I remember how it was -- JR
The modern-day American Left does not of course have access to Stalin's psychiatric prisons as a means of dealing with dissenters but accusations of insanity do nearly as well. Never mind the fact that calling your opponent insane is completely "ad hominem" and, as such, an argument of no scholarly merit whatever. The article below deals with the Australian anthropologist (Derek Freeman) who conclusively demolished Margaret Mead's lies about the sexual permissiveness of primitive societies -- Lies which were for a long time immensely influential and eagerly seized on by Leftists.
The article summarizes a thesis put forward by Hiram Caton and if "ad hominem" arguments are of interest, I might note that in my own conversations with Prof. Caton, when he was Head of the "School of Applied Ethics" at Griffith University in Queensland, I found him to have some very odd views of his own (he thinks AIDS is a myth, for instance). He may even be right in his views but I would certainly not accept any of his judgments willy nilly. Those who live in glass houses .....
Just how far should scholars go in debunking intellectual opponents? Is persistence, to the point of ignoring one's own pursuits, a sign of mental instability? The case of Derek Freeman, the contentious Australian anthropologist who died in 2001 at the age of 84, raises both questions. For decades he relentlessly dissected and attacked the work of the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, who died in 1978. Freeman sought to persuade his colleagues that Mead's pathbreaking work on Samoa was fundamentally misbegotten. In particular he criticized her first book, the one that made her reputation: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (1928). In it, Mead depicted casual sex among Samoan teenage girls to argue that adolescence is not a stressful time in all cultures....
Freeman was convinced that Mead had been duped into believing that Samoa was a sexual Shangri-La. He laid out his argument in two books: Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999). Freeman also participated in the making of a 1988 documentary, "Margaret Mead and Samoa", which included an interview with one of Mead's original informants, Fa'apua'a, who said, in the film's dramatic final moments, that indeed, she and her friends had fooled Mead....
Hiram Caton believes he has found compelling evidence to explain what drove Freeman. The recently retired professor of history and politics at Griffith University, in Australia, specializes in political psychology, with a particular interest in cult leaders and followers. He worked closely with Freeman from 1983 to 1993 and stayed in touch with him until his death. In "The Exalted Self: Derek Freeman's Quest for the Perfect Identity," published last year in the Canadian journal Identity, he argues that the anthropologist, who had a reputation for eccentric and antagonistic behavior, had a clinically diagnosable narcissistic-personality disorder. Freeman's urgency stemmed as much from that disorder as from his critique of Mead and cultural anthropology, Mr. Caton believes.
Not surprisingly, this starkly psychoanalytic view discomfits some scholars. Peter Hempenstall, a professor of history at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, is preparing a biography of Freeman with Donald F. Tuzin, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. While he finds some of Mr. Caton's ideas "suggestive," Mr. Hempenstall says, the "presentation of Derek Freeman's personality as the result of a clearly established clinical pathology is too extreme and unconvincing."
The question of Derek Freeman's mental health and its role in his scholarly work is not new to close observers of the battle over Margaret Mead and her legacy. As Mr. Caton notes, Freeman was "shadowed by a reputation that he was a 'difficult man' who suffered from a mysterious psychological disorder." "Until his last breath," Mr. Caton says, "he denied imputations of a disorder, styled them 'defamatory,' and unequivocally affirmed his complete mental health and self-control."....
Mr. Caton says he became keenly aware of what he calls Freeman's "unusual psychology" during their extended collaboration. They conferred closely in a campaign to get social scientists to consider biological perspectives in their scholarship. During that time, Caton writes, Freeman gave him access to a large amount of his current personal correspondence and agreed to extensive interviews on his beliefs. That led Mr. Caton to ponder the complexities of the anthropologist's personality.
For instance, despite the obvious intensity of the two breakdowns, the correspondence unearthed by Mr. Caton reveals that Freeman did not suffer from long-term mental illness. No psychiatrist would suggest that Freeman was, say, schizophrenic. Rather, Mr. Caton argues, the documents suggest that Freeman's attacks on his opponents — whether real or perceived — stemmed from a narcissistic personality disorder. People with a narcissistic-personality disorder are generally arrogant, exploitative, and unempathetic, while exhibiting a grandiose sense of self-importance, observes Mr. Caton. They are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success or brilliance, and they believe that they are "special" and can be understood only by other special people.....
Other anthropologists differ on whether Mr. Caton's use of the play and other evidence to argue that Mr. Freeman had a personality disorder is helpful, or even responsible. Paul Shankman, a Samoa specialist and professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says the strength of Mr. Caton's analysis is his ingenuity in using such clues as Freeman's response to Mr. Williamson's play. That makes clear the dimensions of Freeman as "a deeply troubled individual," Mr. Shankman says. Moreover, he says, Mr. Caton "suggests how Freeman's psychological problems — with sex, aggression, dominance, and conflict — came to be personified in Margaret Mead."
Mr. Tuzin, of San Diego, is in the opposite camp. Mr. Caton's article, he says, "must be added to the long list of works that approach Derek Freeman ad hominem — this one with a vengeance — and prefer to dwell on his style and personality instead of the quality of his arguments."
Another former colleague of Freeman's, Michael W. Young, finds the article, and a similar one that Mr. Caton will soon publish, "compellingly argued" and "very persuasive." Both works "confirmed in a scientific manner what I knew about him intuitively," says the professor of anthropology at Australian National University, who knew Freeman and who in 2004 published a highly regarded first volume of a biography of Bronislaw Malinowski, the social-anthropology pioneer and South Pacific expert, titled Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920 (Yale University Press).
And yet, Mr. Young says, "there is something about Caton's relentless dissection that is reminiscent of Freeman's own ruthless attempts to 'expose' others and demolish them. I sense an almost scary determination to lay the man bare. The overall effect, of course, is to diminish Freeman in some way — as all psychological biography tends to do — so it comes as something of a surprise when right at the end of his second paper Caton says something to the effect that he was an immensely talented man."
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SOWELL ON EDUCATIONAL DECLINE
Recent news that school children in Charlotte, North Carolina, had the highest test scores among children in big cities across the country had a special impact on me. Back in the late 1930s, I went to school in Charlotte and, while I don't know what the test scores were then, I do know that we were far behind the children going to school in New York. That became painfully clear when my family moved north and I enrolled in a school in Harlem in 1939. From being the top student in my class down in North Carolina I was suddenly the bottom student in my class in Harlem -- and struggling to try to catch up.
Decades later, my research turned up the fact that the kids I couldn't keep up with in that school back then had an average IQ of 84. Contrary to fashionable beliefs, it was not the racial segregation that made the education inferior in Charlotte, since the school in Harlem was also a black school. It was common in those days for a kid from the South to be set back a full year when he entered school in New York. The difference in educational standards was that great. I had somehow persuaded the principal to let me be an exception. It was a mistake on his part and mine. I was clearly a year behind the kids who had gone to school in Harlem.
Three years later, I had caught up and pulled ahead, and was now assigned to a class for advanced students, where the average IQ was over 120. That does not mean that IQs don't matter. It means that I had a lot of work to do to get my act together in the meantime, in order to overcome the disadvantage of an inferior education in North Carolina.
Fast forward a few more years. I am now in the Marine Corps, going through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. When the mental test results from my platoon were tabulated, the man in charge expressed amazement at how many high scores there were. "Where are you guys from?" he asked. "New York? Pennsylvania?" We were from New York -- and the high quality of our schools at that time was undoubtedly a factor in the high test scores we made.
No one in those days would have thought that Charlotte schools would end up turning out better educated students than the schools in New York. I don't know what has happened in Charlotte but I do know what has happened in New York.
Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind -- with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.
New York City has two kinds of high school diplomas -- its own locally recognized diploma, that is not recognized by the state or by many colleges, and the state's Regents' diploma for high school graduates who have scored above a given level on the Regents' exam. The Regents diploma is for students who are serious about going on to a good college. Only 9 percent of black students and 10 percent of Latino students receive Regents diplomas.
That a Southern city's school children would now top the list of big city test scores may be due to the fact that the South has not jumped on the bandwagon of the latest fads in education to the same extent as avant garde places like New York City, where spending per pupil is about 50 percent above the national average.
These fads now include the dogma that racial "diversity" improves education, as does emphasis on racial "identity." In reality, a recent study shows that black students who perform well in racially integrated schools are unpopular with their black classmates. They are accused of "acting white," a charge that can bring anything from ostracism to outright violence. The same is not true to the same extent among blacks attending all-black schools. Hispanic students' popularity likewise falls off sharply -- even more so than among blacks -- as their grade-point average rises.
Is it surprising that white and Asian American children do better without these self-inflicted handicaps to academic achievement? Is it surprising that New York City schools are now paying the price for avant garde educational dogmas?
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US EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS MAY HAVE SLIPPED BUT SO HAVE STANDARDS ELSEWHERE (As any reader of this blog would know)
I know it's absolutely dreadful to speak the truth in these matters but it is only the blacks and Hispanics who make the USA look bad comparatively. But don't take my word for it. Read what the frightfully proper Educational Testing Service says in their report on the subject:
"If we adjust the mean NALS scores for U.S. adults under age 65 to exclude all foreign-born adults as well as native-born Blacks and Hispanics, then the mean prose and quantitative scores of the remaining U.S. adults (Asian and White, native-born) would rise to 288, ranking the U.S. second highest-tied with Finland and Norway-on the prose scale and fifth highest on the quantitative scale.. The findings clearly suggest that future gains in the comparative, international literacy standing U.S. adults will require substantial improvements in the literacy proficiencies of Blacks, Hispanics, and the foreign born from all racial/ethnic groups." [ETS Report, P.23]
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
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