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The Seville Statement on Violence
After the signing of the Seville Statement on Violence, I obtained a small grant of $2000 from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to help disseminate the Seville Statement newsletter. They also gave a larger grant to Jeffrey Goldstein to write a history of the Seville Statement, and, on Jeffrey's request, I sent him all of the relevant materials that he might need for such a book. For his photo, see the International Society for Research on Aggression
I suppose that one could justify the meeting that Guggenheim called for December 11-12, 1990, as an evaluation of their investments, although ironically, the meeting must have cost them more than the grants themselves in the plane fares they paid to fly in people from all over the world. But I did not think of it as an evaluation. For reasons to be explained, I consider it to have been the "Guggenheim inquisition."
I became very concerned about the meeting as early as July of 1990 when I learned that Jeff Goldstein intended to invite to the meeting two of the most vocal, and as far as I was concerned, irrational and ideological critics of the Seville Statement, Robin Fox and Napoleon Chagnon. I wrote two long letters about this to Robert Hinde and Santiago Genoves, co-signatories of the Seville Statement, who also were being invited to the Guggenheim meeting. Fox had accused me in print of manipulating the signatories of the Seville Statement, while Chagnon had made a career on controversial claims (later shown to be fraudulent) of genetic selection for war in a Brazilian tribe. Chagnon had been publicly censored for this by the Brazilian Anthropological Association, yet he continued to get top billing for his view in Science Magazine, the New York Times, etc, at a time when they would not report about the Seville Statement on Violence.
Just before the meeting was to take place, the participants received a draft of the proposed Goldstein book. I sent all the participants a full set of Seville Statement Newsletters and wrote a rebuttal of some of his claims. In particular, I tried to correct a series of false claims that Goldstein included about the paper that I had presented at Seville, entitled "The myth that war is intrinsic to human nature discourages action for peace by young people". The claims were patently false, bordering on libelous, to such an extent that it is hard for me to believe that Goldstein had even bothered to read the claims and our article before putting them in his report.
The first day of the meeting was chaotic and confusing, consisting largely on attacks on the Seville Statement. I had the feeling we were being asked to "recant" the Statement, much as Galileo was demanded to recant his scientific conclusions about the solar system. For example, the Guggenheim representative, Karen Colvard claimed, without justification, that Richard Leakey had already "recanted."
On the second day, those of us from the Statement (myself, Santiago Genoves and Ben Ginsburg) along with the eminent psychologist Brewster Smith, went on the offensive, saying that the Goldstein book was poorly conceived and that the effects of the Seville Statement have yet to be evaluated. Ben demanded that Goldstein look at the data presented in Seville (including his own, carefully written paper on genetics). Santiago criticized the ad hominem attacks by Robin Fox. Jeffrey Goldstein seemed embarassed by what he had done, and he got little help from Napoleon Chagnon or the others attacking the statement, Thomas Gregor and Michael McGuire.
As far as I know, Jeff Goldstein abandoned his plans to write the book in question. And Santiago Genoves wrote me a long letter analyzing what I call the "inquisition" as a case of jealousy by second-rate scientists and a foundation that felt it should have been consulted to write such a statement since it gives a great deal of money to aggression research.
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