Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2172

Penned pages commenting on Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.

July 1959

 

 

     In its references to the natural sciences, concerning nature other than man, this book is unexceptionable. But it is sadly deficient in all its premises concerning the nature of man, in that it does not distinguish the unique power of man above that of the beasts — the power to conceive and, in freedom, to create. Drawing no distinction, it sees both only as creatures under the dominion of environment, but man in the worse case as being under the dominance also of a “culture” — traditions and tools, customs and institutions, of his own making — to which he is helplessly inert and thus hopelessly enslaved. Scholarly and sophisticated, it is the most profoundly erroneous and completely misleading book — to the intellectually naive — that I have ever seen.

S.H.

July 1959

 

     Trying to be constructive, it may be said that this book emphasizes the existence of a body of culture — knowledge or beliefs and customs that is accumulated by a population, either primitive or political or as a Society — and more or less amended or improved as the generations of people affect them and are affected (determined) by them. This “cake of custom” etc. in the long run must be a benefit to the population if they make any advance or at least not inimical to their survival. A very primitive population naturally has a very crude and in many ways injurious culture to which they are rigidly bound. But those more advanced accumulate a culture that is more serviceable to them. And a very civilized people can, over a period of time, create a culture that, so far from “determining,” is of the utmost service and value to them. It seems that Leslie A. White must have drawn his conclusions from observations on the most degraded condition of men who are terribly custom bound and then applied this generalization to men at all levels of culture. It may well be that a savage has little or no determination, but it is the function of Society through its culture to lift its members into an ever more self-determinating mode of life. When men cannot cope with their own culture they must be very primitive or greatly enslaved. And so far as any culture is political, they are enslaved.

 

     Probably Mr. White’s neglect to distinguish what is social from what is political — his conception of society and the state as being the same — accounts for his belief that the culture, meaning the state, dominates and “determines” men. There are a number of passages in the book that show its socialist and totalitarian slant.