Science Quote by Claude Levi-Strauss

There is a particular kind of contempt reserved for people who are absolutely sure and spectacularly uncurious, and Levi-Strauss nails it with surgical economy. The sting comes from the pairing: "naive conviction" is not merely wrongheaded belief, it is belief unscarred by doubt, the sort that feels innocent even as it bulldozes complexity. Then he detonates it against "greater intellectual poverty", a phrase that refuses to grant moral neutrality to ignorance. Poverty here isn’t a lack of facts; it’s a lack of conceptual tools, a failure of method, imagination, and self-suspicion.

Levi-Strauss, the architect of structural anthropology, spent his career arguing that what looks "natural" in one culture is often just a local arrangement mistaken for destiny. In that context, the line reads as an indictment of ethnocentrism and the colonial-era confidence that other societies were simple because Europeans lacked the patience to read their logic. It also targets a broader modern pathology: the more elaborate our institutions of expertise become, the easier it is for certainty to masquerade as intelligence.

The sentence works because it flips an expected correlation. Conviction is supposed to signal depth, seriousness, a spine. Levi-Strauss treats it as a red flag when it’s "naive" - when certainty arrives without the labor of interpretation. The subtext is methodological: if your worldview doesn’t make room for structures you can’t immediately see, you’re not just mistaken; you’re impoverished. And you’re loud about it.