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The Dehumanization of Man
Discusses a current trend toward a dehumanization of mankind through technological development and violence, examines the devitalization of society, personality, culture, and politics, and explains how to combat such evolution
246 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1984
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About the author
Ashley Montagu
208 books68 followersBooks, such as
The Natural Superiority of Women
(1953), of Ashley Montagu, originally Israel Ehrenberg, a British-American, helped to popularize anthropology.
As a young man, he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". After relocating to the United States, he used the name "Ashley Montagu."
This humanist of Jewish ancestry related topics, such as race and gender, to politics and development. He served as the rapporteur or appointed investigator in 1950 for the The Race Question , statement of educational, scientific, and cultural organization of United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_...
As a young man, he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu". After relocating to the United States, he used the name "Ashley Montagu."
This humanist of Jewish ancestry related topics, such as race and gender, to politics and development. He served as the rapporteur or appointed investigator in 1950 for the The Race Question , statement of educational, scientific, and cultural organization of United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 20, 2023
This book is one I inherited from my father after he died. His name is written on the inside cover, and he clearly read it as there are his neat marks at passages throughout the book. I wish there were notes, but there aren’t. I on the other hand have messily underlined, bracketed, made marginal notes, exclamation- and question-marks throughout. Books like these are talismans of my relationship with my father, both in life and since his death almost 30 years ago.
If he were alive, I would tell him how much better I understand him and how much more I agree with him. Regardless I treasure our abiding questions.
The Dehumanization of Man by Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson was published in 1983. The book analyses many of the cultural events of the American post-war era. Montagu takes a hammer to some of the more egregious developments in culture, politics, and technology. He is excellent on the growth and acceptance of behaviorism (early experiments in aversive conditioning of BABIES!), also on the dead soul at the core of the sex researchers like Masters and Johnson with all that measuring and quantifying. He is also good on the relentless coarsening of social relations and in the arts. I can no longer doubt that, taken as a whole, much that seemed groovy in the Sixties carried a poisonous stinger and that it affects America even now. But this book is not a retread of the tired, conservative arguments the pin everything on the Sixties. Although he doesn’t give as much space to the various civil rights movements as he might have done, Montagu clearly recognizes the demands and the justice of those movements. Where his thinking fall down, for me, was in giving sufficient credit to the sources in the past that generated so much rebellion. For the generation of the 60’s there was no going back, no subtle differentiation of what to kept and what to throw out. And so the culture plunged ahead and, as the saying goes now, “broke things” as it went. The connection to the present is probably worth pondering.
Where Montagu lost me was in the three final chapters that, approximately, dealt with movies and violence, with music and the punk rockers, and with sport. (I actually skipped the latter because I had caught his drift.). In these chapters, Montagu got in touch with his inner fuddy dud and mostly annoyed me: I’d argue both with his account of the genesis of such artifacts as the Sex Pistols or spaghetti westerns, and with his view of their lasting and malign influence. Yes, there is still that issue of coarsening, why it has occurred, what it means, where it is going. Montagu didn’t really get to those questions. A friend of mine said it better (though I’m not quoting): everything is changing all the time, there is a degree of randomness, we humans have a lot to go through, and sometimes all you can do is wait.
The book ends with these words:
“The possible attainment of full humanness—the transformation of the species from Homo Sapiens to Homo Humanus—rests upon our recovery of the lost world of fellow feeling, the source of all human connection. Before thinking of new horizons, before planning any bold new enterprises, we must come back to our senses—or perish senselessly.”
The first time I read these lines I thought it was little bang for the buck, perhaps banal, and yet given the foregoing pages of this book, I think Montagu is not wrong.
P.S. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805
‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion fill’d the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soul of common life was at that time
Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,
And not then only, ‘what a mockery this
Of history; the past and that to come!
If he were alive, I would tell him how much better I understand him and how much more I agree with him. Regardless I treasure our abiding questions.
The Dehumanization of Man by Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson was published in 1983. The book analyses many of the cultural events of the American post-war era. Montagu takes a hammer to some of the more egregious developments in culture, politics, and technology. He is excellent on the growth and acceptance of behaviorism (early experiments in aversive conditioning of BABIES!), also on the dead soul at the core of the sex researchers like Masters and Johnson with all that measuring and quantifying. He is also good on the relentless coarsening of social relations and in the arts. I can no longer doubt that, taken as a whole, much that seemed groovy in the Sixties carried a poisonous stinger and that it affects America even now. But this book is not a retread of the tired, conservative arguments the pin everything on the Sixties. Although he doesn’t give as much space to the various civil rights movements as he might have done, Montagu clearly recognizes the demands and the justice of those movements. Where his thinking fall down, for me, was in giving sufficient credit to the sources in the past that generated so much rebellion. For the generation of the 60’s there was no going back, no subtle differentiation of what to kept and what to throw out. And so the culture plunged ahead and, as the saying goes now, “broke things” as it went. The connection to the present is probably worth pondering.
Where Montagu lost me was in the three final chapters that, approximately, dealt with movies and violence, with music and the punk rockers, and with sport. (I actually skipped the latter because I had caught his drift.). In these chapters, Montagu got in touch with his inner fuddy dud and mostly annoyed me: I’d argue both with his account of the genesis of such artifacts as the Sex Pistols or spaghetti westerns, and with his view of their lasting and malign influence. Yes, there is still that issue of coarsening, why it has occurred, what it means, where it is going. Montagu didn’t really get to those questions. A friend of mine said it better (though I’m not quoting): everything is changing all the time, there is a degree of randomness, we humans have a lot to go through, and sometimes all you can do is wait.
The book ends with these words:
“The possible attainment of full humanness—the transformation of the species from Homo Sapiens to Homo Humanus—rests upon our recovery of the lost world of fellow feeling, the source of all human connection. Before thinking of new horizons, before planning any bold new enterprises, we must come back to our senses—or perish senselessly.”
The first time I read these lines I thought it was little bang for the buck, perhaps banal, and yet given the foregoing pages of this book, I think Montagu is not wrong.
P.S. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805
‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion fill’d the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soul of common life was at that time
Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,
And not then only, ‘what a mockery this
Of history; the past and that to come!
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