Justin’s Notes

Taboos Don't Extend Past the Border

2026-07-30 · AI-generated insight

The Coon anecdote is usually read as a story about scientific integrity: an association condemning a book its members hadn't read, choosing moral signaling over examination. But pair it with Thayer's account of Chinese perceptions and a different dimension appears — taboos are domestic institutions, and strategic rivals stand entirely outside their enforcement perimeter.

The anthropologists at that secret meeting weren't really doing science; they were doing boundary maintenance. The statement against Putnam was a ritual declaring certain questions unaskable within American institutional life. Whatever one thinks of the underlying empirical disputes, the mechanism is clear: the community decided that the social cost of the inquiry outweighed the value of engaging with it, and condemnation-without-reading was the efficient way to signal that.

Thayer's Chinese observers, though, never attended the meeting. The taboo has no jurisdiction over them. So where American elites see multiculturalism as a moral achievement — partly constituted by rituals like the AAA statement, which fence off discourse deemed corrosive to a diverse society — Chinese strategists see "a sickness," a symptom of decline from the Anglo-Protestant coherence they once respected. The very norms Americans built to hold a plural society together read, from Beijing, as evidence it is coming apart.

This creates a genuine epistemic asymmetry, and an uncomfortable one. A society that enforces taboos loses the ability to model how it looks to observers who don't share them — the AAA members couldn't evaluate Putnam's argument because they hadn't read it, and by the same logic American strategists may struggle to take seriously a rival's assessment when that assessment is itself phrased in forbidden terms. Thayer's own framing (Chinese racism as a strategic liability) suggests the asymmetry cuts both ways: China's freedom from American taboos comes bundled with blind spots of its own.

The deeper point is that condemnation-without-examination isn't just an intellectual failing; it's a strategic one. You can rule a question out of bounds at home, but you cannot rule it out of your adversary's planning documents.

Woven from these notes

From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-­Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.
— Thayer THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States
Carleton Coon was one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century and a champion of the study of racial differences. In 1961 he was elected president of the American Anthropological Association. It was during this year that Carleton Putnam's infamous book Race and Reason came out. Putnam's book argued that there were significant differences between the races and that this had important political implications. A few anthropologists became upset when they saw the book gain popularity and wanted the AAA to intervene. But they knew that Coon supported the book and that, as a result, having the AAA take action against it would be difficult. So they organized a secret meeting behind Coon's back in order to issue a statement denouncing Putnam's work. Coon found out about the meeting and went to stop it. Upon entering the meeting Coon asked all the association members who had actually read Putnam's book to raise their hands. Only one rose. He then asked for the hands of everyone that had even heard of the book prior to that meeting. Only a few hands rose. None the less, the statement against the book passed. Coon, disgusted by the actions of his peers, resigned from the AAA (1). This incident stands out in the history of science as a particularly clear example of scientists not living up to what people expect of them. People often take what scientists say for granted. They trust that scientists have looked at the evidence rationally and are giving the public as accurate an account of all the relevant facts as they can. When explaining science to laypeople researchers are expected to only make authoritative statements on topics they are knowledgeable of, to not lie about scientific evidence, and to not omit obviously relevant facts. People trust scientists to do these things and so feel comfortable taking what they tell them for granted. (See