thenation--2020-05-05--One Damn Thing After Another

One Damn Thing After Another

The coronavirus pandemic reminds us viscerally of the original meaning of the word “ crisis.
” According to the ancient Greeks , krisis designated a moment when a stark choice was revealed .
In medicine , the patient is going to either live or die ; in criminal law , the defendant will be found guilty or not guilty .
And in politics ?
The past few years have seen a growing list of books produced by what skeptics might deride as the “ crisis of democracy ” industry .
But are we dealing with a crisis in the sense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideal of self-government ?
Or are we witnessing one of the regular ups and downs in political development—mild symptoms of a decay that could well be reversed ?
Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe : From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day Sheri Berman ’ s Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe and Adam Przeworski ’ s Crises of Democracy both attempt to give us sober answers to this question .
Berman ’ s book is an impressive , amazingly wide-ranging account of European political development since the 17th century .
Analyzing the trajectory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ War to the current malaise of the European Union , she seeks to identify the political , social , and cultural preconditions for democracy .
Przeworski , one of the world ’ s most influential scholars of comparative politics , urges us to tone down the crisis talk , partly reflecting his minimalist understanding of what counts as democracy in the first place .
Drawing on three historical examples—Weimar Germany , France ’ s Fourth Republic , and Chile in the run-up to the 1973 coup—he argues that a real crisis of democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a reality TV star as president or a country deciding to exit the EU , as worrisome as those developments might be .
Yet he also observes two long-term trends that do make him concerned about the fate of even long-established democracies : increasing instability in party systems and , on a less abstract level , the fact that large majorities in countries across the West expect their children to be worse off than they are .
These trends , Przeworski warns , are deeply disconcerting .
Read together , these two books @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last without citizens having a minimum sense of the same shared fate—the very sense that once animated social democratic parties ( of which Berman is a distinguished historian ) .
At the same time , contrary to American centrists who lament divisions as such , the books make it clear that democracy does not require consensus but rather the capacity of a political system to process conflicts in a peaceful manner and the willingness of politicians to see their adversaries assume power .
The problem is that the facade of such a system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ underlying reality has disappeared .
In Democracy and Dictatorship , Berman doesn ’ t make any claims to historical originality .
Her aim is to identify larger patterns on the basis of previous scholarship , and she does so through a series of stylized accounts ( with helpful summaries at the end of most chapters ) of the advances and , more commonly , setbacks of democracy in the United Kingdom , Germany , Italy , France , and Spain , with occasional glances at Eastern Europe .
Such a vast amount of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tight conceptual scheme .
Berman ’ s wager is that what she calls her “ conceptual brush-clearing ” —cutting back the thickets of misunderstanding that have engulfed terms like “ democracy ” and “ liberalism ” —will help us see patterns we missed before .
One potential misunderstanding involves our very notion of liberal democracy .
Berman argues that this seemingly self-evident compound combines two concepts potentially in tension with each other .
With its collective empowerment of citizens through elections , democracy is not the same as liberalism , which , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the rule of law and minorities ’ rights as well as a commitment to treat all members of the polity as equals .
Specifically , liberal democracy , she continues , is a rare and relatively recent achievement in Europe .
One can not get to it fast , and there certainly are no shortcuts ; as Berman puts it , we should expect a marathon , not a sprint .
And she goes on to show in the book that the marathon is impeded by an obstacle course .
The obstacles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Berman helpfully reminds us that those trying to build democracy never start with a blank slate .
Absolute monarchies and dictatorships and even relatively moderate regimes like Wilhelmine Germany rule by dividing societies .
Berman ’ s presentation of 19th and 20th century German history backs up this point .
After unifying the country and establishing a relatively wide franchise , Chancellor Otto von Bismarck waged an all-out kulturkampf against Catholics , about a third of the country ’ s population .
He accused them of being loyal to Rome rather than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Social Democratic Party , the largest and electorally most successful workers ’ party at the time .
The “ Anti-Socialist Legislation ” left a poisonous legacy for the Weimar Republic : Social Democrats were suspected of being traitors to the fatherland .
Another lasting effect , not discussed by Berman but equally relevant to the trajectory of German democracy up to the present day , was that the SPD long felt the need to prove itself as staatstragend , a patriotic party that ultimately keeps the polity together .
The party voted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the conflagration ’ s aftermath , it rescued German capitalism by turning against the country ’ s more radical leftist forces .
As recently as 2018 it saved Angela Merkel , as the party ’ s leadership felt compelled to enter yet another grand coalition with the center-right for the sake of German democracy ’ s stability .
Berman is blunt about her view that having some significant degree of consensus and sense of national belonging is critical to make it to the finish line of the liberal democracy marathon .
Italy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of why .
After the country was largely unified in 1861 , only about 2.5 percent of the population spoke anything recognizable as Italian .
Sicilians had no idea what the word Italia meant ( some thought it was the name of the king ’ s wife ) ; one figure who refused to use the country ’ s name altogether was the pope , who lost large chunks of the Vatican ’ s state to the new Italy and who proceeded to excommunicate the king , his ministers , and anyone else @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the “ Subalpine usurper.
” Italy apparently lacked Italians , and a democracy without a proper demos , Berman argues , is not a democracy at all .
Indeed , for decades , Italy remained deeply divided , the state functioned only intermittently—and hardly at all in the south—and ruling elites secured power mainly through patronage .
For Berman , the clientelism that came to be associated with democracy in those years only further divided society , making it difficult to broaden the expanses of solidarity and to form strong political parties—the latter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for modern liberal democracies to work .
For her , this sense of fragmentation , strongly felt in 19th and early 20th century Italy and Germany , helped facilitate the rise of fascism in both countries .
The Nazi Party , which at one point counted 10 percent of Germans as members , and the Italian National Fascist Party were what later came to be known as people ’ s parties , which cut across various class divisions and created an image of national solidarity , albeit one strictly limited by racial boundaries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ social harmony ” consisted in labor remaining subordinate to capital . )
According to Berman , the dangers of fascism point to the sense of solidarity and collective identity that liberal democracies need .
Without them , polities can democratize too early and get stuck with mere “ electoralism , ” or regular elections that depend on the de facto exclusion of significant parts of the population and result in no real turnover in power ( a situation all too familiar to students of the American South ) .
Another fateful scenario @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the upheaval of nation building , state building , and democracy building all at the same time .
This , Berman asserts , is essentially the story of Eastern Europe after World War I , where liberal democracy struggled to take hold properly , with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia ( a fact that casts doubt on her thesis that a common national culture is essential to democratic politics , since Czechoslovakia was the most ethnically diverse country in the region ) .
As Berman shows by examining the history of Eastern Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ often proved the largest obstacle to democratization .
Tocqueville warned that “ an aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle , in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between different classes of society.
” The only exception to this pattern—and an instance of “ comparatively puzzling behavior , ” according to Berman—is Britain ’ s gentry , which gradually extended the franchise in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries .
Of course , it did so partly to avoid violent revolution .
Faithful to Lampedusa ’ s famous line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for everything to remain the same , its members ended up preserving much of their wealth and power .
It ’ s a depressing thought that the persistence of inequality may have contributed to the fact that , during the interwar period , the UK was the only one of the states discussed in Berman ’ s book that could count as a consolidated democracy .
In Berman ’ s view , liberal democracy is ultimately possible only in strong states where there is a common sense of belonging and national culture .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ such commonality lies long-forgotten and often brutal histories of violence .
Because England went through a civil war in the 17th century , it had a much smoother political development in the 20th—or so the logic of Berman ’ s account suggests .
Thus the reader is left with the question , What other paths are there toward collective solidarity that do not move in the direction of a violent majoritarianism ?
According to Berman , this is where France fits in .
In her French story , the violent consolidation of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pernicious long-term legacy .
But France also shows that not all forms of state creation and nation building have to be brutal or defined by histories of suppression .
The Third Republic , the longest-lasting regime since the French Revolution , made society more cohesive through a common republican school education ( and military service ) that helped establish liberal democracy in the country .
Even here , however , an irony lurks in Berman ’ s focus on the role a national culture plays in the formation of liberal democracy : It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to say , effective protection of minorities— only in circumstances in which there are no vulnerable minorities and hence no real need for liberalism to begin with .
In the last pages of Democracy and Dictatorship , Berman urges us to lower our political expectations and take leave of the naive post-1989 expectation that every nation would race toward liberal democracy and get there quickly enough .
She writes that countries stumbling “ along the way to democracy are the norm rather than the exception.
” That ’ s not much of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hungarians who saw their dreams of liberal democracy crushed in the past decade .
Berman would tell them that democracy building requires two phases : a proper dismantling of the old regime and then consolidation of self-rule .
It takes patience and time—to which they ’ d likely respond with John Maynard Keynes ’ s observation that , in the long run , we are all dead .
Young Eastern Europeans might further remind us that until recently , some social scientists had a politically hopeful message for their increasingly prosperous countries .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Polish-born political scientist teaching at New York University .
He still maintains that “ we have known for some time that democracies are impregnable in economically developed countries.
” He also suggests there is another empirical constant : The longer a country has been a democracy , the more likely it is to remain one .
As he puts it , “ The taste for selecting governments through elections is an acquired one , but it is addictive once acquired ” ( or as Berman might say , once you get jogging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) .
Citing the United States as an example , he notes “ the probability that the incumbent would not hold an election , or hold one making it impossible for the opposition to win , is 1 in 1.8 million country years.
” ( Improbable is , of course , not the same as impossible ; we ’ ll find out more this year . )
Przeworski opens his short , dense , but rewarding book with an appeal to tone down what Saul Bellow once called “ crisis chatter.
” According @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longing for strong leadership do not demonstrate that democracy is giving way , nor do mass strikes or even riots ( even if they were more frequent in countries where democracy eventually fell ) .
Actual breakdown looks different , he insists , pointing to three paradigmatic cases : the collapse of the Weimar regime , which still casts the largest shadow over democracy studies ; the ascension of Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s in France ; and the military coup in Chile in 1973 .
The lesson is that crises @ @ @ @ @ @ @ system fails to regulate rivalry and resolve conflicts in a peaceful manner , and in nearly all liberal democracies , we do not seem to be at that point—at least not yet .
Even though Przeworski ’ s historical arguments are persuasive , sometimes the past might be just the past .
As he acknowledges , “ history does not speak for itself , ” and we might simply be caught in webs of misleading but oddly comforting analogies .
Until recently , the breakdown of democracy was almost always accompanied by violence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between 1788 and 2008 political power changed hands as a result of 544 elections and 577 coups.
” But what about those democracies that were not destroyed by force but instead were undermined stealthily or just slipped away somehow ?
And in the latter cases , how would we be able to tell ?
Przeworski ’ s previous work gives us a hint .
At one point he offered one of the pithiest definitions of democracy : a political system in which parties can lose elections .
This might sound not so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an important insight .
If there is no real turnover of power , it probably isn ’ t a democracy , which Przeworski also summed up , in an equally epigrammatic manner , as “ institutionalized uncertainty.
” Political outcomes have to be unpredictable ( if you like complete predictability , North Korea is probably an attractive option ) ; at the same time , this uncertainty needs to be institutionalized through constitutions and electoral laws that all of the contenders for power accept and that make what is unknown still nonetheless controllable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ force , much of the uncertainty seems to have been taken out of politics in “ autocratizing ” ( alas , an entirely appropriate neologism for our age ) countries like Turkey and Hungary .
The courts have been packed , the media brought to heel , and gerrymandering and all kinds of other political dark arts used to ensure that electoral outcomes aren ’ t much in question .
The more that can be done under the color of law , the less needs to be accomplished through force of arms .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s latest brazen attempt—immediately approved by the Russian constitutional court—effectively to keep himself in power for life .
How Should We Remember the Puritans ?
Is something similar possible in the democracies that Przeworski deems “ impregnable ” ?
Here , worries finally set in , and his tone changes .
He identifies two current developments that are unprecedented and that he argues might signify that the supposed laws in democracy-promoting social science no longer hold .
The first is a level of pessimism never seen in surveys before .
Sixty percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think their children will be financially worse off than themselves .
Przeworski observes with barely concealed alarm that “ this collapse of the deeply ingrained belief in intergenerational progress is a phenomenon at a civilizational scale.
” The second factor is less obviously threatening to democracy .
He diagnoses an increasing fragmentation and instability of party systems .
One of the remarkable empirical findings of his book is that , despite the enormous upheavals over the course of the 20th century , the dominant parties in many Western European countries remained ideologically consistent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 90s .
It ’ s not quite evident why that should be such a problem in and of itself .
Think of left-wing newcomers like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece or , for that matter , the ideologically still somewhat indistinct Five Star Movement in Italy .
They obviously made the formation of governments more difficult ; Spain had caretaker governments for months on end .
And in the eyes of admirers of the Westminster system , ever-larger coalitions also exact costs in terms of accountability : Unlike in a simple @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea who ’ s responsible for what .
But consider what new parties have actually meant outside the abstract modeling of specialists in comparative politics .
For decades , Spanish and Greek politics were dominated by two large and , to varying degrees , corrupt parties that , during the euro crisis , offered more or less the same cruel economic policies .
Disillusioned youngsters—whose lives will forever be marred by this lost decade of austerity—returned to the voting booth once new , attractive options appeared on the ballot .
True , neither @ @ @ @ @ @ @ austerity .
But to read their rise as a sign of a “ crisis of democratic representation , ” as has been common , is to get things exactly the wrong way around .
The crisis would have consisted in the old parties continuing to govern as a kind of cartel .
As societies change and new conflicts appear , party systems should adapt and transform in sometimes surprising ways ; they should indeed provide institutionalized uncertainty .
That still leaves us with the new wave of intergenerational despair .
The danger is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over existing democracies , though the patently inadequate responses of many democracies to the coronavirus crisis might encourage that kind of thought .
( But if it does , never fail to mention democratic Taiwan , which dealt with the pandemic much better than the mainland . )
But that doesn ’ t mean the more plausible explanation of how despair could destroy democracy is necessarily any more reassuring .
Many citizens seem aware that the Viktor Orbáns and Donald Trumps of the world are chipping away at democracy .
Yet in highly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are willing to put up with the damage because of economic self-interest ( whether illusory or real ) or other short-term partisan advantages .
As Yale political scientist Milan Svolik has shown , there is little evidence that people have had it with democracy as such—a major difference with attitudes in the 20th century , when plenty of people considered parliamentary democracy an obvious failure and embraced fascism as the way of the future .
But today some citizens are willing to engage in a trade-off between what ’ s personally good for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their kids—and respect for institutionalized uncertainty .
Given that this problem is ultimately a matter of far-reaching changes in the economy and society , Przeworski can ’ t help but end up declaring himself “ moderately pessimistic about the future.
” What he ’ s afraid of is not spectacular coups but a stealthy , creeping authoritarianism that keeps diminishing institutionalized uncertainty .
Many governments , from Orbán ’ s in Hungary to Narendra Modi ’ s in India , are following this path ; the coronavirus crisis , if anything , makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Both Democracy and Dictatorship and Crises of Democracy , while not quite spelling out the point , remind us of the important link between liberal democracy and social democracy .
Berman stresses at the end of her book that democracy in postwar Western Europe worked because the large political parties proved responsive to the citizens ’ socioeconomic demands ; Przeworski , in pointing to the perils of widespread pessimism about the economic future , effectively backs up that point .
Both books also exhibit a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oriented political science , long driven by economics envy , can help us under the circumstances .
Berman stresses the importance of historical contingency and what is sometimes called path dependency .
History may be just one damn thing after another , but the sequence of these things matters in terms of some political possibilities opening up and others being foreclosed .
Przeworski , no stranger to complicated statistical calculations , even goes on record with a remarkable admission .
“ The intuitions from memoirs and even novels , ” he writes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ systematic data : they tell us how individuals perceived and experienced the dramatic events in which they were protagonists and , in the end , it is their actions that determined the outcomes of crises.
” Of course , this point about “ action ” is actually a hopeful message : It ’ s still at least somewhat up to us .

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
The coronavirus pandemic reminds us viscerally of the original meaning of the word “crisis.” According to the ancient Greeks, krisis designated a moment when a stark choice was revealed. In medicine, the patient is going to either live or die; in criminal law, the defendant will be found guilty or not guilty. And in politics? The past few years have seen a growing list of books produced by what skeptics might deride as the “crisis of democracy” industry. But are we dealing with a crisis in the sense of a truly make-or-break moment for the ideal of self-government? Or are we witnessing one of the regular ups and downs in political development—mild symptoms of a decay that could well be reversed? Books in Review Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day By Sheri Berman Buy this book Crises of Democracy By Adam Przeworski Buy this book
Sheri Berman’s Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe and Adam Przeworski’s Crises of Democracy both attempt to give us sober answers to this question. Berman’s book is an impressive, amazingly wide-ranging account of European political development since the 17th century. Analyzing the trajectory of the continent from the English Civil War to the current malaise of the European Union, she seeks to identify the political, social, and cultural preconditions for democracy.
Przeworski, one of the world’s most influential scholars of comparative politics, urges us to tone down the crisis talk, partly reflecting his minimalist understanding of what counts as democracy in the first place. Drawing on three historical examples—Weimar Germany, France’s Fourth Republic, and Chile in the run-up to the 1973 coup—he argues that a real crisis of democracy looks very different from the election of a reality TV star as president or a country deciding to exit the EU, as worrisome as those developments might be. Yet he also observes two long-term trends that do make him concerned about the fate of even long-established democracies: increasing instability in party systems and, on a less abstract level, the fact that large majorities in countries across the West expect their children to be worse off than they are. These trends, Przeworski warns, are deeply disconcerting.
Read together, these two books remind us that democracies are unlikely to last without citizens having a minimum sense of the same shared fate—the very sense that once animated social democratic parties (of which Berman is a distinguished historian). At the same time, contrary to American centrists who lament divisions as such, the books make it clear that democracy does not require consensus but rather the capacity of a political system to process conflicts in a peaceful manner and the willingness of politicians to see their adversaries assume power. The problem is that the facade of such a system can be kept up long after the underlying reality has disappeared.
In Democracy and Dictatorship, Berman doesn’t make any claims to historical originality. Her aim is to identify larger patterns on the basis of previous scholarship, and she does so through a series of stylized accounts (with helpful summaries at the end of most chapters) of the advances and, more commonly, setbacks of democracy in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, with occasional glances at Eastern Europe. Such a vast amount of material has to be fitted into a tight conceptual scheme. Berman’s wager is that what she calls her “conceptual brush-clearing”—cutting back the thickets of misunderstanding that have engulfed terms like “democracy” and “liberalism”—will help us see patterns we missed before. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
One potential misunderstanding involves our very notion of liberal democracy. Berman argues that this seemingly self-evident compound combines two concepts potentially in tension with each other. With its collective empowerment of citizens through elections, democracy is not the same as liberalism, which, she holds, is best understood as respect for the rule of law and minorities’ rights as well as a commitment to treat all members of the polity as equals. Specifically, liberal democracy, she continues, is a rare and relatively recent achievement in Europe. One cannot get to it fast, and there certainly are no shortcuts; as Berman puts it, we should expect a marathon, not a sprint. And she goes on to show in the book that the marathon is impeded by an obstacle course.
The obstacles are often a legacy of the past. Berman helpfully reminds us that those trying to build democracy never start with a blank slate. Absolute monarchies and dictatorships and even relatively moderate regimes like Wilhelmine Germany rule by dividing societies. Current Issue View our current issue
Berman’s presentation of 19th and 20th century German history backs up this point. After unifying the country and establishing a relatively wide franchise, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck waged an all-out kulturkampf against Catholics, about a third of the country’s population. He accused them of being loyal to Rome rather than the Reich; he also went after the Social Democratic Party, the largest and electorally most successful workers’ party at the time. The “Anti-Socialist Legislation” left a poisonous legacy for the Weimar Republic: Social Democrats were suspected of being traitors to the fatherland. Another lasting effect, not discussed by Berman but equally relevant to the trajectory of German democracy up to the present day, was that the SPD long felt the need to prove itself as staatstragend, a patriotic party that ultimately keeps the polity together. The party voted to enter World War I; in the conflagration’s aftermath, it rescued German capitalism by turning against the country’s more radical leftist forces. As recently as 2018 it saved Angela Merkel, as the party’s leadership felt compelled to enter yet another grand coalition with the center-right for the sake of German democracy’s stability.
Berman is blunt about her view that having some significant degree of consensus and sense of national belonging is critical to make it to the finish line of the liberal democracy marathon. Italy, she insists, is a good example of why. After the country was largely unified in 1861, only about 2.5 percent of the population spoke anything recognizable as Italian. Sicilians had no idea what the word Italia meant (some thought it was the name of the king’s wife); one figure who refused to use the country’s name altogether was the pope, who lost large chunks of the Vatican’s state to the new Italy and who proceeded to excommunicate the king, his ministers, and anyone else associated with what he referred to as the “Subalpine usurper.” Italy apparently lacked Italians, and a democracy without a proper demos, Berman argues, is not a democracy at all. Indeed, for decades, Italy remained deeply divided, the state functioned only intermittently—and hardly at all in the south—and ruling elites secured power mainly through patronage.
For Berman, the clientelism that came to be associated with democracy in those years only further divided society, making it difficult to broaden the expanses of solidarity and to form strong political parties—the latter being, according to her, indispensable for modern liberal democracies to work. For her, this sense of fragmentation, strongly felt in 19th and early 20th century Italy and Germany, helped facilitate the rise of fascism in both countries. The Nazi Party, which at one point counted 10 percent of Germans as members, and the Italian National Fascist Party were what later came to be known as people’s parties, which cut across various class divisions and created an image of national solidarity, albeit one strictly limited by racial boundaries. (Also, the reality of “social harmony” consisted in labor remaining subordinate to capital.)
According to Berman, the dangers of fascism point to the sense of solidarity and collective identity that liberal democracies need. Without them, polities can democratize too early and get stuck with mere “electoralism,” or regular elections that depend on the de facto exclusion of significant parts of the population and result in no real turnover in power (a situation all too familiar to students of the American South). Another fateful scenario: Countries might have to go through the upheaval of nation building, state building, and democracy building all at the same time. This, Berman asserts, is essentially the story of Eastern Europe after World War I, where liberal democracy struggled to take hold properly, with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia (a fact that casts doubt on her thesis that a common national culture is essential to democratic politics, since Czechoslovakia was the most ethnically diverse country in the region). Related Article Is Populism What’s Really Threatening Democracy? Steven Hahn
As Berman shows by examining the history of Eastern Europe, the persistent power of landed elites often proved the largest obstacle to democratization. Tocqueville warned that “an aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between different classes of society.” The only exception to this pattern—and an instance of “comparatively puzzling behavior,” according to Berman—is Britain’s gentry, which gradually extended the franchise in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course, it did so partly to avoid violent revolution. Faithful to Lampedusa’s famous line about everything having to change in order for everything to remain the same, its members ended up preserving much of their wealth and power. It’s a depressing thought that the persistence of inequality may have contributed to the fact that, during the interwar period, the UK was the only one of the states discussed in Berman’s book that could count as a consolidated democracy.
In Berman’s view, liberal democracy is ultimately possible only in strong states where there is a common sense of belonging and national culture. But her book also notes that behind such commonality lies long-forgotten and often brutal histories of violence. Because England went through a civil war in the 17th century, it had a much smoother political development in the 20th—or so the logic of Berman’s account suggests. Thus the reader is left with the question, What other paths are there toward collective solidarity that do not move in the direction of a violent majoritarianism? According to Berman, this is where France fits in. In her French story, the violent consolidation of the nation-state under the ancien régime left a pernicious long-term legacy. But France also shows that not all forms of state creation and nation building have to be brutal or defined by histories of suppression. The Third Republic, the longest-lasting regime since the French Revolution, made society more cohesive through a common republican school education (and military service) that helped establish liberal democracy in the country.
Even here, however, an irony lurks in Berman’s focus on the role a national culture plays in the formation of liberal democracy: It can read as if we get liberalism—which is to say, effective protection of minorities— only in circumstances in which there are no vulnerable minorities and hence no real need for liberalism to begin with.
In the last pages of Democracy and Dictatorship, Berman urges us to lower our political expectations and take leave of the naive post-1989 expectation that every nation would race toward liberal democracy and get there quickly enough. She writes that countries stumbling “along the way to democracy are the norm rather than the exception.” That’s not much of a consolation for the despairing Poles and Hungarians who saw their dreams of liberal democracy crushed in the past decade. Berman would tell them that democracy building requires two phases: a proper dismantling of the old regime and then consolidation of self-rule. It takes patience and time—to which they’d likely respond with John Maynard Keynes’s observation that, in the long run, we are all dead.
Young Eastern Europeans might further remind us that until recently, some social scientists had a politically hopeful message for their increasingly prosperous countries. One of them is Adam Przeworski, a Polish-born political scientist teaching at New York University. He still maintains that “we have known for some time that democracies are impregnable in economically developed countries.” He also suggests there is another empirical constant: The longer a country has been a democracy, the more likely it is to remain one. As he puts it, “The taste for selecting governments through elections is an acquired one, but it is addictive once acquired” (or as Berman might say, once you get jogging, you’ll just keep going). Citing the United States as an example, he notes “the probability that the incumbent would not hold an election, or hold one making it impossible for the opposition to win, is 1 in 1.8 million country years.” (Improbable is, of course, not the same as impossible; we’ll find out more this year.)
Przeworski opens his short, dense, but rewarding book with an appeal to tone down what Saul Bellow once called “crisis chatter.” According to Przeworski, surveys that show people longing for strong leadership do not demonstrate that democracy is giving way, nor do mass strikes or even riots (even if they were more frequent in countries where democracy eventually fell). Actual breakdown looks different, he insists, pointing to three paradigmatic cases: the collapse of the Weimar regime, which still casts the largest shadow over democracy studies; the ascension of Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s in France; and the military coup in Chile in 1973. The lesson is that crises lead to collapse only when the political system fails to regulate rivalry and resolve conflicts in a peaceful manner, and in nearly all liberal democracies, we do not seem to be at that point—at least not yet.
Even though Przeworski’s historical arguments are persuasive, sometimes the past might be just the past. As he acknowledges, “history does not speak for itself,” and we might simply be caught in webs of misleading but oddly comforting analogies. Until recently, the breakdown of democracy was almost always accompanied by violence. As he points out, “between 1788 and 2008 political power changed hands as a result of 544 elections and 577 coups.” But what about those democracies that were not destroyed by force but instead were undermined stealthily or just slipped away somehow? And in the latter cases, how would we be able to tell?
Przeworski’s previous work gives us a hint. At one point he offered one of the pithiest definitions of democracy: a political system in which parties can lose elections. This might sound not so much pithy as banal, but it contains an important insight. If there is no real turnover of power, it probably isn’t a democracy, which Przeworski also summed up, in an equally epigrammatic manner, as “institutionalized uncertainty.” Political outcomes have to be unpredictable (if you like complete predictability, North Korea is probably an attractive option); at the same time, this uncertainty needs to be institutionalized through constitutions and electoral laws that all of the contenders for power accept and that make what is unknown still nonetheless controllable.
Yet without any overt show of force, much of the uncertainty seems to have been taken out of politics in “autocratizing” (alas, an entirely appropriate neologism for our age) countries like Turkey and Hungary. The courts have been packed, the media brought to heel, and gerrymandering and all kinds of other political dark arts used to ensure that electoral outcomes aren’t much in question. The more that can be done under the color of law, the less needs to be accomplished through force of arms. Just think of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest brazen attempt—immediately approved by the Russian constitutional court—effectively to keep himself in power for life. Related Article How Should We Remember the Puritans? Andrew Delbanco
Is something similar possible in the democracies that Przeworski deems “impregnable”? Here, worries finally set in, and his tone changes. He identifies two current developments that are unprecedented and that he argues might signify that the supposed laws in democracy-promoting social science no longer hold.
The first is a level of pessimism never seen in surveys before. Sixty percent of Americans and 64 percent of Europeans think their children will be financially worse off than themselves. Przeworski observes with barely concealed alarm that “this collapse of the deeply ingrained belief in intergenerational progress is a phenomenon at a civilizational scale.” The second factor is less obviously threatening to democracy. He diagnoses an increasing fragmentation and instability of party systems. One of the remarkable empirical findings of his book is that, despite the enormous upheavals over the course of the 20th century, the dominant parties in many Western European countries remained ideologically consistent from the 1920s to the late ’90s. It’s not quite evident why that should be such a problem in and of itself. Think of left-wing newcomers like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece or, for that matter, the ideologically still somewhat indistinct Five Star Movement in Italy. They obviously made the formation of governments more difficult; Spain had caretaker governments for months on end. And in the eyes of admirers of the Westminster system, ever-larger coalitions also exact costs in terms of accountability: Unlike in a simple two-party system, voters have no real idea who’s responsible for what.
But consider what new parties have actually meant outside the abstract modeling of specialists in comparative politics. For decades, Spanish and Greek politics were dominated by two large and, to varying degrees, corrupt parties that, during the euro crisis, offered more or less the same cruel economic policies. Disillusioned youngsters—whose lives will forever be marred by this lost decade of austerity—returned to the voting booth once new, attractive options appeared on the ballot. True, neither Podemos nor Syriza was able to end austerity. But to read their rise as a sign of a “crisis of democratic representation,” as has been common, is to get things exactly the wrong way around. The crisis would have consisted in the old parties continuing to govern as a kind of cartel. As societies change and new conflicts appear, party systems should adapt and transform in sometimes surprising ways; they should indeed provide institutionalized uncertainty.
That still leaves us with the new wave of intergenerational despair. The danger is not necessarily that people will prefer authoritarianism over existing democracies, though the patently inadequate responses of many democracies to the coronavirus crisis might encourage that kind of thought. (But if it does, never fail to mention democratic Taiwan, which dealt with the pandemic much better than the mainland.) But that doesn’t mean the more plausible explanation of how despair could destroy democracy is necessarily any more reassuring. Many citizens seem aware that the Viktor Orbáns and Donald Trumps of the world are chipping away at democracy. Yet in highly polarized and increasingly unequal societies, they are willing to put up with the damage because of economic self-interest (whether illusory or real) or other short-term partisan advantages. As Yale political scientist Milan Svolik has shown, there is little evidence that people have had it with democracy as such—a major difference with attitudes in the 20th century, when plenty of people considered parliamentary democracy an obvious failure and embraced fascism as the way of the future. But today some citizens are willing to engage in a trade-off between what’s personally good for them—scrambling to provide a better future for their kids—and respect for institutionalized uncertainty.
Given that this problem is ultimately a matter of far-reaching changes in the economy and society, Przeworski can’t help but end up declaring himself “moderately pessimistic about the future.” What he’s afraid of is not spectacular coups but a stealthy, creeping authoritarianism that keeps diminishing institutionalized uncertainty. Many governments, from Orbán’s in Hungary to Narendra Modi’s in India, are following this path; the coronavirus crisis, if anything, makes them show their authoritarianism more openly.
Both Democracy and Dictatorship and Crises of Democracy, while not quite spelling out the point, remind us of the important link between liberal democracy and social democracy. Berman stresses at the end of her book that democracy in postwar Western Europe worked because the large political parties proved responsive to the citizens’ socioeconomic demands; Przeworski, in pointing to the perils of widespread pessimism about the economic future, effectively backs up that point. Both books also exhibit a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to how much an overly abstract and quantitatively oriented political science, long driven by economics envy, can help us under the circumstances. Berman stresses the importance of historical contingency and what is sometimes called path dependency. History may be just one damn thing after another, but the sequence of these things matters in terms of some political possibilities opening up and others being foreclosed. Przeworski, no stranger to complicated statistical calculations, even goes on record with a remarkable admission. “The intuitions from memoirs and even novels,” he writes, “may be as illuminating as from systematic data: they tell us how individuals perceived and experienced the dramatic events in which they were protagonists and, in the end, it is their actions that determined the outcomes of crises.” Of course, this point about “action” is actually a hopeful message: It’s still at least somewhat up to us.


thenation--2020-05-05--The Long Shadow of Cultural Anthropology

In 1949 a Columbia anthropologist named Geoffrey Gorer published an essay in his study The People of Great Russia , in which he attempted to provide insight into why those living in the Soviet Union were not more resistant to Stalinist authoritarianism .
It was not because they were tortured or threatened with the gulag , according to Gorer and the study ’ s coauthor , the psychoanalyst John Rickman ; it was because they had been swaddled for too long as babies .
Gorer had studied child-rearing practices across Western and Eastern Europe and found that Russian peasants tended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than other parents did , sometimes up to nine months .
Therein lay the explanation , Gorer and Rickman insisted , for why the Soviets preferred the warm cloak of authoritarianism to the freedoms of Western liberalism .
The theory , which came to be known as the swaddling hypothesis , was roundly and rightfully mocked .
One critic called it “ diaperology.
” Gorer ’ s friend and fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead defended and even doubled down on his theory ; she insisted that in swaddling them for so long , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that a strong authority is necessary.
” Gods of the Upper Air : How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race , Sex , and Gender in the Twentieth Century The swaddling hypothesis and the ire it justly provoked dealt a considerable blow to the prestige of the national character studies program just as it was reaching its zenith at Columbia , raising questions about the methodologies being employed there and even the value of culture as a heuristic .
It also highlights a problem with the work of these anthropologists , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for insisting that human differences are rooted in culture rather than race .
That such a worldview would be any less dangerous is belied by the reality of how this research—culture cracking , as it was known—was employed .
From World War II into the early years of the Cold War , anthropologists in the program were repeatedly tapped by the US government to create national profiles for countries deemed threats to US national security .
The most famous of these was Ruth Benedict ’ s wartime study of Japanese culture , later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( 1946 ) , but the program produced countless reports for the government on China , Syria , Eastern European Jews , and other “ cultures ” that needed decoding before they could be exploited .
Thus , while it attracted the most attention , the diaperology controversy did not represent a break with the tenets of cultural anthropology so much as it exposed the problems that had always been lurking beneath the surface , obscured by the hallowed lineage of the discipline .
Besides Gorer , Mead , and Benedict , Franz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cara Deloria , and Edward Sapir all considered themselves cultural anthropologists .
At a time when the country ’ s foremost social scientists , figures like the eugenicist Madison Grant , were insisting that different cultures fell along a continuum of evolution , cultural anthropologists asserted that such a continuum did not exist .
Instead of evolving in a linear fashion from savagery to civilization , they argued , cultures were in a constant process of borrowing and interpolation .
Boas called this process “ cultural diffusion , ” and it would come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , inspiring an entire generation of anthropologists to travel the world searching for examples of it .
Hurston went to Florida to collect African American folklore , Deloria to the American Southwest to codify Native American languages , and Mead to American Samoa to ask teenagers about their sex lives .
And while their findings have been heralded as revolutionary—within the social sciences and for the general public—they also laid the groundwork for a new form of liberal racism centered on cultural rather than physiological difference .
Boas referred to himself and his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group , ” and in a new book , Gods of the Upper Air , Georgetown professor Charles King puts their lives , habits , and missteps on full display .
He paints their rise as a heroic struggle against xenophobia , racism , and theories of cultural supremacy .
“ This book , ” he tells us , “ is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time : the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color , gender , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” and he is certain that in this battle , they not only fought but won .
“ If it is now unremarkable for a gay couple to kiss goodbye on a train platform , for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class , for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid…then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it.
” But reading King ’ s highly researched book , one can come to a different conclusion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be too slippery a term in the hands of these “ gods of the upper air ” ( a phrase borrowed from Hurston ’ s autobiography , Dust Tracks on a Road ) .
As King traces their development , particularly Boas ’ s , it becomes clear that their ideas about culture and cultural differences were not as distinct as they imagined from the notions of racial difference they sought to overturn .
Franz Boas was born in 1858 in the small Prussian town of Minden .
He passed his childhood years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything he could get his hands on .
He was rapaciously curious and tactile , and it was through academia and fieldwork that he would ultimately satisfy his thirst for adventure , both physical and intellectual .
He started taking courses at Heidelberg , then transferred to the University of Bonn before he eventually matriculated at the University of Kiel .
German universities were , at the time , awash in the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder .
As Boas would do many years later , Herder challenged the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ races , arguing instead that the distinctions between people were contingent and tied to culture and homeland .
His ideas electrified Boas ’ s thinking and continued to do so for the rest of his life .
In his writings and lectures , Herder insisted that the idea of separate races or peoples was a fiction ; instead , there was one human race that had been transformed over time into many different cultures .
Yet as his work would show , such a view was not incompatible with a white supremacist ideology @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Herder wrote , for example , that “ the Negro ” should be met with empathy , not hatred , “ since the conditions of his climate could not grant his nobler gifts , ” and Herder ’ s view of cultural difference would pave the way for a romantic nationalism that rooted culture in a specific homeland or “ soil ” —concepts of national identity that later became prominent in Nazism .
Nonetheless , for Boas , Herder ’ s theorization of “ culture ” helped chart a way forward for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not rooted in physicality but in culture , then culture needed to be studied with the same seriousness as other academic disciplines .
Boas did not immediately take up anthropology as his field of specialization .
He first studied physics and wrote his dissertation on the way light is polarized in water .
He took plates to the main harbor in the city of Kiel to see at which depths their reflections began to change in appearance .
However , he soon became more interested in how different groups might perceive those changes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to understand “ the point at which we make the decision that something is no longer blue , say , but aquamarine.
” After defending his dissertation in 1881—just as the first British textbook on a nascent subject , anthropology , was published by Edward Burnett Tyler—Boas joined a new generation of scholars excited about the promises of ethnology to explain human diversity .
What exactly the field was , no one really knew , but that was part of its appeal for Boas .
So , too , was the prospect that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ travel , ” King writes , while “ building , bit by bit…a master science of humankind.
” Boas ’ s first foray into the field was a trip to Baffin Island in the Arctic to study the Indigenous groups that lived there .
From the outset , there was little doubt that he brought from Europe not only his notebooks but a certain cultural chauvinism as well , referring to the groups he studied as “ my Eskimos ” and writing that their dwellings were “ not as dirty as I thought.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ learn—in particular about how the local population on Baffin Island was able to navigate a landscape that repeatedly stymied outsiders .
The journey was also , Boas confessed , an effort to advance his career .
“ I would immediately be accepted among geographical circles , ” he explained to an uncle about the purpose of the trip , during which he planned to “ map the ice floes , snowdrifts , and habits of seal pods.
” The terrain and weather proved too treacherous for such research , so Boas spent more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , writing down Inuit words , and learning more about these people upon whom the European whalers were totally dependent .
He jotted down notes on igloo building and the mechanics of a dogsled .
He became particularly close with an Inuit man named Signa ; through their conversations , King tells us , Boas learned that “ Signa was no timeless native simply struggling for survival on an unchanging shore .
He had a past , with wanderings and movement , a family lineage , and remembered moments of hardship and joy.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and it ’ s unclear how much of this made its way into Boas ’ s published record of the journey , which drew from his trunks of sketches , notebooks on local languages , and maps ( mostly drawn by Inuit people ) .
Upon returning from the Arctic , Boas turned his attention to the native population in British Columbia .
He hoped that fieldwork in North America would position him better for employment in the United States , where anthropology was finding a home in new institutions like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Museum of Natural History in New York City .
But on the Pacific Coast , he began to have doubts about American social science .
While the Smithsonian organized cultures into stages of development , beginning with “ savagery ” and rising to “ barbarism ” before finally reaching “ civilization , ” he found that many of the Indigenous peoples thought to exist at the same stage of human development were , in fact , quite disparate .
“ On the Northwest Coast , ” as King writes , “ Boas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ similarities among indigenous communities , with nothing to suggest that Bella Coola and Salish , for example , were all at the same stage of development.
” Boas ’ s growing ambivalence toward American social science was on full display , literally , at the world ’ s fair in Chicago in 1893 .
At the behest of Frederic Putnam , the curator of Harvard ’ s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology , Boas agreed to create an exhibit that would showcase anthropology ’ s potential as a new field of study @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anthropometry , the science of measuring human anatomy and a frequent site for racist faux-scientific theories , where physical features like chin length were used to explain social behavior .
Boas lined up the skeletons of Native Americans and “ half-bloods ” ( presumably people with one black and one white parent ) in accordance with Putnam ’ s wishes , but as King notes , no conclusions could be drawn from this display .
For instance , “ an attempt to show the heights of Italians ended up finding no obvious pattern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The exhibit was , at least from Putnam ’ s point of view , a disappointment , because few people attended it , but it helped sharpen Boas ’ s insistence that the science did not provide evidence to support white supremacy or proof that cultural differences manifested physically .
Zora Neale Hurston and the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade ’ s Last Survivor Soon after , Boas was hired by Columbia , where he would spend the rest of his career and train some of the most influential writers and thinkers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his first major research grants came from Congress .
Vermont Senator William P. Dillingham had just put together a commission to study the effects of the recent wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe .
Like Putnam , Dillingham wanted Boas to create a way to , in King ’ s words , “ distinguish advanced , healthy , and vigorous northern Europeans from the lesser subraces now stumbling over one another on the streets and alleyways of the Lower East Side.
” Boas never disputed the terms of the inquiry and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the heads of US-born children of immigrants to see if they looked more like their parents ’ or like those of other American children .
Boas was not morally opposed to the idea that there were real physical differences among ethnic groups and that those differences had meaning beyond the body , but he also wasn ’ t convinced that this could be backed up by scientific inquiry .
At the end of his study , he concluded that the children of foreign-born “ round-headed Jews ” took on the characteristics of their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The same was true of other immigrant groups , he wrote .
“ The long heads of Sicilians compressed into shorter heads .
There was , in other words , no such thing—in purely physical terms—as a ‘ Jew , ’ a ‘ Pole , ’ or a ‘ Slovak.
’ ” Consequently , the Dillingham Commission largely rejected his findings when drafting its conclusions .
Much like Herder , Boas wasn ’ t interested in scrubbing culture of the kinds of differentiation and hierarchies that underpin the notion of race .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people into , but he never believed that people defied categorization .
He regarded his work as primarily a matter of empirical analysis , not political or moral argument .
But his early anthropological work and desire for factual evidence still put his research in direct contention with the fearmongering eugenicists and racists of his era .
While Boas is the protagonist of the first half of Gods of the Upper Air , King focuses on his disciples in the second half , in particular on Mead , Hurston , Benedict , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who , like the others in this circle , proved to be as formidable as her mentor .
Born to academic parents ( her father taught business at Wharton , and her mother was a sociologist who researched Italian immigrants ) , she grew up in Pennsylvania and entered Barnard College in 1920 as a sophomore .
While taking a course in anthropology with Boas and his assistant , Benedict , Mead fell in with a “ group of freethinking , adventurous women , disheveled but intellectually fashionable , half of them Jewish @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay , ” who were looking for a way to quietly rebel .
At the time , Boas was in the midst of developing his theory of cultural diffusion , a counter to the dominant school of cultural evolution , and Mead found in it the perfect outlet .
As King describes it , “ Human practices and habits did not diverge from some single ancient norm ; rather , from the earliest times , people living in different places had done things differently , sharing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into contact with unfamiliar individuals and groups.
” It was a provocative idea , and Mead decided to pursue it in graduate school at Columbia .
( She also wanted to pursue Benedict further . )
For her PhD dissertation , Mead decided to look for examples of cultural diffusion in Polynesia .
After arriving there in 1925 , she became interested in a topic closer to her personal circumstances : sexual norms and how to break free from them .
Mead was carrying on three love affairs at the time .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New York , ” King writes , “ and a boyfriend in Chicago , and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of [ Benedict ] .
” She would also become involved with another person on her sea voyage back .
In Samoa , Mead began exploring the sexual practices of the people there , writing that they were freer to experiment with homosexuality and polyamory .
“ Romantic love , ” she wrote in her book Coming of Age in Samoa , “ as it occurs in [ American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideas of monogamy , exclusiveness , jealousy and undeviating fidelity , does not occur in Samoa.
” She conceded that while there might be similar patterns in behavior between the two cultures ( infidelity , as she well knew , occurred in the United States ) , how people felt about that behavior differed widely .
As King writes , for Mead , “ Americans…seemed to organize their intimate lives around an idealized sex experience… .
Samoans saw things another way.
” Coming of Age in Samoa soon became a landmark work of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sexual freedom in the United States in the 1960s .
As King suggests , the popularity of her book points to some of the problems with its analysis .
“ Mead was trying something new , ” he writes , but what she ended up doing was to use it as “ a mirror…to hold up to her own society.
” Her desire to create a world of sexual liberation in America had led her largely to invent one in Samoa .
“ Coming of Age in Samoa was full of bravado and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mead had few compunctions about drawing grand conclusions from a small sample set , fifty girls in three small villages on one island in the South Pacific.
” It is of course tempting to excuse Mead , a young queer woman who was no doubt in search of validation and acceptance , for projecting her interests onto her research , but in the coming decades the Americanization of other cultures—the way in which other parts of the world became grist for American self-definition—would prove to be not just dangerous but deadly , especially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the war effort .
When the United States entered World War II , many American officials regarded Germany as an aberration , “ a normal , civilized society that had been overtaken by a devilish ideology and a barbaric dictator , ” King writes .
The Japanese , on the other hand , were seen as “ subhuman and repulsive , ” an alien species that most Americans knew nothing about .
The US government enlisted the help of Benedict , who had by then joined Columbia ’ s anthropology department as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Japanese culture .
Tasked by the Office of War Information with writing a report on “ Japanese behavior patterns ” that might help the US military identify weaknesses it could exploit , Benedict employed what was called anthropology “ at a distance , ” ethnographic work based on documents and cultural works such as novels and films .
She also consulted at length with a Japanese American named Robert Hashima , who was born in the United States but was educated in Japan .
He reportedly tutored Benedict “ on everything from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Japanese soldiers , from hazing rituals in schools to popular movies .
When her reports required a Japanese term or phrase , handwritten in kanji characters , it was Hashima who supplied them.
” The 60-page summary eventually became the basis of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword .
Though the book made Benedict a household name and a legend in the field of cultural anthropology , it has been widely criticized by Japanese and American scholars of Japan , not least because it relied so much on the perspective of one person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gently , “ [ Benedict ’ s ] assessment of Japanese culture could sometimes look like an idealized portrait of the Japanese middle class or of its military elite , precisely the people whom Hashima and other informants knew best.
” Of all of Boas ’ s students , the one who provided the most enduring works of cultural anthropology was probably the one whose work departed most from his and his circle ’ s methods : Zora Neale Hurston .
While Mead , Benedict , and others sought to identify cultural patterns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ altogether .
She wrote that she was born to be someone who “ questions the gods of the pigeon-holes.
” Already an active figure in the Harlem Renaissance by the time she was a student at Barnard , she looked for ways to exist within that flourishing movement without being defined by it .
“ Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem , ” she observed .
“ I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject.
” Hurston saw in her ethnographic research less an opportunity for codification than for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of having to mold it into a larger narrative of uplift or condemnation .
As the scholar Cheryl Wall explained , “ The cultural relativity of anthropology freed Hurston from the need to defend her subjects ’ alleged inferiority.
” She could simply give them space to voice their views and describe their lives as they experienced them .
“ My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so , regardless of his color , ” she wrote .
“ It seemed to me that the human beings I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same stimuli .
Different idioms , yes… .
Inherent differences , no.
” Can Charles Mills Save Liberal Philosophy From Itself ?
Boas encouraged Hurston to return to her native Florida for her fieldwork , to collect folktales , jokes , and the kind of stories of life back home that she entranced her audiences in Harlem with .
In the South she spoke to “ more than a hundred different people : phosphate miners , domestics , laborers , boys and girls , Bahamian plantation owners , shopkeepers , ex-slaves , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , restaurant keepers , laundresses , preachers , bootleggers , along with a Tuskegee graduate , a ‘ barber when free , ’ and a ‘ bum and roustabout ’ ” ( the last was Hurston ’ s parlance ) , and instead of a work of anthropology , she turned her fieldwork into the 1935 novel Mules and Men , beginning what would become her hallmark of ethnographically informed fiction , or literary anthropology , as it became known .
Hurston ’ s writings showcased a rigor and presence lacking in many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time , particularly as Benedict continued to proselytize for anthropology “ at a distance.
” That some of Boas ’ s most committed disciples believed their subjects deserved no better than this kind of detached study showed how much they carried within their work many of the same prejudices they claimed it was dismantling .
Indeed , one of the most pernicious threads that emerges in King ’ s study of the Boasians is the way in which “ culture , ” despite being seen as a countertheory to “ race , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cultural inferiority was something liberals could live with and feel less guilty about .
The long shadow cast by cultural anthropology ’ s troubling framework persisted well into the 1960s and ’ 70s .
In the ’ 60s , the Harvard sociologist and Democratic politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan , putting together his report “ The Negro Family ” for Lyndon Johnson , blamed “ ghetto culture , ” not racism and racial inequality , for the poverty and social instability plaguing black families .
This language was renewed in the 1990s , when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ welfare reform bill , said he wanted to “ change the culture of dependency ” in America .
Such language united across party lines the many politicians looking to scapegoat the poor and disenfranchised .
In 2014 , then-Representative Paul Ryan discussed his plans to take on poverty by telling reporters , “ We have got this tailspin of culture , in our inner cities in particular , of men not working , and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work , so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that has to be dealt with.
” That Boas ’ s intervention against racism and racial inequality would ultimately produce a reincarnation of them , albeit cloaked in more respectable language , is less surprising after reading Gods of the Upper Air , in which King admits that Boas fell into the habit of letting “ cultural inferiority [ stand ] in for biological inferiority.
” Boas , Mead , Benedict , and their circle sought to show the fallacy of biological and physical difference , but they also created forms of categorization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inform them .
To return to Boas in his days as a university student , with his plates at the harbor : Did he really think that all Germans ( or all Eskimos , for that matter ) agreed on when blue became aquamarine ?
Certainly not , but a patternless individualism would have been impossible to codify and make into a science ; such chaos—or humanity—is more the stuff of great art .
Hurston , attuned to both , put it best : “ There is no single face in nature , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , sees it from its own angle .
So every man ’ s spice-box seasons his own food .
”

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
In 1949 a Columbia anthropologist named Geoffrey Gorer published an essay in his study The People of Great Russia, in which he attempted to provide insight into why those living in the Soviet Union were not more resistant to Stalinist authoritarianism. It was not because they were tortured or threatened with the gulag, according to Gorer and the study’s coauthor, the psychoanalyst John Rickman; it was because they had been swaddled for too long as babies. Gorer had studied child-rearing practices across Western and Eastern Europe and found that Russian peasants tended to swaddle their children for longer periods than other parents did, sometimes up to nine months. Therein lay the explanation, Gorer and Rickman insisted, for why the Soviets preferred the warm cloak of authoritarianism to the freedoms of Western liberalism. The theory, which came to be known as the swaddling hypothesis, was roundly and rightfully mocked. One critic called it “diaperology.” Gorer’s friend and fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead defended and even doubled down on his theory; she insisted that in swaddling them for so long, “Russians communicate to their infants a feeling that a strong authority is necessary.” Books in Review Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century By Charles King Buy this book
The swaddling hypothesis and the ire it justly provoked dealt a considerable blow to the prestige of the national character studies program just as it was reaching its zenith at Columbia, raising questions about the methodologies being employed there and even the value of culture as a heuristic. It also highlights a problem with the work of these anthropologists, which is often framed as revolutionary and egalitarian for insisting that human differences are rooted in culture rather than race. That such a worldview would be any less dangerous is belied by the reality of how this research—culture cracking, as it was known—was employed. From World War II into the early years of the Cold War, anthropologists in the program were repeatedly tapped by the US government to create national profiles for countries deemed threats to US national security. The most famous of these was Ruth Benedict’s wartime study of Japanese culture, later published as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), but the program produced countless reports for the government on China, Syria, Eastern European Jews, and other “cultures” that needed decoding before they could be exploited.
Thus, while it attracted the most attention, the diaperology controversy did not represent a break with the tenets of cultural anthropology so much as it exposed the problems that had always been lurking beneath the surface, obscured by the hallowed lineage of the discipline. Besides Gorer, Mead, and Benedict, Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, and Edward Sapir all considered themselves cultural anthropologists. At a time when the country’s foremost social scientists, figures like the eugenicist Madison Grant, were insisting that different cultures fell along a continuum of evolution, cultural anthropologists asserted that such a continuum did not exist. Instead of evolving in a linear fashion from savagery to civilization, they argued, cultures were in a constant process of borrowing and interpolation. Boas called this process “cultural diffusion,” and it would come to be the bedrock of cultural anthropology, inspiring an entire generation of anthropologists to travel the world searching for examples of it. Hurston went to Florida to collect African American folklore, Deloria to the American Southwest to codify Native American languages, and Mead to American Samoa to ask teenagers about their sex lives. And while their findings have been heralded as revolutionary—within the social sciences and for the general public—they also laid the groundwork for a new form of liberal racism centered on cultural rather than physiological difference. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Boas referred to himself and his students at Columbia as “our little group,” and in a new book, Gods of the Upper Air, Georgetown professor Charles King puts their lives, habits, and missteps on full display. He paints their rise as a heroic struggle against xenophobia, racism, and theories of cultural supremacy. “This book,” he tells us, “is about women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that—despite differences of skin color, gender, ability or custom—humanity is one undivided thing,” and he is certain that in this battle, they not only fought but won. “If it is now unremarkable for a gay couple to kiss goodbye on a train platform, for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid…then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it.” But reading King’s highly researched book, one can come to a different conclusion. “Culture” often proved to be too slippery a term in the hands of these “gods of the upper air” (a phrase borrowed from Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road). As King traces their development, particularly Boas’s, it becomes clear that their ideas about culture and cultural differences were not as distinct as they imagined from the notions of racial difference they sought to overturn.
Franz Boas was born in 1858 in the small Prussian town of Minden. He passed his childhood years reading Robinson Crusoe and tinkering away at anything he could get his hands on. He was rapaciously curious and tactile, and it was through academia and fieldwork that he would ultimately satisfy his thirst for adventure, both physical and intellectual. He started taking courses at Heidelberg, then transferred to the University of Bonn before he eventually matriculated at the University of Kiel. German universities were, at the time, awash in the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder. As Boas would do many years later, Herder challenged the idea that humankind was divided into distinct races, arguing instead that the distinctions between people were contingent and tied to culture and homeland. His ideas electrified Boas’s thinking and continued to do so for the rest of his life.
In his writings and lectures, Herder insisted that the idea of separate races or peoples was a fiction; instead, there was one human race that had been transformed over time into many different cultures. Yet as his work would show, such a view was not incompatible with a white supremacist ideology. While King does not mention this, Herder wrote, for example, that “the Negro” should be met with empathy, not hatred, “since the conditions of his climate could not grant his nobler gifts,” and Herder’s view of cultural difference would pave the way for a romantic nationalism that rooted culture in a specific homeland or “soil”—concepts of national identity that later became prominent in Nazism. Nonetheless, for Boas, Herder’s theorization of “culture” helped chart a way forward for his own work. If difference was not rooted in physicality but in culture, then culture needed to be studied with the same seriousness as other academic disciplines.
Boas did not immediately take up anthropology as his field of specialization. He first studied physics and wrote his dissertation on the way light is polarized in water. He took plates to the main harbor in the city of Kiel to see at which depths their reflections began to change in appearance. However, he soon became more interested in how different groups might perceive those changes in the first place. He wanted to understand “the point at which we make the decision that something is no longer blue, say, but aquamarine.” After defending his dissertation in 1881—just as the first British textbook on a nascent subject, anthropology, was published by Edward Burnett Tyler—Boas joined a new generation of scholars excited about the promises of ethnology to explain human diversity. What exactly the field was, no one really knew, but that was part of its appeal for Boas. So, too, was the prospect that he could satisfy his “lust for travel,” King writes, while “building, bit by bit…a master science of humankind.” Current Issue View our current issue
Boas’s first foray into the field was a trip to Baffin Island in the Arctic to study the Indigenous groups that lived there. From the outset, there was little doubt that he brought from Europe not only his notebooks but a certain cultural chauvinism as well, referring to the groups he studied as “my Eskimos” and writing that their dwellings were “not as dirty as I thought.” But he did go there to learn—in particular about how the local population on Baffin Island was able to navigate a landscape that repeatedly stymied outsiders. The journey was also, Boas confessed, an effort to advance his career. “I would immediately be accepted among geographical circles,” he explained to an uncle about the purpose of the trip, during which he planned to “map the ice floes, snowdrifts, and habits of seal pods.”
The terrain and weather proved too treacherous for such research, so Boas spent more of his time speaking with the locals, writing down Inuit words, and learning more about these people upon whom the European whalers were totally dependent. He jotted down notes on igloo building and the mechanics of a dogsled. He became particularly close with an Inuit man named Signa; through their conversations, King tells us, Boas learned that “Signa was no timeless native simply struggling for survival on an unchanging shore. He had a past, with wanderings and movement, a family lineage, and remembered moments of hardship and joy.” These are King’s observations, and it’s unclear how much of this made its way into Boas’s published record of the journey, which drew from his trunks of sketches, notebooks on local languages, and maps (mostly drawn by Inuit people).
Upon returning from the Arctic, Boas turned his attention to the native population in British Columbia. He hoped that fieldwork in North America would position him better for employment in the United States, where anthropology was finding a home in new institutions like the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. But on the Pacific Coast, he began to have doubts about American social science. While the Smithsonian organized cultures into stages of development, beginning with “savagery” and rising to “barbarism” before finally reaching “civilization,” he found that many of the Indigenous peoples thought to exist at the same stage of human development were, in fact, quite disparate. “On the Northwest Coast,” as King writes, “Boas had found both wide variety and striking similarities among indigenous communities, with nothing to suggest that Bella Coola and Salish, for example, were all at the same stage of development.”
Boas’s growing ambivalence toward American social science was on full display, literally, at the world’s fair in Chicago in 1893. At the behest of Frederic Putnam, the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Boas agreed to create an exhibit that would showcase anthropology’s potential as a new field of study. The exhibit was to focus on anthropometry, the science of measuring human anatomy and a frequent site for racist faux-scientific theories, where physical features like chin length were used to explain social behavior. Boas lined up the skeletons of Native Americans and “half-bloods” (presumably people with one black and one white parent) in accordance with Putnam’s wishes, but as King notes, no conclusions could be drawn from this display. For instance, “an attempt to show the heights of Italians ended up finding no obvious pattern from northern Italy to the south.” The exhibit was, at least from Putnam’s point of view, a disappointment, because few people attended it, but it helped sharpen Boas’s insistence that the science did not provide evidence to support white supremacy or proof that cultural differences manifested physically. Related Article Zora Neale Hurston and the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade’s Last Survivor Elias Rodriques
Soon after, Boas was hired by Columbia, where he would spend the rest of his career and train some of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 20th century. One of his first major research grants came from Congress. Vermont Senator William P. Dillingham had just put together a commission to study the effects of the recent wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Like Putnam, Dillingham wanted Boas to create a way to, in King’s words, “distinguish advanced, healthy, and vigorous northern Europeans from the lesser subraces now stumbling over one another on the streets and alleyways of the Lower East Side.” Boas never disputed the terms of the inquiry and went forward using anthropometric tools, measuring the heads of US-born children of immigrants to see if they looked more like their parents’ or like those of other American children. Boas was not morally opposed to the idea that there were real physical differences among ethnic groups and that those differences had meaning beyond the body, but he also wasn’t convinced that this could be backed up by scientific inquiry. At the end of his study, he concluded that the children of foreign-born “round-headed Jews” took on the characteristics of their new country and “became long-headed.” The same was true of other immigrant groups, he wrote. “The long heads of Sicilians compressed into shorter heads. There was, in other words, no such thing—in purely physical terms—as a ‘Jew,’ a ‘Pole,’ or a ‘Slovak.’” Consequently, the Dillingham Commission largely rejected his findings when drafting its conclusions.
Much like Herder, Boas wasn’t interested in scrubbing culture of the kinds of differentiation and hierarchies that underpin the notion of race. He may have wanted new categories to place people into, but he never believed that people defied categorization. He regarded his work as primarily a matter of empirical analysis, not political or moral argument. But his early anthropological work and desire for factual evidence still put his research in direct contention with the fearmongering eugenicists and racists of his era.
While Boas is the protagonist of the first half of Gods of the Upper Air, King focuses on his disciples in the second half, in particular on Mead, Hurston, Benedict, and Deloria. He begins with Mead, who, like the others in this circle, proved to be as formidable as her mentor. Born to academic parents (her father taught business at Wharton, and her mother was a sociologist who researched Italian immigrants), she grew up in Pennsylvania and entered Barnard College in 1920 as a sophomore. While taking a course in anthropology with Boas and his assistant, Benedict, Mead fell in with a “group of freethinking, adventurous women, disheveled but intellectually fashionable, half of them Jewish, and all equally acquainted with Bolshevism and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” who were looking for a way to quietly rebel. At the time, Boas was in the midst of developing his theory of cultural diffusion, a counter to the dominant school of cultural evolution, and Mead found in it the perfect outlet. As King describes it, “Human practices and habits did not diverge from some single ancient norm; rather, from the earliest times, people living in different places had done things differently, sharing and modifying their habits as they came into contact with unfamiliar individuals and groups.” It was a provocative idea, and Mead decided to pursue it in graduate school at Columbia. (She also wanted to pursue Benedict further.)
For her PhD dissertation, Mead decided to look for examples of cultural diffusion in Polynesia. After arriving there in 1925, she became interested in a topic closer to her personal circumstances: sexual norms and how to break free from them. Mead was carrying on three love affairs at the time. “She had left behind a husband in New York,” King writes, “and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of [Benedict].” She would also become involved with another person on her sea voyage back. In Samoa, Mead began exploring the sexual practices of the people there, writing that they were freer to experiment with homosexuality and polyamory. “Romantic love,” she wrote in her book Coming of Age in Samoa, “as it occurs in [American] civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity, does not occur in Samoa.” She conceded that while there might be similar patterns in behavior between the two cultures (infidelity, as she well knew, occurred in the United States), how people felt about that behavior differed widely. As King writes, for Mead, “Americans…seemed to organize their intimate lives around an idealized sex experience…. Samoans saw things another way.”
Coming of Age in Samoa soon became a landmark work of cultural anthropology and was a touchstone for sexual freedom in the United States in the 1960s. As King suggests, the popularity of her book points to some of the problems with its analysis. “Mead was trying something new,” he writes, but what she ended up doing was to use it as “a mirror…to hold up to her own society.” Her desire to create a world of sexual liberation in America had led her largely to invent one in Samoa. “Coming of Age in Samoa was full of bravado and overstatement,” King writes. “Mead had few compunctions about drawing grand conclusions from a small sample set, fifty girls in three small villages on one island in the South Pacific.” It is of course tempting to excuse Mead, a young queer woman who was no doubt in search of validation and acceptance, for projecting her interests onto her research, but in the coming decades the Americanization of other cultures—the way in which other parts of the world became grist for American self-definition—would prove to be not just dangerous but deadly, especially as cultural anthropology soon became part of the war effort.
When the United States entered World War II, many American officials regarded Germany as an aberration, “a normal, civilized society that had been overtaken by a devilish ideology and a barbaric dictator,” King writes. The Japanese, on the other hand, were seen as “subhuman and repulsive,” an alien species that most Americans knew nothing about. The US government enlisted the help of Benedict, who had by then joined Columbia’s anthropology department as a faculty member, to “crack” Japanese culture.
Tasked by the Office of War Information with writing a report on “Japanese behavior patterns” that might help the US military identify weaknesses it could exploit, Benedict employed what was called anthropology “at a distance,” ethnographic work based on documents and cultural works such as novels and films. She also consulted at length with a Japanese American named Robert Hashima, who was born in the United States but was educated in Japan. He reportedly tutored Benedict “on everything from the Japanese tea ceremony to the captured diaries of Japanese soldiers, from hazing rituals in schools to popular movies. When her reports required a Japanese term or phrase, handwritten in kanji characters, it was Hashima who supplied them.” The 60-page summary eventually became the basis of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Though the book made Benedict a household name and a legend in the field of cultural anthropology, it has been widely criticized by Japanese and American scholars of Japan, not least because it relied so much on the perspective of one person. As King puts it a bit gently, “[Benedict’s] assessment of Japanese culture could sometimes look like an idealized portrait of the Japanese middle class or of its military elite, precisely the people whom Hashima and other informants knew best.”
Of all of Boas’s students, the one who provided the most enduring works of cultural anthropology was probably the one whose work departed most from his and his circle’s methods: Zora Neale Hurston. While Mead, Benedict, and others sought to identify cultural patterns, Hurston was trying to escape identification altogether. She wrote that she was born to be someone who “questions the gods of the pigeon-holes.” Already an active figure in the Harlem Renaissance by the time she was a student at Barnard, she looked for ways to exist within that flourishing movement without being defined by it. “Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem,” she observed. “I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject.”
Hurston saw in her ethnographic research less an opportunity for codification than for collecting African American folklore without the pressure of having to mold it into a larger narrative of uplift or condemnation. As the scholar Cheryl Wall explained, “The cultural relativity of anthropology freed Hurston from the need to defend her subjects’ alleged inferiority.” She could simply give them space to voice their views and describe their lives as they experienced them. “My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color,” she wrote. “It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes…. Inherent differences, no.” Related Article Can Charles Mills Save Liberal Philosophy From Itself? Christopher Lebron
Boas encouraged Hurston to return to her native Florida for her fieldwork, to collect folktales, jokes, and the kind of stories of life back home that she entranced her audiences in Harlem with. In the South she spoke to “more than a hundred different people: phosphate miners, domestics, laborers, boys and girls, Bahamian plantation owners, shopkeepers, ex-slaves, sawmill hands, housewives, railroad workers, restaurant keepers, laundresses, preachers, bootleggers, along with a Tuskegee graduate, a ‘barber when free,’ and a ‘bum and roustabout’” (the last was Hurston’s parlance), and instead of a work of anthropology, she turned her fieldwork into the 1935 novel Mules and Men, beginning what would become her hallmark of ethnographically informed fiction, or literary anthropology, as it became known.
Hurston’s writings showcased a rigor and presence lacking in many other works of cultural anthropology at the time, particularly as Benedict continued to proselytize for anthropology “at a distance.” That some of Boas’s most committed disciples believed their subjects deserved no better than this kind of detached study showed how much they carried within their work many of the same prejudices they claimed it was dismantling. Indeed, one of the most pernicious threads that emerges in King’s study of the Boasians is the way in which “culture,” despite being seen as a countertheory to “race,” ultimately just made racism more palatable. Cultural inferiority was something liberals could live with and feel less guilty about.
The long shadow cast by cultural anthropology’s troubling framework persisted well into the 1960s and ’70s. In the ’60s, the Harvard sociologist and Democratic politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, putting together his report “The Negro Family” for Lyndon Johnson, blamed “ghetto culture,” not racism and racial inequality, for the poverty and social instability plaguing black families. This language was renewed in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton, in defending his so-called welfare reform bill, said he wanted to “change the culture of dependency” in America. Such language united across party lines the many politicians looking to scapegoat the poor and disenfranchised. In 2014, then-Representative Paul Ryan discussed his plans to take on poverty by telling reporters, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
That Boas’s intervention against racism and racial inequality would ultimately produce a reincarnation of them, albeit cloaked in more respectable language, is less surprising after reading Gods of the Upper Air, in which King admits that Boas fell into the habit of letting “cultural inferiority [stand] in for biological inferiority.” Boas, Mead, Benedict, and their circle sought to show the fallacy of biological and physical difference, but they also created forms of categorization without questioning the underlying biases that might inform them. To return to Boas in his days as a university student, with his plates at the harbor: Did he really think that all Germans (or all Eskimos, for that matter) agreed on when blue became aquamarine? Certainly not, but a patternless individualism would have been impossible to codify and make into a science; such chaos—or humanity—is more the stuff of great art. Hurston, attuned to both, put it best: “There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”