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Citation: American Political Science Review March 1999, v.93,
1, 193(1)
Author: Affigne, Tony
Title: The Culture of Intolerance: Chauvinism, Class and Racism
in the United States.(Review) reviewed by Tony Affigne
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1999 American Political Science Association
By Mark Nathan Cohen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 320p.
$27.50.
Tony Affigne, Providence College
For the most part, political science has held itself well back from the
cutting edge of race theory. As a general rule, political scientists have
adopted minimalist approaches to explicating the racial upheavals of recent
decades. Perhaps we find it easier to squeeze "new" racial variables into
familiar equations developed from earlier, whiter generations of data than to
reconsider our basic assumptions. We have left most of the really hard
thinking about the American scholar's own racial attitudes, and how these
affect our work, to practitioners of the sister sciences, especially
sociology, anthropology, and history. If greater knowledge and cross-cultural
understanding are the solution, then much of political science has been, the
author of Culture of Intolerance might argue, part of the problem.
Many political scientists will thus want to, and should, read this engaging
and well-crafted book by anthropologist Mark Nathan Cohen, an eminent scholar
best known for histories of human health and the development of agriculture.
Conversant in human prehistory and evolution, comparative culture, language,
and social organization, Cohen synthesizes from these disparate fields an
impressive argument against racism and for cultural relativism and tolerance.
How, the author wonders, might our society overcome its profound cultural
chauvinism, especially white racism, the peculiar and persistent prejudice
that sets European and European colonial culture above all others?
In part, Cohen's book is a critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell
Curve (1994), which proclaimed that social inequality springs from natural
inferiority among those at the bottom of society (as "proven" by IQ tests).
Following a flash of early notoriety, The Bell Curve has faded somewhat, due
in part to persuasive, unanswered criticism from the very sciences on which
Herrnstein and Murray avowedly based their conclusions - genetics and
cognitive psychology. The History and Geography of Human Genes (by geneticist
Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994), for example, as well as Inequality by
Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (sociologist Claude S. Fischer et al.,
1996), and The Mismeasure of Man (paleoanthropologist Stephen Jay Gould,
1996), exposed The Bell Curve's most serious flaws: egregious
misinterpretation of psychometric data and reliance on discredited theories
predating the emergence of molecular genetics.
Cohen attacks The Bell Curve's underlying thesis of natural inferiority from
a different direction, however, applying insights from cultural anthropology.
The aptitude tests on which the Herrnstein/Murray arguments were based, for
example, are culturally biased instruments, favoring test-takers familiar with
white, middle-class, North American conventions and experiences. Other equally
valid knowledge, and other forms of intelligence, are not recognized or
measured. But if ours were actually the best and most advanced culture, as
Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987) and others have argued,
perhaps this bias would be less problematic.
Cohen's argument goes farther, however (after all, the cultural-bias
criticism of IQ tests is well established), and directly challenges the
central theses of Eurocentrism: that Western cultures are superior to others
and that nonwhite peoples and groups are inherently deficient, as individuals
and as cultures. In reality, Cohen writes, intact cultures successfully serve
similar purposes in diverse ways and can hardly be rank-ordered according to
some universal criterion of quality.
It is true, Cohen acknowledges, that all cultures set themselves apart,
preferring their own practices to others, to solve in distinctive ways
universal problems of human community. Cultural self-importance, in other
words, may be a nearly universal trait. All cultures are capable of, if not
predisposed to, such parochialism. Furthermore, just as translating from one
language to another inevitably yields mistakes of nuance and context, our
efforts to comprehend entire cultures, with much deeper differences of
weltanschauung, social convention, and meaning, are prone to more dramatic
errors of interpretation. Some degree of misunderstanding may be inescapable.
But, Cohen reminds us, most cultures "have been less militaristic than ours
and less able to defend themselves or to commit large-scale aggression" (p.
61). As a result the West, especially the United States, finds itself in a
predominant postcolonial position, shaping to an extraordinary degree the
world's economic and political order, which gives rise to facile arguments
that equate wealth and power with cultural superiority. Cohen challenges the
reader to ponder whether hierarchies established through brute force - not
innate superiority in any biological, moral, or cultural sense - are natural,
or just, or inevitable. "We see the world's others in the condition to which
they have been reduced by conquest and then conclude that we are seeing their
inherent inferiority" (p. 62).
In the remainder of the book Cohen shows how "race" can only be a cultural
artifact (or, in other terminology, a social construction), since there is, he
asserts, no genetic basis whatsoever for dividing humanity into racial groups.
"Even skin color, which is widely accepted as the primary basis for 'racial'
divisions, is determined by only an estimated 6-10 gene pairs out of
50,000-100,000 gene pairs that make up a human being, so it hardly seems a
rational basis for classification" (p. 45). Readers who have not studied
cultural anthropology will appreciate Cohen's concise and lucid introduction
to cultural systems and cultural variation, and all readers may benefit from
his discussion of key aspects of American culture, showing how faulty
assumptions about intelligence serve to justify social inequality. Finally,
based on all this, Cohen offers a powerful, well-reasoned defense of
affirmative action and multicultural education.
Readers accustomed to densely referenced scholarly writing, tables of data,
and extensive bibliographies may be surprised - for better or worse - by the
lean, discursive format of the book. There are no footnotes or data tables at
all, and the list of recommended reading is brief. I find this a bit
troubling, but in the end decided it is better to have no footnotes and speak
the truth than to have hundreds (as in The Bell Curve) and be misleading and
false. If you can only read one book by an anthropologist this year, Culture
of Intolerance is a good place to start.
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