Rousseau and Voltaire hated each other, Voltaire was the father of enlightenment, the advocate of freedom without the State’s interference; Rosseau was the father of totalitarianism, that the State has the power to provide “positive” freedom if we give up our natural rights in favour of social contract. Voltaire advocated for civil liberty while Rousseau believed human nature is savagerily good. Voltaire inspired Victor Hugo while Rousseau inspired Karl Marx.
I came across this Ayn Rand’s essay “Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors’ War Against America” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought years ago, one thing I remembered specifically from the essay was her mentioning of Derek Freeman, a New Zealander. I came across this name again reading another book on human genome. Essentially, Rand used Anthropology as one of the examples of the anti-reason attitude in academia. Margaret Mead was an anthropologist who wrote a dishonest book in which she presented Samoa as a perfect society “gentle, peaceful, open, devoid of jealousy, free of stress”. Hence we have a resurgence of the Rousseau idea of anarcho primitivism. Then Freeman came into the picture, who wrote an opposite account of what Mead wrote after he finished his studies in Samoa, he concluded that Samoans “have high rates of homicide and asasult, and the incidence of rape in Samoa is among the highest in the world… The Samoans live within an authority system that regularly results in psychological disturbances ranging from compulsive behaviors to hysterical illnesses and suicide. They are extremely prone to fits of jealousy.” And he criticized Mead’s works “are fundamentally in error and some of them preposterously false”.
The basis of this fight goes way beyond the lack of integrity in academia, but the debate on nature and nurture, which is also a focus for subsequent event seen in the sociobiology debate and in evolutionary psychology. Mead’s naivity and subjectivity to understand information lead to her false report of a dreamy paradise when the reality shows a primitive society full of violence. But what is the response of academia? Shut him down. First the critics of Freeman began spreading rumours that Freeman only published this because Mead was dead and couldn’t respond, then they argued that industrialization and Christianity essentially destroyed this paradise. Even better, the American Anthropological Association did not invite Freeman to defend his work and declared his work “unscientific”.
So what can we see here? Social antrhopology, a field that is almost completely useless to the society is championed as science while evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are hated because it might be RACIST. This is a fight we are gonna keep fighting, we are seeing more and more of these attacks on reason and science such as Feminist Economics, Racist Maths and Activist Sports Science. As long as we can stay vigilant, we will not be easily convinced by fake science like the propaganda from I Fucking Love Science.
Kuo's Gulch 