You can’t.
Science has no values. Not officially. The whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked so that nobody could prove anything of a general nature about anybody. No matter what you said, it could be shot down any time by any damn fool on the basis that it wasn’t scientific.
What theory existed was marked by bitter quarrels over differences that were not anthropological at all. They were almost never quarrels about accuracy of observation. They were quarrels about abstract meanings. It seemed almost as though the moment anyone said anything theoretical it was a signal for the commencement of an enormous dog fight over differences that could not be resolved with any amount of anthropological information.
The whole field seemed like a highway filled with angry drivers cursing each other and telling each other they didn’t know how to drive when the real trouble was the highway itself. The highway had been laid down as the scientific objective study of man in a manner that paralleled the physical sciences. The trouble was that man isn’t suited to this kind of scientific objective study. Objects of scientific study are supposed to hold still. They’re supposed to follow the laws of cause and effect in such a way that a given cause will always have a given effect, over and over again. Man doesn’t do this. Not even savages.
The result has been theoretical chaos.
Phædrus liked a description he read in a book called Theory in Anthropology by Robert Manners and David Kaplan of Brandeis University. Scattered throughout the anthropological literature they wrote, are a number of hunches, insights, hypotheses and generalizations. They tend to remain scattered, inchoate, and unrelated to one another, so that they often get lost or are forgotten. The tendency has been for each generation of anthropologists to start afresh.
Theory building in cultural anthropology comes to resemble slash-and-burn agriculture, they said, where the natives return sporadically to old fields grown over by bush and slash and burn and plant for a few years.
Phædrus could see the slash and burn everywhere he looked. Some anthropologists were saying a culture is the essence of anthropology. Some were saying there isn’t any such thing as a culture. Some were saying it’s all history, some said it’s all structure. Some said it’s all function. Some said it was all values. Some, following Boas' scientific purity, said there were no values at all.
That idea that anthropology has no values Phædrus marked down in his mind as the spot. That was the place where the wall could best be breached. No values, huh? No Quality? This was the point of focus where he could begin an attack.
What many were trying to do, evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning all theory, by agreeing not to even talk about such theoretical reductionist things as what savages do in general. They restricted themselves to what their particular savage happened to do on Wednesday. That was scientifically safe all right — and scientifically useless.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. wrote, The very term "universal" has a negative connotation in this field because it suggests the search for broad generalization that has virtually been declared unscientific by twentieth-century academic, particularistic American anthropology.
Phædrus guessed anthropologists thought they had kept the field scientifically pure by this method, but the purity was so constrictive it had all but strangled the field. If you can’t generalize from data there’s nothing else you can do with it either.
A science without generalization is no science at all. Imagine someone telling Einstein, You can’t say E=mc2. It’s too general, too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory. Cuckoo. Yet, that’s what they were saying in anthropology.
Data without generalization is just gossip. And as Phædrus continued on and on that seemed to be the status of what he was reading. It filled shelf after shelf with volume after dusty volume about this savage and that savage, but as far as he could see, anthropology, the science of man, had had almost no guiding effect on man’s activities in this scientific century.
Whacko science. They were trying to lift themselves by their bootstraps. You can’t have Box A contain within itself Box B, which in turn contains Box A. That’s whacko. Yet here’s a science which contains man which contains science which contains man which contains science — on and on.
He left the mountains near Bozeman with boxes full of slips and many notebooks full of quotations and the feeling that there was nothing within anthropology he could do.
Back down in the plains, in a country motel one night with nothing to read, Phædrus had found a small dog-eared Yankee magazine, thumbed through it, and stopped on a brief account by Cathie Slater Spence entitled In Search of the April Fool.
It was about a child prodigy who had possibly the highest intelligence ever observed, and who in his later life went nowhere. Born on April 1, 1898, it said, William James Sidis could speak five languages and read Plato in the original Greek by the age of five. At eight he passed the entrance for Harvard but had to wait three years to be admitted. Even so he became Harvard’s youngest scholar and graduated cum Jaude in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Frequently featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Sidis made the front page of The New York Times nineteen times.
But after graduating from Harvard, the Boy Wonder pursued his own obscure and seemingly meaningless interests. The press that had lionized him turned on him. The most scathing example came in the New Yorker in 1937. Entitled April Fool, the magazine article ridiculed everything from Sidis’s hobbies to his physical characteristics. Sidis sued for libel and invasion of privacy. Though he won a small out-of-court settlement for libel, the invasion of privacy charge was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision. The article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, the court conceded, but Sidis was a public figure and thus could not claim protection from the interest of the press, which continued to hound him until his death in 1944. Obituaries called him a prodigious failure and a burnt-out genius who had never achieved anything of significance despite his talents.