THE IGNORANCE OF CERTAINTY.

ByAshley Montagu and Edward Darling '29.New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,1970. 240 pp. $6.95.

Learnedly and. wittily, the authors discuss myths from the Bible, magicians, folk medicine, ancient and modern history, and cliches and proverbs. Their purpose is to help readers progress intelligently from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful probability and to persuade them that their "knowledge" is often really ignorance, fostered by myth based on some truth. Hence myths cannot be chucked aside as old biddies' hokum.

It is ridiculous, is it not, that Samson, a man who could knock off a thousand Philistines with any handy weapon, the jawbone of an ass, for example, should lose his strength if his hair were cut? Fraser tells us that many witches and wizards on trial never budged an inch under torture but folded up when shaved. Consider the charming power of the long-hairs today. The actors in the play Hair forced Leonard Bernstein to walk out and Richard Rodgers to damn it as "a love rock musical." But a year later it was still playing in the leading cities of the world and exalting hippie hair: "Long, beautiful, shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen, long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy," ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, down-to-there hair."

Man is the only souse. No other creature drinks himself into a stupor and then returns for more. Wrong: some wasps feeding on decaying grapes get so pickled that they pass out, sleep it off in the grass, and then return to get spifflicated again. The myth contains this truth: man is the only animal to whom liquor is available with a mind capable of understanding how alcohol can wreck him, his family, and career and yet keeps on getting blotto until his car collides with that of a stranger and the stranger is killed.

If you go swimming right after eating, you'll get cramps and drown. Wrong. A small amount of food makes no difference Perhaps you trust the French. Anyone foolish enough to immerse himself in a river or lake will end up dead, sooner or later. Bons nageurs sont à la fin noyés. An ocean of wine never hurt anyone.

Voltaire did not say, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." As Bergen Evans remarks, "The phrase has enough exaggeration to be striking and enough paradox to seem vaguely witty."

"We are a Christian nation." We spend billions on churches. Our money says "In God We Trust." We extol the ethics of Jesus: love, mercy, justice, charity, forgiveness, humility. Witness our humility in Vietnam and Cambodia. "The 'Christian Nation' is one of the stickiest myths ever to attach itself to this country, with the collaboration and support of the dominant white Anglo-Saxon leadership."

Everyone can always say what he means in his native tongue. Wrong again. Consider these letters to an Office of Public Welfare in a large Arizona city. A dutiful mother writes, "In accordance with your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope." And a daughter writes, "Both sides of my parents is poor and I can't expect nothing from them as my mother has been in bed for a year with the same doctor and won't change."