[Footnote 1: Boas: _Mind of Primitive Man_, pp. 203-04.]
This may be illustrated by our immediate reactions of pleasure or disgust at customs or ideas that provoke directly opposite reactions among races reared in another tradition.
Again primitive races have been accused of lacking self-control. The fact is that they exhibit self-control about matters which they regard as important, and lack of it in respect to matters which they regard as trivial. "When an Eskimo community is on the point of starvation, and their religious proscriptions forbid them to make use of the seals that are basking on the ice, the amount of self-control of the whole community which restrains them from killing those seals is certainly very great."[2] The case is similar with regard to nearly all the alleged inferiorities of primitive man, his improvidence, unreliability, and the like. In nearly every instance, it has been found that we are holding him to account for not being able to persist in courses of action which do not seem to him, with his training and education, worth persisting in, and for not conforming to standards which, given his background, are meaningless.
But if differences in racial attainments are due to differences in environment, it might be said that this itself is testimony to the superiority of the race that has the more complex and exacting environment. This is not by any means clearly the case. The "culture" or civilization which a race exhibits is a very uncertain index of its gifts or its capacities. The culture found in a race is, it may be said without exaggeration, largely a matter of accident or circumstance rather than of heredity.
Some of the environmental causes for differences in culture may he explicitly noted. Any modern culture is the result of interminglings of many different cross-streams and cross-borrowings. Races that have long been isolated as, for example the African negroes, have no possibility of picking up all the acquisitions to which races that intermingle have access. Progress in the developments of arts, sciences, and institutions depends on fortunate individual variations. The smaller the race the less the number of variations possible, including those on the side of what we call genius. Again fortunate variations depend not so much on the general average intellectual capacities of the race as on its variability. So one race may possess a relative superiority of achievement because of its high variability, just as, as we have already pointed out, the greater preëminence of the male sex with regard to intellectual accomplishment is due to the greater number of variations both above and below the norm which it displays. The reasons for variability are again, according to Professor Boas, largely environmental. "We have seen, when a people is descended from a small uniform group, that then its variability will decrease; while on the other hand, when a group has a much-varied origin or when the ancestors belong to entirely distinct types the variability may be considerably increased."[1]