At least two revolutionary sciences were created in the 1920s, and both have to do with deliberate madness. The first is the physics of atoms, which today can celebrate triumphs as quantum mechanics, because its representatives at the time regarded madness as normal and consoled themselves with Hamlet, "If it be madness, it hath method." This physics serves here as an introduction to the simultaneous emergence of the science of man, anthropology. While atoms were understood by men in Europe, it was mostly American women who swarmed out into the world to describe their "childhood and youth in Samoa", like Margaret Mead.
Mead was married to a man, loved a woman and was attracted to other men during her Polynesian excursions. She was certainly personally interested in how girls in Samoa reacted in such situations, but her thinking centered not on her own sexuality, but on two curious contradictions that were part of the American society from which she came. Firstly, while the USA invoked the ideas of the (European) Enlightenment, it also perfected an enormous system of ethnic disenfranchisement, dividing peoples into races to which white Americans felt superior and which they could consequently oppress and exploit as slaves or second-class citizens - even classifying women lower, as gender, although of course this word sounds different today than it did 100 years ago. Secondly, Americans considered themselves a unique - God-pleasing - nation, while at the same time insisting that their ideas of a good society could claim universal validity. They did not see the contradiction and were shocked when Margaret Mead and her anthropological colleagues realized that there is not one white culture, but many cultures of human communities, each with its own particular value and which together constitute humanity. The white man in the White House does not yet know this. Perhaps he is willfully insane.
