Does Ruth Benedict Burn in Hell with Harry Truman?

Ruth Benedict was a protege of Franz Boas, father of American anthropology. She was one of the lights of the discipline in the 30s and 40s, and no history of anthropology would be complete without some mention of her. She might also be hellbound.

Professor Benedict pioneered the now discredited "National Character" study. In a nutshell, this involved taking cultural observations about people in a country and distilling them into a composite profile of their "national character". This was state of the art at the time, although we should now recognize what hokum such grotesque generalizations are and how utterly useless they are. It is not uncommon to hear regular folks spouting such nuggets as "your Arab has no sense of time" or "your Asian has no moral commitment to truth telling and no sense of guilt", but the speaker is unlikely to be a trained anthropologist (unless there is an anthro program at Regents).

In the 1930s and 1940s, the "culture" concept was relatively undeveloped (it still is, IMO), and national character studies represented a way to illustrate that some pretty significant cultural differences could be observed and a way to compare "cultures". We have yet to know how to define the boundary of a so-called "culture", and the concept becomes increasingly meaningless and less accurately descriptive as it is applied to larger aggregates. One might attempt to describe the culture of of all human Terrans, but this would be relatively useless except as an exercise in pointing out human universals or widely distributed cultural characteristics. National character studies attempt to apply the culture concept to a nation, a strange exercie given the arbitrariness of borders and differences among economic classes, sub-groups, religions, regions, etc. Imagine describing the national character of the United States. How would you account for both Puerto Ricans in Washington Heights and Texas oil barons? Would any American resemble or embody your composite? How would anyone ever hope to use this "information"? You see the problem, I am sure. It is the old nemesis of sound reasoning: the reification of scientific concepts.

Professor Benedict worked up a National Character profile for Japan for the USG before or during WW2. Was this used in any way to legitimize the mass murders of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This might be an interesting research project for a young scholar of history. If I remember correctly, the murders were rationalized on the basis that the Japanese would never surrender because of their undue attachment to honor and "face". They would have fought to the last man, woman and child. Accordingly, avoiding an invasion saved at least one million American servicemen, and many more Japanese would have been killed in the event of an invasion. It was the right thing to do to incinerate the denizens of the two cities.

This is still the argument I hear whenever I question the murders. It sounds like it comes, in part, from a national character study. Of course, the argument ignores the surrender overtures already made by Japan at the time of the bombings, and most folks are not even aware of these. Ultimately, the argument is based on propositions about Japanese character. We felt able to predict the Japanese response because we thought we knew the Japanese mind. Or, we felt and continue to feel comfortable using this in legitimizing discourse. Was this applied anthropology in the service of mass murder?

Professor Benedict would have been a naif if she did not imagine that her work would be used in the furtherance of killing and destruction. She could not have foreseen the magnitude of the crimes, but she ought to have foreseen how dangerous her national character work could be in the hands of evildoers. Moreover, as a student of Boas, she ought to have seen that she was perpetuating a form of racism, and racism and nationalism and other similar cognitive disorders inevitably lead to an unhappy ending. Even today, the ignorant rely on national character generalizations to keep the myth of the "good war" alive. Her work has contributed to the continued canonization of FDR and Truman when they should be condemned as criminals and tyrants. To worship them and WW2 is to worship the most egregious aspects of the state.