The Survival of the Species

THANK-YOU citizens of Cambridge! It is you who have made my writing debut a great success. The past few weeks have been among the happiest in my life. You have invited me to your parties and even the doctors of your health services have expressed an interest in meeting with me. The sentences of my last article were only the awkward scribblings of a scientist eager to share his observations, to see whether his untested theories might experience photosynthesis in the light of day, or whether they would merely exhale more harmful carbon dioxide. Yet some of my readers seem to think that I have a style which is not unpleasing. A young lady has told me that she could easily get me a job on a large American magazine. I could not accept this offer because my ideas often take months to gel, so that I could not write for The Weekly Reader no matter how extensive its circulation in academic circles. However, my friends assure me that the readership of this magazine and of The Harvard Crimson are one and the same.

"The species must survive," this is what is said by the students of Cambridge. When the music stops at their parties of rock and roll, this fact always stares them in the face like a bull with horns. I have become accustomed to wear flared trousers to these parties. Frequently lovely young girls have taken me aside and shown me their virginity. At times they seem to have intuitively grasped the importance of this, but I am a scientist of society so that even if they asked me to touch this sacred state I would not. Although every autumn the Harvard Cooperative Society passes out free survival kits including many items, I know that these girls must save themselves for their husbands if the species is to survive. Besides, there is the American proverb that you "cannot have your cake and eat it too." Also, "lips that touch liquor will never touch mine."

Even though they have recently unionized, the teaching fellows at Harvard realize that there must be a free marketplace of ideas if the world is to learn how to survive. These teaching fellows know many things, and yet when they hear a smart new idea they are willing to move a lot of furniture to fit it in. In a class one day our teaching fellow was telling us about Dr. Levi-Straus who thinks that not only can everything in life be known by studying words, but by studying the order of words. I reminded this teaching fellow of the philosopher's remark, that "one picture is worth a thousand words." He must have seen the truth in my observation because for a few minutes he did not say anything at all, and it was only after the athletes started tapping their cleats on the linoleum and burping that he said "class dismissed" and left the room.

I DO NOT MEAN to imply that there is nothing to what Dr. Levi-Strauss said. Dr. Herrnstein, the genetics specialist, told me that anyone with the chromosomes of both the great trouser manufacturing family and the famous Viennese composer was sure to be a smart guy. However, I tend to side more with Dr. Freud and see that Dr. Levi-Strauss's having the first name "Claude" forced him to compensate creatively for what he lacked as a person. In fact, I think some of the flaws in Dr. Levi-Strauss's thinking personally and structuralism generally stem from an unconscious overcompensation.

Over the past few months I have come increasingly to consider myself a modern successor to the late Charles Darwin. Both of us early in life came to weird places where by closely examining the mutant native fauna we began, I think, to unravel a few of those major questions life poses us. There are other parallels to explore: I have often been told I look like a beagle. While it seems self-evident that the city of Cambridge is a Galapagos for humans, I am still left with the word "Archipelago." Until I find a dictionary that defines Archipelago, I will continue to assume that it refers to a close conglomeration of McDonald's Hamburger restaurants along a highway in the Southwestern part of the United States, most likely Los Angeles.

From many volumes I have read in the stacks of your Widener Library I have learned that women do not actually enjoy sexual expression but only submit to male advances because of their duty to propagate the species. On this basis, I think the whole issue of promiscuity should be re-examined, because it shows that these girls who sleep around are not indulging any immoral carnal "desires" but are performing a duty they secretly find thoroughly repugnant. This means that they are practicing "self-denial," one of New England's oldest virtues, in order to create needed human "capital." Birth control, however, is a completely different issue.

The single gravest threat to the survival of the species is the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Such an event would necessarily upset the vital political experiments now underway in Chile, Greece and Uganda. Such an event would destroy the laboratory as well as the experiments occurring in it. In fact the only comforting thought about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust is that so little is at stake.