Why Modern Anthropology is so monolithically Leftist
and what can be done about it


By Eric Dondero R.


Last weekend I trekked to the world famous Cincinnati
Zoo. I was on a quest to see the rare Bonobo
Chimpanzee Exhibit, one of only two in the United
States. (The other located in San Diego).

The geneticists say that Common Chimps and Bonobo
Chimps are just as close genetically, (or far
depending upon how you wish to look at it), from us
Homo Sapiens on the family tree. We share precisely
98.4% of our DNA with both Chimps and Bonobos, which
makes both species even more closely related to us
than they are to Gorillas or Orangutans. After having
observed the "Cincy Bonobos" up close, like an
increasing number of anthropologists, I now believe
that they are even more closely related to us than
Common Chimps.

After my hour with the "Pygmy Humans" (Bonobos are
usually called "Pygmy Chimps" but I prefer a more
accurate nomenclature), I turned the corner to read
the large mounted Facts Board titled, "Differences
between Common Chimpanzees and Pygmy Chimps." I was
met with feminist propaganda exalting the fact that in
Bonobo society females were the "leaders," and males
were docile. Also, it asserted that Bonobos unlike
Common Chimps were highly socially cooperative not
warlike, and did not engage in meat eating.

This is a gross over-simplification of Bonobo day to
day existence in the extreme; No doubt "massaged" for
the throngs of sponge-brained young American visitors
to the zoo. In reality, Bonobo males are basically
sex fiends. The males do exhibit clear signs of
competitiveness and aggressiveness. Also, they are
slightly larger in size than the females, which
indicates a moderately patriarchic social structure.


Moving on over to the nearby Gorilla exhibit, I
noticed a similar sign, this one explaining to viewers
how habitats for the large apes were dwindling at a
rapid pace and that extinction in the wild in the very
near future was a foregone conclusion.

Fair enough. Sounded like a reasonable conclusion.
But reading further down, could you guess what group
the Zoologists blamed for the swift demise of the
Lowland Gorillas?

The African bush-meat traders? No.

The exceedingly corrupt murderous leftist regimes in
Zaire and Zambia? Nope.

They blamed Home Depot!

That's right. The final sentence in the rant blamed
"home improvement centers, the marine supply industry,
and Western-owned logging companies," for the
destruction of Gorilla habitat.

Now, I'm no expert, but I have read that bush-meat is
almost completely eaten by Africans (and on occasion
used for export to Asia). I'm not aware of ape
bush-meat showing up on the menus of fine European
restaurants, certainly not in the United States where
we routinely arrest Korean and other Asian immigrants
to this country who are caught trafficking in dog and
cat meat.

To blame "the West" the implication being the United
States, of course, for the destruction of Gorilla
habitat is an absurdity in the extreme. Surely, it's
the African governments themselves who are to blame.
It is their responsibility, not the responsibility of
the United States Government to create wide-ranging
wildlife preserves and to provide protection for
endangered species. Can you imagine the outcry from
African nations continent-wide if Americans were to
intervene and to pressure these nations on such
issues? Can you imagine what names George Bush would
be called worldwide if he were to suddenly tie further
U.S. Foreign Aid to Central African nations to the
institution of American-style environmental
regulations and endangered species acts?

I read a multitude of books on human evolution,
anthropology, paleontology and the study of primates;
at least two a week. I have scoured every Half-Price
Bookstore and Barnes & Noble in the Houston area and
purchased every book ever written on these subjects.
Plus, I've spent countless hours at the downtown
Houston library reading each and every book on the
shelves for these subject matters.

As a long-time libertarian, I have been absolutely
astounded at the extreme leftist bias that I have
found in the Anthropology community. Books by Stephen
Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Lewontin, Jarred
Diamond, Jane Goodall, Donald Johanson, and even
Richard Leakey, all anthropologists whom I otherwise
deeply respect and admire, are loaded with
anti-capitalist/environmentalist extremist rants that
always blame the United States for whatever evil
exists in the world. And you don't even want to look
at a Modern Anthropology Textbook. I picked up a copy
of the most widely-used Anthropology textbook by
William A. Haviland of the University of Vermont,
"Cultural Anthropology" (Ninth Edition, by Harcourt
College Publishers.) It is almost like reading
something straight out of the Communist Manifesto with
a plentiful amount of male bashing/feminist extremist
ideology thrown in.

I could give you countless quotes from these texts
that would make a conservative or a libertarian's skin
crawl. But in the interests of space, I'll just urge
you to go to a used bookstore and pick up a few books
by these prominent authors and a recent Anthropology
textbook, to see for yourself.

Where are the conservative and libertarian viewpoints
in the anthropology community? Where are the
conservative and libertarian counterpoints to leftist
propaganda promulgated to school-children at our
nation's zoos? Where are the PBS or Discovery Channel
Programs that blame the Africans themselves for the
destruction of their own environments instead of the
"evil Western-owned logging companies," or the
"insidious" Tim Allen-type home improvement guys who
spend weekends constructing back porches for their
consumption-driven female mates?

The emerging evolutionary psychology movement headed
by New York Times Best-selling Author Stephen Pinker,
Biologist Christopher Wills, Archaeologist Millard
Wolpoff, Geneticists Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkings
comes close to representing a more balanced view.
Pinker in particular, as of late, has been raising
questions in his "Blank Slate" challenging the
politically correct views of the 70s, 80s and 90s
style Anthropologists. In the "Nature versus Nurture"
debate, Pinker and the other evolutionary
psychologists espouse the Nature side of the equation,
which has been giving the liberal social behaviorists
a cow. Even more they've been backing up their claims
with extensive well-documented research.

But even Pinker and the others back away from
explicitly pro-capitalist/ libertarian views when it
comes to politics and public policy. They never seem
to take their findings to their logical conclusion,
which is evidenced by their criticisms of libertarian
sociologist Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame for his
applications of their modern genetic research to
current public policy issues.

One has to go back to the 1960s and even much further
to find any Anthropologists or Paleontologists who
represent an explicitly conservative or libertarian
viewpoint. Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase
"survival of the fittest" is probably the best-known
libertarian evolutionist. Though his views in the
modern day have been savagely trashed by the
liberal-Anthropols if you can find them at all. I've
done Google searches and visited just about every
bookstore in Texas and still can't locate more than
just a scant overview of Spencer's writings. Also
discredited have been the views of paleontologists
Raymond Dart and Eugene Dubois, who though still
admired for their archaeological finds are dismissed
today by liberal anthropols as right-wing cranks for
their "hopelessly masculinist" and "man as primal
savage" viewpoints. I did discover a neat little book
on a dusty bottom shelf at Half-Price Books that
seemingly posits a conservative "man the
hunter/warrior" view from the early 1960s, "African
Genesis" by Robert Ardrey. Desmond Morris, Author of
the classic best seller "The Naked Ape," published in
1966, probably represents the last gasp of the
right-wing Anthropologists.

Whatever became of these guys?

In the case of the early Conservative Anthropols they
were severely discredited when their views were
adapted and perversely misapplied to the Eugenics
(selection for superior human genes) movement of the
early 20th Century which eventually culminated with
the mad racial supremacy of Hitler and the Nazi
Regime.

The early Anthropologists who recognized distinct
differences in human abilities, and differences
between genders, never really recovered from that
gross misapplication. Whenever they raised an
objection, the Margaret Mead libs of the day simply
attacked them for being "Eugenicists" and implicitly
"Hitlerian."

As a result, the Anthropological field has been solely
dominated by leftist social behaviorists for the last
half century. Their views have gone almost entirely
unchallenged.

Added to that the shifting of the Political Right in
the United States from the more secular enlightened
libertarian approach of the Barry Goldwater era to
Ronald Reagan's strategic alliance with the
bible-thumping formerly Southern Democrat religious
right and you have the makings of a disaster in the
extreme.

There are some limited signs of hope. As previously
mentioned Pinker and others in the Evolutionary
Psychology movement have breathed some signs of life
into Conservative/Libertarian Anthropology. But even
more encouraging, Jonah Goldberg, Emininent Co-Editor
of NATIONAL REVIEW on-line recently wrote a
masterpiece of a column, titled, "Metropolitan
Conservatism" where he let it be known that every
single writer at NR save one, was a diehard
Evolutionist and did not believe in the myths of
Creationism. Goldberg asserted that the only reason
why they still associated themselves with the
religious righters in the South was purely political
opportunism; the bible thumpers are able to muster
more votes for Republicans than the haughty
Metro-cons.

The cocktail sipping intellectual conservatives need
to get out of their cigar parlors and join in alliance
with us secular libertarians and take the fight to the
streets. We need to demand that textbooks be selected
for taxpayer-funded high schools and colleges that
represent a more balanced non-dogmatically leftist
viewpoint. We need to join big city Boards that
oversee the budgets of our Zoos and Museums and demand
that signs and pamphlets be more broad-based and not
representative of a monolithically politically correct
leftist viewpoint. We need to urge the Stephen
Pinkers of the world not be so timid in enunciating
their non-politically correct views on public policy.
We need to cultivate young thinkers on the right who
don't just come from narrowly focused bible-belt
environs and to urge them to go into Anthropology.

It's too easy to blame the left in all this. In
reality we should be blaming ourselves. We've allowed
the ultra-liberals/socialists to completely overrun
our institutions of higher learning. A recent study
found that 96% of all college professors are
self-described Democrats! We conservatives and
libertarians should be pointing the finger at
ourselves for letting the left run roughshod over our
viewpoints for the last 50 years in Institutions of
Higher Learning, and the Anthropology Departments in
particular.

It's time to take a stand and re-establish a
legitimate pro-Capitalist brand of Anthropology.


*Note - Eric Dondero Rittberg is a Multilinguist who
speaks over 20 languages. He is an Interpreter and
Certified Language Instructor in Houston, Texas. He
is also a world traveler and adventurer. Dondero
recently authored the "Worldwide Multilingual Phrase
Book" for globetrotters and other world travelers. He
is the founder of the Republican Liberty Caucus that
represents the libertarian wing of the GOP, and has
worked in numerous Republican political campaigns
nationwide for the last 20 years.




































=====

Eric Dondero, Author

"Worldwide Multilingual Phrase Book; Survival Skills for Over 40 Languages"

For busy travelers who need to learn languages fast!

http://www.portsidelanguages.com




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