Science Quote by Margaret Mead

Mead is drawing a hard boundary between compromise and moral amnesia. The line concedes what serious adults eventually learn: in politics, institutions, even fieldwork, you sometimes choose the option that does less damage, not the option that feels pure. But she refuses the comforting second step, the one societies love most: laundering that choice into a virtue so we can stop feeling implicated.

The rhetoric does its work through timing and verbs. "Temporarily" narrows the permission slip; it frames the lesser evil as an emergency measure, not a lifestyle. Then comes the real command: never "label" it as good. Mead targets language as the first site of corruption. Once you rename harm as righteousness, you don’t just justify a single act - you build a reusable template. Bureaucracies run on those templates. So do nations at war.

As an anthropologist writing in a century of total war, Cold War realpolitik, and technocratic confidence, Mead’s warning lands as both ethical and methodological. Scientists and policy experts are especially prone to confusing necessity with legitimacy: if something is instrumentally required, we start treating it as morally endorsed. Mead rejects that slide. She’s not offering purity politics; she’s offering moral bookkeeping.

The subtext is bracing: guilt can be useful. Keeping the act in the category of "evil" preserves pressure to end it, limit it, and compensate for it. Calling it good is how temporary exceptions become permanent norms - and how decent people learn to speak like their own apologists.