Nurture, Not Nature – Minding The Campus
American cultural anthropology has a lot to answer for.
Its icons people like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir were the indispensable precursors of the woke ideology now so deeply entrenched in our schools and universities, courts, politics, and business.
This is not to say that cultural anthropology is the sole source of wokeism, but that its contribution was seminal. Its mid-twentieth-century practitioners took what began as a simple field method, cultural relativism, and by insensible degrees transformed it into a philosophical movement. What started out as the common-sense proposition that you could only understand a culture from the inside was soon transformed into the rather different notion that every culture was just as good as every other culture, and that there was no ground on which to prefer one over the other.
There is nothing about the first proposition that leads inexorably or logically to the second. So, what might explain the leap of faith and logic? One little-examined possibility is that these pioneers of American cultural anthropology were looking outside America for examples of cultures that accepted, or even celebrated, sexual and other behaviors that appealed to them but that were socially sanctioned at home.
The logic is clear. If Culture A finds Behavior B normal, then, when other cultures designate B abnormal, that designation is arbitrary, not natural. If America finds same-sex attraction unnatural, but South Sea Islanders don t, then America cannot claim its attitudes are rooted in nature. They must be mere prejudice instead, and persistent prejudice cannot be morally justified.
But what if these early practitioners of cultural anthropology, driven by a desire to normalize their own behavior at home, committed the cardinal scientific sin of reading into cultures what they needed to find there, rather than describing those cultures as they found them? If so, subsequent anthropological investigations of those same cultures would not reproduce the pioneers original findings, and cultural anthropology s contribution to the intellectual foundations of wokeism would be revealed as a sham and a travesty. This article presents the prosecution s case against cultural anthropology s American founders.
Based on what I saw of cultural anthropology in the 1970s, I won’t take much convincing.