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. At this point, therefore, it seems worthwhile to examine with some care the ideology- for it is an ideology- by which American social scientists justify this sort of project.

At the 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 men of power are humanized and civilized. They need a way of perceiving the consequences of what they do if their actions are not to be brutal, stupid, bureaucratic, but rather intelligent and humane. The only hope for humane government in the future is through the extensive use of the social sciences by government (Emphasis added)." Not only are the social sciences our only hope at home, but they hold out the added virtue of constituting a painless substitute for revolution abroad. "The social sciences provide a new and better way of linking the intelligentsia (in underdeveloped countries) to their masses. The link will be made somehow with or without us. If it is made by ideological political movements, it will be made by revolutions and it will be made in turmoil and struggle by people killing each other. There is a better way now of making this link and that is through social science research."

Few of the 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 endangered by the ignorance of the American, Soviet and Chinese governments than by any knowledge they could ever have." Deutsch feels that hard social science research into the political systems of both the U.S. and the rest of the nations of the world will show Americans that the politics of other nations are not so mallcable and manipulableas Americans have long believed and that this will make us more inclined to respect the rights and traditions of other countries. "If you can get fundamental work done which you think will benefit mankind," Deutsch says, "and which will not help people make stupid wars, then you should go ahead. We have a common commitment that the truth will not be immoral, but that it will serve morality."

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.

A point that Cambridge Project backers have repeatedly emphasized is that the Project will accept no classified research, and all developments will be available to anyone who wants to use them. "The methods developed with the support of the Cambridge Project, and data prepared with its support." reads a memorandum circulated at Harvard last week. "shall he available to competent invetigators everywhere.... None of the work undertaken or partially supported by the Project," it continues, "will be subject to military or proprietary secrecy. The Project will not accept as a condition of a grant or contract the requirement that the sponsor have special privileges in access to data, to programs or to computers that the Board controls."

The implication of this policy is supposed to be that although the Defense Department is sponsoring the research, the research remains apolitical or non- partisan because everyone will have equal access to it. But there is serious doubt as to whether this "equal access" is any more than a meaningless formula. Havward Alker, a professor of political science at M. I. T. who 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. "But how much money," responded Alkerthis week, "do the Black Panthers have to pay for computer application? Or, for that matter, how much do the Third World countries have? How can they afford it?"

Even once the (rather hypothetical) claims of radical insurgent movements have been ruled out of the realm of "equal access," however, Alker sees little hope that the results of the Cambridge Project can be widely distributed and applied in non-Defense areas. The reason for this is that the Defense Department, in spite of its tendency to be suspicious of social science research, has nonetheless come to control the behavioral sciences field. Well over half the government-supported behavioral science research in the U.S. today is under Defense Department sponsorship. This trend. by concentrating experience in social science research within the Defense Department, serves to insure that the Defense Department will continue to be the only organization able to use the new applications which its social science programs develop. Alker sees ARPA's move into basic methodological research via the Cambridge Project as the most monopolistic development of all in this regard. In computer technology and the behavioral sciences, the technology contains imperatives of its own, and these are already making obsolete the traditional safeguards of academic openness to which the Cambridge Project so carefully adheres.

THE PROBLEM, in any event, is ultimately not where research money come from but how the research will eventually be used. The fact that the Defense Department is willing to fund a project is only an indicator that the project is likely to have Defense applications, whether immediate or remote. The money does not in itself transform the project, and it would be unfortunate if the mounting arguments over the Cambridge Project became sidetracked into questions of "tainted money" and guilt by association.

On the other hand, the question of how the research will be used is one that needs to be pursued honestly and with a grounding in reality. The argument is made that since the Cambridge Project is funding "basic" research, there is no sure way of determining how whatever applications may eventually arise from a given research project will be put into use-and that therefore science should be allowed to run its course. But while it is true that the outcome of theoretical or advanced research is impossible to forecast with great accuracy, that does not mean that we can only assume that it is all for the best. Our experience in this country at this time suggests the opposite. The American government does not have the welfare of the people of the world as its guiding principle. On the contrary, we have seen how all over the Third World America is normally to be found on the side of "stability" and reaction, on the side of the ruling clites as against the underlying population. It may be that this is the result of ignorance rather than of knowledge on the part of the men who guide American foreign policy, but this does not seem likely. We are accustomed to explaining the actions of other nations in terms of the rationally considered interests of the men who rule them, and it is appropriate that we apply the same criterion to our own country. To do so is to discover that rationality is not the same as morality, that particular national policies can in fact become increasingly immoral and oppressive as they become increasingly immoral and oppressive as they become increasingly founded on hard knowledge. The slogans of the hawkers of the new social science just don't make it as a substitute for the hard moral choices that people in this country and this University should be facing.