Margaret Mead

Many readers here will probably be aware of the historical role played by Margaret Mead in the Leftist attack on sexual morality. Her influential book "Growing up in Samoa" paraded Mead's libertine ideology as anthropological fact.

I have made a few comments on the matter over the years and Prof. Hiram Caton has recently taken me to task over some of my comments. You can read the dialogue here. The dialogue is actually about Derek Freeman, the man principally responsible for exposing Mead's lies. Freeman had to be an unusual character to take on such an acclaimed figure as Mead was and Caton says that Freeman was a nut.

I suspect that Freeman simply had a strong ego but that the furious attacks that he sustained from the Left did unnerve him at times. But, as I initially pointed out to Caton, all that is ad hominem anyway.

Posted by John Ray.