I came to the party a bit late, but after reading the infamous “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences” written by Ten People Smarter Than You, it strikes me that a rebuttal isn’t even appropriate. Agustín Fuentes and Michael Berubé have criticized the report brilliantly.
Actually, the bulk of the report is given to an (uncredited) rehash of Gross and Levitt’s idiotic 1994 book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. In short, postmodernism and relativism are bad, because they deny reality. And we all should agree on reality. Especially theirs.
In other words, there really is a “view from nowhere”, and somewhat paradoxically that’s where they are positioning themselves.
Clearly not much progress has been made in the grievances against “the academic left,” albeit with one rhetorical update. The new report places itself explicitly against “social justice” as a component of education. And yet, according to the accepted rules of English usage, the only alternatives to “social justice” would either be “anti-social justice” or “social injustice”. Why anyone would wish to present either of those ideas normatively in a college class is completely beyond me. But I’m just an old country anthropologist, whose university has actually taken punitive action against me for publicly expressing my view that basically a world with one less fascist televangelist is a better world.
But enough about me.
Since all of this news is old, I honestly think it would be best to outline the major features of how anthropology has been consistently threatening over all of the generations of its existence. I note that the report emphasizes the importance of “agreed-upon facts” (so that anything they disagree with automatically becomes a non-fact). But I think we can all agree upon these.
1. The experiences that seem normal and natural to you are generally the products of history, not of biology.
It does seem reasonable and polite to say “God bless you” after someone sneezes, but the very first generation of anthropologists, back in the 1870s, recognized that as a “survival” – an act that was meaningful when Europeans thought that your soul might slip out of your body with a strong achoo. Now we continue to say it, but we mean something different, like “Cover your fucking mouth, do you want to make me sick?”
How you dress or otherwise decorate yourself, whom you consider family, how you communicate with other people, how you eat, even how you sleep – all the products of history. That you eat and sleep are biological, of course, but pretty much everything else about them is cultural history.
The moral issue is that disreputable behavior can easily be deflected to “human nature” by creatively imagining some biology. That way, moral accountability for the act can be circumvented, laid at the feet of Darwin or Mendel, or Watson and Crick. Some people, for example, have asserted that war is human nature, for its ubiquity. On the other hand, peace is also ubiquitous, but not nearly as noisy. But if ubiquity is evidence of human nature, and both war and peace are ubiquitous, then biology isn’t really an explanation for war. Wars are fought for reasons other than human biology.
2. The Bible does not represent human prehistory accurately. It is a collection of sacred literature, compiled over centuries in different times and places and languages.
Some televangelists, like the late Charlie Kirk, reject biological evolution and seem committed to the proposition that God handed King James a quill in 1611 and began dictating to him. Real biblical scholars, however, rely on real scholarship to make actual sense of the Bible. The proper context for understanding the Bible, certainly since James Frazer’s 1890 classic, The Golden Bough, is “myths and legends of the ancient Near East,” not “things that I must believe or else I’ll go to hell”.
For example, the Bible cites the non-existent Book of Jashar twice (in Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18). It would seem as though the Bible is sacred literature, some of which got lost or tossed along the way here. Or else God is guilty of falsely citing references, and deserves an F for that assignment.
For example, King Solomon has a sphere constructed for his Temple in I Kings 7:23. The Bible says, very clearly, that it was ten cubits wide and that a line of thirty cubits would completely encircle it. However, it is a universally agreed-upon fact that a circumference is diameter times pi, and a quick bit of arithmetic on that biblical verse will reveal that pi = 3. Pi, however, does not equal 3, and Solomon’s line of thirty cubits would actually fall approximately 1.4159 cubits short. Was that passage written by someone who knew that pi was about 3, or did pi miraculously have a different value back then?
For example, Genesis 1 makes it very explicit that humans were created by God after all of the animals and birds and fish. Genesis 2 makes it very explicit that the animals were created after Adam, but before Eve. Is this the result of two different traditional creation stories having been spliced together by ancient redactors? Or does Creation transcend temporality, rendering concepts like “before” and “after” meaningless?
Check out my book, Why are There Still Creationists? (Polity Press, 2021).
3. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
This is a moral guideline attributed to Jesus by the evangelists Matthew (7:1) and Luke (6:37). Mark and John missed that one, but for the present context, it is close to what anthropologists of the modern age have come to call cultural relativism. Actually it was called “cultural relativity” by Ruth Benedict in 1935, invoking the German philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler explicitly, and Albert Einstein implicitly. What it has generally meant since then is just that when it comes to people who think and act differently from you, it is preferable to try and understand how they see the world than it is to kill them. Benedict herself, at the end of her book, Patterns of Culture, remarked that
The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values which need not be those of the absolutist philosophies. It challenges customary opinions and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. … We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the co-existing and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.
Cultural relativism is generally understood to be an antonym to “ethnocentrism,” coined by the early social Darwinist William Graham Sumner in his 1906 book Folkways, to mean “this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it”. Even Sumner was telling the reader that it is bad. Ethnocentrism is the ultimate rationalization for Kurtz’s infamous attitude in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Exterminate all the brutes.”
The report explicitly positions itself against relativism in anthropology, but doesn’t explicitly position itself against extirpation. However in note 22, they clarify that they have redefined anthropological relativism in order to oppose it, to mean “there is no such thing as objective knowledge or an objective fact, and that reasons to support a view always depend on contingent non-epistemic values and interests.”
4. Human thought is symbolic and linguistic, unlike ape thought.
Scientists have tried for well over a century to try and get apes to speak. Unfortunately, they have neither the brains nor the mouths for it. The apes, that is.
Psychologists famously began teaching sign language to apes in the 1960s, and eventually discovered that apes really don’t have much to say. All animals communicate, but humans do it less by touch and smell, and more by talking. Moreover, human language consists of nested levels of generally arbitrary “choices” made consciously or unconsciously by the ancestors. First, what sounds are meaningful, like clicks, or a trilled “r”, or “zh” - phonemes. Second, combining those meaningful sounds and associating them with things or acts or states. That is to say, a lexicon. Third, combining words in appropriate ways to convey meaning, a grammar. And fourth, how something is said, volume, intonation, appropriate distance, associated body movements and facial expressions – pragmatics.
A fairly useless scientific project has traditionally involved asking how much like human behavior an ape can be trained to approach. Of course, we have known since the early 1700s that chimps can be trained to walk a bit, to pour tea, to ride bicycles and to play the drums. But they can’t tell us what they’re doing or why they’re doing it, which people can do. Consequently, the ethnographic project and primatological project are rather different from one another. You can’t productively study an ape as if it were human, and you can’t productively study humans as if they were apes, regardless of how often thoughtless biologists try to do just that. That is why the biological anthropologist Sherwood Washburn dismissed first-generation sociobiology as “the science that pretends humans cannot speak”.
5. Statistical significance and the hypothetico-deductive method are often useful in establishing empirical validity. But not only are they not the only paths to truth, they are not even the only paths to science.
If you’ve been paying attention for the last forty years, you probably remember The Human Genome Project, an entirely inductive – yet nevertheless unquestionably scientific – elaboration of all (or most) of the A, C, T, and G in the (or a) human genome. Where was your outcry about the production of scientific knowledge then? Mine was in Nature, by the way.
Some knowledge is qualitative, some is theoretical, some is experiential, some is hermeneutic, and some is all of the above. Hence, the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz regarded the task of ethnography to be “thick description”. The worst ethnography has infamously tended to come from those posturing as the most quantitative and hypothetico-deductive ethnographers. That is not to say that there is no valuable information to be learned in those frameworks, but seriously, look up the criticisms of Napoleon Chagnon’s work. Hermeneutic poetry has more scientific validity than Chagnon’s pseudoscience.
Probably the thinnest description comes from the most easily quantified data, namely questionnaires. Well-known biases here include the way a question framed, the way a question is understood, the shoehorning of human experience into binary or otherwise discrete categories, and the fact that humans (unlike chimpanzees) can lie.
Also, see my book, Why I Am Not a Scientist (University of California Press, 2009).
7. Men and women are both from Earth, and so are other people.
Unthinking sex is difficult. Probably the most successful attempt was by the science-fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The binary opposition of man and woman, however is far more symbolic than biological. Granted, men do not menstruate, and you had better believe that fact is highly symbolically charged. On the other hand, neither do pre-pubescent or post-menopausal women menstruate, but there seems little reason to regard them as men on that basis.
Some people produce eggs, some people produce sperm, and some people produce neither, even while wishing they could. Some people develop into women despite having a Y-chromosome, a condition known as androgen insensitivity. Some people develop into men despite having two X-chromosomes, a condition known as de la Chapelle Syndrome. Moreover, once you stop trying to reduce people’s identities to their gametes or their chromosome configuration, you quickly find a lot more ambiguity. And obviously, since most of the peoples of the world do not reduce people’s identities to their gametes or chromosomes, they tend to make more social room for those ambiguities.
The argument over sex/gender parallels in some ways the argument over race. Just as nobody argues that Blacks and Whites are identical, nobody argues that men and women are identical. The first question is, are they equal? This is simply a restatement of the question, “Are you conscious?” The next question is the important one: Given that they are unequal, why are they unequal?
One answer might be for cultural-historical reasons: prejudices, preconceptions, fewer opportunities for self-advancement, conflicting obligations, lack of outside encouragement or acknowledgment, poor mentorship, to name just a few. And we know that those things exist: they are quite real. On the other hand, when the Harvard president (and friend of Jeffrey Epstein) Larry Summers was asked in 2005 why there were so few tenured women science professors there, he didn’t entertain that answer. He suggested, rather, that there might be a "different availability of aptitude at the high end". In other words, imaginary biological differences might be the root cause, not those social things; the problem wasn’t with Harvard, it was with women.
The question isn’t what’s the matter with women? Or what is a woman? They question is, How do we make people equal in spite of being different? That’s what the Declaration of Independence kind of implies, isn’t it? If you are against equality, please elaborate somewhere else, asshole.
Proposition: Only assholes are against equality. Prove me wrong.
And also check out Agustín Fuentes’s book, Sex is a Spectrum.
7. Human groups are primarily of political salience, while occasionally correlating with biological patterns. Races are neither natural nor primordial, but simply the misrepresentation of politically relevant human groups for naturally discrete human groups.
See my book, Understanding Human Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
8. Your genes aren’t really that good, and have a minimal impact on your success or failure in life.
The biological connection between a parent and offspring is probabilistic, not deterministic. That’s the major contribution of Gregor Mendel to the conversation. But of course, that’s a small part of the actual connection between human parent and human offspring, which incorporates the language spoken, the general sets of behaviors and values, not to mention entrée into social networks or a trust fund.
Genetic diseases are quite rare. This is not to trivialize them, but as the meme goes, Your zip code is a better predictor of your health risks than your DNA code. In other words, in terms of the things you might get sick and/or die from, things like stress, diet, exercise, toxin exposure, communicable disease exposure, political instability, natural disasters, and automobile accidents are far more likely to shorten your life than your genes are.
The ultimate result was best summarized by George Carlin:
Everything comes down to luck and genetics. And when you think about it, even your genetics is luck (2004: 158).
Of course, there are people with natural beauty, or natural smarts, or natural athletic or musical aptitudes. The important thing is that they are never the same people. The most trenchant critique of the practice of ranking people based on their imaginary genes was written by H. L. Mencken back in 1926:
There may be, at the very top, a small class of persons whose blood is decidedly superior and distinguished, and there may be, at the bottom, another class whose blood is almost wholly debased, but both are very small. The folks between are all pretty much alike.
9. You may be a monkey and you may be an ape, but if you are reading this, you are definitely human.
It’s not terribly uncommon to hear undergraduate biology students explain that they are apes, but that we are not monkeys. We know that the construction of one’s identity in a world of kinship relations is universally important, for it establishes a place in the social universe, by telling you where you fit in and who you are related to. Actually, though, you are a monkey in precisely the same way that you are an ape.
Traditionally, the “higher primates” or Anthropoidea have been subdivided into three groups, based on their anatomical and ecological features. Monkeys are tailed, and leap about from branch to branch in the treetops. Apes are tailless, and swing from branch to branch with their long arms. Humans are the ones walking and talking.
In that sense, “ape” is a contrast against “human”. Nevertheless, a chimpanzee is more closely related to us than it is to an orangutan. In fact, you can hardly tell human genes apart from chimpanzee genes. So “ape” would not designate a phylogenetic group in this case. The human, chimp, and gorilla are closest relatives; and the orangutan, while still an ape, is a more distant relative. To make you into an ape, then, we need to redefine the word “ape” from an anatomical/ecological contrast against “human” and into a descent group incorporating humans, chimps, gorillas and orangutans. That is the sense in which you are an ape: phylogenetically. You are the ape that strides, speaks, sweats, and does not live in trees and fling its poo.
If you follow the same rules – naming phylogenetic descent groups rather than ecological contrast groups – you face the same situation at a slightly higher level. The rhesus monkey of India is more closely related to you than it is to capuchin monkey of Central America. The rhesus monkey and you (and the “other” apes) are Catarrhini, with nostrils pointing downward; while the capuchin monkey, with all the other monkeys of Americas, are Platyrrhini, with flat noses and nostrils pointing outward.
“Monkey” is thus an ecological/anatomical contrast term against “ape” and “human”, and not a phylogenetic descent group. To be consistent, then, we would need to redefine “monkey” to refer to the descent group (incorporating the Hominoidea) as we did for the word “ape” (incorporating humans). In that sense, then, if you are an ape, you are also, by the same criteria, a monkey.
The interesting question in human genetic evolution, then, is this: How do we get from human genes that are so similar to ape genes, to human bodies, minds, and lives that are so different?
10. It is better not to be a schmuck than to be a schmuck. A special case of this cross-cultural generalization is that hogging resources is generally not admired.
Obviously humans could not have evolved political inequality before there was politics, or economic inequality before there was private property. For most of human existence, our species has existed without the inequalities that we experience today. There simply wasn’t anything to distribute unequally.
As the ethnographic record grew, it became clear that many societies possessed social leveling mechanisms to keep the peace and to ensure that nobody put themselves into too strong a position. Sharing is generally good; hogging is generally bad. And why is that? Because it is generally considered anti-social. In human society, as in chimpanzee society, the goal is to be liked by others. And the best way to accomplish that is by sharing. That seems to be why chimps will share a prized delicacy, like a colobus monkey carcass. A particularly anti-social chimpanzee might get booted out of the group, and won’t stand a very good chance of surviving long alone.
A particularly anti-social human, on the other hand, lives in a symbolic universe unlike that of the chimp’s. Consequently the human jerk might have to worry about the judgments of the ancestors or of the gods, or might be accused of being a witch or demon. That is of course, quite independent of the actual ontological status of gods, witches, and demons.
As far as we can tell, gross inequalities of wealth and power are only about 10,000 years old, in a species that – anatomically, at least – has been around for far longer without such inequalities, and reinforced by the same kinds of leveling mechanisms we know of ethnographically. Over the vast span of human geography and history, then, a resource hog would be considered disreputable, if not evil. With a different value system, of course, such a person might be considered admirable; but such a value system would be antithetical to the deepest impulses of human social nature.
