Greg Stepanich

Our next guest, Ashley Montagu

I've been thinking two things above all after learning of the death of Johnny Carson:

First, watching his show was something of a passage into adulthood.

And second, does anyone remember Ashley Montagu?

Carson's death earlier this month at 79 brought forth the familiar clips, historical accounts of the early days of late-night television, and the tributes from commentators of every kind, some of them quite good. Jay Leno's essay in place of a monologue during his show was moving without being maudlin, and columnist Leonard Pitts made the sharp observation that the death of Carson made Pitts think that in some way, the old mainstream American culture had died along with the comic.

Craig Ferguson, newly ensconced behind a desk at CBS' late-night show, also delivered a fine reminiscence of how seeing Carson for the first time as a visitor from his home in Scotland helped explain the United States, a big, overwhelming country with which he had started to fall in love.

For me, one of the better things about Carson was that, as a teenager, once you started to tap into the undercurrent of sex and adult emotion on display in his show, you could begin to think of yourself, however tentatively, as a grown-up.

But the best thing about him outside of his cool, quick wit, was that amid a lot of mediocre comedians and actors doing plugs, he also liked to book people who could really talk.

One of those people was the English-born anthropologist and writer Ashley Montagu, who would have been 100 this year, and almost made it: He was 94 when he died in Princeton, N.J., in 1999. Montagu (a pen name; he was born in London as Israel Ehrenberg) was a public intellectual, a professorial type who brought the weight of real science to the most vexing conundra of the day, including gender, race and the potential annhiliation of civilization.

I admired Montagu a great deal, so much so that I gave serious thought to becoming an anthropologist. For Christmas in 1976 I asked for a copy of his then-new book, The Nature of Human Aggression, and when I resumed an interrupted college education in the early 1980s, I took courses in physical anthropology as part of my history curriculum.

But in recent years I've heard virtually nothing of Montagu, possibly because I don't keep up with events in anthropology or sociobiology, though more likely it's because public intellectuals tend to fade from view faster than other cultural celebrities. They're high-octane commentators, but commentators just the same, and while they might bring more cerebral heft to the proceedings, their subject is the Zeitgeist, and she never wears the same clothes for long.

Doing an Amazon search, I found that few of Montagu's more than 60 books are still in print, though the county library systems of Palm Beach and Broward still have sizable collections of his work. I also discovered that a biography of Montagu called Love Forms the Bones is due out in June from Susan Sperling.

I spent an afternoon reacquainting myself with a few volumes of Montagu, and while some of it necessarily has dated, the reason for his one-time popularity is clear. He's an excellent writer, and one of those scientists with the enviable ability of being able to explain complicated things clearly.

Another aspect of his art is its highly optimistic core. The Nature of Human Aggression, which came out while the Cold War was still hot, is a refutation of the idea that humans are natural-born killers. Montagu is on the nurture, not nature, side of the argument, and contends that while genetic factors are not to be gainsaid, it it a human being's environment that ultimately decides his or her specific behavior. The opposing views of human behavior, he writes (no doubt with an inward smile), constitute more than "a faddy question to be gummed into obscurity on television talk shows.":

The subject is neither a dry-as-dust science or a popularity contest. The two views define not only two ways of looking at human beings — important enough in itself — but also two ways of being human. And that has implications for us as individuals, as societies and as survivors.

Montagu took controversial stands at important times. The first edition of his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, came out in 1942, and it bears remembering that the world was currently fighting a war against a regime that had built its appalling policies in part on junk anthropology. Montagu contends — decades and decades before the mapping of the human genome — that all humans are, biologically, essentially identical, and that the idea of race is essentially a psychological construct, and a murderous one at that (the fifth edition, which came out in 1974, is dedicated to the memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the martyrs of Freedom Summer).

He underlined this point in 1957, in an introduction to a section on race in his Anthropology and Human Nature:

The facts (about race) are today clear, at least clear enough for us to be able to say that they have no relevance whatsoever insofar as the rights of man are concerned. The ethical principle of equality does not depend upon the biological findings of scientists, but upon the simple judgment that every human being has a right to the development of his potentialities by virtue of the fact that he is human. This is the long and short of the whole story.

Developing those potentialities was a continual concern for Montagu, who explicity linked nurture and intellectual growth. "Out of the learning of love grows the love of learning," he wrote in Growing Young (1981), which used the idea of neoteny, or the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood, to argue that humans are not designed to turn into rigid adults, but are meant to remain open and flexible as children throughout their lives.

Montagu was in his mid-70s when he wrote the book, and while much of it reminds me of the Leo Buscaglia-Iron John school of thought, there are passages such as this one, in which Montagu argues for the importance of dancing:

Meanwhile, whatever age one may be, one should dance, and dance frequently, for there are few activities so wholly and deeply gratifying ...The experience of dancing constitutes something more than a body in motion. There is a release and replenishment of psychic energy that leaves one with an oceanic feeling of freedom from which all constraint has fallen away ... One is infused with a lyrical joy.

Shake that thing, Ashley!

I haven't done enough research to determine whether Montagu is held in any sort of critical odor or repute; perhaps Sperling's book is a way of reintroducing him to the general public. I do know that I found enough in my brief review of his books selected at random to find food for a dozen avenues of conversation, and that shows to me that there's some durability in his work. (He also wrote an early study of Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man," and caused a stir in 1953 with his The Natural Superiority of Women.)

It also shows that you really can have guests who take on the big topics on talk shows, and not chase away an audience. There isn't much of that on today's TV gabfests, though David Letterman conducted decent interviews of major political newsmakers in the weeks before the national election, and Craig Ferguson is making time for guests like opera superstar Renee Fleming.

You have to believe, though, as Carson and Montagu undoubtedly did, that the audience is there. All it needs is to be spoken to.