B. U. G. S.

If you ever saw the movie of Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 AD you see it begins with two groups of monkeys battling at their border. An extraterrestrial thing comes down and inspires one troop of monkeys to grab the first weapon, the horns of a dead deer, and win the battle with it.

This is puzzling now, but at the time it was understood by the whole audience. It was based on a book called African Genesis by Robert Audrey.

It is important to realize that the point Audrey made with that book he soon declared to be absurd. The idea that some African apes who first used deer horns as weapons were the direct ancestors of man was incorrect.

No one but Audrey himself even noticed that error.

Before African Genesis became a runaway best seller among the literate – especially the science fiction nerds – Mommy Professor’s enforced doctrine on animal behavior was so clumsy and stupid that it I have now forgotten.

Militantly.

One Soviet newspaper in the 1950s had a picture of a workers’ riot in Chicago. All that Soviets noticed in the picture were the fine clothes mere workers in America were wearing.

Audrey’s book had a similar totally unexpected effect: It showed those trapped in the Intellectuals’ Paradise what serious thinking about animal behavior LOOKED LIKE.

Before African Genesis became popular, animal behavior was just a subtitle of Political Correctness. Political Correctness has the Innocent Animal to compare to the Evil Man, and the Evil White Man contrasted to the Innocent non-Whites who live WITH nature, not AGAINST nature.

No one dare mention it, but there is really no difference whatsoever between Mommy Professor’s image of a Native American and his image of any other wild animal.

Audrey, who got rich as a Hollywood writer, populated his anthropology with fascinating animals, each of which had a personality and motivations no academic could have imagined. He was a trained anthropologist, but he had spent his time in the field.

Like the failed Soviet propaganda picture, what Audrey brought out had absolutely nothing to do with what it was intended for. The Soviets wanted to show American worker discontent. But in doing that they also showed the living standard of American workers.

In exactly the same way, the point Audrey was aiming at was absolutely forgotten as he took us through the world view of a real, honest-to-God anthropologist.

“Modern anthropology,” as only National Review still calls it, was the social anthropology of Franz Boas and company.

Social anthropology is not very interesting, but we all know it. Social anthropology says that animals and Indians are, though it is not stated that way, mindless innocents.

In Modern Anthropology, White supremacy is debunked by a declaration that all men are exactly alike. No race is unique.

At the same time a main theme of Modern Anthropology is that White people are UNIQUELY evil.

Everybody has been coached in these conclusions so often that they can repeat them in their sleep.

The result is that, since we all now the punch lines, Modern Anthropology is very boring. The history of life Audrey discussed was totally fascinating to those who had been bored sick by tome after tome of Official Anthropology.

That picture of an American labor riot was supposed to show Russians how angry American workers were. But what the Russians saw was that under Communism they were in rags that no American worker would be seen dead in.

Audrey wanted to put forward a new theory on the origin of man, but what his readers saw was the lost world of real anthropology, how fascinating the world of real evolution can be before the Marxists make it straight doctrine and, just incidentally, boring as hell.