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Conclusion: Science, Awards, and Ideology
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Conclusion: Science,, Awards,, and Ideology In response to the charges that Cattell’s work had encouraged racism, many of his supporters emphasized his warmth and personal decency; this was a good person,theyemphasized,whohadneverdisplayedethnicprejudiceofanykind, responding to everyone as an individual. “In conversation,” recalled Richard Gorsuch—a clergyman as well as an APA fellow, who had been a civil rights activist at the same time that he apprenticed in Cattell’s lab—“I . . . never heard comments from Ray that I would interpret as racist.” The Web site created in Cattell’s memoryquicklyfilledwithreminiscencesfrom friendsandcolleagues noting,forexample,thathis“closefriendsincludedpeopleofallshadesofcolor and beliefs.” One respondent, a student at the University of Illinois thirty years earlier, observed that “even as a lowly undergraduate Dr. Cattell accorded me the respect of an equal colleague,” adding that he now tried “to treat younger people in the manner that Dr. Cattell treated me.”1 Moreover, as a result of the intermarriage of one of his children, near the end of his life the scientist who had once considered anti-Semitism a biologically unavoidable reaction to the presence of “outsiders” attended his grandchild’s bar mitzvah. Tucker_Cattell_text.indd 167 12/16/08 10:31:13 AM There is no reason to doubt that Cattell was indeed a decent, thoughtful person to his friends and acquaintances, and a kindly mentor to his many students with an admirable ability to elicit from them an almost filial loyalty. There is also no reason to believe that these commendable personal characteristics are in any way relevant to a discussion of his socioreligious ideology. The issue is not Cattell’s personal reactions to others; no one has claimed that he is David Duke in a psychology lab, personally spewing invective against blacks and Jews. Humans are complex beings, often composed of seemingly contradictory tendencies, and it is hardly unusual to find considerable personal charm and kindness coupled with monstrous beliefs. Two hundred years ago Goethe commented on this paradoxical nature in his almost Freudian observation that “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, Die eine will sich von der andern trennen” (Two souls reside alas! in my breast; the one wants to separate itself from the other).2 In his revealing study, The Nazi Doctors, Yale psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton enlarged on this notion, coining the term doubling for the process in which two selves were constructed, each one psychologically isolated from the other. For many of these physicians, one self was committed to National Socialist ideology, carrying out such grizzly duties as selection—the regular differentiation of those fit to work from those destined for the gas chambers—while the other self was a loving father and husband, typically characterized by friends as a dedicated and sensitive professional. A leading medical authority in the Reich and administrator of its euthanasia program, later found guilty of war crimes and executed, was described by a close colleague as “a highly ethical person, . . . one of the most idealistic physicians I have ever met,” someone who had been ready earlier in his life to work with Albert Schweitzer in Africa. Some concentration camp doctors in Lifton’s study displayed sensitivity and kindness toward inmates, in one case even treating Jewish prisoners who had been physicians in a “gentlemanly” manner , as if they were still members of the profession.3 In no way is this meant to argue that Cattell was involved in or responsible for anything remotely comparable to the atrocities in the camps, but rather to suggest that, if these persons could make such a dramatic separation between the persona that faithfully executed their ideological responsibilities and the one displayed to family members and professional colleagues, then Cattell’s cordiality and generosity in personal relationships can hardly be construed as evidence that his system of evolutionary ethics—which, after all, was entirely theoretical and never involved him in personally inflicting harm on anyone else—had no horrific implications. 168 the cattell controversy Tucker_Cattell_text.indd 168 12/16/08 10:31:13 AM [3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:20 GMT) Justifying Totalitarian Tribalism In fact, despite his personal charm, Cattell’s ideological thought—from his evolutionary ethics in the 1930s to its refinement as Beyondism four decades later—was essentially an intellectual justification for the form of fascism adopted by Nazi Germany and most precisely encapsulated by the phrase “totalitarian tribalism.”4 Although fascism does not have as clear-cut a definition as, say, democracy or even socialism, it is distinguished by a...