The Truth Is Out, After Many Years...The Racism of E. O. Wilson




Today's article in Slate is not what the average person might term "blockbuster revelations". But it is to me. 

https://slate.com/technology/2022/02/e-o-wilson-archives-legacy-scientific-american.html

I was assigned the writings by E. O. Wilson 45 years ago in my PoliSci program at Temple University. His writings on "Sociobiology" changed my life. How so?

I recognized it then for what it was and is. Race Science, Eugenics. The philosophical and pseudo scientific foundation for Nazism. Now, scholars going into his correspondence have unearthed the ugly truth, that he was exactly what I thought and said at the time. 

During my studies at Temple several of my professors were pushing Wilson, "The Club of Rome" Limits To Growth Report from MIT, and other Neo-Malthusian ideologues like Paul Erlich, favoring genocidal population reduction in the name of "managing scarcity". Wilson fit in well with this group, as his theories meshed seamlessly with the political intentions of the Social Darwinists who intended to implement these schemes. If people starved, it wasn't due to racist neo-Colonial policies of blocking development and withholding technology, it was because they were "unfit" according to contrived scientific evidence on genetic factors in intelligence. 

This was a big part of the racist legacy of Harvard, which enabled Eugenics advocates Shockley and Jensen, as well as Wilson. I saw this at the age of 19 as just a cleaned up version of Nazi Eugenics and rebelled against it. I knew at a visceral level what it meant for the future were these types of ideas to become popularized and mainstream education by academics, many of whom influenced government directly and indirectly. 

One of my professors was so outraged at my polemical refutations of these theorists like Wilson that he imposed a gag order on me, so that I could not speak in class. My professor was ironically an Orthodox Rabbi in addition to a PoliSci professor. He didn't like being confronted, nor did he enjoy the opposition I sparked in his classroom. 

I wound up cutting these classes, taking Incompletes, dropping out, and taking up political activism. I did that for 40 years, and threw aside a traditional career. I never looked back, except to reflect on occasion.

So, ironically, this Neo-Nazi pseudo-scientist Wilson helped shape my outlook, define a new pathway in my life, and to a degree why I am the way I am. It's also how and why I met my wife Martha who was similarly inclined and coming from the same place intellectually.  I owe him something...thanks maybe?

And here I am, 45 years later, vindicated. It was all worth it. Isn't it sometimes awesome to look back, and see how we got from there to here?

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