Exploiting Research

To the Editors of the Crimson:

I write in reply to the letter in The Crimson (November 19), which seeks to link the work of E.O. Wilson to its use by reactionary and neo-fascist groups in England and France.

The fact that serious academic work will be blatantly misused, especially for fascist causes, is always a reason for concern. But one has to distinguish the serious and knowledge-seeking inquiry (which is always open to challenge and debate) from that misuse. Unscrupulous persons will always twist material for their ends. In 1942, I was managing editor of The New Leader, a social-democratic weekly. I wrote at that time a number of articles attacking the practice of "Jim Crow" in the American Army-the vicious discrimination against blacks. I remember meeting A. Phillip Randolph in Washington, where he had gone to see President Roosevelt to obtain a change of that policy, and found that the only place where Randolph and I could eat was in Union Station, since restaurants in the nation's capital would not serve blacks. I wrote about this in The New Leader. Shortly thereafter, I found to my dismay that Goebbels had reprinted and broadcast these pieces to show the "hypocrisy" of American democracy. Should we have refrained from continuing to write such stories because of their misuse?

But the letter writers go further and say that these racial "applications are the logical extension" of those sociobiological inquiries. That is not only simplistic and mechanistic, it distorts the multivalent nature of any complex theory such as E.O. Wilson's. Would one say that the genocidal policies of the Marxist Pol Pot regime "follow logically" form the writings of Karl Marx? Would one say that the Aryan superiority doctrine of the Nazis "followed logically" from the Superman statements of Neitzsche? Alain de Benoist, one of the espousers of the French "New Right" belief in genetic superiority, is also violently anti--Christian; does that mean that E.O. Wilson is anti-Christian as well? But all this could follow from the queasy logic of amalgam which the writers use.

There is an ethic of controversy: Debate an argument in its own terms; expose pernicious misuse where practiced; but do not degrade scientific discourse, even "in the name of the People." Daniel Bell   Professor of Sociology