public schools to workplaces, insists that we should all agree on what constitutes marriage, a good joke, or a flourishing society. The narrative is one of overreach and unreasonableness, of an overweening state’s infringing on individual speech, thought, and sincerely held values. Similar battle lines exist in other countries—between celebrating certain kinds of difference and preserving the time-honored values of past generations.
Yet a more fundamental shift preceded any of these debates. It was the result of a body of discoveries made by a small band of contrarian researchers whom Franz Boas modestly called “our little group.” Real, evidence-driven analysis, they believed, would overturn one of modernity’s most deeply held principles: that science will tell us which individuals and groups are naturally smarter, abler, more upstanding, and fitter to rule. Their response was that science pointed in precisely the opposite direction, toward a theory of humanity that embraces all the many ways we humans have devised for living. The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial—the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society. We are cultural animals, they claimed, bound by rules of our own making, even if these rules are often invisible or taken for granted by the societies that craft them.
The Boas circle’s story is worth knowing not because they were the only people ever to challenge old misconceptions. The oneness of humankind is an idea braided through the world’s religions, ethical systems, art, and literature. But if Boas and his students were especially adept at sensing the distance between what is real and what we say is real, it was because they were living inside a case study. The United States in the first half of the twentieth century proclaimed its origins in enlightened values but perfected a vast system of racial disenfranchisement. Its inhabitants believed themselves to be uniquely endowed as a nation but insisted on the universal applicability of their idea of a good society. Their government worked hard to keep out certain types of foreigners while expending unprecedented wealth and military power to refashion the countries that sent them. The science of the Boas circle was born of a time and a place that seemed in special need of it.
They called themselves cultural anthropologists—a term they invented—and they named their animating theory cultural relativity, now often known as cultural relativism. For nearly a century, their critics have accused them of everything from justifying immorality to chipping away at the foundations of civilization itself. Today cultural relativism is usually listed among the enemies of tradition and good behavior, along with such terms as postmodernism and multiculturalism. The work of the Boas circle makes appearances as bugbears and objects of derision in conservative media and on alt-right websites, among campaigners against diversity programs and political correctness, and on such lists as “Ten Books That Screwed Up the World.” How can we make any judgments about right and wrong, critics ask, if everything is relative to the time, place, and context in which our judgments occur?
The belief that our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones has a powerful allure, especially when expressed in the language of science, rationality, religion, or tradition. All societies are predisposed to see their own traits as achievements and others’ as shortcomings. But the core message of the Boas circle was that, in order to live intelligently in the world, we should view the lives of others through an empathetic lens. We ought to suspend our judgment about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.
Culture, as Boas and his students understood it, is the ultimate source for what we think constitutes common sense. It defines what is obvious or beyond question. It tells us how to raise a child, how to pick a leader, how to find good things to eat, how to marry well. Over time these things change, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Yet there is no more fundamental reality in the social world than the one that humans themselves in some measure create.
The implications of the idea that we make our own agreed-upon truths were profound. It undermined the claim that social development is linear, running from allegedly primitive societies to so-called civilized ones. It called into question some of the building