CHAPTER 2: ANTHROPOLOGY: HUMANITY IN ITS SPLENDOR

From what I can see, the root of the problem with anthropology is not Mr. Franz Boas, although he certainly deserves some malice. It goes back to France’s own Jean-Jacques Rousseau-he of the noble savage and the blank slate. From him most of modern leftism is derived. I will not delay any further:

The ideology of the noble savage (still alive to this day, although never referred to by name) is not only wrong, it is hysterically wrong. Any archaeologist worth his salt can tell you that pre-history was far from a “20,000 year camping trip”. the glorious indigenous peoples were quite capable of committing massacres, compiling mass graves, holding slaves, and all of the other sins that are only attributed to those awful Snow People. Also, fun fact: archaeological evidence shows scalping was being performed in the Americas about 200 years (at least) before the white man landed on these shores (Keely, Lawrence, War Before Civilization, page 100). Some of the earliest artifacts from anatomically modern humans (and even other hominids) are undoubtedly weapons. As much as I hate to quote “Uncle Dana”(a joke for the sports fans reading this), fighting is indeed in our blood.

Or to put it another way: The !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert have a murder rate (when adjusted to a sample per 100,000) that is 5 times higher than that of the United States (Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate, 2003 )

While tribal peoples do not have the formal, wide-scale battles of settled peoples, there is a nigh-constant culture of raiding, wife stealing, and individual, low-level violence (“low-level” referring to small amounts of people, certainly not low-levels of brutality or pain), and this is overwhelmingly the case with nomadic and hunter-gatherer people. (As a side note, concepts of “living in harmony” with nature are fairly wrong as well, you can ask an agronomist about the efficiency of a nomadic lifestyle, or you can ask a North American paleontologist about buffalo runs). This, of course, doesn’t stop books such as “The Harmless People” (about the aforementioned Kalahari Bushmen) from being published to this day. But at least the !Kung San actually, y’know, exist, which is more then I can say for the Tasaday

Similarly, the blank slate is wrong: while there is overlap (look up “clades”), the fact remains that your average anthropologist or geneticist can identify the race or ethnic group of human remains with ~90% accuracy-human groups can be distinguished by a few things, such as susceptibility/predisposition to certain diseases and disorders, average body morphology, dentition, average blood type, average baby weight, placental and red blood cell volume, cranial shape and volume (fun fact, this article cites Jason Lewis, one of my professors at Rutgers), and genetic clustering and uniform variation/ratios within populations (also known as Lewontin’s Fallacy, which, to put it very simply, states that while variation is more prevalent at any one individual locus within a population then between them, the frequency of certain alleles in association with each other at multiple loci, also called genetic clustering, are uniform within the population, and when looked at together can be used to identify them). Just to name a few.

Some of these differences tend to be adaptations, like sickle cell anemia amongst West Africans, or steatopygia among various tropical peoples, or increased red blood cell volume amongst various alpine peoples. These people have, as we all are taught in school, adapted to their surrounding environments over many successive breeding generations-it’s the third tenet of the basic theory of evolution. Having adapted to their environments, and thus different selection pressures (unless you’re seriously telling me that an alpine environment is identical to a rainforest environment) they are within the human species but are clearly distinct from each other, as are populations of many other animals in the world, through a combination of the Founder’s Effect (populations founded from a small “pioneer” population will be homologous to the founding population, with any endemic diseases more frequent amongst the descendants, see the Afrikaners or Ashkenazi Jews) and the bottleneck effect  (populations that are reduced through unintentional reasons will be reduced in genetic diversity). In other words, evolution worked its magic on a homogenous population, as it does for every other species on the planet!

(Or to put it another way, try this thought experiment: take the preceding two paragraphs, and compare them to the works of any person preaching Human Biological Uniformity. In both of those arguments, replace any use of “human”, “Race”, “ethnic group”, or the names of specific ethnic groups, and replace them with “dog”, “breed”, and names of particular dog breeds. See whose argument makes sense.)

And yet, evolution magically just doesn’t apply to humans in the progressive mindset. To clarify, these people claim to be the most ardent defenders of the theory of evolution, mocking THE REDNECKS (incidentally, their favorite racial slur…used to refer to the people that they claim are always using racist language) for their beliefs in religion and disbelief in the theory of evolution, and yet they believe that evolution just stops working on Homo sapiens sapiens. Never mind that evolution evidently worked on Habilis, Ergaster, Erectus, Heidelbergensis, and every other extinct member of genus Homo (I suppose you could ask them about their opinions on inter-species competition), it just magically stops working on our own species.

Is this modern belief not in itself magical thinking, equal to that of the most fundamentalist devotee of a religion? Keep this thought in mind too, it will be sprinkled throughout this work. Needless to say, when many of those on the “Alternate Right” Sphere (a loosely connected group of modern, but not modernist, writers and philosophers that has greatly inspired this writing) refer to modern progressive thought as “The Cathedral”, it is a fairly apt descriptor. But I digress

As stated previously, much of this Tabula Rasa idealism was debunked in my formal education. Yet, oddly, only some of the doctors and professors would speak similarly to what you have just read-I can think of at least two professors of biological anthropology, or similar subjects, who would tell us the exact information I stated above, and STILL argue with me over the existence or non-existence of race as a biological fact. They would tell us the old saw of race being a social construct, pointing to the old “one drop rule” as evidence of this. I would reply that “…while creating a binary paradigm in which an individual can only be 100% black or  only 100% white is indeed a social construct, that doesn’t  change the fact that a geneticist can identify if a given person is, say, 75% African and 25% European. Thus doesn’t that prove that African ancestry and European ancestry have definable traits and are therefore a biological fact?!” I would then be given a look that I can only imagine is similar to the look I would have received if I told a medieval peasant that God doesn’t exist. And these were not middling professors-one of these had been on Time Magazine’s 100 Influential People list in the early 2000s (it is not the aforementioned Dr. Lewis).

The “cathedral” metaphor is also apt for the field of anthropology due to the fact that there is a schism between cultural and biological anthropology, much as the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have their own, more famous schism. As the aforementioned Time Magazine honoree stated jocularly in one of his books, “They [culturals] think we’re [bios] fascists, we think they’re idiots”. And to be fair, one of the two accusations that make up that statement is true.

I suppose I might speak more respectfully of the cultural types, if they didn’t adhere to long since debunked theories postulated in the early 20th century. I won’t mince words-Franz Boas and many of his protégés (who have formed the basis of much of the thought of “The New Left”) were frauds.

More specifically, the famous and highly influential 1912 study, in which he found that European immigrants to the USA and their descendants had different cranial morphology (Attributed to environmental pressures), was fraudulent (“…environmental effects are insignificant compared to differentiation between ethnic and racial groups.”) It appears that Mr. Boas first sought to disprove the scientific racism of his day (which, admittedly, was wrong in many respects), and was willing to manipulate his data to prove his theories. It appears that both genetics and environment are capable of affecting human characteristics, and while the extent each factor has varies per population, evidence certainly does not support the idea of genetics/inborn characteristics having no effect upon race at all (yet the progressives will, at the same time, claim that homosexuality has a 100%, iron-clad, genetic basis and can only be something congenital and never once affected by environment, but more on human sexuality in a later chapter) .

Similarly, Boas’ protégé Margaret Mead was also guilty of spectacularly manipulating her data to prove a point as well, albeit she sought to “debunk” gender roles. Her famous and, again, highly influential study involved observations and surveys of three Polynesian tribes-One, the Arapesh, was described as having both males and females being graceful, cooperative, and all things that Western society refers to as feminine.  Another, the Mundugumor, described both males and females being belligerent, swaggering, and assertive (traditional masculine stereotypes), and the third, the Tchambuli, being a complete inversion of “Western” gender roles-men described as being emotional, gossipy, etc. and women as being domineering, practical, and other masculine traits. The conclusion that was sought was that traditional gender roles were, of course, “socially constructed”, and that there was no real/practical basis to them at all, “no more than the headdresses of chiefs signify masculinity or femininity” (Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1923, Columbia University Press)

The problem with this was that the data was falsified nonsense. Far from the gentle “noble savages” Mead really, really, wanted them to be, the Arapesh in fact had a long tradition of wife-stealing and other intermittent tribal battles (somewhat suppressed at the time by German occupation, but it still occurred). The old men bragged of their exploits, and men organized themselves in hierarchies of masculine strength and accomplishment, as almost every other culture of men on the planet do (…”we may cite the proverb, men’s hearts are different, women’s hearts are different” (Donovan, Jack, No Man’s Land, 2011, self published)

Similarly, the other two tribes were also misinterpreted (albeit not completely falsified like the Arapesh)-in short, there had been economic depression in the area (by the standards of these peoples), and the women were working similar labors to the men simply because all hands were needed. When observed at other times, these two tribes were similarly patriarchal to the Arapesh. And indeed, women doing hard labor is certainly not unusual throughout world history-whenever large numbers of people are needed to labor, as in non-mechanized agriculture, you will inevitably find women working alongside the men. Although I am arguing that gender roles have a basis in nature, I will never deny that they are also flexible to some extent as well.

It has since been noted that Mead’s data gathering was not thorough-she had been barred from chiefly consortiums strictly because she was a woman, and mainly interviewed young children who would of course not be highly involved in the cultural goings on of their tribe. Later anthropologists corroborate that, contrary to what Mrs. Mead said, the men of Polynesia are competitive, prideful, valiant, and obsessed with rank. I normally wouldn’t say this, but your average professional wrestling promotion has a more accurate depiction of Oceanic culture than this famous study.

While there are certainly differences between each group, almost every culture on the planet more or less places upon men ideals of what we in the west call masculine virtues-boldness, daring, strength, high status/success, confidence, intelligence/practical skills, hiding vulnerability, etc (IBID)

Does this not suggest that there is some adaptive basis to the male gender roles, and as such they are, to some extent, not mere social constructs that act to “shackle” men? Needless to say, feminists and radical sexual theorists still proselytize Mead’s work, and these fraudulent studies form the basis of their writings, and by extension much of the sexual dysfunction that exists in the modern day, and there will be a lot more on this later.

Mead was in this sense very similar to her mentor Boas-she grew up in time where belief in eugenics and other racist theories were popular, and actively sought to disprove what her forebears believed. Sir Francis Galton (one of the fathers of eugenics that he was) had his famous Error, assuming that nature and nurture were in conflict, and effects on humanity could only be of one or the other. Mead’s error was almost identical, the difference being that Galton supported nature completely, and Mead nurture completely. Galton’s theories are rightly relegated to the ashbin of history, while Boas’ and Mead’s are still lauded by feminists and sexual theorists the world over.  In other words, much of modern thought (transgenderism, anti-racism, third wave feminism, critical theory), the writers of which still cite Boas and Mead (as well as other frauds like Kinsey, more on him later), is blatantly built upon lies. And it is through these lies that they are capable of painting all of recorded human history as a patriarchal “mistake” from the “true” human nature of roaming the plains in peaceful, matriarchal, Magna Mater worshipping (and likely herbivorous) tribes. And if everything that has ever happened is thus a mistake, they are of course the ones to “correct” the mistake. A lot of more of this sexual furor to be discussed in a later chapter, but for now I’ll just leave you with this article proving that Wicca was invented by a male Briton in the 1950s.

Another famous way that the field of anthropology is fudged to support left wing nonsense is the meme that “racism is invented” (implication: “…by evil white people”). In fact, humans are repeatedly shown in controlled experiments (and, y’know, any history book ever written) to be tribal by nature, and while race is not the only way to form a tribe, it is often the most easily noticed and convenient (Kronk, Lee and Leech, Beth, Meeting at Grand Central, 2003, Princeton University Press).

However, any anthropologists that choose to combat one of these views, in other words to present a Hobbesian savage rather than a noble savage, to show a biological basis to gender roles, or show inborn differences between the races of man, will face a tremendous uphill battle from academia-just ask Napoleon Chagnon, who spent 20 years studying undocumented Amazonian tribes, putting himself at great personal risk in the process, only to be made a pariah in the intellectual community for his candor about their brutal tribal battles and masculine pecking order (claims that he had spread measles and “facilitated a genocide” are still sniffled as tangible reasons for his ostracizing

It has become clear, to me at least, that modern progressivism’s claims to be paragons of science, logic, and reason are half-truths at best. They are, in fact, the apostles and priests of a religion, built upon just as many ideals and falsities as the other, older religions that they so delight in mocking. The only difference is that their religion puts on airs about being scientific and logical, but they stifle debate and censor criticism just as well as the Catholic Church’s Inquisition did centuries ago, and, like their Papist forebears, they occasionally unleash their equivalent of Jesuits to punish the heretics-thankfully, as of this writing this only results in death threats, public shaming, and loss of jobs and livelihood. Or perhaps there is another reason why the world’s most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, has such faith in human biological uniformity (Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Page 266)

To their credit, some left-wing cultural anthropologist types are capable of realizing just how incorrect their ideals are, and honestly admitting this-see David Stoll’s (PHD, University of Vermont) excellent book Norte or Bust!: “Nebaj seethes with schemes to acquire wealth” (Stoll, David, Norte or Bust, 2013, University of Vermont Press). “…Aid workers so want to believe in Mayan wisdom, harmony between genders, respect for nature, and consensual decision making.” (ibid). “…the still widespread assumption that Native Americans are better persons than the rest of us, that they have a strong cultural disposition to place the interests of the group ahead of the interests of the individual, and that they are inherently communal and unselfish, at least until corrupted by Western civilization.” (ibid)

The book goes on to describe how ruthless the competition is to illegally come to the United States, and debunks many myths of illegal immigration, but more on this later.

I admit I don’t exactly know when anthropology became inundated with ultra-lefties (neither does Napoleon Chagnon, for that matter, and he’s a tenured professor), my guess is that they heard the names “biological anthropology” and “human biology” and thought that sounded too much like eugenics, and was therefore fascist, and thus they had to do something. Then again, the issue might be to ask, why did academia on the whole swing far to the left (and we certainly know it has). However, I plainly recognize what I saw, and now that I have discussed one of my fields of study, I will discuss history and liberal arts, the other side of academia that I studied, in which there were even fewer shields against progressivism than the sciences.

TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 3