Born That Way

by William Wright

  Nursery mishaps could be remedied; congenital mishaps could not. The Freudians didn’t so much deny the existence of innate traits and tendencies as they ignored them.

  AT THE TURN of the century the Freudians were not the only group intoxicated by exciting new ideas about improving humanity. Some years earlier, Darwin’s cousin, scientist and thinker Sir Francis Galton, who dabbled brilliantly in many areas, including meteorology and anthropology, pondered the ramifications of Darwinism for the future of the species. As a result of these ruminations, Galton launched eugenics, a movement aimed at encouraging the propagation of the most fit and discouraging the propagation of the indisputably unfit, such as lunatics and the deformed. Although the eugenics movement, which would later acquire an infamous name, was attributed to Galton, Darwin also pointed out that man was the only species with the ability and desire to overrule evolutionary pressures by helping the unfit. He worried, as did his cousin, about the long-term implications for the species of well-intended efforts to protect and care for “the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick.”

  Although the original purpose of eugenics was merely to reduce the numbers of genetic disasters born into the population and to encourage the “fittest” to have more offspring, the thinking was soon picked up and expanded by others who applied it to the horrendous social problems plaguing cities—poverty and the attendant crime and violence. Instead of blaming the economic system itself, the eugenicists blamed the unfortunates, who were seen as congenitally incapable of adapting to modern society. Since eugenics focused on inherited personality traits, its sorry and reckless career would for many years stigmatize behavioral-genetics thinking.

  The movement took off rapidly and some of the day’s most socially concerned and liberal intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, embraced eugenics wholeheartedly. The eminent Harvard zoologist Charles B. Davenport launched a eugenics society in the United States that drew large numbers of adherents. An officer of Davenport’s Eugenics Records Office on Long Island was Alexander Graham Bell, who had worked for many years with the deaf and had written papers about the hereditary basis of deafness. At the first International Conference of Eugenics, which was held in London in 1912, Winston Churchill was an officer. The movement was not just a fin de siècle fad, but flourished for many years. Davenport remained director of the Eugenics Records Office until 1934, and the theory was considered a respectable program for social betterment until the Nazis so grotesquely demonstrated the perils in eugenic thinking.

  It is surprising that these early eugenicists failed to foresee the dangers in such procreational tinkering. In fairness to them, for all their tendencies toward paternalistic elitism, they were mostly decent types who were unable to envision that a member of their own species might one day apply their concepts in a drive to eliminate disliked races and ethnic groups. The monstrosities of Hitler demonstrated that when dealing with populations, there is a frightening proximity between the power to decide who is born and who is not born and the power to decide who lives and who dies.

  Some people were strongly opposed to the eugenics movement long before Hitler. Their objections, however, were on ideological, rather than moral, grounds; for them, eugenics placed too much emphasis on genetic inheritance, with the implication that the only way to improve the species as a whole was to prevent the birth of the unfit. The theory implied that existing men and women were unimprovable. Still, for many years eugenicists and their focus on humanity’s biological makeup were a highly influential group that grew steadily. For a long period they were the only group who proposed a way to solve society’s most nagging problems, poverty and crime, without demolishing the social order.

  IN AMERICA, the leader of the backlash to the eugenicists’ burgeoning popularity was Franz Boas, an anthropologist from an affluent, educated German Jewish family, who had moved to the United States in the 1880s as a young man because he believed German anti-Semitism would hinder his academic career. Establishing himself at Columbia University, Boas eventually became one of America’s most respected and compelling voices in the social sciences throughout the century’s first decades. Early field research with Eskimos and Pacific Northwest Indians convinced Boas of the importance of culture in shaping personality and behavior. He did not dismiss the contribution of heredity, as did his followers, but he believed biological processes were separate and distinct from culture and could only be turned to for explanations if the cultural possibilities had been thoroughly explored and rejected. He also believed that culture was sui generis, that “culture came from culture.”

  Boas saw his mission as reversing the eugenics tide with all its implications of immutable human behavior that could only be controlled by regulating births. His references to inherited traits bordered on lip service; his emphasis was invariably on culture’s massive role in determining human behavior. The encouraging corollary was that changing the culture could change the humans who are formed by it. For all his optimism, Boas was under no illusion this would be a simple matter. Indeed, he believed that man was “shackled by culture.” Still, his worldview offered more workable, humane, and less drastic remedies for social problems than draconian efforts to regulate births. Populations didn’t have to be culled for unfit parents; cultures could be changed to make them fit.

  Boas’s use of the emotionally charged term shackled provides a clue to the passion and liberationist’s zeal of Columbia University’s anthropology department in those pre–World War I years. Boas, and later his followers, were not just convinced they were right; they were convinced that eugenics and other schools of genetic determinism were dangerously wrong.

  In the first years of the century, however, Boas was almost alone in his fight to halt the spread of eugenics among thinking people. But his gene-minimizing ideas had strong appeal among political liberals, who abounded in the country’s academic and intellectual circles. Because Boas’s culturalism struck hard at eugenic assumptions, political progressives—who had always hated the eugenicists’ blaming poverty on the poor—were thrilled that such a respected scholar had provided an alternative vision for improving society. His thinking was eagerly adopted by many in the social sciences, and by 1920 Boas’s cultural-determinist school was well on its way to becoming the reigning view of human nature.

  With a missionary’s conviction, Boas sought to inspire students with his vision. Two of these, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, would surpass Boas in influence on the nation’s intellectual zeitgeist as they beat back the forces of biological determinism and planted the flag of culturalism. Of the various forces that turned enlightened thinking away from biological determinism, these two anthropologists were among the most important.

  In spite of Boas’s success in winning adherents, his theory lacked powerful substantiation. To his mind, a “proof” would be the discovery of an existing human culture that was free of the behavioral problems that plagued American society. If such a group could be found, it would prove that humans were born free of behavioral leanings and were instead programmed by their culture to behave as they did. The underlying assumption, one that informs so much comparative anthropology, is that humans are pretty much the same genetically. If behavioral differences exist, they must come from outside the individual, that is to say, from the culture.

  This is a hefty assumption and overlooks the possibility that Australian aborigines may differ from urbane Parisians or New Yorkers, not because of their culture, but because of minor genetic variations. There is a built-in circularity to the cultural determinists’ argument that the existence of different cultures proves the human is a blank slate on which diverse cultures can write a wide variety of behaviors. Differing cultures can just as readily prove the opposite: that the slate is not blank, but the inherited writing on it is not always identical. Cultural variety may also indicate that the hard wiring shared by all humans is flexible and can be adapted to a large number of differen
t expressions.

  In the 1920s, however, anthropologists were exhilarated by the idea of a natural human, Rousseau’s idealized man, a creature identical to us but untouched by the grindstone of Western civilization and therefore simple and good as we might have been and might be again. However shaky this premise, Margaret Mead made her famous trip to Samoa in 1925 eager to please her mentor by proving it was true. She would find what Boas needed to codify his theory, an idyllic culture so different from America’s that it established once and for all the enormous malleability of human behavior. With so much riding on her expedition, it is not surprising that Mead believed she had found precisely such a culture.

  Her landmark 1928 book on the expedition, Coming of Age in Samoa, depicts an idyllic society with values and mores diametrically opposed to those prevalent in America at that time. Among the long list of differences: Samoans were casual about sex (premarital as well as homosexual), indifferent to rank, devoid of passions, indulgent of their children, unpossessive of them, uncompetitive with one another, nonviolent, peaceable. The long list of attributes might have been a manifesto from the Woodstock Nation and stood as an eloquent rebuke to 1920s American society, which appeared to be destroying itself with opposite tendencies. Samoa sounded too good to be true. And, in fact, it was.

  Mead’s portrait stood for a half century as inspirational proof that culture was everything and inherited traits irrelevant, until Derek Freeman, in his exhaustively researched book Margaret Mead and Samoa, demonstrated how every one of Mead’s observations about the Samoans was wrong. It was not a matter of her interpretation but of her facts. In order to debunk Mead’s picture, Freeman used government records of Samoan warfare and uprisings, police records of violent crimes, and Samoan testimony about their preoccupation with rank and competition, their violent jealousies, their murderous obsession with chastity in unmarried girls. He also used first-person testimony of a large number of Europeans and Americans, combing detailed reports by explorers and missionaries who had been visiting Samoa for eighty years before Mead arrived. With this and other evidence Freeman showed that in virtually every instance the reality of Samoan life was the opposite of Mead’s portrayal.

  The picture Freeman paints of Mead herself carries an implied explanation of her upside-down account. He presents a twenty-three-year-old anthropologist, fresh from graduate school, on her own for the first time, eager to make a contribution to science—or at least to her mentor Franz Boas’s anthropological vision, which was her science—exhilarated by her role as sympathetic scholar curious about the natives’ uncorrupted ways, approving of everything she saw—and getting everything dead wrong in an almost Mr. Magoo kind of blind confusion.

  The picture would be comic, ideal material for the late Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Absurd, if it were not for this upended view of reality becoming the bedrock upon which much modern thinking about human nature was built. Mead’s book was an immediate bestseller, continued to sell widely for many decades, and would eventually be read by more people than any anthropological book in history. Although no one, including Freeman, ever suspected Mead of deliberately cooking her data, the report is now seen by most scholars as a scientific embarrassment along the lines of the Piltdown man hoax. At the time, however, the enthusiastic reception of Mead’s book marked the triumph throughout the nation’s intellectual life of Boas’s view of human nature as a nearly blank slate on which culture imposes personality and behavior. Till then this had been just one of many theories; Mead had made it triumphant fact with a delightful book about nubile virgins in a Gauguin paradise.

  Freeman’s debunking of Mead did not appear until 1983, fifty-five years after the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Throughout those decades there were a few boggles and grumbles from Samoans and others who knew the islands, but for the most part Mead’s idyllic portrait of the wonderful Samoans stood unchallenged. At the same time, the book’s major message, that humans can become whatever their culture cares to make them, became canonical truth upon which modern society could remake itself. Until her death in 1978, Mead remained perhaps the world’s best-known and most influential anthropologist, an eminence she undoubtedly deserved because of her later contributions to the understanding of human cultures—and her much later acknowledgment of genetic components to behavior. She can hardly be blamed for the world’s enthusiastic embrace of her youthful research debacle. In anthropology, as in show business, give the people what they want.…

  When, in 1934, Mead’s colleague and former teacher Ruth Benedict published her major work Patterns of Culture, it too made an enormous impact and reinforced the cultural determinism that Mead’s book had validated. The Benedict book was translated into fourteen languages and over the next twenty-five years sold more than 800,000 copies. It was on course lists for every anthropology department in the United States. When I was at Yale in the early fifties, it was required reading for all undergraduates, an honor not shared by On the Origin of Species or Moby-Dick.

  Benedict’s book, which examines three disparate cultures, is far more accurate and scholarly than Mead’s. It is also more forthright in its conclusions that human behavior is highly variable and a product of the surrounding culture. While Mead had let her portrayal of flaw-free Samoans stand as refutation of hereditarian views about human nature, Benedict was more confrontational toward those who still clung to notions of innate traits and tendencies.

  It is remarkable to read Benedict’s book today in the light of all the recent information about the gene-behavior dynamic. Even though the new data undermine her ultimate conclusion about the absence of inherited characteristics in humans, Patterns of Culture still emerges as a major scholarly achievement. Her research into three complicated cultures and her graceful and lucid presentation of her findings succeed admirably in the not minor task of establishing beyond question cultural relativism, the many workable variations in human societies. That she went on to offer this data as proving the absence of inherited behavioral traits appears almost a minor shortcoming when placed next to her brilliant analysis of dissimilar cultures. Unfortunately, it was the aspect of her book most enthusiastically seized upon by social thinkers and policy-makers.

  Like others of the Boas school, Benedict was high on diversity and saw the many cultural variations as establishing the unlimited malleability of the human animal. In studying other cultures, today’s evolutionary psychologists see something quite different; they focus instead on the vast number of similarities that run through every culture—incest taboos, altruism, and religiosity are three of the most frequently cited. The global presence of such traits—and of a far larger number of behavioral commonplaces—rendered them less interesting and, as a result, less noted than the differences, especially by anthropologists like Mead and Benedict, who were grooving to the differences. The ubiquitousness of specieswide traits made them invisible.

  Now, however, such across-the-board similarities are cited as strong evidence of the species’ shared genes. Travelers today complain of the growing similarity of the world’s peoples, whose quaint differences had always been a lure to get up and go. One could speculate that the ease with which McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, the film industry, and other multinationals are gratifying tastes shared by all humans is evidence of specieswide behavioral genes. Cultural variation may have been an aberration of geography and is rapidly being obliterated by telecommunications. Human sameness, for better or worse, is where it’s at.

  Benedict was among the few from her camp who gave serious attention to the customs and taboos found in virtually all cultures. Admitting such planetwide behaviors presented problems for cultural determinists; Benedict explained them as traits that reach back to the species’ origins, to a time when humans were one race, one culture, and few in number. They originated, not in our genes, she claims, but were adopted by the primal tribe and have been passed down to every descendant tribe that spread throughout the world. These traits have been with us so long, she bel
ieved, that they have become “automatic,” which explains their survival in every culture in the world. She called such universal behavior “cradle traits” and refused to yield them to the genetic camp.

  Yes, present-day Australian aborigines may have no cultural interchange with Swedish professors, but at one time a few hundred thousand years ago they were all part of the same tribe and certain tribal customs—not sleeping with your sister, for instance—have survived the eons and are cultural artifacts subscribed to by all humans. Her clever explanation seems an almost minor variance in interpretation from the behavioral-genes explanation, but it is one that produced a vastly different conclusion. In her model the human remained a blank slate at birth but a slate that had been scribbled on when it was fresh from the evolutionary factory. The scribbling was passed on through the ages culturally, not genetically. One weakness of Benedict’s construct is that cultural traditions, which have repeatedly proved to be frail determinants of behavior, were subjected to eons of vicissitudes, exigencies, and human caprice, whereas the genes, should they underlie aspects of culture, were safely encased within each human cell and were passed down for the most part intact throughout the millennia.

  The turn-of-the-century eugenicists, in their gusto for the new Darwinian thinking, all but ignored environmental influences and may have been guilty of establishing the ersatz either-or premise that has long dogged the culture-versus-inheritance debate. Boas’s school of cultural determinists was no more balanced. In their counterattack, they went to similar extremes. When eugenics top dog Charles Davenport could write of “the fundamental fact that all men are created bound by their protoplasmic makeup …,” it is not surprising that Boas’s disciples, in refuting such strident biological determinism, would go equally overboard in their sweeping claim that cultural was all. Both sides, fueled with a modicum of evidence in their favor, crammed human nature into their opposing ideological boxes.