Margaret Mead

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“Pollution Is Nothing But Resources We’re Not Harvesting”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The view From the Year 2000,” a 1971 Life article, Buckminster Fuller, ever the technological positivist, saw skies that were blue and cloudless. Our gadgets have grown much more powerful, but we’re still waiting for his future to arrive. An excerpt:

“A lot of what you’re hearing today is absolute nonsense,” he said. “The population bomb. There is no population bomb! Industrialization is the answer to the population problem. In colonial times, the average American family had 13 children, but now that we can count on the little ones growing up healthy, the average is about two. That’s evolution working–where industrialization occurs, the birth rate simply goes down. Now, of course, you have the environmentalists telling you that you can’t industrialize any further because of pollution, which is more nonsense. Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they’d be collecting.

“Margaret Mead gets quite cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing very important things because they’re so worried and excited and I’m going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we’re dealing with something much bigger than we’re accustomed to understanding, we’re on a very large course, indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there’s no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.

“These social adjustments we’re witnessing are very big. They are marvelous, the most marvelous part of the whole show. They don’t get done overnight, but they’re actually happening so fast I can’t believe it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a fantastic amount of change, and I know we’re going through something very extraordinary in the history of the world. We’re going through some great flume, and if we will only hold on and have patience and respect the integrity of the universe itself, we’ll make it beautifully together.”•

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“Limiting Facial Animation May Make People Less Appealing”

March 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m terrible at recognizing faces but really good at reading them, at interpreting the microexpressions that reveal inner feelings. Dr. Paul Ekman, the inspiration for the TV show Lie to Me, pioneered the study of facial expressions during his psychological career. From a 2003 New York Times interview with him conducted by Judy Foreman:

Question:

More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way.

But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media.

I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.

Question:

One of your most fascinating findings is that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion. In other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out. Is happiness really as simple as putting on a happy face?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

In a very limited way, yes. The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness. With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions.

Question:

If I received Botox injections all over my face and could not make normal expressions, would my emotions be similarly curtailed?

Dr. Paul Ekman:

Probably not. I did a study with Robert Levenson, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, on people who had been born with facial paralysis. We found no impairment in their ability to recognize or experience emotions. There is a problem with Botox, though. Limiting facial animation may make people less appealing.•

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“People Are Living In A Period Of The Fastest Change The World Has Ever Known”

September 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Margaret Mead commenting on speeded-up America in Life in 1968, remarks that seem even more applicable in our time:

“There is tremendous confusion today about change. This isn’t surprising because people are living in a period of the fastest change the world has ever known. Young people have been confronted with the changes, but at the same time they have no sense of history and no one has been able to explain to them what has happened. We are always very poor at teaching the last 25 years of history. Adults have been shrieking about the fact that great newnesses are here but they are not talking about what the newnesses are.”

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“Trance And Dance In Bali,” by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1939:

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