My recent Brussels Journal “exhumation” of Robert B. Edgerton’s remarkable study of Sick Societies (1992) provoked a variety of responses, with a good many veering from Edgerton’s main topic (also mine) of “maladaptation” into discussions of colonialism and the relation of the West to the so-called Third World. The sliding from one topic to another is itself of interest, but I should first like to address a number of reader-comments that focus directly on the “maladaptation” thesis.

The reader dubbing himself “Kapitein Andre” calls attention to the contrast between Edgerton’s dispassionate discussion of “maladaptation” with Jared Diamond’s politically de rigueur praise for contemporary Austronesian society in the widely reviewed and much praised Guns, Germs, & Steel: “While Western European youth were playing video games and quaffing unhealthy food and beverages, the Austronesian youth were exploring the jungles, constructing shelters, hunting, etc. [Diamond] concluded that the latter were much more intelligent.” The commensurability of contemporary Austronesian and Western societies is a complicated one. In a way, Diamond is right: it is probably better to be a competent stone-age tribesman than a decadent modern person; but Diamond’s PC apology for the supposed practitioners of “Primitive Harmony” leaves open the question whether contemporary Papua-New Guineans are competent stone-age tribesman or something else less pretty just as it ignores the likelihood that Western civilization is a largely positive achievement despite the fact that overweight adolescents with twenty electronic entertainment devices and C-minus grade-point-averages have effectively abandoned that civilization.

A society that becomes obsessed with diversion, as modern Western society has, is a society in the grip of maladaptation. The real contrast is not the contrast distinguishing the Papua-New Guinean youth and his Western age-counterpart but rather the one distinguishing Western society prior to the 1950s and Papua-New Guinean society at any point in its millennial non-development. Ten thousand years ago, presumably, all societies stood at the same level of social complexity, technical proficiency, and ethical development, more or less. Today, some societies have hardly changed from what they were ten thousand years ago (this is Edgerton’s point about the Tasmanians), but some societies that did develop in objectively praiseworthy ways have become afflicted by maladaptive ideas and practices that seriously endanger their wellbeing. The value of Edgerton’s thesis is that it is universally applicable. Diamond’s PC anti-Western attitude, by contrast, works only in one direction and is itself a cognitive maladaptation.

Edgerton’s comments on complaints made by Tasmanian women to early European explorers, to the effect that Tasmanian men systematically and severely mistreated them, prompted Kapitein Andre to these words: “Speaking of maladaptive, I also recall Swedish feminists attempting to prohibit men from urinating while standing; urinals signifying superiority over toilet bowls. Yet, I cannot think of any societies that can claim greater gender equality than the Scandinavian ones. Indeed, fair skin, light eyes and blond hair [are] correlated with respect for women and femininity… However, feminists are convinced that angry dark youth can act as the violent vanguard of those opposing the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy (to reference Bell Hooks).” I recall reading about those Swedish feminists in Dagens Nyheter a few years ago.

When I studied Swedish at UCLA more than thirty years ago, the language textbooks still made reference to the Swedish idea that the nation was “ett folkhem,” the country of one people, a decent people who took care of their own. When I spent part of a summer in Stockholm in 1986 to research the poet Harry Martinson, the friendliness of the Swedes – and of Swedish women – affected me powerfully. I sensed that Swedish women trusted well-behaved men and that this feeling of safety directly correlated with the extraordinarily high degree of civilized order that the Swedes had achieved. But I can recall one experience that, in retrospect, strikes me as ominous. I was staying in Skärholmen and had gotten into the habit of taking my lunch in a shopping mall there in a food-stall run by a Bosnian Muslim immigrant. The man spoke Swedish and when he began to recognize me talked with me affably and freely.

During one conversation the subject of women came up. “Kvinnor,” the fellow said to me, “de är ett slags djur, vet du inte?” – “Women, they’re a kind of animal, don’t you know.” I said that Americans did not see it that way and neither, I thought, did Swedes. He said that Swedish women were the worst, since their men had convinced them that they were not animals, and they had the effrontery to “talk to men.” I changed the subject.

In contriving to multiply that misogynist of a shopkeeper several hundred-thousand-fold in the years since 1986, the politicians elected to office by Swedish voting majorities have imposed on Sweden, through their immigration policies, a disastrously maladaptive agenda. The willingness of the Swedish press to cover up the severe social consequences of those policies compounds the problem and is itself maladaptive, as a lack of knowledge must always be. Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet are, with respect to many serious policy-issues, as scrubbed clean of truth as either Pravda or Izvestia ever was in the Soviet heyday. But Sweden is a democracy. A majority of Swedes have repeatedly voted for the politicians who have inflicted large non-Swedish populations on places like Malmö and various Stockholm suburbs. There is a precise analogy between the judgment of the Swedish voting majority and that of the American voting majority although the Swedish liberal majority is much larger proportionally than the American liberal majority. At the last presidential election the American liberal majority stood at fifty-two per cent.

The reader dubbing himself “KO,” like a number of other readers, found in the topic of Edgerton’s Sick Societies an opportunity for the discussion of empire and colonialism. This veering-away from Edgerton’s thesis to these other topics is not so arbitrary as it might at first seem. What Edgerton calls “the myth of primitive harmony” emerged as a kind of (ill-founded) guilty conscience in the latter days of European overseas rule, which intensified as the empires withdrew and the newly independent societies lapsed into tribal politics and economic chaos. KO, reflecting what I take to be a type of Nietzschean conviction, has freed himself in a refreshing way from any guilty conscience. He writes boldly that: “Strong and confident peoples have a ‘right’ to leave their home territories and express themselves in foreign projects, conquests or state-building or extraction of wealth. This is recognized in natural law. It is a solution to domestic problems they have earned the right to exploit. The result may be tragic and wasteful, but life was not designed to be comfortable.”

That more adept people impose themselves on less adept people, I take to be less something morally permissible in an a priori way than a fact of reality, to be evaluated morally by its effects a posteriori. It is difficult – not impossible, but difficult – to work up much resentment on behalf of the Gauls, for example, against Julius Caesar, given what Romanitas would ultimately mean for the region of Western Europe now called France. To take another example: The Gustavian Dynasty in Sweden could behave heavy-handedly, but (this is another thing one will not read in Dagens Nyheter) Sweden during the Gustavian period played an important role in organizing the political, economic, and cultural life of the Baltic – at least as important a role as the German-speaking Junkers, who usually get credit for the accomplishment. Places like Helsinki, Vyborg, and Riga began as Swedish entrepôts. Thus to aggressively pursue trade, the tide that lifts all boats, turns out to have been behaviorally adaptive, not alone for the Swedish entrepreneurs, who constituted the founding elites of those cities, but for those whom the Marxists would say they exploited.

The discussion of Sick Societies put the reader dubbing himself “Traveller” (with two l’s, as spelt) in mind of that ready-to-hand scapegoat of the modern left-liberal mentality – the Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism had, Traveller notes, “an original imperial structure, which needed a large number of ‘soldiers/representatives’ in the form of priests, monks, bishops, and monasteries.” The Roman-Catholic clerisy, in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, adeptly imposed itself on the less organizationally accomplished peoples of post-Imperial Europe. Traveller writes that the Church, as Europe slowly recovered from the Roman economic collapse, “also needed a large number of educated scholars to support the teachers and professors of the Catholic schooling institutions” and that “this created a very large thinking mass in the outskirts of the European continent with enormous distances and [logistical] problems.”

One might think that, organizationally, the Medieval Church had flung itself too far and in too many places, but Traveller understands that geographical dispersion was adaptive, that it “was the real origin of the many-facetted theories and thoughts which came to fruition independently from all corners of Europe” at a later period.

Traveller notes further that the intellectual diversity of Europe in the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Centuries was formidable, and he sees the clash of arguments and differences of opinion as the real sources of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment itself treated its origins churlishly by denouncing religion, a tendency that one might justifiably call intellectually maladaptive, considering what has become of Enlightenment ideas in the Twenty-First Century. Were those ideas not prone to their later misuse and ossification? As Traveller puts it, “As soon as the communication… became an instant service, unified ‘consumption-thinking’ became more the norm.” Now we have diversity, a euphemism for mandatory cognitive conformity, which is no kind of thinking at all.

The reader dubbing himself “Marcfrans” writes that: “I had the great fortune of reading Sick Societies soon after it was published by The Free Press in North America in 1992, and it had a major impact on my own thinking. It seemed to confirm my earlier experiences as a young economist in ‘a primitive society’ in the 1970s.” Marcfrans asks whether “such illuminating books could still be published in Europe today – and in America tomorrow – without risk of being dragged into some ‘court’ on charges of ‘racism, hate-speech’ or some such similar ruse?” The necessity of pen names in public pronouncements by European conservatives already partly answers this question, as do various cases of state prosecution, such as those against the late Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Brigitte Bardot in France, and Mark Steyn in Canada.

Marcfrans wonders, “How did Edgerton ‘survive’ in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA?” Professor Edgerton undoubtedly already possessed tenure when he published his book. Even in 1992, if he had published the same book hoping to win tenure, his department would probably have rebuked him.

The reader dubbing himself “Pale Rider” admits that, “I have ambivalent feelings towards colonialism,” but adds that, in his judgment, “Western colonialism was really inevitable.” As Pale Rider sees things, Western people “began exploring the world and we found new continents and places with… environments and inhabitants that looked very different and lived in very different ways from us” and “hence, [Westerners] saw this as an opportunity for more prosperity for our countries and as well as an opportunity to spread Christian civilization.” Western exploration, colonization, and settlement often affected non-Western people drastically, as when diseases to which Europeans were largely immune decimated native populations; but disease traveled in both directions, syphilis for example reaching Europe from Central America. As Pale Rider remarks, “it is also true that [Western] discoveries and advantages were misused by… colonial rulers and that innocent people were exploited and have died as a result of the greed of some.”

But critics of the colonial enterprises should exercise caution in their judgments (although they rarely do): “The problem is that rather than condemning the exploitation and excesses, many… condemn Western civilization and Christianity in [their entireties], and conveniently ignore the fact that colonialism was an unavoidable point and progression in history that was a result of many historical factors, and that colonialism also produced good things. They depict colonialism in such a way that it seems as though the White man was responsible for nothing but evil and that the natives were united as one peace-loving people defending their territory. This is simply not true.” Pale Rider has hit on the theme of “White Guilt,” a phenomenon of modern European and North American societies, which I hope to address in a subsequent essay on the novelist V. S. Naipaul.

The reader dubbing himself “4Symbols” objected to what he took to be my condemnation of the British “underclass.” I am an American – a Californian by birth who has lived successively in Michigan and Upstate New York in the years since 1989 – and my reflexive reference is contemporary American society. 4Symbols writes: “In the U.K. there is no willingness to live on ‘welfare,’ a large part of the indigenous population [having] been forced into an underclass, surviving on a subsistence level of [approximately] £8.60 per day… [a] sum [that] can not in any way be considered welfare. So sad to blame the British underclass for the collapse of western civilisation but of course you do not want to blame those who have had the privilege of a university education and dumbly have implemented the nonsense that is neo-liberalism.”

I shall gladly let 4Symbols speak for British society. I had in mind the longstanding, multi-generational, seemingly permanent welfare underclass in the United States, which exists in a peculiar maladaptive relationship to the degree-holding elites, who authored, advocated, and implemented “the nonsense that is neo-liberalism” in the United States. The American welfare system, beginning with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great-Society” initiatives in the mid-1960s, has clearly had the effect, through subventions of indiscipline and self-indulgence, of creating successive generations of people who shun labor and exist on wealth redistributed, through taxation, from those who produce it. During the Clinton and Bush II presidencies, Congress enacted some rational adjustments to the “Great-Society” dispensation. The current one-party regime is hell-bent, however, on aggrandizing wealth-redistribution and subvening anti-social behaviors as much as possible.

There is a startling lesson in following the “Births” column in the local newspaper in Oswego, the small Upstate New York town where I live. Often the majority of births in the local hospital are to teenaged girls, with no father indicated; always a disproportionate number of the recorded births fall under this category. This is a widespread pattern all across the United States, and not only in this or that ethnic segment of the population or in the big cities, where one would expect a high incidence of social pathology. Fatherless-ness is maladaptive in that it demonstrably produces misery in those whom in afflicts. Yet it is defended by the political left, who excuse it by the usual feminist dogmas. Formerly, before the 1960s, American social tradition heavily stigmatized premature sexual activity and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Relentless liberal propaganda succeeded in destabilizing the stigma, which, in hindsight, one can see was strongly adaptive.

In my own work as a college English teacher, I see another species of maladaptation – the decreasing literacy of the arriving cohorts of freshmen. Alphabetic literacy with its concomitant literature stands as one of the greatest of all cultural innovations. (Posterity owes it to the Greeks.) None of my grandparents ever went beyond high school in his or her formal education, but, on the basis of their surviving personal letters, they were all well read people with superb command of written English. Obsessed by their cell phones and portable gaming devices and Ipods, contemporary American college-freshmen have not developed the habits of literacy. Their ability to think logically, to make inferences, to interpret metaphors, and to express themselves coherently is shockingly undeveloped. I have recently written about this phenomenon here, here, and here. “Post-literacy,” as my friend John Harris calls it, is severely maladaptive.

I wish to thank all of those who contributed comments to my Edgerton essay – and to the previous essay on Eric L. Gans and Generative Anthropology.