s solely pure; man is a sample in search of creature in any case. Suppose we see this shift as a internet unfavourable and may’t assist however discover how a disproportionate variety of Jews are behind it. Effectively, then the Jews and their defenders will most certainly reply in two methods: they’ll downplay the unfavourable (or the Jewish function in it), and they’ll label their accuser an anti-Semite. However, if you happen to describe the very same cultural shift, however as a optimistic factor—and may’t assist however discover all of the Jews behind it—nicely, then you definately’re all proper. The takeaway right here is that telling the reality (or not) is much less necessary than whether or not or not one offends Jews.
I name this phenomenon “samefacting,” and it occurred to me whereas studying Charles King’s 2019 e-book Gods of the Higher Air. Whereas the mud jacket abstract describes it as a “historical past of the beginning of cultural anthropology,” and whereas it does emphasize the lives of a lot of its early gentile adherents (for instance, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston), the e-book focuses most carefully on Franz Boas, the German Jew who based cultural anthropology as an educational self-discipline at Columbia College within the Nineties—and who planted the insidious seed of cultural relativism within the Western thoughts.
As a result of Kevin MacDonald devoted a chapter in The Tradition of Critique to Franz Boas and Boasian anthropology, readers of The Occidental Observer will need to understand how a lot samefacting is happening between MacDonald and King. Reply: fairly a bit.
For instance, in chapter two of The Tradition of Critique, MacDonald writes:
An necessary strategy of the Boasian college was to forged doubt on normal theories of human evolution, resembling these implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the huge range and chaotic trivialities of human habits, in addition to the relativism of requirements of cultural analysis. The Boasians argued that normal theories of cultural evolution should await an in depth cataloguing of cultural range . . .
Simply so, claims King:
With out homogenous, simply identifiable “races,” your complete edifice of racial hierarchy crumbled. “The distinction between several types of man are, on the entire, small as in comparison with the vary of variation in every kind,” Boas concluded. Not solely was there no shiny line dividing one race from one other, however the immense variation inside racial classes known as into query the utility of the idea itself.
These are similar info, in any case. MacDonald and King agree on fairly a bit about Franz Boas and his immense contributions to the sphere of Anthropology. They each recount Boas’ dissent from the prevailing perception that cultures evolve from savagery to barbarism to civilization—with, after all, Nordic Caucasians representing the apotheosis of this course of. They each contact on Boas’ abrasive character, his authoritarian management over his college students, his irrepressible vigor, and his overtly political and ideological targets. King states that Boas “wore his political opinions on his sleeve,” whereas MacDonald states that Boas and his college students have been “intensely involved with pushing an ideological agenda inside the American anthropological career.” In addition they agree on the cultish nature of the Boasian circle, with MacDonald noting its “excessive stage of ingroup identification, exclusionary insurance policies, and cohesiveness in pursuit of frequent pursuits.” For his half, King describes how Boas recruited new anthropologists “with a zeal approaching that of a nascent faith,” and the way he excluded sure people from his circles, for instance Ralph Linton, in the event that they displeased him.
When Ralph Linton, a just lately demobilized battle veteran, confirmed up for his doctoral research wearing his navy uniform, Boas berated him so strongly that Linton quickly transferred to a rival program at Harvard. He would later complain that the “Jewish Ring” at Columbia had conspired to maintain him down.
In Tradition of Critique MacDonald basically adopts Linton’s perspective in that it’s no coincidence that so lots of the Boasians have been Jews. MacDonald additionally explicitly states what Linton within the quote above saved implicit—that Boasian habits accorded with well-known stereotypes of Jews being clannish, cussed, pushy, and subversive. Oddly, King by no means disagrees with this. He makes no secret that a lot of Boas’ college students have been Jews—particularly, Edward Sapir, Alexander Goldenweiser, Paul Radin, and Melville Herskovits. He portrays Boas not less than as being pushy and cussed. Of Boas’ time on the American Museum of Pure Historical past within the Nineties, King writes
[Boas] had a behavior of creating himself extra revered than preferred. His time on the museum had produced new analysis and exhibitions but in addition disappointments, skilled disagreements, and harm emotions amongst his colleagues, who discovered him assured to a fault, officious, and given to pique.
Additional, King describes on many pages how existentially subversive Boas was to the humanities all through his profession. He affords intensive and impeccable proof of how Boas and his ideological progeny finally usurped the race-realists, the Darwinians and the eugenicists who dominated the social sciences on the time. This could come as no shock, given the subtitle of the e-book: “How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Intercourse, and Gender within the Twentieth Century.”
As with different examples of samefacting, the first distinction is a qualitative one. King praises Boas and trumpets Boasian cultural relativism as a “consumer’s handbook for all times” meant to “enliven our ethical sensibility.” In the meantime, MacDonald criticizes Boas and condemns Boasian cultural relativism as scientifically unsound, ethically hypocritical, and finally damaging to white majorities since it’s the lynchpin for arguments supporting mass immigration.
The query needs to be whether or not MacDonald or King is objectively right—not whether or not both man likes or dislikes Jews. And a more in-depth evaluation of Gods of the Higher Air reveals that Charles King has numerous work to do to catch as much as Kevin MacDonald in the case of the reality.
As can be anticipated, King’s e-book affords a lot biographical knowledge on Boas. King is a first-rate author, so if the reader can get previous his left-wing biases (which, to be honest, he doesn’t beat anybody over the pinnacle with) then Gods of the Higher Air is an engrossing learn. King dutifully covers Boas’ upbringing in Germany, his time as a younger researcher within the Arctic among the many Eskimos, his time as a household man and itinerant scholar in the USA, in addition to his triumph on the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. King presents the mental zeitgeist of the day with a tolerably low stage of slant, precisely recapitulating the arguments of race-realists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard and of eugenicists resembling Henry Goddard and Charles Davenport. It’s as if he’s assured that such reactionary takes on the human situation will refute themselves. He’s evenhanded sufficient to humanize his villains. For instance, he reminds the reader that Grant was a passionate conservationist who singlehandedly prevented the American bison from going extinct. King additionally does a splendid job in depicting America on the flip of the final century, a time now gone from dwelling reminiscence.
When setting the stage for the 1893 Chicago Exposition, King affords up this pleasant little passage:
The Halfway Plaisance featured displays on the peculiar methods of the world’s peoples, from a Bedouin encampment to a Viennese café, most of them skinny disguises for hawkers of merchandize and low cost leisure. A whole constructing was devoted solely to the lives and progress of ladies, whereas others highlighted advances in agriculture, electrification, and the plastic arts. A brand new fastener known as a zipper made its debut over the six months of the honest’s operation, as did a chewable gum labeled Juicy Fruit, a tall round experience introduced by a Mr. Ferris, a prize-winning beer provided by the Pabst household, and a breakfast dish with the reasonably complicated identify Cream of Wheat.
The issues of Gods of the Higher Air change into manifest as a lot for what King doesn’t write as for what he does. Boasian cheerleading apart, King principally commits the identical sin Stephen Jay Gould dedicated in his notorious 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man: he’s content material to refute race realism because it was a century in the past however not how it’s in the present day, and even because it was fifty years in the past. Additional, he cherry picks a few of the extra egregious errors made by race-realist pioneers with their calipers and head measurements and outlandish classification schemes (for instance, “Dolichocephalic Nordics” and “Brachycephalic Alpines”). With the boldness of momentum, King then feels he can safely declare that “[h]ow we outline intelligence is the results of a social course of, not a organic one.” By no means as soon as does he point out the analysis of Arthur Jensen or J. Phillipe Rushton or the mountain of knowledge proving race-realism to be right—simply as he retains mum about Kevin MacDonald. To say any of this may require extra refutation than Charles King is ready (or may ever be ready) to do. So, he chooses to disregard counter-argument and fake that he and Franz Boas are comfortably on the best aspect of historical past—which they aren’t, as a result of they’re mistaken.
King can be blind to the central Boasian contradiction (some would say double customary) which requires unreasonably vigorous requirements when proving human variations and virtually no requirements in any respect when testifying to human sameness. Quite a few instances, King describes how Boas demanded that his college students by no means leap to conclusions earlier than assessing proof. On the similar time, nevertheless, King fortunately repeats such glib and unproven egalitarian mantras from Boas resembling “Cultures are many; man is one.”
It’s about as cowardly as it’s dishonest.
One other dishonorable side of Gods of the Higher Air is King’s kid-glove therapy of Boas’ star pupil Margaret Mead. King isn’t so ham-fisted as to painting her as some genius-level forward-thinking visionary, however his sympathetic tackle her does come shut at instances. One web page one of many e-book he describes this fascinating and mysterious younger girl as having “left behind a husband in New York, a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental practice experience within the arms of a girl.” These are good issues, apparently. Mead, who by no means appeared to take to sexual self-discipline, realized the time period “polygamy” in anthropology class someday, after which devoted her life to creating the Western world much less sexually repressive, probably so she may interact within the follow herself. And she or he did this by holding up sexually permissive Third World societies as examples. This amounted to fixing the “intercourse downside,” as she known as it—even when the societies she fetishized have been in actuality not as sexually permissive as she claimed. If this sounds sordid, that’s as a result of it was. King doesn’t assist issues by delving into the petty social sniping that Mead and her circle continuously engaged in. Sapir, for instance, had been Mead’s lover for a time, and by no means appeared to beat being spurned by her. He would continuously dismiss her work to their colleagues, and at one level prompt she be totally institutionalized. In 1933, Mead even fashioned a triangle between her husband Reo Fortune and her lover Gregory Bateson (each anthropologists) whereas all three have been on web site in Melanesia. She and Fortune would argue bitterly, even violently. Alcohol, for Fortune not less than, was a serious element.
Say what you need about Franz Boas, however based on King he was the paragon of sophistication in comparison with this.
Mead was disciplined sufficient to work within the discipline and write about it. She was good, severe, and prolific. She deserves credit score for that. However, given the historic file, King merely can not get across the girl’s perverse fixation on intercourse:
Mead, too, needed to find out about folks’s lives: how they thought of childhood and getting old, what it meant to be an grownup, what they considered sexual pleasure, whom they liked, once they felt the sting of public humiliation or the gnawing illness of personal disgrace.
What he does get round to—considerably—is Mead’s shoddy scholarship. When doing analysis for her first e-book Coming of Age in Samoa in 1925, Mead determined to go away the village of Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila as a result of it had been “corrupted” by the affect of Christian missionaries and the American navy. She traveled to the extra distant island of Ta’u to proceed her analysis. There she occupied a room within the house of an American household. That is how King describes the expertise:
She had fearful that this may not represent actual fieldwork. As she wrote to Boas, she was torn between the need to dwell like a local and the necessity to have sufficient quiet time to write down notes and replicate on her experiences, one thing that might have been tough in an open-sided, communal Samoan home.She may need been doing anthropology from the veranda—her room consisted of half of the Holts’ again porch, screened off by a skinny bamboo barrier—however she was by no means in need of informants. Youngsters and youngsters flocked to her for dialog and impromptu dance events, arriving as early as 5 within the morning and staying till midnight.
Later, after a flash of perception which prompt that primitive societies should not as ritualistic as beforehand believed, she started to query youngsters and youths about sexual practices, together with their very own. She then claimed to have realized that intercourse in Samoa was no huge deal in comparison with the way it was in the USA. Samoan children didn’t appear to undergo the identical rising pains as adolescents did the place Mead was from. Thus, Mead got here to her grand conclusion concerning the struggles of youth: “The stress is within the civilization, not within the bodily adjustments by means of which our kids move.” Thusly, nurture surpasses nature.
Now, I’m on no account an knowledgeable within the historical past of anthropology, however having learn this I knew one thing was amiss. Sure, King admits that Coming of Age in Samoa “was filled with bravado and overstatement, free argument, and infrequently purple writing—very very similar to each different work of anthropology written on the time.” He quibbles about Mead’s small pattern measurement and mentions what number of Samoans themselves have been displeased with Mead’s portrayal of them. However wasn’t there extra? I remembered studying that Mead had performed some shady issues whereas in Samoa. Certain sufficient, three volumes in my library (together with The Tradition of Critique) recounted a few of Mead’s lower than scholarly practices.
Steven Goldberg in his 1993 work Why Males Rule (the unique version of which, within the Seventies, Margaret Mead herself reviewed), gives an instance of how Mead’s conclusions don’t comply with from her knowledge. Additional, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson recall of their 1996 work Demonic Males how Mead left Pago Pago not as a result of it “had little left to supply,” as King places it, however due to (as Mead herself describes in a letter to Boas) the “nervewracking circumstances of dwelling with half a dozen folks in a home with out partitions, all the time sitting on the ground and sleeping within the fixed expectation of getting a pig or hen thrust itself upon one’s discover.” Mead had spent ten days in a Samoan family in Pago Pago and determined that that was sufficient.
King is dishonest for not mentioning this. He’s dishonest for not mentioning how police experiences from Samoa from the time of Mead’s go to contradict a lot of her rosy conclusions on sexual violence. He’s dishonest additionally for not mentioning how Mead hardly ever included primitive war-making or violence (sexual or in any other case) in her analyses. (MacDonald bangs this level house properly in Tradition of Critique.) Lastly, King is kind of sneaky when he downplays Derek Freeman’s withering criticisms of Mead in a footnote on web page 368 reasonably than within the physique of his textual content.
As for samefacting Franz Boas alongside the MacDonald-King divide, I discovered one exception. In Tradition of Critique, MacDonald writes that Boas “was deeply alienated from and hostile in direction of gentile tradition, notably the cultural ultimate of the Prussian aristocracy.” As typical, he lists his sources proper there on the web page (George W. Stocking’s Race, Evolution, and Tradition from 1968 and Carl Deglers’ In Search of Human Nature from 1991). But, within the early Eighteen Eighties, when a younger Boas had simply left Germany on a ship certain for the Arctic the place he would do his first anthropological analysis, he wrote in his diary, “Farewell, my expensive homeland! Expensive homeland, adieu!” This may increasingly not imply a lot, however I did discover it shocking. Maybe Boas turned extra alienated as he grew older. King actually doesn’t report any normal animosity from Boas in direction of gentile tradition—however that doesn’t imply there wasn’t any. In Gods of the Higher Air, Boas reserved most of his ire for anybody supporting organic determinism, or who aggravated him personally.
Both manner, nevertheless, this does lead us to the one episode in Gods of the Higher Air during which Franz Boas is portrayed sympathetically. Through the years earlier than America’s entry into the First World Struggle, he was vocally in favor of Germany and in opposition to American intervention. Though I don’t problem Boas’ Jewish identification making up an enormous a part of his character, I ponder if his Jewishness had something to do along with his ardent pro-German stance in 1916. King appears to imagine this got here as results of Boas’ pure affinity in direction of his nation of beginning—which does considerably problem MacDonald’s interpretation above. Additional, Boas did stroll it like he talked it, and suffered main profession setbacks after the battle for his unpopular, and a few would say treasonous, opinions.
Nonetheless, it may be argued that Boas’ help for Germany hinged way more on the comparatively excessive diploma of emancipation German Jews loved on the time than for something inherent about Germans or Germany. This is able to clarify why the Germanistic Society of America (for which Boas was secretary at one level) contained so many influential and ethnocentric Jews as members—Jews resembling the long run Soviet financier Jacob Schiff. Boas’ help for Germany may be defined by German antagonism towards Czarist Russia through the battle. As MacDonald writes in an ongoing revision of Tradition of Critique:
It’s generally argued {that a} letter from 1916 decrying criticism of German throughout World Struggle I exhibits the predominance of Boas’s German identification. Nevertheless, it needs to be identified that by far essentially the most outstanding perspective of Diaspora Jewish communities was to oppose Czarist Russia due to its perceived anti-Semitism and thus help the German battle effort. For instance, immigrant Jews within the U.Ok. overwhelmingly refused to be drafted into navy service as a result of Germany was combating Russia.
Regardless, this can be the exception that proves the rule. In some ways Kevin MacDonald’s chapter on Franz Boas in The Tradition of Critique reads like a condensed model of the Boas chapters in Gods of the Higher Air. The info are the identical—however because it usually is with the Jews, it’s the way you say them that makes all of the distinction.
