When we use the word modern to describe something, it's usually a positive. We're very appreciative and even a little smug about the miracles of modern science, modern technology, and even the superiority of modern viewpoints. But what if, in speeding towards a new and ever better future, we've left some important truths about modern science?
ourselves behind one of the people who best helps us to explore this problem is margaret mead perhaps the most famous anthropologist in the world margaret mead was born in the usa in nineteen o one the oldest of five children her father was a professor of finance and her mother was a sociologist. After studying psychology as an undergraduate, Mead began a PhD in the relatively new field of anthropology. Her supervisor, Franz Boas, was the founder of the discipline in the United States. Unlike earlier anthropologists who'd imagined that civilization was progressing in a linear fashion from barbarism to savagery to civilization, Boas argued that the world was teeming with separate cultures, each with their own unique personality. perspectives, insights and efficiencies.
The modern Western world was not the pinnacle of human achievement, but simply one specific example of what humans could get up to. Boas suggested that Mead travel for her fieldwork to Samoa, a few tiny volcanic tropical islands in the centre of the Pacific Ocean. Mead was particularly interested in primitive communities because she believed that such isolated cultures could serve as laboratories that would reveal ways of living that the modern world had forgotten about. but needed to remember.
Starting in 1925 and lasting until the beginning of the Second World War, Mead lived in Samoa in a highly authentic way for long periods. She learned the languages, dressed like a local and even carried babies around by having them cling to her neck. Mead became fascinated by Samoan attitudes to sex in particular.
In the book that made her name, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, Mead described Samoan culture as far more open and comfortable with sex than the modern United States. Little children in Samoa knew all about masturbation and learnt about intercourse and other acts through first-hand observation, but thought of it as no more scandalous or worthy of comment than death or birth. Homosexuality was incidental, but also not a matter of shame, and people's orientations fluctuated naturally throughout their lives, without defining them. This intrigued and inspired Mead, who herself led rather unconventional life, simultaneously involved with successive husbands and an ever-present female lover, another famous anthropologist called Ruth Benedict. Mead argued that the Samoan approach to sex made adolescence far easier for girls there, because there was little pressure for them to conform to particular kinds of sexuality.
They were neither pressured to abstain from sex, nor to achieve particular milestones like having boyfriends or getting married. Gradually, Mead got interested in gender roles and discovered that modern societies are far more rigid in this area than primitive ones. For example, Americans tend to think of men as productive, sensible and aggressive, while women are often told that they're more frivolous, peaceful and nurturing.
But in her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead studied tribes in Papua New Guinea and recorded that in the Arapesh tribe, both men and women were peaceful and nurturing, while among the Mundugamor tribe, men and women were both ruthless and aggressive. In short, Mead suggested that no gender traits are ever simply human nature. They're all instead simply possibilities which are either taught, encouraged or shunned by any given culture.
Mead's striking conclusion is that it isn't gender that makes women curl their hair or listen to people's feelings or race that makes some nations regularly attack their neighbors. Rather, it's the social expectations and norms that have developed slowly over centuries and which have laid the groundwork for each individual psychological makeup. We must recognize, she reminded her readers, that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race, the same potentialities always exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.
Mead herself learned so much from her anthropological subjects. She brought up her daughter according to some of the parenting ideas of the primitive people she worked with, like breastfeeding on demand, which she helped to popularize in modern-day America. During World War II, access to the South Pacific was impossible. So Mead began to study more complex cultures like her own. After the war, Mead worked for the US military, studying Russian responses to authority, in order to try to predict what the Soviets might do during the Cold War.
She grew increasingly famous, traveling widely, giving lectures and teaching at universities. For 50 years, from 1928 until her death in 1978, she worked on and off for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, as a curator for their special projects. She wrote 20 books in all, and was awarded 28 honorary degrees. Mead's work helps us to use the experiences of other nations and people as a storehouse of good ideas. As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who's never left his own doorstep, she suggested, so a knowledge of another culture will always sharpen our ability to scrutinize our own more steadily.
In doing so, she suggested, we will always uncover and support undeveloped human potential, forgotten in our rush towards modernity. How to Think More Effectively is a book about how to optimise our minds so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfil our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.