Sick Societies / The Decomposition of Sociology
Edgerton, Robert & Horowitz, Irving Louis
SICK SOCIETIES: CHALLENGING THE MYTH OF PRIMITIVE HARMONY Robert Edgerton The Free Press / 269 pages / $24.95 THE DECOMPOSITION OF SOCIOLOGY Irving Louis Horowitz Oxford University Press / 243...
...Boas, crusader for tolerance that he was, argued nonetheless that the sympathetic study of 70 The American Spectator March 1994 different cultures should not lead to the absence of overarching moral standards...
...What Edgerton wants "is a moratorium on the uncritical assumption that the traditional beliefs and practices of folk societies are adaptive while those of modern societies are not and a commitment to examining the relative adaptiveness of the beliefs and practices of all societies...
...A merican anthropology has its ori gins in Franz Boas's crusade against white supremacy and the racism of the eugenics movement, which argued that Darwinism explained the moral and mental attributes as well as the physical characteristics of different groups...
...I t's an approach with which Irving Louis Horowitz would very likely concur...
...Horowitz takes up the contemporary correlates of a cultural relativism unhinged from its Enlightenment origins in describing what happened to criminology...
...His appetite satisfied, the man has no longer any need of the woman, nor the woman of one particular man...
...But it turned out that she simply meant that with all the discussion of how American popular culture in general and ghetto culture in particular had turned rancid, those specialists on culture, the anthropologists, had nothing to say...
...are all a matter of weeks...
...Just as the French anthropologist Levi-Strauss turned to reading Rousseau to explain what he was seeing in the Brazilian jungle, Mead's account of sexual life in Samoa seems in retrospect not to have required a physical journey...
...This was to be the via media between research demands imposed by the scientific method and the unavoidable moral concerns the researcher brought to his task...
...Chief among these assumptions, as Edgerton explains, is that "because smaller and simpler societies . . . develop their cultures in response to the demands of their immediate and stable environments, their ways of life must have produced far greater harmony and happiness...
...it is the style of life of the rich...
...While anthropologists following Levi-Strauss were denying any meaningful distinction between "savagery" and "civilization," criminologists, says Horowitz, sought to reduce the "distinction between normal and criminal behavior . . . to the whimsical nature of law in society...
...The future depends on whether the campus Bourbons will be willing to acknowledge that, as New York polymath Jim Chapin puts it, "the Rousseauian kingdom has failed in both its countercultural and totalitarian forms...
...Four thousand years of isolated primitivism led not to harmonious adaptation but...
...It is from Rousseau and his heirs that the radical left derives what might be described as its anarchoStalinist tendencies葉hat is, its ability to define even the most minimal demand for order in bourgeois societies as repressive while embracing Castro-like carriers of the general will...
...The 1983 general meeting of the American Anthropological Association responded to Freeman's criticisms not by reconsidering Mead's evidence but by roundly condemning Freeman's book as blasphemy...
...171 72 The American Spectator March 1994...
...His solution to the "decomposition of sociology" is, in the tradition of John Dewey and Sidney Hook, to reengage the discipline whereby the individual researcher's passions are contained by continually testing propositions against the best available evidence...
...An instructive case for Horowitz is one of the most embarrassing episodes in the annals of social science: In 1983 Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa, which showed that not only had Margaret Mead gotten her facts wrong about the sexual paradise she had found in Samoa, but that Samoans suffered from their share of social and personal pathologies, including a "cult of female virginity" carried further than its Western counterpart...
...Here is Mead on Samoa: Sex has produced a scheme of personal relations in which there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity . . . and in personal relations, caring is slight...
...Love and hate, jealousy and revenge...
...Xenophilia replaced xenophobia, so that many anthropologists came to respect every culture but their own...
...Liberalism," wrote Dewey "as a method of intelligence...
...Yes" he answered and went on: "Nature wishes us to have children because the earth produces enough to feed everyone...
...The upshot he notes, is not just the highly publicized closing of the sociology departments at Washington University and the University of Rochester but "the departure [from sociology departments of] urbanologists, social planners, demographers, criminologists, penologists," all of whom have spun off their own independent fiefdoms...
...The combination of cultural relativism ("Who are we to judge...
...But that attack on xenophobic intolerance, the benefits of which we are still reaping today, turned on itself...
...Relativism," Horowitz concludes, often ends "in sheer intellectual nihilism...
...sonal intimacy, social cohesion . . . were lost in the transition to urban life" that Edgerton challenges...
...Important though the question of sexual liberation was, it was part of a larger apostasy in which Freeman had undermined the primitive ideal anthropologists had so long used to bash their countrymen...
...Given their relatively abundant food supply the various tribes might have been able to live relatively amicably...
...What's been lost, he argues, is the once-fruitful interaction between empirical researchers, now separated into their specialities, and sociological theory which, cut off from its empirical connections, has become an "escape from reality...
...After an almost four-hour conversation with the chief of a remote tribe, the interviewer stopped to say, "Okay, enough about me様et's talk about you...
...Here again, although Horowitz doesn't discuss Rousseau, the radical tendencies within sociology can be described as Rousseauian...
...Anthropologists who are capable of sniffing out the slightest smell of repressive power in their own societies are able to defend cannibalism, ceremonial rape, and head-hunting as successful adaptations...
...to a "slow strangulation of the mind...
...Rousseau," wrote Judith Shklar, was both "the voice of protest against every social rule and the voice of therapeutic moral authority...
...it is your style of life which robs my children of bread...
...Most of Sick Societies is given over to summarizing cases of dysfunctional, primitive practices and societies maladapted to their environment...
...Take Tasmania, which, because of its geography, was totally isolated and free from external pressure or competition...
...Unable to make fire the Tasmanians gave up on fishing, and lived generation after generation, abandoning previously useful practices without creating new ones...
...But his account of the Rousseauist assumptions enshrined in American anthropology provided part of the answer to my friend's question...
...SICK SOCIETIES: CHALLENGING THE MYTH OF PRIMITIVE HARMONY Robert Edgerton The Free Press / 269 pages / $24.95 THE DECOMPOSITION OF SOCIOLOGY Irving Louis Horowitz Oxford University Press / 243 pages / $25 reviewed by FRED SIEGEL R ecently a friend, a businesswoman with a passing interest in social policy, asked me, "Whatever happened to anthropology...
...What now for anthropology and sociology...
...This was a tension様ike the anthropologists' conflict between universalism and particularism葉hat radicals resolved in favor of moral relativism...
...The non-anthropologist who reads Edgerton will be struck by the similarities between the argument evoked to place primitive societies beyond criticism and those that have been used to defend the dysfunctional and deadly expressions of ghetto culture like "gangsta" rap, as a reasonable response to the brutality of white society...
...But as a part of what has been called the "de-Enlightenment" of anthropology, that tension was resolved in favor of a romantic localism...
...But instead in pursuit of women they lived in a Hobbesian world of raid and counter...
...Criminals were viewed as little different from other citizens engaged in expressions of grievances or searching for wealth through self-help...
...Thinking that she was referring to the increasingly self-conscious and therapeutic character of cultural anthropology, I told her the joke about the New Age anthropologist doing field work...
...It is the belief "that emotional and moral commitment, perFred Siegel is professor of history at the Cooper Union and a columnist for the New York Post...
...Horowitz, a distinguished professor and the editor of Transaction publishers and Society magazine, is passionately and persuasively critical of the way sociology "has become so enmeshed in the politics of advocacy .. . that it is simply unaware of, much less able to respond to, new conditions...
...Neither discipline is likely to revive until the diehards are willing to acknowledge容ven if only tentatively, in the form of Isaiah Berlin's "'yes, but . . .' to the Enlightenment"葉hat the idea of progress may still have something to offer...
...signifies the adoption of the scientific habit of mind in application to social affairs...
...In a letter to Mirabeau, Rousseau wrote, "I do not see an endurable middle way between the most austere democracy (of the general will) and the most complete Hobbesianism...
...and functionalism ("They must know what they're doing") has had the effect of shutting off debate...
...Robert Edgerton's Sick Societies addresses American culture only for a few pages, to discuss the pathologies of the West Virginia hollows...
...What's more, one of Mead's central informants then came forward to explain that she and her friends had only been pulling Mead's leg...
...There was for Boas, as for Montesquieu before him and Isaiah Berlin after him, an irreducible tension between the claims of a universal morality and a respect for local traditions...
...Here is Rousseau on man in the state of nature: Males and females united fortuitously according to encounters, opportunities and desires...
...Barbarous customs like female genital infibulation have been passionately defended by anthropologists on the grounds that they must be functional or else societies living close to nature wouldn't have adapted them in the first place...
...T he "society made me do it" school of sociology has done little to improve on Rousseau's answer when asked if it was true that he had sent all his children to orphanages...
...Mead, only 24 when she had been in Samoa, and herself troubled by questions of her own sexual identity, appeared to have been had, but so it turns out was most of her profession...
...But it is precisely The American Spectator March 1994 71 that excluded middle that Horowitz is looking for...
...Sociology in general, Horowitz argues, has largely become a "repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas" and find the ideal ofobjectivity to be merely the burdensome baggage of a bourgeois past...
...Freeman's findings had the same effect on anthropology that the collapse of the USSR had on sociology溶ext to none...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
