For the intellectual Left that came to power in the 1960s and 1970s, no front of the culture wars is more important than the national question—what constitutes a nation, the benefits and costs of nationhood, the connections between national identity and interests, ethnic and racial differences, and the proper relations between nation, state, immigration, domestic ethnic groups and other countries. Four of the five taboos in the social sciences are related directly or indirectly to these issues: race differences; blaming the victim; stereotype accuracy; and nativism.[1]
Leftist values are not automatically anti-national. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Western elites often combined affection for their peoples with liberalism, including support for expanded civil rights. The Christian drive to end slavery in the late eighteenth century was not associated with unpatriotic sentiment. Labour movements have often supported protectionism and restrictive immigration in alliance with conservatives. However, as Eric Kaufmann has documented, the internationalist strand in socialist thought rose to prominence during the course of the twentieth century.[2] From before the Bolshevik coup of 1917, cosmopolitans have fought against beliefs that would bolster Western identity and confidence.
One such activist was Columbia University anthropology professor Franz Boas, who helped supplant the nascent biosocial sciences in the United States with the cosmopolitan New Social Sciences. Boas’s opposition to biosocial science is valorised as “scientific anti-racism”, which he pioneered in a famous publication of 1912[3]. The research purported to demonstrate that races rapidly converge on a common type when living in the same country. His goal was to assuage Anglo-American concerns that mass immigration would alter national identity. Boas was so strongly motivated in this direction that he opposed all biological theories of human nature. To that end he abandoned liberal and academic standards. Despite evincing the values of the 1848 liberal revolutionaries, he remained a stalwart of the Soviet Union through the Ukrainian genocide of 1931–32. On the scientific side, he doggedly supported official Soviet Lamarckianism, the theory that characteristics acquired by individuals during their lifetimes are passed on genetically to children. Boas remained a Lamarckian long after the theory was discredited in scientific circles. He approved Margaret Mead’s deeply flawed doctoral thesis on Samoan teenage sexuality that attributed white puberty blues to pathologies of Western civilisation. His 1912 research, a keystone document in the effort to radicalise American social science, was recently shown to be fallacious, not in the data collected by junior colleagues but in the statistical analysis conducted by Boas, a master statistician.[4] Subsequent attacks on biosocial conceptions of ethnicity and nationhood have frequently been tempted to trade truth for ideology.
