ROBIN FOX’S

PARTICIPANT OBSERVER: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life

A boy should not keep secrets from his mother, nor tell her lies; but once he does, a marvelous new world of possibilities opens up. (24)

No shop girl could resist a dancing curate. (41)

For all its datedness, is there a better summary of human decency and integrity than Kipling’s “If”? (49)

What things fill a boy’s mind with wonder? Those things that are absolutely strange, yet which he knows were always somehow part of him. (64)

His shallow voracity for facts, his flashy but undoubtedly effective talent for assembling them in readable prose, these were the very things that “journalism” was about. (68)

Hamlet didn’t kill Claudius right away because then he would have missed a terrific chance to torment his mother. (78)

[Hamlet] is a play about a play-actor who spins out the yarn for his own narcissistic fascination. (78)

Youth is wonderful at whatever age it kicks in. (80)

If he [God] was looking out for the universe … then did it make sense to think he cared at all about what we did with our neighbors’ fences, or whether we gathered firewood on Saturdays, put pictures in our churches, or cut the ends of our willies off? (81)

The whole point of marriage, they earnestly explained, was that with a wife you could do whatever you liked as much as you liked whenever you wanted. What a dismal surprise these little lechers were in for. (85)

The State as Metaphysical Absolute versus the State as the Greatest Good of the Greatest Number, was a lot more fun than the finer points of public housing policy and the devaluation of the pound. (88)

It’s the still waters that run deep; he was a shallow babbling rivulet. (112)

Thus character calcifies around old emotional wounds. (129)

Euthanasia was not the unnatural ending of life, but the termination of the unnatural avoidance of death. (132)

Renunciation – of something – was perhaps a necessary rite of passage. (165)

[In the USA in the fifties] There was skin-deep confidence and subcutaneous angst. (167)

You couldn’t imagine the Christian Scientists burning anyone at the stake. (168)

He was drifting into a consideration of American values, including the very low value placed on body hair, and the absurdly high value placed on perfect teeth. (171)

When it comes to parting anxious sinners from their money, the older religions had nothing to teach the talking cure. (174)

It [football] comprised brief episodes of violent activity interrupted by what looked like prayer meetings. (177)

They [anthropologists] then assigned to Culture powers that ambitious theologians would have been embarrassed to attribute to God. (181)

What was it about mathematics that required it to be taught at dawn? (187)

The men had sharp-edged personalities and soundproof imaginations. (222)

It didn’t matter much what the content of the initiation was – it could be genital mutilation or construing dead languages; what mattered was that the pain was inflicted and the boys understood who was boss. (227)

This was the England of the late fifties, a negative age in which the forties had not died, and the sixties had yet to be born. (247)

It [Cornwall and Devon] was England’s southwest corner and, like California in the USA, all the kooky stuff seemed to slide down there. (247)

He had professionally to accept what he had personally never believed: that in some things the group trumped the individual. (253)

Some smells have the ability to arouse us as profoundly as the taste of Proust’s madeleine: burning pinyon in the New Mexican desert, and burning peat on the Donegal coast are olfactory wellsprings for him. (255)

The gross impersonality of the ocean, which created and destroyed life without judgement or even interest, seemed to represent Nature herself in her unconcern for either herself or her children. From her we came and unto her we must return, and there is no one there to care one way or the other. (267)

All of them had that tantalizing mix of learning and madness that at once endears The Irish to foreigners and leaves the serious visitor in a state of subtle bafflement. (269)

[In Ireland] No one revels in the death of a young person, but when an old one dies, having lived a good and full life, you do not mourn the death, you celebrate the taking on of eternal life and rest. (299)

We don’t like the unknown; that is one reason we invent religion and grammarians. (303)

As we (the species) were crossing the human-animal frontier, we did not check in our animal badge and gun at the border: we brought an enormous animal baggage with us. (316)

Society was older than man; we did not invent it, we inherited it. (316)

A mother-child unit could never be an anomaly, and certainly not an immorality. (329)

“History” was reduced to a couple of flickering frames at the end of an hour-long film. It was an experiment whose result was in doubt. (330)

Whatever the Yanks did would be initially disparaged, then imitated a decade later. (340)

Egos are always bigger than issues.

There was no more male-initiated fiddling with condoms; girls slipped out of their clothes and into sex like otters into the river. (353)

He tried to be generous: to temper justice with mercy, and mercy with common sense. (370)

Conspiracies restore one’s faith in rationality. (372)

As with the Kennedys, the best way to get to the top was to start there. (375)

Things may be established by the evolutionary process, but whether that made them unmovable by human imagination and intelligence was an open question. (380)

[Milton] Eisenhower asked him if he thought taking guns away from people would reduce violence. No, he said, but it might mean fewer people getting shot. (385)

These [Unitarians] were people who had essentially lost their Christian faith, but still needed something earnest to do on Sunday mornings. (386)

The Sisterhood was fragile when it came to sexual competition. (388)

There was much rumbling about “genetic determinism” even though no one talked much of genes: nor was there much to say except that you had to end up there because there was no other known way to make an organism. (389)

The summer of ’68 had been to the twentieth century what that of ’48 had been to the nineteenth. (393)

He used to ask them [feminists] if they practiced safe gender. (399)

The truly devious have to be adept at self-delusion. (401)

California was seductive. Ready at any minute to slide into the Pacific Ocean, and so living constantly on the edge, it was a kind of fantasyland that had been put together by shipwrecked Americans who tried to recreate what they remembered of their culture. (404)

Faced with questions like, “Would you approve of a woman president?” he replied that he’d rather have a president who was pregnant some of the time, than one who was impotent all of the time. (419)

Scoundrels are the last refuge of patriotism. (419)

Fanaticism has its own agenda, independent of the cause to which it attaches itself. (431)

How the peripherals love to see the dominant male fall, and how they then panic and want another right away to replace him. (433)

Leonard Cohen ran like a river through the valley of the shadow of their lives. (445)

Perhaps, life expectancy having almost doubled, divorce was just a way of reminding the couple that one of them should be dead? (450)

Divorce is the price of consciousness, and he was about to pay it again. (451)

Women are Utilitarians; men are Kantians… A man asks of an action “Is it right?” and judges accordingly. A woman asks “What harm does it do?” and judges likewise. (491)

The genius of social class as a system of domination is its elevation of difference into worth. (531)

We cannot put the clock back. No. But we can learn to tell the time better. (540)

He saw only the power hunger of the few, the gullibility of the many, and the xenophobia of all. (543)

But this meant that men came to operate not in terms of raw nature, but in terms of their ideas and illusions about nature. (543)

To have any kind of an identity crisis you must first have an identity. (548)

He was a stranger wherever he went, not least in the country of his birth. (548)

You struggle and strive, you dance and skate, there are a few pleasant sensations here and there, and then you die. (553)

While all other social movements are open to analysis, your own is exempt. (554)

We are chimps with existential questions. (554)

A civilization has to initiate its young successfully, or it will fall away from the inside. (555)

With hypocrites there is always the possibility of negotiation; the virtuous are implacable. (555)

Clarion calls to moderation do not get people to the barricades. (555)

There was no stopping, as they often said, the march of progress, even if illusion-riddled humanity was only crawling to another place on the flypaper of history. (556)

Verse aphorisms:

The virtues of the questing mind
Are not as they are billed
For in the country of the blind
The one-eyed man is killed. (417)

The democratic roundabout
Makes sure the people never win,
For if they throw the rascals out
They put the other rascals in. (434)

Chosen from the works and arranged by Sanjit Gupta

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and
quacks like a duck, it’s a social construction of a duck.

******

Preamble: Exceptions to generalizations are the norm. Any generalization that does not have exceptions is probably a tautology. Laws must hold in all cases, or they are not laws. Exceptions prove the rule in the sense that they test it. If they are true exceptions then the law must be abandoned or re-written. Aphorisms only have to be witty.

We constantly reproduce that which produced us.

(Behavioral ontogeny reproduces biosocial phylogeny - after Freud)

Kinship systems ensure that the marriage choices of the younger generation are contingent on the choices of the previous generation: thus building control of the young into the system, rather than depending on direct confrontation.

Descent and alliance - the two fundamentals of human kinship systems - are both found in nature: the human innovation is to combine them into one system. (More recent work on Gelada baboons challenges this generalization. The Geladas may have both descent and alliance, in which case this is not a human innovation but itself part of nature.)

The three building blocks of primate social order are: (a) dominant males (b) females with young (c) peripheral or aspirant males.

Corollary: The Human Revolution occurred when kinship ceased simply to link the blocks, but began to determine the allocation of mates among them.

Corollary: Initiation ceremonies for males will be fiercest where the struggle for control of the females is strongest (e.g. competitively polygynous societies.)

Law of sibling incest avoidance: The intensity of heterosexual attraction between co-socialized siblings after puberty will be inversely proportionate to the intensity of physical interaction between them before puberty.

(Revival of Edward Westermarck’s hypothesis, and coinage of term "Westermarck Effect" - 1962 - as opposed to “Freud Effect.”

(Data from the Israeli Kibbutim show that the law should be re-written to say “ intensity…. before age six.”)

Law of the dispensable male: In mammalian mating systems, if the mother-child unit can survive without the support of a male then it will do so.

Corollary: The basic unit of kinship is therefore not the nuclear family but the mother-child unit.

Corollary: Humans alone can separate the courtship bond from the parental bond; corollary of this - that basic cultural unit of kinship is the avunculate - brother, sister and sister's children, not the nuclear family.)

Exogamic rules (rules against marrying within the kin group), not incest taboos, are the passage from nature to culture. (Comes out the same as Lévi Strauss, but starting assumption is totally different: incest avoidance is natural; incest rules are cultural acceptance of this fact.)

Evolution of equilibration (neo-cortex) means we are geared to both facilitation and inhibition (ritualization) of aggression.

Human rule systems (societies/cultures) are not sustainable if they are in conflict with basic human needs laid down in the EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptation - Upper Paleolithic).

The brain did not evolve to give us accurate information about the world, but to give us useful and optimistic information.

Consciousness today is operating out of its normal context. It was an adaptation to life in the Upper Paleolithic.

Corollary: “History” is a series of wilder and wilder swings away from the Paleolithic norm.

Evolutionary biology does not so much explain what we do, as explain what we do at our peril.

We are not directly motivated to maximize reproductive success, but to maximize success: reproductive success may or may not follow.

Prejudice is not a warped form of thinking: thinking is a normal form of prejudice.

The tyranny of ideas is inescapable: we cannot operate without them, and we cannot survive because of them.

Corollary: the roots of war lie not in aggression, but in fanaticism and ideology.

Men love the treaties as much as the wars.

Corollary: The actual time spent on violence in wars is significantly less than that spent on
logistics and diplomacy.

War is diplomacy’s way of generating more diplomacy.

The basic confusion of social science has been to attempt to marry a collectivist theory of society with an individualistic theory of epistemology, because of a mistaken association of the latter
with a progressive utopian ideology.

The 'disease' model of aggression (and social pathologies) is wrong. Aggression is a normal part of the system (digestion not diarrhea.) So-called social pathologies are often endogenous
healing processes mistaken for diseases.

* * *

Some laws, rules and aphorisms:

When it comes to adaptation there is no substitute for centuries.

We have no choice but to be human.

Kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy and the nude is to art.

History is not kind to the hopeful.

The state of nature was never the war of all against all: it was the war of some against others,
and the some and the others were always groups of kin

The nature of order is part of the order of nature.

If man cannot be perfect, he can learn to live more tolerantly with his imperfections.

Humans are eternal adolescents: put them in a fast car and they'll speed.

A trout is only as smart as he has to be: a fisherman is twice as smart as he needs to be.

We are like someone who has been handed a great fortune along with instructions to commit suicide.

We may never have lived in sillier times.

We live in an intellectually lazy age.

When I hear the word “postmodern” I reach for my gun. (After Goebbels)

It does not need all of the people all of the time, just most of the people some of the time will do.

It is not that man is as culture does, but that culture does as man is.

Something went wrong at the end of the seventeenth century.

Sumus ergo cogitamus.

We could almost define man as the animal that wants things.

We are the only animals that blame each other for their misfortunes.

As one who is constantly shaken by the evidence of man's capacity to create truly hideous and revolting cultures, I would feel happier to think that something in human nature was always
going to be able to say 'no' to human culture in the name of common humanity.

If wars are indeed "culturally and not biologically caused" then, given the record of culture, we are indeed in serious trouble.

When the state fails to protect, people turn to the security of kinship.

Man is what he produces and was produced by what he is.

Being good is nowhere near as important as ethical theory would have it: the problem is to be human.

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a social construction of a duck.

It is a sociological generalization seldom made but easily tested, that somewhere a war is going on and always has been.

In anthropology, with every active mouth, God sends but one indifferent brain.

(After Malthus, who said that with every hungry mouth God sent two active hands.)

We should try, after a hundred years, to take Darwin seriously.

Fox's first law: All foreigners are funny.

Fox's iron law of departmental mediocrity: While good departments may get better,
mediocre departments will always get worse.

(Since mediocrities will never appoint anyone smarter than themselves.)

Fox iron law of bureaucratic stupidity: Whenever the administration does something so stupid it is impossible to conceive of it doing anything more stupid, it will.

Fox's rule of Harvard recruiting: Harvard will only recruit people so eminent that they have long ago run out of anything to contribute.

Fox's rule of Gaelic usage: Those that speak it can't read it; those that read it can't speak it.

Fox's first rule of feminism: If you don't like the current state of feminist thinking, wait a minute. (After Mark Twain.)

Fox's second rule of feminism: Women are men who take time off occasionally to have babies.

Fox's third rule of feminism: Children are either little fetuses to be aborted, or little nuisances to be dumped in day-care centers.

Fox's first contradiction of feminism: Women are fundamentally different from men and hence their superiors: Women are exactly the same as men and hence their equals.

Since I refuse to write book reviews, I think it only fair never to read them. Fortunately, my agent does that.

In university teaching every proposition should be up for grabs, including this proposition.

All Cretans may be liars, but some Cretans are bigger liars than others.

The meek may very well inherit the earth; in the meantime be vigilant and keep up your guard.

To restore the basic conservatism of the species may require the most radical action of all.

Cultural relativism did not abolish ethnocentrism, as it intended; it simply extended the privilege to all societies.

To lose some of one's instincts is unfortunate: to lose all of them smacks of carelessness.
(After Oscar Wilde)

Instinct is the organism's demand for an appropriate environment.

Corollary: Nature is the demand for appropriate Nurture.
(Hence the Nature/Nurture problem does not exist.)

Helen Fisher says that for love to work you must “forget the past.” The trouble is, the past won’t forget you.

There may not be a free lunch, but it sure as hell is deductible.

For all his Irish sympathies, [Roger] Casement was thoroughly English, and therefore preferred to live a lie rather than tell one.

To ensure genetic survival the sex urge need only be satisfied a few times in a lifetime; the hunger urge has to be satisfied every day.

I collected examples until I reached a hundred since that gives a nice round number and one can quote accurate percentages without the tedium of calculation.

What is most worth dying for: material interests or diacritical ideas? It is ideas that make us human after all.

Not including material from THE VIOLENT IMAGINATION, later incorporated into THE PASSIONATE MIND, q. v. especially “The Interrogation: A Nightmare.”)

* * *

Minor generalizations:

Kinship systems are derivable from four premises (a) the women have the children (b) the men impregnate the women (c) men usually control the system (d) primary kin do not mate with each
other.

Put another way: Gestation, Impregnation, Domination and Hybridization (the avoidance of incest) lie at the root of all social organization.

There are four solutions to 'the matrilineal puzzle.' (see Kinship and Marriage.)

There are three methods of lineage segmentation: the 'drift' method, the 'spinal chord' method, and the 'perpetual' method.

The development of double descent in central Africa was a result of a switch to general polygyny in matrilineal systems (not a change in residence rules viz G. P. Murdock).

The consanguineal family is independent of matrilineal descent. (Tory Island)

Partible inheritance does not necessarily lead to land fragmentation (Tory Island)

Crow-Omaha systems are logical developments from an 'elementary' base (The Keresan Bridge, etc.) Their variations reflect not degrees of acculturation, but the degree to which they have developed from that base.

The 'family/household' distinction, stemming from the Latin and Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage, is a source of major confusion for English-speaking anthropology, since the distinction is not
necessarily made elsewhere.

The basic struggle in the West is not dyadic - between the individual and the state,
but triadic - between the individual, the kinship group and the state.

The Anglo-Saxon individualistic bias leads to a totally wrong interpretation of history and an even worse interpretation of the aspirations of the third world.

All history is the history of reproduction and succession.

Kinship categories are natural categories: category systems are adaptive in that a rapid switch between the categories of “marriageable” and “unmarriageable” is possible.

A few rules can generate many outcomes. Of the large number of possible outcomes, surprisingly few are realized.

Any rules are better than no rules. The substantial content of social rules is not as important as having rules at all; without some rules - no matter what - behavior has no orientation.

The rules for breaking the rules are as important as the rules themselves.

The evolution of inhibition leads to the possibility of delayed gratification, which is the basis for the ability to make and keep rules.

The adult female orgasm is the homologue of the pre-pubertal male masturbatory orgasm.

(This follows from the clitoris being a rudimentary, i.e. non-ejaculatory, penis.)

Corollary: The female orgasm is a purely vestigial phenomenon, like the appendix.

The aim of a young primate male is to rise in the hierarchy to copulate with the group females. The aim of a young human male is to rise in the hierarchy to control the marriages of the group’s
females.

There is nothing in the long-term memory that was not first in the emotions.

This requires visual representation during REM sleep (dreaming.)

Corollary: Totemic categories physiologically enhance their own memorization.

Copyright:© Robin Fox 2002

LATEST POEM

Reflections on the Rabbi

The Rabbi we call Jesus (think instead
of Yeshua ben-Yussef) did not claim
to be the Son of God; he simply said
we all are sons of God: that spreads the blame.

The scruffy rabbi with the dirty hair
urged that we concentrate our minds upon
the prospect of the Kingdom, and repair
the damage to our souls that greed had done.

He trashed the gaudy temple of the self,
leaving no place for piety to hide.
He made each giant ego seem an elf,
and shook his buttocks at the sons of pride.

Self-abnegation does not suit our age,
so we rewrite the gospel for the times
when every chorus boy wants center stage,
and poets seek to profit from their rhymes.

The angry rabbi with the scraggy beard
expelled the merchants from the temple door;
but this was just a gesture (as we feared)
and so the merchants are in charge once more.

So when he told us “turn the other cheek,”
did he mean it literally, we wonder?
when he gave earthly title to the meek,
did that include petroleum rights thereunder?

The way – the televangelists seem to know –
to reap the profit and write off the loss,
is, like each pious Christian CEO,
to nail our golden handshakes to the cross.

O earnest little rabbi by the lake,
bless loaves and fishes so the hungry feed;
but don’t you understand, for goodness sake,
the trickle-down effect of private greed?

Our ingenuity is plain to see -
the Holy Church turned up the vital clue:
in reconciling God and mammon we
ignore your teaching, but we worship you.

We figure if we deafen you with praise
that you won’t notice if we deviate;
and do we really need you in these days
when rabbi Greenspan rules the interest rate?

The awkward little rabbi with the quiz,
no longer is around to pry and nod.
We render unto Ceasar what is his:
on Sunday mornings we can deal with God.

So we reject the tedious enterprise,
while in his tomb, bewildered by our plight,
the wounded rabbi hesitates to rise,
and we nail down the coffin, good and tight.

© Robin Fox, 2004

Permissions to reprint any of the above is granted,
Providing authorship is acknowledged.

Copyright:© Robin Fox 2002