Sons of the Pioneers

No, I don't mean the country/western group nor do I mean Bush's version of the "700 Club." I didn't have anything better to do and was thinking about all of the silly discussions over The Bell Curve overtaking some of the blogs the past couple of days (including this one). In addition I was reading the below-mentioned Bell Curve Debate and came across an article called "Professors of Hate." Like the Lane article excerpted below it focused on academics who received funding from the dubious Pioneer Fund. I also knew that professors who should have known better such as William Shockley of Stanford and Arthur Jensen of Berkeley got a lot of flak in the seventies because of their silly beliefs about "intelligence" and race. But I had no idea that U.C. Santa Barbara professor emeritus and prolific author Garrett Hardin (born 1915) was a recipient of Pioneer largesse. It was mentioned in passing in the article. I searched the web, and sure enough, what I found confirmed what I read.

I used to read a lot of Hardin's work in the early 70s, when environmentalism and concerns about world overpopulation were on the minds of many people. Hardin was a leading figure in discussions of overpopulation. He wrote often and brilliantly about abortion and birth control issues, calling forced pregnancy "compulsory pregnancy." I believe he even wrote articles for The Humanist magazine, a magazine as far removed from racism as one can get. He may have always been the pro-eugenics type, but I had no clue then. I know the last time I followed his writings at all (in the mid-70s or thereabouts) was when he was into his belief of "lifeboat ethics," or sink-or-swim to Third World nations as I would call it now. However, I never pegged him as a racist of any sort or would be the type to take money from a clearly racist organization.

Well, I was wrong. I was young, I was naive, I was impressionable. Not anymore. Once again somebody I put on a pedestal is now on my shitlist.