SEX AND SCIENCE
the agency of science. Sex is inextricably involved with morality, and
hitherto it has been dealt with by those representatives of our cultural
imagination that have been committed to morality-it has been
dealt with by religion, ethical philosophy, and literature. But now
science seems to be the only one of our institutions which has the
authority to speak decisively on the matter. Nothing in the Report
is more suggestive in a large cultural way than the insistent
claims
it makes for its strictly scientific nature, its announcement of divorce
from
all
questions of morality at the same time that it patently
intends a moral effect. Nor will any science do for the job-it must
be a science as simple and materialistic as the subject can possibly
permit. It must be a science of statistics and not of ideas. The way
for the Report was prepared by Freud, but Freud, in all the years
of his activity, never had the currency or authority with the public
that the Report has achieved in a matter of weeks.
The scientific nature of the Report must be taken in conjunc–
tion with the manner of its publication. The Report says of itself
that it is only a "preliminary survey," a work intended to be the
first step in a larger research; that it is nothing more than an "accu–
mulation of scientific fact," a collection of "objective data," a "report
on what people do, which raises no question of what they should do,"
and it is fitted out with a full complement of charts, tables, and
discussions of scientific method. A work conceived and executed in
this way is usually presented only to an audience of professional
scientists; and the publishers of the Report, a medical house, pay
their ritual respects to the old tradition which held that not all medical
or quasi-medical knowledge was to be made easily available to the
general lay reader, or at least not until it had been subjected to pro–
fessional debate; they tell us in a foreword for what limited profes–
sional audience the book was pri!ll-arily intended-physicians, biol–
ogists and social scientists and "teachers, social workers, personnel
officers, law enforcement groups and others concerned with the direc–
tion of human behavior." And yet the book has been so successfully
publicized that at the present writing it stands fourth on the natio;>al
non-fiction best-seller list.
This way of bringing out a technical work of science is a cultural
phenomenon that ought not to pass without some question. The
public which receives this technical report, this merely preliminary
461
