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JUST as the behaviorist establishment in psychology has long centered its attention on environmental influences on man, so too have the leading figures in anthropology. From the days of Franz Boas, most American anthropologists have been cultural relativists, seeing each society as distinctive and trying to show how man's feelings and thoughts were shaped by the way he lived. Anthropologists did not believe in a narrowly fixed, hereditary human nature. Early in her career, Margaret Mead, for example, set out to show how even the notions of maleness and femaleness vary from place to place. As she explained later: "It was a simple—a very simple—point to which our materials were organized in the 1920s, merely the documentation over and over of the fact that human nature is not rigid and unyielding." Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf contributed to cultural relativism by stating that different linguistic groups conceive reality in different ways, that the way they think shapes the language they speak and vice versa.
Mead subsequently modified her views, and other anthropologists and linguists came along with different notions. Noam Chomsky contends that the way people learn languages and the structure of those languages are basically the same the world over. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French structuralist, gathered thousands of myths from different cultures and demonstrated that beyond their great diversity were even greater similarities. At the deepest level, believes Lévi-Strauss, there is an implacable pattern ingrained in the human intellect and this pattern has not changed since primitive times.
To humanists and others who believe that both man and society are perfectible, Lévi-Strauss extends small comfort. "Humanism has failed," he believes. "It has lent itself to excusing and justifying all kinds of horrors. It has misunderstood man. It has tried to cut him off from all other manifestations of nature." He is gloomy about the population explosion, the pollution of air and water and "the destruction of living species, one after another." Like many another student of past societies, he admires those primitive cultures that struck a balance between man and his natural environment.
Two other scholars with a nostalgia for primitive societies are Rutgers' Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (who met, ironically enough, at the London Zoo). They too believe in implacable, ingrained patterns of behavior that they call "biogrammar." "A species is what it is because of the pattern of successful adaptation built into its genes," they wrote in The Imperial Animal. "It is programmed to grow and develop in a highly specific way." Aggression is central to man's emotional evolution and survival.
And the mother-infant bond is essential. "Nature intended mother and child to be together." Add the authors: "The human mother is a splendid mammal—the epitome of her order."