SEX AND SCIENCE
complex society has its agencies which are "concerned with the
direction of human behavior," but we today are developing a new
element in that old activity, the element of scientific knowledge.
Whatever the Report claims for itself, the social sciences in general
no longer insist that they merely describe what people do; they now
have the clear consciousness of their power to manipulate and adjust.
First for industry and then for government, sociology has shown its
instrumental nature. A government which makes use of social knowl–
edge still suggests; benignity; and in an age that daily brings the
proliferation of government by police methods it may suggest the
very spirit of rational liberalism. Yet at least one sociologist has
expressed the fear that sociology may become the instrument of a
bland tyranny-it is the same fear that Dostoevsky gave immortal
expression to in "The Grand Inquisitor." And indeed there
is
some–
thing repulsive in the idea of men being studied for their own good.
The paradigm of what repels us is to be found in the common
situation of the child who
is
understood
by its parents, hemmed in,
anticipated and lovingly circumscribed, thoroughly taped, finding it
easier and easier to conform internally and in the future to the
parents' own interpretation of the external acts of the past, and so,
yielding to understanding as never to coercion, does not develop the
mystery and wildness of spirit which it
is
still our grace to believe
is the mark of full humanness. The act of understanding becomes
an act of control.
If,
then, we are to live under the aspect of sociology, let us at
least all be sociologists together-let us broadcast what every sociol–
ogist knows, and let us all have a share in observing each other.
The general indiscriminate publication of the Report makes sociology
a little less the study of many men by a few men and a little more
man's study of himself. There is something right in turning loose
the Report on the American public-it turns the American public
loose on the Report. It is right that the Report should be sold in
stores that never before sold books and bought by people who never
before bought books, and passed from hand to hand and talked
about and also snickered at and giggled over and generally submitted
to humor: American popular culture has surely been made the
richer by the Report's gift of a new folk hero-he already is clearly
the hero of the Report-the "scholarly and skilled lawyer" who for
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