Chapter Ten

Why Anthropology?

John St. John
 

A reasonable reader might wonder at the treatment of a highly respected
science. “Just what is it about anthropology that upsets you?” My answer is
that anthropology is important. it is the fountainhead of a whole range of
disciplines. Not only are there cultural anthropology, political
anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, economic anthropology and others, but
psychology, social studies, economics, and the humanities are all influenced
by this root science. Every occupation from law-enforcement and penology to
international monetary policy-making is populated with students of
anthropology. The importance of anthropology has not been ignored by anyone
who is in the people business. Policy makers, editors, advertisers, and
police, whether they are aware of it or not, have been programmed by
anthropology. The corporations are cognizant of its importance. There is a
powerful political element involved here. This is the reason why those who
finance higher education keep a tight rein on any innovations by naive
scholars. Anthropology is a potentially dangerous thing.

Why is anthropology important? It is the study of Man and the problem of
every living thing on this planet is Man. Without an understanding of Man we
cannot even approach a solution to the coming apocalypse. We need to know
more than his genetic makeup. We need to know him as he is and not as we
would like him to be. We need a psychoanalysis of Man . . . a written and
thorough inventory of the species. Humanity has become a force in the
universe . . . a new force that moves the very process of creation itself to
a new level. Certainly this must have been the aim of the creator when she
motivated that ape to pick up a pointed stick. Man represents a new level of
creative potential. he is the answer to entropy. His creations do not take
millions of years to fruition. Human creation is the result of applied
reason coupled with divine inspiration. Today we can investigate the cosmos.
We see in our own solar system planets that are inhospitable to life. The
rampant growth of our knowledge might someday make them bloom. We are at a
point when we can blossom into something beautiful or self-destruct. We do
not have to turn into another of god’s mistakes.  God make mistakes?! Why
not? God is not perfect . . . Perfection is stasis and God is not dead. This
is not humanism. Humanism can do without God. This is Dualism and means that
Man must work with God as a partner. He must learn to listen to the
still-small voice that will direct him. He must elevate the altruism that
was the gift of God to the tribe. God made the jungle and out of the jungle
came Man. Man cannot go back to the jungle. He can not allow the jungle to
come between him and his divine destiny. He must overcome the techno-jungle
that has entered the tribal compound and he must stop its corporations from
destroying the natural jungle. Man must become responsible for relating his
own biological success to his own holding capacity. he must learn to control
his Totem gene. Killer Man must become the demi-god he was meant to be.

 We live in an era when technology and invention are turning to things like
genetic cloning and artificial intelligence. We are stuck with a social
outlook that has not progressed at all and are watching corporation
conservatism dismantle fifty years of progress.  The deaths of slave society
and feudal society were the result of technical innovations. Each of the
former societies went in the trash can of history for the same reason. Like
its forerunners; bourgeois society in its final stage has become oppressive
to the majority of the tribe. The answer of those in power is repression,
more jails, more police, and militarism. Palliatives like social security,
welfare, and Medicaid are going to be scrapped when they are most needed.

GATT and NAFTA have little to do with free trade but have a lot to do with
cheap labor and unlimited exploitation of the environment. Sweat shops in
Asia bring sweatshops to New York and Los Angeles. The new fast-track will
allow a World Trade Authority to level what is left of American labor and
environmental  gains.

I am an optimist: one of God’s fools. I have always been a survivor and I
want to see my great-grandchildren’s children survive. I want to see you
survive. I don’t believe in the perfectibility of Man because nothing will
ever be perfect. Perfection:  a human conception, like anthropomorphism,
came out of our role as a manual creator. We have trouble imagining a God of
Einstinian dimensions. We want a little God that we can visualize . . . a
baby God playing with clay. The idea of a God that touched off the Big Bang
and sent galaxies hurtling through space is frightening to us. It makes us
think that we are insignificant. But the fact that we are beginning to get
an understanding of the cosmic reality indicates that we are very
significant indeed.

My interest in anthropology developed as a result of an inner knowledge that
if we were going to reach an understanding of what is happening today, we
would have to have a more realistic understanding of ourselves, not only as
individuals but as a species. I had to take a complete moral inventory of
myself in order to find out what was wrong with me as a person. In doing
this I found out that much that I had condemned myself for was
understandable. Raised in the great depression and immersed in the caldron
of W.W.II; there were many reasons for my many shortcomings that I had
little control over. I had to take a good hard look back into my own
personal history.  Part of my personal character was a revolt against
authority. This is only a character defect if it lands one in jail. It can
also lead one to become a crusader. In my case: I exercised both options.
The moral psychological shambles that resulted from my personal disillusion
with Marxism is today mirrored by the problems facing whole countries who
have come to the same conclusion. Having taken my own personal inventory I
was now ready to take an inventory of my species. The first thing that
struck me was its enormous age. From three to five-million years we have
been differentiated from the other animals because of our technology.
Obviously, even as primitive beings armed with spears, we managed to survive
in just about any climate or ecology. It was also equally obvious that the
reason for this ability was because we had or could develop technology to
meet just about any situation. When I looked for the beginnings of
civilization I found that it happened only ten-thousand years ago as a
result of the development of agriculture. If I were to do a fearless and
thorough inventory of humanity it would have to begin at the beginning five
million years ago. In comparing my own microcosmic history to the
macrocosmic life of humanity: it became obvious, that in searching for human
nature, I would do well to ignore the confusing cultural and economic
mish-mash that was characteristic of civilization.

Investigating post-agricultural cultures for behavior would be like trying
to find out the reason for all of the erratic and self-destructive things
that I did. The reason was  that I had discovered alcohol. The reason
agriculture changed normal happy humans into greed driven neurotics was
because they had discovered private-property. They say it is only human
nature to want to get ahead. Is it? I know of no examples of a hunting and
gathering tribe where this is so. Thus it would appear that economic
ambition is a cultural thing and is not at all genetically determined. In
discovering what is nature and what is nurture we have to stick with the
5,000,000 years for nature and oppose it with 10,000 years of nurture.

Of course my transition from a drunk into an anthropologist raised problems;
but the problems lay more with the anthropology than they did with me. One
factor that has held true for both primitive and civilized Man  was that
both were symbiotic with technology. Nowhere did I ever find any example of
human beings existing without some form of technology. In the shelves of
anthropological works that I have; very few even have the word technology in
their appendix. This worried me . . . It was like the many economic books I
read where the word capitalism was freely used; but where the word
corporation was missing from the appendix. I could not believe that both
these words describing phenomena so ubiquitous were missing as a result of
oversight or ignorance. This raised my old revolutionary hackles. It caused
me to construct a conspiracy theory. Somewhere; some force was deliberately
trying to keep me stupid. There was too much evidence for this for it to be
simple paranoia.

“In the land of the blind . . . the one-eyed man is king.” But before
mounting my throne as king of the anthropologists I was stopped by the
realization that the poor bastards were not dumb . . . they were just
scared. Further investigation, into possible forces that were making these
Galileos recant, led me to The American Enterprise Institute, The American
Heritage Institute, The Rand Corporation, and a whole army of tax-exempt
foundations and think-tanks with their boards dominated by corporation CEOs.

The poor devils had to publish or perish, and what they had to publish had
better meet the standards of publishers who were themselves corporate
conglomerates. Naturally I had at least one good eye. I never liked
corporations since my boyhood in Flint Michigan; a General Motors company
town. I hated school and turned down the army A.S.T.P. program where they
put me on the campus of Michigan State, and when the war was over I blithely
ignored the GI Bill of Rights. This left a book-worm with a Mensa IQ out of
the academic decision making process; and made him a pariah to government
agencies with a mandate to carry out decisions made by corporation boards
and their bought and paid for Congress critters. I couldn’t get a letter to
the editor published. It wasn’t until I got hold of a computer and got on
the internet that I saw a chance of breaking through the concrete wall of
censorship erected by the corporations.

I have learned to appreciate the discoveries of Dart, Leakey, and Johannson
without the neccesity to accept their conclusions. The current ideas
purporting to prove that early human-beings were essentially scavengers
seemed laughable to me. Why would a tribal hunter armed with spears have to
take the leavings of some other animal? Why are the corporations so intent
on proving that human beings are inherently selfish and without the
redeeming qualities of social behavior? The answer came to me that it was
because corporations are not human beings, and it is the task of
corporations to keep these social creatures separated just as they separate
their employees in cubicles. It is because these man-made robots are wary of
their creators. They know that the people who created them can un-create
them. The measure of an accountant is how well he adheres to the bottom
line. This is the rule of the accountant. Accountants like the reliability
of numbers, and corporate policy is set by accountants.

It is understandable that a taxonomy should develop in naming the different
stages of human development as though they were different species.
Australopithicus and Cro Magnon vary in their relative size and
intelligence, but size and intelligence are not  factors that determine
species. The fact that the Chimp and the Human are 99% genetically
identical, and that they have pursued different paths of development since
an event occurring 5,000,000 years ago, leads me to believe that just as the
there has been no ancestral claim for specieization by Chimps there should
not be any for us. The sure test is whether mating produces offspring. As it
is impossible to mate Lucy the australopithicine with George Bush the homo
sapiens sapiens . . . we will never know for sure.  I will not allow the
American Enterprise Institute to separate me from my australopithicine
ancestors because they lived in loving tribes and shared; nor will I adopt
the egocentric selfish paradigm set by corporation accountants.