why america’s top pundits are wrong anthropologists talk back

[...]... why children died, why crops failed, and why chiefs were chiefs and the rest were not They found design and purpose in pain and suffering Mythmakers in contemporary America provide just-so stories to explain, for example, why many foreigners are angry at the United States, why the poor are poor, and why racial inequality persists 4 Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman The pundits we review here are. .. kinds of people, and they have the effect of legitimating the status quo They are also based on wrongheaded assumptions about human nature that we are determined to debunk All the contributors to this volume are distinguished and experienced anthropologists who can no longer watch America’s pundits at work without speaking up As anthropologists, we specialize in studying human nature, cultural interaction,... and Dinesh D’Souza of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute Some of these pundits are based in universities, others are not, but they share an ability to reduce controversial issues to sound bites and, consequently, to harness the full power of the media to project their opinions Some are self-identified liberals, while others are conservatives; some focus their attention on international relations,... experience, and boiling all of them down to a couple of catchy, easy-to-quote-and-remember ideas, which are then passed off as pragmatic, practical, sensible, and clear.”2 Pundits, then, are modern-day mythmakers All societies have mythmakers—people who provide a comforting explanation of why things are the way they are Mythmakers provide a way to make sense of complexity, to reconcile contradictory realities,... pundits influence in American public life, dangerous Although most of the contributors to this book are to the left of political center, we do not have a shared political agenda We are less concerned with speaking as exponents of a particular political philosophy than as anthropologists We see America’s pundits, in turn, not as sectarian partisans but as joint contributors to a set of “myths we live... gender—all the issues the pundits write about In the following chapters we demonstrate over and over that the myths of the punditocracy, whether overtly liberal or conservative, are based on loudly voiced rhetorical and not scientific claims, and on the cultural assumptions of the privileged Uncorrected, their assumptions about human nature and culture are not just wrong but also, given the pundits influence... culture is immutable; that terrible poverty, inequality, and suffering are natural; and that people in other societies who do not want to live just like Americans are afraid of “modernity.” We have put together a book subjecting these pundits to cold, hard scrutiny because of our concern that, while their voices are often the loudest, they are not necessarily the wisest Although they may be glibly persuasive... the statistics they use to make their case The two compare IQ scores of blacks and whites without making much effort to ensure that the blacks and whites they stack against one another are comparable According to Marks, when black children are compared with white children from families with comparable incomes, numbers of children, educational backgrounds, and access to good schools, then the statistical... civilizational blocs are emerging from the ruins of the old cold war global order “Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together,” he says “Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization” (p 125) These emerging civilizational blocs are the ultimate... public life in recent years Some of these questions—about race, gender, and class are hardy perennials of American disputation; others, such as those about globalization and the apparent conflict with Islam, are particular to our times In our national debate about such questions, some of the loudest voices belong to pundits: men (and, yes, they do almost all seem to be men) such as Thomas Friedman . America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson UC_Besteman (O).qxd 9/3/2004 3:53 PM Page ii Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong anthropologists. University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Why America’s top pundits are wrong : anthropologists talk back / edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson. p. cm.—(California.