Elman Service suggested that White’s theories about the evolution of culture and the science of culture were two separate, completely independent bodies of theory: “Culturology, the science
of culture as he presented it, is not the same thing as, nor does it
even imply a connection to, his ideas about the evolution of culture” (1976:613). This may be slightly overstated because White’s
notions of the evolution of culture certainly exemplify what he
thought a science of culture should contain: (1) it should be science; (2) it should be about culture, not cultures; and (3) it should
be deterministic, i.e., denying appeals to free will, the individual,
or to any cause other than Culture.
For White, humans had two ways of dealing with
experience—science and art. “The purpose of science and art is
one: to render experience intelligible,” White wrote, but these
two ways of knowing approached experience from different directions. “Art deals with universals in terms of particulars.” In
contrast, science was not merely a collection of facts and formulae, but a way of knowing by dealing with particulars from universals. “Art and science thus grasp a common experience, or
reality, by opposite but inseparable poles,” White concludes
(1949:3).
Therefore, if we are interested in a science of culture, our task
is to discover and delineate the universal principles that explain
particular phenomena. Note that these phenomena exist independently of the subjective viewer; White approvingly cites Einstein’s statement, “The belief in an external world independent
of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” Such
phenomena—existing in space, time, and having particular formal properties—can be viewed from different frames of reference. Thus a raindrop may be viewed as one event in the
evolution of the cosmos, as a mass changing its spatial relationship with other masses like the earth and clouds, or as a mass
that changes form through time (White 1949:13). Although we
define the different frames of reference, the reality exists separate from the viewer. Whereas some changes in form are repetitive and reversible—water may become ice and then melt
again—the temporal order of events is not: “Only in Through the
Looking Glass do Queens scream before they prick their fingers,
or Alices pass the cake before they cut it. The evolutionary
process, being temporal as well as formal, is likewise irreversible”
(White 1949:13, emphasis added).
This developmental argument sets the stage for White’s deterministic approach to cultural evolution. New cultural forms
develop out of preceding cultural forms, regardless of the role of
individuals. The theory of natural selection was discovered by
Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; it was not created from thin
air by either man but was a crystallization of previously existing,
culturally expressed knowledge. Calculus was “invented” by
both Leibnitz and Newton, but calculus would have been developed even if both men had died as infants. “The development of
mathematics, like the development of technology or medicine, is
an evolutionary process: new forms grow out of preceding
forms” (White 1949:14). We may not be able to predict the name
of an inventor or when another innovation will occur, but the
fact that such an innovation will occur is predictable because of
the inevitability of cultural evolution. White lavished great care
on his article “Ikhnaton: The Great Man vs. the Culture Process,”
which considered the case of the pharaoh Ikhnaton who introduced monotheism to replace the multitude of gods in ancient
Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C. Ikhnaton has been variously lauded as a seer or damned as a heretic but universally
characterized as a “Great Man,” a singular individual who
brought about a truly original innovation. Not so, White argued:
all the elements that made the acceptance of monotheism possible existed independently of Ikhnaton:
In the process of cultural development, a Great Man is but the
neural medium through which an important synthesis of culture takes place. Darwin, Newton, Beethoven, and Edison
were men of this type. They were the neurological loci of important cultural events. To be sure, they were superior organisms. But had they been reared as swineherders, Greatness
would not have found them. (1949:280)
A science of culture, White argued, is concerned with the
general principles that define and predict relationships in cultural phenomena. It is not interested in defining specific cultural
traits, but instead in understanding general cultural patterns.
Particular cultures vary among themselves in specific form
and content, but all are alike in general respects; i.e., all have
tools, language, customs, beliefs, music, etc. And every cultural system functions as a means of relating man to the earth
and cosmos, and as a means of relating man to man. The science
of culture will therefore concern itself with the structure and function
of cultural systems. (White 1959a:29, emphasis added)
Not only is such a science uninterested in particular cultures
except as examples of universals, but it should consider culture
as a realm of phenomena, “as if it had an existence of its own,
independently of the human species” (White 1959a:16). Considered this way, a science of culture is one that posits generalizations about culture that are verifiable through the study of
culture.