Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NOONE connected with the Cambridge Project denies that the Department of Defense is likely to benefit from the program. There is some private skepticism about Pool's optimistic predictions in the proposal to ARPA and Foster- which was, after all, an effort to sell social science to a Defense Department that is looking for utility, and utility rather narrowly defined. But unless the whole field of technological behavioral science is a complete fraud with no connection to reality whatsoever (which seems unlikely), then the Defense Department is going to get something back on its investment in the Cambridge Project...
...core of the social scientist's ideology is an equation of rationality and morality. Men act badly to one another, the argument runs, when they are ignorant; the more knowledge that men have about each other, the more moral their conduct will become. "The day of literature, philosophy, etc., is not over," Professor Pool remarked not long ago. "They have their value. But there are a great many things that we have learned to understand better through psychology, sociology, systems analysis, political science. Such knowledge is important to the mandarins of the future for it is by such knowledge that...
...Cambridge Project's present members would care to put the case for government-related social science research in such wierdly millenarian terms as Dr. Pool's. But the notion that the morality of almost any government's actions is likely to be greater as its knowledge about the world increases- regardless of the social basis of the government and the social or economic interests which it represents- seems to be something like an ideological common denominator among the social scientists who are now gathering around the Cambridge Project. "The world," said Harvard Government professor Karl Dcutsch this week "is more...
Deutsch has plans to use the facilities made available through the Cambridge Project to develop a theoretical model of national assimilation and social mobilization. Projects of this type- the possible applications of which are simply impossible to predict- are not likely to receive support from anywhere if they don't get it from the Defense Department. Everyone would prefer that the money were available from the National Science Foundation, but it just isn't. And this calls for a final disgression...
...participated in the initial drafting of the Cambridge Project proposal, noted this week that although the Project is directed towards "methodological" research rather than towards applied research specific to the Defense Department, the fact remains that only organizations which have a background in computerized social science research will ever be in a position to apply those methodologies. Licklider was reported to have told dissident graduate students last spring that he would make Cambridge Project facilities available to them to use for programs which they felt to be useful- such as some kind of work for the Black Panther Party...