Above all, do no harm

Natural History, Oct, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

Enough resistant whites are available to

officer them.

I find it simply astonishing that this brilliant man, who preached the equality of humankind in numerous writings spanning more than fifty years, could be so caught in conventional racial prejudices and so wedded to the consequential and standard military practices of European and American armies that he couldn't expand his horizons far enough even to imagine the possibility of competent black officers and therefore had to sigh in relief at the availability of a few good men among the rarely resistant whites. If Haldane couldn't anticipate even this minor development in human relationships and potentialities, why should we trust his judgments about the far more problematical nature of future wars?

(This incident should carry the same message for current discussions about underrepresentation of minorities as managers of baseball teams or as quarterbacks in football. I also recall a famous and similar episode of ridiculously poor prediction in the history of biological determinism--the estimate by a major European car manufacturer, early in the century, that his business would be profitable but rather limited. European markets, he confidently predicted, would never demand more than a million automobiles--for only so many men in the lower classes had sufficient intellectual ability to work as chauffeurs! Don't you love the triply unacknowledged bias of this statement--that poor folks rarely rank high in fixed genetic intelligence and that neither women nor rich folks could ever be expected to drive a car?)

The logic of this argument must lead to a truly modest proposal. Wouldn't we all love to fix the world in one fell swoop of proactive genius? We must, of course, never stop dreaming and trying. But we must also temper our projects with a modesty born of understanding that we cannot predict the future and that the best-laid plans of mice and men often founder into an even deeper pit dug by unanticipated consequences. In this context, we should honor what might be called the "negative morality" of restraint and consideration, a principle that wise people have always understood (as embodied in the golden rule) and dreamers have generally rejected, sometimes for human good but more often for the evil that arises when demagogues and zealots try to impose their "true belief" upon all humanity, whatever the consequences.

The Hippocratic oath, often misunderstood as a great document about general moral principles in medicine, should be read as a manifesto for protecting the secret knowledge of a guild and for passing skills only to designated initiates. But the oath also includes a preeminent statement, later recast as a Latin motto for physicians, ranking (in my judgment) with the Socratic dictum "Know Thyself" as one of the two greatest tidbits of advice from antiquity. I can imagine no nobler rule of morality than this single phrase, which every human being should engrave into heart and mind: primum non nocere--above all, do no harm.