Note 1

Obviously, many careful, gifted, and humane scholars were attracted to de Man's and Heidegger's work, and ideas are not contaminating, nor do they carry guilt by association. But I think there are complex and interesting connections between de Man's and Heidegger's social actions and the intellectual temperament evident in their works. Here is the mature de Man:

It is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt or innocence.

--from Allegories of Reading (1979)

For those who think that Heidegger or de Man were ignorant of the general direction of the Nazi program despite Mein Kampf, the Nuremberg laws, and Kristalnacht (or that Hitler did not know! according to David Irving's imaginative claims), here is Hitler's public pronouncement of his plans for the Jews in a 1920's magazine interview:

Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows--at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example--as many as traffic allows.

Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

Note 2

Each of these atrocities has its constituency of deniers, both subtle and crude, academic and journalist, and far larger battalions who exercise their evasions wantonly and their outrage selectively and expediently, to discredit those they dislike. One cannot even get Gore and Clinton to ask for the removal of symbols of the Confederacy from the flags of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia, much less the Republicans for the South Carolina flag.

Note 3

As you guessed, Judith, not only do I oppose abridgements of freedom of speech--like France's on the Holocaust--on principle and everywhere, but such tactics propagate what they purportedly combat. Persecution creates the compelling and glamorous drama of the person with ideas too dangerous to let speak--Banned in Boston!--rather than the overfamiliar and sleep-inducing tale that some souls still remain willfully ignorant. (The penalty in France for "contestation des crimes contre l'humanité" is imprisonment for between 30 days and two years and/or fines of 2,000 to 300,000 francs.)

Denouncing also subverts refutation--since it implies that the real motive for the refutation is not honest evaluation but the pre-rational defense of a foregone conclusion. The fact that I have spoken out on MacDonald will make my subsequent critique that much less valuable, as does my history of contributing to the Simon Wiesenthal effort to obtain justice for the victims of Nazism.

Note 4

Although my choice in this case is to work on refuting MacDonald's theories, I simply have no criticism whatsoever to make of others who have never paid attention to MacDonald's work, or if they have, regard his work as not worth responding to. Judith, I think you give "ignoring" altogether too short a shrift with your claim that "vigorous discussion" is always better. There are literally millions of erroneous views and thousands of noxious doctrines, and to invest the time and effort to speak out in an informed, knowledgeable way on any one issue necessarily requires neglecting--"being silent" or "ignoring" all or almost all of the others. Hence the judgment to speak on one issue means that you think that it is the most pressing of all possible issues--and the best possible use of your time. I am not the least inclined to second guess others on these judgments, and I regard with horror your implication that, to qualify as ethical, scientists ought to be trolling newsgroups to sniff out the spread of erroneous or noxious doctrines to dispute with their expertise. This idea, if actually implemented, would cause all productive activity in every cancer lab, the CDC, and all other scientific institutions to cease, as the number of bad or malign ideas swamps the number of scientists that exist to rebut them. Ignoring bad ideas happens naturally because the researchers that do happen to encounter them know not to waste others' time by passing them along, leading to a slow but natural death of 99.9 percent of bad ideas. Attention needs to go to the many bad ideas that are widely accepted and deeply entrenched in the minds of scholars: The fringe at the center is the real problem.

Occasionally, individuals take bad scholarship directly to the public, like MacDonald did in the Irving trial. This is the kind of cue that may lead to a reassessment of whether ignoring is best.

Note 5

In 1995, before his views of Judaism were widely known to the membership, MacDonald volunteered to perform certain duties, and so he was duly elected to the position of secretary-archivist. This carries with it membership on the executive board, to which he acts as recording secretary, as well as being the fallback newsletter editor when no one else volunteers. This position has a six-year term, so the next election will be in 2001. The society has not had the opportunity to vote on him one way or another since 1995, and in any case, until this month I suspect that few members knew about this sideline. Thus, this one position, secretary-archivist, has been spun up to "secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and executive board member of HBES," as if there were four separate votes and embraces of his views by the Society's membership.

For this to have constituted endorsement of MacDonald's ideas about Judaism by the membership (much less four separate endorsements), the membership would have had to know about them prior to the election, which they did not. These volumes are obscure, only began to come out around the time of the election (the first review was published after the election), and were not preceded by other publications on the same topic. Nor has MacDonald been published in the society's journal, on this or any other topic.

I hope that future press accounts will make clear that MacDonald's role as secretary-archivist cannot be construed as an endorsement of his ideas by the society any more than Yale University's hiring of Paul de Man was an endorsement of his wartime activities: Both were unknown at the time the relevant decision was made.

Also, by our constitution, officers (including me) are precluded from presenting themselves as speaking for the society on political or social issues. So I am not speaking as president, just as MacDonald was not speaking as a representative of HBES at the Irving trial.

As for what will happen, unlike the U.S. Constitution, so far as I know, HBES has no mechanisms for impeachment, so the likeliest possibility is that MacDonald will serve out his remaining year. We'll see at the next business meeting this summer. I suspect also that the membership would be sharply divided about what it means for freedom of scholarship to remove officers purely on the basis of the content of their publications after election, regardless of how the members feel about such content. Re-election is a different matter.

An earlier instance of what many, including me, perceived to be anti-Semitism led to the closing down of an HBES newsgroup, discussions of societal dissolution, and drafting by me of a refutation that was abandoned only when the publisher of the journal involved announced that it would not accept anything more on the topic.

Note 6

Our response to MacDonald's books will be found on the Web page of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, under the Critical Eye section, as soon as it can be drafted.

Since Judith and Alex have taken one of my objections to constitute all of them, I should state that the problems with MacDonald's books are far more numerous than their dependence on biologically unrealistic types of group selection.

Nevertheless, the lax concepts of group selection endorsed by Richard Lewontin in the New York Times Book Review are not distant from the ideas MacDonald is proposing, and, if accepted, are by themselves sufficient to intellectually re-animate the central tenets of European social Darwinism, not to mention Gould's even scarier version, regardless of the fate of MacDonald's work. While these may not be "central to Lewontin's thinking," they reach far more people, and with far more imputed authority, than MacDonald ever will. Moreover, MacDonald doesn't believe that religious rituals and other cultural details are innate evolved adaptations; simply that they are expressions of a general propensity for groups to act as selfish biological units, something entirely compassed within what Lewontin accepts and endorses in his article. And species selection and bursts of evolutionary change that rapidly differentiate populations truly are central to Gould's thinking. Criteria for disapproving of MacDonald would have to be carefully drawn indeed to avoid picking up Lewontin, at least, on this issue.

Of course, "liable to cause human suffering" is not an argument that a position is not true.

Finally, people might want to know who David Sloan Wilson is. David is an exceptionally creative evolutionary biologist who has fought a lonely battle for decades, with bravery and intelligence, to rid the field of dogma about the primacy of individual selection over group selection. While I have many disagreements with him, he has made important contributions on a number of fronts.