A critique of cultural relativism by an ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton’s
Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony
(1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the
pre-modern, non-Western folk-societies (primitive societies) studied by
professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might
understand both institutions and social practices – and perhaps even
political ones – more generally.
Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless,
Sick Societies
deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks.
Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of
intellectual profit.
Sick Societies might well be a meditation
on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West’s
seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the
Twenty-First Century.
I.
Adaptation, a
Darwinian evolutionary concept, plays a central role in anthropology.
The theory of adaptation articulates the anthropologist’s conviction
that all societies manage to come to terms optimally with their external
environment, and with the internal difficulties presented by communal
life, as a people strives to fit itself in its niche. This optimal
coming-to-terms will be the case even when it might seem to uninformed
or prejudiced outsiders that the beliefs and practices of a given
community operate inefficiently or counterproductively and that they
therefore fail to meet the requirements of human happiness. Under this
view, a modern Westerner’s disdain for magic or witchcraft or for
elaborate rituals or proliferating taboos would itself indicate a
deformation (“
ethnocentrism”)
because the objects of that disdain, which the anthropologist or
ethnographer properly understands even where the lay person does not,
operate by concealed rationality. On this assumption, seemingly
irrational commitments and practices would in fact be just as rational
as modern Western arrangements, but in a way that Western prejudice
makes people liable not to recognize.
From this position, in Edgerton’s words, “it follows that any attempt
to generalize about either culture or human nature must be false or
trivial unless it is confined to people who live in a specific cultural
system.” This would imply, in turn, that “Western science is only a
culturally specific form of ethnoscience, not a universally valid way of
verification or falsification.”
Edgerton does not directly state, but rather he implies, that, if the
idea in the last sentence quoted above were true, as anthropologists
and ethnographers by consensus assert, then that truth would hold
important implications for anthropology and ethnography themselves. Why,
for example, must one validate the tribal belief in magic while
withholding validation for the modern Western suspicion about magical
thinking? But ethnography does not treat Western self-confidence as
adaptive.
The idea that all societies have achieved adaptation, whether
apparent to the outsider or not, thus communicates strongly with that
longstanding strain in the modern Western mentality of irate rebellion
against norms, simply because they are norms, and of seeking to replace
the existing order, blamed for all sorrows, with a utopian one. In
anthropology, this strain of antinomian rebelliousness can take on a
rebarbative character, violating its own ostensible principle that
cultures are “incommensurable” by extolling pre-modern and non-Western
societies at the expense of modern Western society, the latter now
coming under condemnation through a sneaky reintroduction of
commensurability. The ethnographer, becoming an advocate for what he
studies, declares the ethnic societies to be
better adapted
than the modern Western society. Adaptation as a concept belongs with
the set of ardent convictions called cultural relativism, with the
codicil that relativism is never really relative, but always serves the
rhetorical purpose of establishing a covert, antithetical hierarchy.
The rhetoric of cultural relativism stems classically from the work of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778), who asserted, with literary flair, the supposed unique
sickness of the European civilization of his own day. Rousseau joined
his denunciation of civic society with nostalgic speculation about a
primitive utopia before the invention of prohibitions and institutions –
la société commencée. There is a strong Rousseauvian strain the work of
Franz Boas (1858-1942), usually credited with being the founder of modern anthropology, as such.
Edgerton, whose willingness to admit reservations and concede
opposing points makes him quite different from Rousseau, argues, not
that no folk-societal arrangements are truly adaptive (some are), but
that anthropologists and ethnographers have exaggerated adaptation,
always taken to signify some type of rationality, into a dogma. The
acceptance of that dogma has rendered practitioners of the discipline
uncritical of what they actually observe when in the field and, if not
exactly incapable of an honest evaluation, then quite reluctant to
embrace a strictly neutral type of objectivity. Edgerton’s subtitle
names the fixed position:
The Myth of Primitive Harmony. In
fact, Edgerton writes, “it has never been demonstrated that all human
customs or institutions, or even most of them, have adaptive value, but
the assumption that this is so is still commonplace among scholars who
study,” not only ethnic or primitive cultures, but also, in larger
terms, “human evolution.” Edgerton indeed brings against ethnology a
universally observed phenomenon: “All populations yet discovered have
agreed [that] a steel axe is better than a stone one.”
Against adaptation, as dogmatically construed, Edgerton posits “
maladaptation.”
The term, he asserts, requires subtlety of explanation, so he throws
out a number of complementary definitions and analogies. Thus by
analogy, and in Darwinian terms, “a single gene or number of genes that
in combination may predispose an individual to depression,
schizophrenia, or panic,” would illustrate the idea.
Edgerton’s interest lies mainly elsewhere than in individual
psychology, however; so he swiftly reminds his readers that, for
example, “a group of related individuals’ refusal to engage in
altruistic behaviors, or the absence of well-being among cooperating
groups of people engaged in warfare or big-game hunting” would
illustrate the idea just as well, if not better. In the discussion of
maladaptation, Edgerton writes, “the focus can legitimately fall on
categories or corporate groups of people who share common interests and
risks because of their age, gender, class, ethnicity, race, occupational
specialty, or some other characteristic, or it can encompass an entire
society, a kingdom, an empire, or a confederation.” Edgerton imagines
that, in certain circumstances, the whole of the human race might prove
itself maladapted to some emergent global condition. Nuclear arsenals on
hair trigger might well have constituted such a condition, as more than
one science fiction scenarist imagined.
Edgerton finally offers three formulaic definitions. In the first of
these definitions, maladaptation refers to “the failure of a population
or its culture to survive because of the inadequacy or harmfulness of
one or more of its beliefs or institutions.” In the second,
“maladaptation will be said to exist when enough members of a population
are sufficiently dissatisfied with one or more of their social
institutions or cultural beliefs that the viability of their society is
threatened.” In the third, “it will be considered to be maladaptive when
a population maintains beliefs or practices that so seriously impair
the physical or mental health of its members that they cannot adequately
meet their own needs or maintain their social or cultural system.”
Edgerton’s first definition applies mainly to historical peoples,
whose existence today only the physical remains or vestiges of their
societies – items of their material culture – indicate. Edgerton’s
second definition operates historically but also implicates societies
that exist today and are subject to observation; this would include the
modern Western societies. Edgerton’s third definition has the same range
of application as his second.
II.
In the main chapters of
Sick Societies, Edgerton piles up
the instances of maladaptation, one after the other, until the quantity
of examples seems to make his case all by itself. In about two-thirds of
these instances, Edgerton finds himself obliged to discuss, not only
the particular maladaptation, but also the deliberate eliding of failed
or counterproductive or misery-producing institutions or practices in
the field-reports of the ethnographers. Deliberate misreporting and the
suppression of unflattering truths occur with alarming frequency in
professional accounts of folk-societies,
Margaret Mead's
romantic descriptions of the supposed sexual utopia in Samoa
establishing the pattern. Aware of a widespread tendency to excuse the
exotic Edgerton directs his analysis to two cases of specifically
Western – indeed of American – sub-cultures that demonstrate how
maladaptation can result in the destruction of a community. These cases
are significant because romantic misreporting has not distorted the
relevant facts, which, belonging as they do to the historical record, no
one disputes.
The first of Edgerton’s two preliminary cases is that of the
Oneida Colony
in mid-Nineteenth Century Upstate New York, founded in 1848 by its
leader John H. Noyes, and dissolved in a major scandal in 1879. The
second of these two cases is that of the “Duddie’s Branch” community in
Eastern Kentucky in the mid-Twentieth Century.
THE ONEIDA COLONY
The Oneida Colony functioned, in effect, as a large-scale experiment in
group-marriage,
the governance of which ran to the bizarre. In Edgerton’s words, the
Colony’s rules of promiscuous cohabitation “prohibited any lasting
emotional attachments (including those between mothers and their
children), and required all men, except Noyes and a few other leaders,
to practice
coitus reservatus,” or non-ejaculatory intercourse.
Later on, Noyes imposed new strictures, according to which, “only older
men… would be allowed to have sex with young… women,” whereas “young
men… could only have sex with postmenopausal women.” These arrangements,
which exist elsewhere only in a comedy by Aristophanes, produced so
much revulsion that communal order broke down in open rebellion, with
Noyes fleeing to Canada in order to evade charges of statutory rape.
DUDDIE's BRANCH
“Duddie’s Branch” was an extremely isolated mountain hollow, home to
two hundred and thirty-eight incestuously related people, who, while
nominally English-speakers, “spoke to one another so rarely that for
some time [Rena] Gazaway,” the anthropologist who studied them, “thought
that many of them were mute.” The “Branchers” not only could not read
or write; they could not even count change. They had no notion of the
civic order and could not name for Gazaway the (or any) president of the
United States or explain their situation as citizens of a county or
state. The Branchers’ poverty and insouciance left them perpetually
malnourished, especially the children; people defecated not in outhouses
or trenches (they had none), but on the ground outside their shacks, in
the perpetual mud where their louse-infested children played. The
Branchers found it impossible to reckon kinship both from lacking the
requisite terms and “because sexual relations were indiscriminate… and
illegitimate births were commonplace.”
Concerning the Oneida Colony, the glaringly patriarchal and sexually
exploitative set-up of the community makes it difficult for cultural
relativism to mount any kind of rhetorical rescue, especially given
Noyes’ final megalomaniacal rule that reserved to him – and to him alone
– the
jus primi nocti with any adolescent girl who had just
experienced her first menses. The regulatory structure of Noyes’ little
kingdom cut across every propensity in the sexual side of human nature,
exacerbated the predisposition of people to resent unjust shares, and
more or less doomed itself to death by internal revolt.
The Branchers, by contrast, lived without internal regulation, and
were so symbolically, as well as so materially, impoverished that they
only survived through food-welfare from the county and state
governments. “There was little interaction,” Edgerton writes, “among
households, and none at all as an entire community,” no church or
community council or neighborhood picnics on holidays. Families slept in
piles on the floor and “girls began to have sexual intercourse as early
as the age of six.” The Oneida Colony qualifies as maladapted under
Edgerton’s first and second definitions and the Branch community under
the third.
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THE TASMANIANS
While it is next to unimaginable that even a committed cultural
relativist would want to touch either the Oneida Colony or the Branchers
apologetically with a ten-foot pole, the non-anthropological laity will
probably – if only from its vestigial impulse to Christian charity –
experience considerable sympathy for another case: that of the
Tasmanians. Yet according to Edgerton these people, whose demise came
about in part due to heavy-handed European interference, present a case
of maladaptation as vivid as any other. At the same time, they present
an actual people whose level of cultural development stands remarkably
close to that of Rousseau’s speculative
société commencée, the
supposed happiest era of human existence. Once the ice-bridge that
permitted human migration to Tasmania melted, the Tasmanians remained in
isolation from all other human contact for somewhere between ten and
twelve-thousand years before the arrival of Europeans in modern times.
Not only did the Tasmanians have at least ten millennia to come to
terms with their natural environment and learn how to live together
happily in a territorially ample multi-tribal community; they also lived
in a resource-rich, exploitable landscape that would have yielded a
bounty, had only the denizens innovated an instrumentality and devised
the social practices to realize the potential. Instead, as Edgerton
notes, “when Europeans first made contact with them in the Eighteenth
Century, the approximately 4,000 Tasmanians then living had the simplest
technology ever reported for any human society.”
On the Australian mainland, where the closest kindred-peoples lived,
the tribes had developed “a substantially more complex array of tools,
weapons, and other artifacts long before European contact.” As Edgerton
puts it, “the Tasmanians put the lie to the myth of
Homo Faber.”
They also put the lie, once again, to “The Myth of Primitive Harmony.”
Tasmanian men dominated and exploited Tasmanian women, delegating almost
all of the necessary subsistence labor, some it arduous, to them while
taxing themselves hardly at all. Worse: “Despite the risks that women
took and their crucial role in the economy, Tasmanian women appear to
have been treated harshly by men, and to have been denied access to the
choicest foods.” Tasmanian women complained of such maltreatment already
to the earliest European travelers, clearly indicating their
unhappiness. Now
institutions serve to mediate conflicts within
a community, but, as Edgerton writes, “unlike the Australians, the
Tasmanians had no initiation rituals, only rudimentary religious
conceptions and rituals, and no elaborated forms of social organization.
III.
Although the physical conditions of the island of Tasmania did not of
themselves impose scarcity, the meager material culture did, as did
also fierce tribal rivalries, which resulted in raids for women and food
and counter-raids for revenge in an endless cycle. “The Tasmanians
failed to devise social and cultural mechanisms to control their
destructive tendencies.” An unhappy people, their way of life could not
withstand contact with outsiders.
Edgerton finds similar patterns of
maladaptation among or Kalahari Bushmen, the Inuit, and the medieval
Icelanders, among others, who all suffered from internal violence driven
by social arrangements that exaggerated rather than reduced resentment
and capitally failed to address matters of scarcity and fair
distribution. The much-romanticized
Chumash tribes of California raided
their neighbors for slaves and developed a materially impoverished
forced-labor-economy that, while discouraging innovation, necessitated
the devotion of considerable energy to policing the chattels. Such
practices stultified and brutalized the society. But tribal societies
are not the only ones vulnerable to maladaptation, as the case of the
Aztecs shows.
THE AZTECS
Aztec achievement at the level of material culture ran high. Their
pyramidal remains testify to their engineering audacity. The Aztec
elites articulated a social hierarchy, governed by elaborate rituals, on
par with those of the Early Bronze-Age, Old-World kingdoms, from which
they differed, however, in signally failing to win the friendliness and
loyalty of the masses.
The bloody order of the Aztec polity
– although defended by such relativistic lights of academic
anthropology as Marvin Harris and Marshal Sahlins – justly inspires a
high degree of popular revulsion. The Aztec elites valued
warrior-competency and male-super-dominance above all other values,
practiced slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism all on a lavish
scale, and incessantly raided their neighbors for slaves and victims –
the latter also furnishing the viands for the great ritual feasts. Aztec
art celebrated these forms of brutality and the Aztec calendar provided
a precise schedule for the bloody displays.
Edgerton writes: “The desire for human flesh was so great that many
wars were fought for no other reason than the capture of prisoners.” The
commoners tilled, planted, harvested, and paid burdensome harvest-taxes
to the nobles, who returned almost nothing in the other direction.
The nobles apparently believed in their many superstitions, and this
credulity contributed to their downfall when Europeans arrived in the
form of Hernan Cortez and his
Conquistadors. Montezuma, the
Aztec Royal, interpreted Cortez in mythic terms as an avatar of
Quetzalcoatl, a god whose return the prophecies foretold. That served
Cortez well, but even more so did the fact that the neighbors of the
Aztecs, weary of harassment, willingly formed a military auxiliary to
back up the handful of Spanish troops. Spanish occupation of
Tenochtitlan refuted Montezuma’s claim to divinity, broke the hold of
superstition on the elites, and triggered a belated
coup-d’état
against the Royal by the cadet branch of the aristocracy. The spasm
bespoke pure ire, as no possibility existed, once the rebels had
assassinated Montezuma, that the commoners would then side with them to
expel the interlopers.
Aztec society disintegrated rapidly, as did also Tahitian society,
equally warlike if not equally sacrificial or cannibalistic, on initial
contact with Europeans. The complex of social structures and ritual
practices characteristic of Aztec society, dominated by the haughty
elites, ultimately doomed itself because it systematically shut out the
masses from the actual commonwealth and aroused the hatred of the
neighboring peoples through constant aggression and depredation.
It is worth saying that Spanish colonial society in the New World was
almost as brutal and perverse as the societies of the sacrificial
kingdoms – Aztec, Inca, or Caribe. The anomaly that redeems Spanish
colonial society marginally is that it could produce someone like
Bartolomé de las Casas, a man willing to speak out, at no little risk to
himself, on behalf of native peoples against the atrocious colonial
policies.
IV.
Dramatically deformed societies such as those discussed in the
foregoing summary of Edgerton’s book represent only a small minority of
known human communities, as Edgerton openly allows.
Nevertheless,
Edgerton writes, “all societies maintain some beliefs and practices that
are maladaptive for at least some of their members, and it is likely
that some of these social arrangements and cultural understandings will
be maladaptive for everyone in the society.” Edgerton reminds his
readers that his “insistence that maladaptive beliefs and practices are
commonplace must not be construed to mean that humans never make
effective adaptations to their environments.”
Edgerton confesses to being uninterested, finally, in the question
“whether so-called primitive thought is less abstract, more magical, or
less able to assess marginal probabilities” than modern Western thought.
Edgerton asserts otherwise that, “most people in all societies,
including those most familiar with Western science, sometimes make
potentially harmful mistakes and tend to maintain them.” Thus as
Edgerton writes: “It must be… acknowledged that populations have not
always gotten things right,” but rather, “inefficiency, folly, venality,
cruelty, and misery were and are also a part of human history” and
“human suffering is one result.”
THE MODERN WEST
One can hardly read
Sick Societies, nearly twenty years
after its publication, without speculating how Edgerton’s arguments and
observations might apply to the existing condition of the West, governed
as it is by dogmatic elites who would implement the antitheses of the
market and repeal longstanding norms –
I refer to redistribution of
wealth, penalization of productivity, and the infliction, via
immigration, of pre-modern and non-Western cultural forms on Western
societies, under a doctrine that goes by the misleadingly abstract name
of “Multiculturalism.”
For one thing, the maladaptation theory implies a
consistent human nature that bad arrangements can violate. This notion
of a consistent
human nature is rejected by the reigning
cultural relativism, but affirmed by the continuity of the Western
tradition from Greek philosophy through the Gospels to Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations and the American Constitution.
Self-criticism is central to the Western tradition, from Plato and
Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The currently prevalent
self-hatred,
urged on the commonality by the elites (who certainly never show any
similar hatred of themselves or their own beliefs), differs radically
from genuine introspection.
One might trace the history of this
self-hatred, while cataloguing its destructive results, from Rousseau,
who directly influenced the French Revolution and provided theoretical
justification for its enormities, through Karl Marx’s inspiration of the
Bolsheviks, with their homicidal record, to the deliquescence of civic
society consequent on the socialist-and-multicultural policies of
existing Western governments. Not least of these inimical governments
would be the increasingly radical and dictatorial Democrat-Party regime
in the USA, whose idea of economics resembles the magical thinking of
primitives and whose social policies, administered by “Czars,” mimic the
most non-productive notions of Soviet-era Third-World governments.
We have seen earlier how Edgerton identifies the semantic
slipperiness in the standard ethnographic claim that intuitively
maladaptive practices operate by concealed rationality, which the
professionally uninitiated cannot perceive or understand.
It is striking
that the advocates and defenders of
many-times-tried-and-failed public
and national policies, invariably leftwing, make similar
counterintuitive claims.
High taxation and deficit spending first cause
and then deepen economic recessions, but the authors of such
programmatic devastation invariably assert that their tax-and-spend
schemes “are working” to revive prosperity, even despite the
non-appearance of the promised results and the worsening of the general
picture.
The architects and defenders of borderless-ness claim that the
massive unrestricted influx of foreign nationals, many of them
linguistically and educationally handicapped, serves a goal of utopian
(call it “neo-primitive”) harmony, even despite the visibly
demoralizing, because culturally divisive, effects that large-scale
demographic intrusions inflict on the host-society.
One cannot blame the current sickness of the West on governments
solely, which after all acquire their mandates through majority
endorsement at the ballot box.
To turn slightly an old observation:
everyone in a democratic polity, no matter how wisely he votes, gets the
government that the gullible majority deserves.
Many widespread traits
of Westerners qualify as “sick,” from the willingness of the underclass
to live on welfare, letting producers subsidize their destructive
habits, to the willingness of elites to defend anti-social behavior, to
the unwillingness of the middle class to assert morality, crippled as
the
bourgeoisie is, spiritually, by a metastatic “White Guilt.”
The elites have carefully inculcated same “White Guilt” through the
educational system for decades. That again is “sick.”
A friend of mine, a psychologist specializing in corporate culture,
recently asked me, in my capacity as a “humanist,” whether I could think
of any historical precedent for the current “norm-hatred” of the
elites. I could not.
I can also not think of any historical society that
was as absorbed in diversion as the modern Western society, whether it
is the ubiquitous pornography of the Internet or the gangster-ethos of
“youth-culture” or the stupidity of TV game shows and glitzy amateur
hours and so-called reality-dramas.
Insofar as they abet the laziness caused by enthrallment to
diversion, other practices, such as those that encourage “self-esteem”
in individuals who have no real claim on it, also qualify as maladaptive
and therefore as “sick.”
These customs and proclivities satisfy the
conditions of all three of Edgerton’s operative definitions of
maladaptation.
