Another voice
Paradise regained
Auberon Waugh
After the Lord Chief Justice's revela- tions last week that the Sunday Times had completed invented a front-page story, in which it said that Michael Fagan, the Palace intruder, had been charged with stabbing his stepson in the neck with a screwdriver, one can never be quite sure, how much weight to attach to any story which appears in the Sunday Times. This is a pity. What Lord Justice Oliver, in his sup- porting judgment, described as a 'very unhappy example of inventive journalism' seems to create a more or less glorious hat- trick for Michael Fagan, who should surely qualify for some Comedian of the Year award from the Variety Club of Great Bri- tain. First he made an ass of the police by wandering into the Queen's bedroom un- molested. Next he made an ass of the law by revealing that there was no law against this behaviour. Finally, he made an ass of our most boastful and self-righteous pillar of the press establishment.
Under the circumstances, it seems a pity that my only authority for what strikes me as the biggest news story of recent times should be this same newspaper. It appeared two weeks ago on page 15 and, if true, strikes me as a much bigger story than Mr Andropov's unsuccessful attempt to murder the Pope, or even than the Sunday Times's equally unsuccessful efforts to whitewash the affair. We all of us knew that the Russians were that way inclined, after all, and many of us may gradually be begin- ning to harbour similar suspicions about the Sunday Times. The incident is of impor- tance only for assessing the lengths to which both of them may be prepared to go in their different activities at any particular time.
But the story which the Editor of the Sunday Times (who is — so I have been told — a member of the executive committee of the Great Britain-USSR Association) relegated to page 15 in the issue of 6 February strikes me as being of truly cosmic importance. The bare bones of the story, as written by Robert Milliken under the headline: 'Was Samoan sex idyll a myth?', are that Margaret Mead, the American an- thropologist who died four years ago, is about to be proved a complete fraud. Her first book, on which her later reputation was based and which inspired, at however many removes, the entire sexual philosophy of the 1960s, not to mention a large part of the 'intellectual' and 'scientific' apologetic for the present women's movement, is a pack of lies.
Well, not deliberate lies. Like many other deeply committed investigators before and since, she allowed herself to be hoodwink-
ed. Perhaps I had better go over some of the background to this momentous claim before trying to convince Spectator readers of its importance.
Margaret Mead, as recorded in the Sun- day Times's 100 Makers of the Twentieth Century, 1969 (produced by David and Charles as a book in 1971) was one of the first people to popularise the newly in- vented (circa 1860) science of anthropology when her early work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), proved an international best- seller. She went to Samoa in 1925 at the age of 23 — her father was an academic economist, her mother a sociologist — to study the adolescent girls of the region, already a firm disciple of Professor Franz Boas, of Columbia University, who was particularly concerned to establish that human behaviour was determined by cultural rather than by biological (i.e. in- herited or individual) factors.
Perhaps I should explain that Samoa is a god-forsaken group of islands in the south- east Pacific, some 1,600 miles north-east of New Zealand, 2,700 miles east of Australia, 2,200 miles south-west of Hawaii. It was certainly not the sort of place you or I would have wanted to visit, at any rate until Margaret Mead had finished with it. She spent nine months there, most of them (as we now learn) intensively grilling 50 Polyne- sian schoolgirls about their sexual habits.
The tales they told her were nobody's business. The society she described fitted every Western office-worker's sexual fan- tasies. As Mr Milliken sums it up, she described a society which was peaceful, free from religious taboos or conflicts and devoid of jealousy: `The young Samoans about whom she wrote inhabited a paradise of free love where rape was unknown, virginity was regarded with indifference and sexual fideli- ty was scoffed at.'
There was none of the turbulence and anger that accompany adolescence in the US and other Western cultures — all as a result of our oppressive religious upbring- ing. She also, as I remember, although Mr Milliken does not mention this, claimed that in Samoan villages it was normal for mothers to hand over their babies as soon as they were weaned into the care of older
children, sometimes themselves no more than six or seven years old, who then look- ed after the babies and educated them. When I first read that I remember thinking it improbable. Was there nothing she was prepared to disbelieve from her giggling in- formants?
The influence which Margaret Mead's findings have had on Western attitudes is incalculable. I remember how, as the Sixties drew to their close, a distinguished former Foreign Office official of very senior rank — now the chairman of a well-known financial daily newspaper — was persuaded to climb upon the stage where Hair! was showing and dance with the cast, being only slightly disconcerted by cries of 'Come on, grand-dad.'
Samoa was a suitable enough place to act as a repository for the world's sexual fan- tasies because not many people were likely to go there. The few that did may have been disappointed to find an intensely sectarian Christian society, divided among 52.1 per cent Congregationalist (from a London Missionary Society influx of the 1840s), 21.1 per cent Roman Catholic, 15.4 per cent Methodist, 7.2 per cent Mormon, 1.6 per cent Seventh Day Adventist and only 1.6 per cent 'others' for the purposes of sexual novelty. The girls, who are regrettably ugly, in fact made a cult of chastity, and possibly because of this the incidence of rape was two and a half times higher than in the United States.
All these things were discovered by another anthropologist called Derek Freeman who visited Samoa from New Zealand in the 1930s. He does not say whether he went there hoping for a bit of the you-know-what, but he does say that when he went there as a comparatively young man he was hoping to confirm Miss Mead's findings. Instead, he found the islands littered with cathedral-sized church- es built of coral and populated by ugly, repressed religious maniacs. I cannot quite understand why it has taken him 42 years and many return visits to Samoa before publishing his findings, which he proposes to do in a book published next month: Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. He says that his final, clinching piece of evidence was in the criminal statistics for rape on the islands while Ms Mead was ac- tually conducting her investigations there.. Of course, the fact that Samoa has never been a sexual paradise where rape was unknown does not, of itself, destroy all sex- ual fantasies about some society somewhere in which virginity might be regarded with indifference, religion almost unknown and sexual fidelity scoffed at. The Sixties may have whimpered out in a drugged hang- over, but many of the sexual attitude', which Ms Mead attributed to adolescent Sa- moan g\rls are now commonplace sexual morality in American high schools, in our own beloved comprehensives and even among readers of the Sunday TiMes 'Look!' pages. Is it Paradise?
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