Ashley Montagu
From Philosopedia.org
Ashley Montagu (28 June 1905 - 26 November 1999)
Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg in East London, has been described by Stefan Harnad:
- was one of those rare men of learning who succeeded in making substantive scholarly contributions to their academic disciplines while at the same time maintaining contact with the educated layman, indeed contributing substantively to the latter's learning. In addition, he was a dedicated and articulate social critic, concerned with bringing the findings of the social and biological sciences to bear upon the betterment of man's lot, while subjecting some of those very findings to critical social scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains, the scientific, the public-educational, and the socioethical, will be treated as a unity in what follows, in accordance with what was clearly the spirit of the program that guided his life's work.
- Although Montagu's contributions span a variety of fields in the social and biological sciences - including work on problems as diverse as Australian aborigines' concepts of sexuality and reproduction, the measurement of internal anatomical landmarks on the heads of intact living human beings, adolescent infertility in girls, the role of cooperative behavior in evolution, and the biological and cultural factors in aggression and in sex roles - his principal legacy will indisputably consist of his critical analysis of the concept of race.
- The problem of race preoccupied Montagu from the beginning of his intellectual career more than a quarter century before the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), which heralded the civil rights activism that has since followed in America. Montagu's work played a role in that Supreme Court decision, as well as in shaping the social consciousness that ushered it in and has attended it ever since. If some of his ideas, as they are discussed below, appear to be relatively uncontroversial and a matter of common knowledge and assent, let it not be forgotten that that very knowledge and assent is in some measure due to the work and efforts of Montagu, and that he was also forcefully expounding those ideas at an earlier time, when they were far from accepted, and indeed being brutally violated on a scale unparallelled in human history.
An anthropologist and social biologist, Montagu wrote more than 60 books. These included On Being Human (1950), The Natural Superiority of Women (1953), The Cultured Man (1958), The Humanization of Man (1962), Immortality, Religion, and Morals (1971), and The Elephant Man (1971).
A consultant for UNESCO on matters pertaining to race, he edited the 'National Historical Society Series. Also, he produced, financed, wrote, and directed the film, One World or None (1946).
Montagu, a Unitarian, once declared,
- "The Good Book" - one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
And to The New York Times (9 Dec 1993), Montagu wrote:
- Why cannot we abolish all guns? In Japan it is a crime to own a gun, and the murder rate is spectacularly low. There is no reason for owning a gun, not even by the police. Guns are made to kill. The freedom to own a gun constitutes the freedom and the license to use it. Can we not begin the control and prevention of violence by the control and prevention of gun ownership? This would be a first significant step toward a healthier America and the recognition that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
He taught and lectured at Harvard, Princeton (where he chaired the Department of Anthropology), the University of California, and New York University. In 1995, he was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year. Upon his death at the age of 94, the funeral was a private, non-religious one.
Quotes
- "Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof."
- "The natural superiority of women is a biological fact, and a socially acknowledged reality."
- "The idea is to die young as late as possible."
- "... circumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society." - in "Mutilated Humanity"
- You show me a murderer and I'll show you a person who's been failed in the supreme need for love - who never learned how to love. . . .
- Who commits rape? Rapists are ". . . not interested in sex at all. It is a crime of violence. And what is the violence about? Rejection by the mother, and they hate women." Touch the Future
At His Princeton Home
