Scientists and socialists

Scientists and socialists François Guillaumat, Mont Pèlerin Society General Meeting 1994 Session 3.1: Intellectuals and the Marketplace

Scientistes et socialistes What you feel like saying after Ralph Raico and Madsen Pirie

If it were conceivable[1], a standard discussion of the papers by Ralph Raico and Madsen Pirie would sound as follows:

"Quoting so and so, Ralph Raico reminds us of this and that. That's true enough. On the other hand, Madsen Pirie rather believes that, yet he does not entirely dimiss this. And I also tend to agree with him. "Nevertheless, Madsen must have been out of his mind when he said this, and Ralph was certainly taking drugs when he wrote that".

I don't really wish to sound boring or obnoxious, and would rather antagonize no one, either because I ignored his favourite subject, or because I trampled on his most cherished beliefs. The prudent solution is at least to state your own views while blinding yourself to any implicit criticism ill-intentioned observers will in any case think it entails[2]. This is why I shall present whatever remarks I have to make under the guise of a benign attempt at providing a related complement[3]. After all, Ralph Raico may have left no stone unturned, there must still be something for others to dig up. And however accurate in his printed meanness Madsen Pirie was, it must be possible to find different points of view.

I will therefore address the particular issue of scientism as an explanation for the intellectuals' socialistic tendencies, which Hayek treated, as you all know, in the first part of his Counter-Revolution of Science. And I shall link that with the redistributive characteristics of Social Democracy. You will learn that natural scientists are much more dangerous people than you have been told so far. For not only are those naturally inclined to think in a socialistic way, but their presuppositions permeate our intellectual atmosphere to such an extent that we ourselves tend to accept their collectivist premises under their influence. And indeed, they are an essential part of the dominant Social-Democratic consensus.

Whereas Chafarevich described socialism as a universal phenomenon, Hayek, as Ralph Raico reminded us, considered socialism to be a consequence of scientism, an offshoot of the scientific revolution in the modern ages. I may surprise you in saying that I consider both opinions to be essentially correct. Socialism prevails wherever and whenever the dominant ideology provides excuses to ignore every man's ability to think, which disregard is liable to destroy any system of law[4]. Based on a denial of man's nature, it is a profoundly irrational system. Indeed, inimical as it is to the use of part of their brains part of their time in part of their lives by most human beings, it is also, and to a large extent, an irrationalist one[5].

On the other hand, Hayek was right in identifying scientism as a major source of today's socialist irrationality. Scientism, of course, is not science itself, i.e. correct knowledge. It means applying uncritically to other fields of knowledge methods which have proved successful in the natural sciences, an error which real scientists are perfectly capable of avoiding[6]. But if we look at the end results, we do have to account for the disquieting paradox that modern science, with all its prestige, could be called upon to sanction the worst power-lust by giving a new life to an age-old form of magical thinking. For the sad fact is that science did provide the excuses for the new socialist irrationalism to destroy the rule of law. And I submit that it still does, to a sometimes unacknowledged extent.

Scientism was indeed an irresistible temptation: you have to remember what a liberation it was to set aside Aristotle's authority in the physical sciences, and what kind of automatic superiority it gave. And, if I have well understood Madsen Pirie, a feeling of superiority is one thing the intellectuals are after. As a consequence, the heuristic postulate of determinism proved so successful in the natural sciences, constantly displacing the limits of knowable regularities, that it gave the impression that no other method was applicable[7].

To be sure, if it is unscientific to practise anthropomorphism when dealing with inanimate objects, it might be less so when dealing with intentional human action. But human beings also are physical objects, and as such do not escape the laws of nature (to take Murray Rothbard's example, just try flapping your arms and fly to the Moon). It was thus only natural that the methods of the physical sciences should be tried out in the study of society. To leave aside such specifically human aspects of man's behaviour as seeking new knowledge, making up one's mind, forming new projects, viz., actual choice, is a perfectly legitimate abstraction, provided of course that one does not confuse it with the whole of reality. And even with the dismal record of "scientific" economic prediction, no empirical evidence has been given that it won't ever work[8].

Most free-market advocates are economists, and most competent economists are free-marketeers. But if you consider the extent to which scientism has invaded the social sciences, you almost come to expect such praise as Paul Samuelson lavished on Soviet central planning as late as in the 1989 edition of his celebrated textbook. Just look at what now passes for economic teaching in many circles, be it "basic" or "advanced". "Basic" economics is most often couched in mechanistic terms, with so-called "indifference curves" which reduce the human mind to a purely reacting automaton. Graduate economic studies involve advanced econometrics and general equilibrium theory that is, a disciplin bent upon sifting to keep as much routinely, deterministic behavior out of human action, and a would-be "general" model of the economy which assumes away all the reasons why law and morality are central to human choice and social interaction. It is unfortunate, but hardly surprising that a mainstream theory that treats human action like knee-jerk robotic reactions, and value judgements - which are acts of thought - as if they were measurable objects, would inspire a political practice that does treat people like objects to be indefinitely manipulated, in complete disregard of their thinking ability, and all that comes with it: natural ownership (possession of goods resulting from individual self-ownership and production), reasoned opinions and personal projects.

Socialism is a natural derivation of scientistic economic thinking, that is, the (acquired) practical inability to understand the role of man's mind in society. An understanding of what von Mises rightly called the most interesting issues of economic theory, that is, how information is created, processed and transmitted in society, which Hayek carried to unprecedented heights, is rarely found in textbooks[9]: which means that the essential questions which Political Economy purported to answer: what is the nature of production, where it comes from, and the origin and legitimacy of property rights, are no longer thinkable, in a quite Orwellian fashion. Production is the transmission to matter of information created by the human mind to serve a personal project. Mathematical economics, whose sole purpose is to ape the methods used to study inanimate matter, is rather ill-equipped to integrate such notions as "creation", "information", or "project"[10].

Being unable to account for the consequences of thinking, acting purposefulness, the pseudo-rationality of scientism is bound to leave them to"initial conditions", a kind of no man's land which it ever abstains from exploring, a perpetual blanking out which turns the past into a kind of epistemological scrap heap and a breeding ground for the worst scientific - generally socialistic - errors. For, as we shall see, its necessary complement in that rôle is "Government", which ends up being the sole moral agent whose existence is recognized in such models. The caracteristic inability of mechanistic, deterministic models to account for past production, and more generally to relate past, present and future thus explains the persistence of the myth of "natural resources" and the incredible survival of Ricardo's unfortunate condemnation of land rent[11], in spite of the fact that it was refuted by Henry Charles Carey and Frédéric Bastiat as early as the mid-nineteenth century[12]. Those whose faith lies in determinism must of necessity ascribe the existence of any resources to an original pool given by nature which must also be limited, even though some may confess ignorance as to where the limit actually lies.

The absurd collectivist consequences of scientistic materialism are also directly observable in the alleged standards of economic policy derived from General Equilibrium theory, the well-worn rigmarole of "externalities, public goods, natural monopolies and increasing returns". Upon examination, those prove totally incapable of providing any observable criterion of where Government action should start and where it should stop (making them nothing but automatic, pseudo-scientific rationalizations for any kind of policy). Worse still, Governments (that is, government people), already entitled by their conclusions to do anything they please, are necessarily elevated by their assumptions to the status of godlike entities, of Dei ex Machinis, who are the only real causes of everything that happens in that (beyond-the-mirror) economic world. Not only do they imply omniscience (and omnipotence) on their part, including an ability to read in other people's minds the "indifference curves" which themselves may not even be aware of; indeed, the crucial assumption on which they rest, the alleged existence of stable, definable (and implicitely measurable) so-called "utility functions", imply the reduction of man's mind to a purely reacting automaton.

This denial of ordinary men's ability to think is an inversion of reality - Government people are irresponsible by definition, and therefore much less able to think properly than normal individuals[13] - and implies an automatic rejection of the basic principle of free-market normative analysis: that the minds of peaceful individual producers, not the necessarily violent interference of government are the source - the real cause - of wealth. On the other hand, to treat Government as the sole moral agent is to regard it as the only possible holder of any rights at all[14]. Hence the unflinchingly collectivist starting point of General Equilibrium pseudo-normative analysis: the cold-blooded assumption that "Society" "owns" resources which are to be "optimally allocated" under the benevolent responsibility of Government[15]. Hence the disquieting slave-owner mentality of those who invoke "consumer sovereignty" to trample on the property rights of producers accused of acting as "monopolies" on the free market in accordance with the spurious standards of scientistic analysis[16], If that is not socialism, what is? This is not meant to imply that "utility functions" cannot be acceptable abstractions, useful as a tool for analyzing certain issues concerning adjustments to changed circumstances. I use this example to illustrate three characteristic traps in which incautious intellectuals are liable to fall, particularly when trained in the natural sciences. The first is the intellectuals' universal tendency of to be carried away by their own abstractions. Abstractions necessarily leave out most of reality, and therefore may never be automatically and uncritically accepted as standards for that reality. Such simplifications of General Equilibrium theory as "perfect competition" focus on certain aspects of economic reality in order to study certain logical relationships, and possibly serve as an element of comparison to assess what they chose not to deal with, specifically the problems of information. But whereas they are impossible - to such an extent that (as Mises reminded us) they cannot even be thought out consistently - we have to admit that they are also mistaken to be, and exert an incredible fascination as, some sort of ideal[17].

Such a mistake come from an uncritical and obvious overestimation of their cherished models by scientistically trained economists. But I submit that it also comes from disregarding an elementary rule of logic, a concept-stealing practice as Ayn Rand would have called it: the typically scientistic pretense to advance rules of human action while denying the essential determining conditions for such an attempt. The rule of logic which scientism ignores, and which I will first state in scientistic terms, is that no model which assumes away the existence of a phenomenon can be used alone to describe, and even less to judge, the consequences of that phenomenon. The purpose of normative analysis is to find out what man should, or should not do, implying that he does have the ability to find out and to choose the appropriate course of action. No standard of behaviour can therefore be deduced from intellectual constructs which do not allow for thought, free will and actual choice on the part of the individuals studied. Nor can any standard of economic efficiency be derived from a model which is not even able to account for the nature of production[18]. The intellectual discipline which knows, as a great contemporary philosopher put it, "why man needs a code of values" and therefore starts its normative analysis from man's thinking ability is of course nothing but "moral philosophy". This is least understood by scientism; on the contrary, its adepts will wander about offering normative statements while denying that they are treading on the turf of moral philosophers - to the extend of dismissing them as "irrational". Verbal camouflage will of course be superabundant: nothing will be "good" but "positive", "optimal", and (climax) "scientific", and nothing "bad" but "negative", "sub-optimal" and (anticlimax) "unscientific". And since the most "unscientific" moral utterances are likely to be those which are explicitely stated as such, it is quite unreasonable to expect relevance, or even minimal consistency from a normative analysis derived from scientistic premises. Hence the scientists' routine attempts at manipulating notions the philosophical basis of which they adamantly deny (concept-stealing), or at presenting the unthinkable as a standard (idealism). Hence also the moral vacuum on which socialism flourishes. Not only because such confusion baffles the mind in the face of socialist aggression, but also because it provides the fertile soil on which the idealistic, unthinkable moral conceptions of the socialist creed will thrive. I refer you to Murray Rothbard's essay on "Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature" for a description of the corrupting influence of an unrealizable ideal on any society. What I would stress here is how badly Social Democracy needs to sever social morality from any reference to objectivity, that is to natural law and any binding rule of consistency.

The basic principle of Social Democracy, the inescapable constraint on those who bid for its power, which dominates every strategy of social democratic life, is that "the beast must be fed continually. [...] whatever of its subjects' liberty and property the state manages to appropriate, must be redistributed to others. [and] Political competition [...] means that neither [the government nor the opposition] can afford to content itself with offering much lower net redistributive gains than its tentative estimate of the net loss it can safely impose on others." (A. de Jasay: The State)

In Social Democracy politicians, whether in office or in the opposition, cannot survive politically unless they constantly find new redistributive schemes. Social Democracy is an unending process of imaginative legal plunder. Hence the central role of progress in social-democratic parlance. If a political entrepreneur can't improve on his opponent's offer, he is done for. Thus, "New rights" are to be constantly granted, which means that new excuses must ever be found for despoiling the weak. Remember Ralph Raico quoting Professor Stigler: "a constant stream of new criticism is being invented, discovered or heavily advertised" against capitalism, that is, the victims' property rights. Scientism provides such excuses, and the standards for such criticism. To be sure, Social Democracy has rock-solid anti-concepts and false values to build its propaganda upon. "Equality" is central as its hundreds of equally defensible interpretations provide for as many government-organized robberies. "Social justice" has the same built-in advantage of being utterly undefinable. "Democracy" is another ill-defined concept believed by some people to imply a measure of respect for individual rights, which helps promote ever more confiscation of property under the guise of "democratization"[19].

But such absurdities could hardly survive without an ideology which constantly intimidates critics as benighted ignorants, and a kind of high priesthood that will uphold the pie-in-the -sky fiction of a bright collective future even in the face of all too visible government failure. I contend that scientism does provide such an ideology, high priests included. Scientism dismisses common morality and natural property from the start, misleading rational normative inquiry toward dead ends. The pseudo-rationalism of scientistic methodology encourages treating human beings like robots, and their value judgements - their thoughts - like a commodity to be added up, compared and redistributed ("science is measurement"[20]). The pseudo-experimentalism of scientistic methodology so disparages common sense that we have now been witnessing more than a half-century of attempts to prove "empirically" that aggressive violence on the part of the state can do otherwise than steal and destroy, an absurdity which would have been exposed by merely imagining the acts under discussion.

This is to prove that, of all intellectuals, natural scientists have been the most dangerous since they remain a potential source of the most basic errors concerning society. All the more dangerous since the wondrous economic achievements made possible by the advancing natural sciences seem to underwrite the indefinite "social progress" claimed by Social-Democratic politicians[21], and to promise miraculous improvement were only the methods of the engineer applied to society.

________________ [1] But it actuality, it isn't. It would imply claiming knowledge which Ralph Raico does not possess, or to know better than Madsen Pirie, and can you seriously imagine that?

[2] Overt expression of disagreement is, in most respects, a venturesome endeavour. It will alienate half of the audience and, since you only really know that which you are fond of, it entails the risk of displaying that kind of arrogant ignorance about alternative views which happens to be the most characteristic feature of constructivism (This, as you may have found out by yourselves, comes from very recent experience).

[3], To make the show both entertaining and peaceful, the solution was to find, as it were, a kind of intellectual niche between two giants, to pretend having found something personal to say about one particular subject. And since we are no longer at the time when Hayek or de Jouvenel were supposedly defending a so-called capitalist status quo, to assume the position of a radical free-marketeer denouncing in accepted opinions and institutions an inherent tendency to maintain the abhorrent Social-Democratic established order.

[4]To prevent people from choosing their ends and to submit them to the arbitrary will of others is to treat, to the same extent, part of mankind like animals, while the remainder revel in the illusion of superiority.

[5]This is to say that Hayek was much too generous in qualifying the constructivist error as "rationalist". Rationalist it may be called, if rationalism is an overestimation, if not an idolatry, of one's own ability to think. But it is no less definitely a denial of others' thinking capabilities, leading to a misunderstanding of the way society works which can only be called, following Hayek himself, a superstition.

[6]Not only real economists, but also natural scientists manage to avoid the pitfalls of scientism. Michael Polanyi even tried to make the latter understand the free market by comparing its discovery procedure with their own as researchers. John von Neumann, a mathematician, once compared belief in socialism with inability to understand an equation of the first degree. And of course, Hayek described socialism as much more inspired by amateurs' interpretations of science than by genuine scientists reflecting upon their calling.

[7] Indeed, as a means to goad scientists into ever further research, it only compares with the rationality postulate in economics. Scientists now feel so secure using it as an unchallenged axiom that they don't mind maintaining questionable explanations for observed phenomena, if they only fit the determinist dogma. As early as in the twenties, G. K. Chesterton marveled at the way spontaneous generation - the hardly thinkable idea that information "somehow" emerges from chaos, had survived once cloaked in millions of years by neo-Darwinism.

[8]The only proof of that is given by logic, i.e. philosophical thinking: by the Scholastics, for instance, who upheld free will, or by Karl Popper, who noted that future history, that is future human action must be determined by a knowledge which no one yet possesses. And many contemporary methodologies now contend that logic is no longer to be held as "scientific" knowledge (which they had better say in order to survive, since they are known to fail their own standards).

[9] Intellectual independence and personal love of truth are nowadays indispensable to maintain the remnants of what used to be called "the moral sciences" among economists. It generally depends upon personal readings, experience and reflection, and comes as a kind of intellectual frill, as it were, like the icing on a cake.

[10] In all rigor, it could only be needed by a behaviourist research program, which has often been proven to be self-defeating in economics, not least by Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science: no economics can make sense without a reference to purpose, which by the way is also a rather commonplace notion among biologists.

[11] Even perfect libertarians still believe in the Ricardian fallacy. A few years ago, I went through the awkward and sometimes painful experience of publishing the translation of an otherwise excellent book whose author apparently believed in the Ricardian canard. -The author deserves plenary indulgence since he was first trained as a physicist, and he made me discover G. K. Chesterton.

[12] Anyone who has followed the proceedings of the latest Rio or Cairo conferences knows what policy errors scientism can inspire. The basic inability to understand that man's mind is the only source of wealth maintains the myth of "natural resources" which supposedly "belong to the whole of Mankind". Hence the claim to "the Earth's" resources, to be managed on behalf of "Mankind" advanced by various breeds of superbureaucrats. We know, of course, that ownership is necessarily a singular relationship between individuals an specified goods, and that "mankind" cannot possess anything, much less nonexistent "natural" resources, let alone undiscovered ones. We also know that an object has no value, and therefore no economic (as opposed to physical) existence unless someone's action has given it such value, if only by starting to treat it mentally as a future means to serve a personal purpose. To quote Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

"There is, of course, no such thing as a "natural resource". All wealth is produced by somebody, and belongs to somebody".

Adherence to the myth of "natural resources" naturally leads to the belief that since the physical world is limited, economic resources must also be finite. (Hayek also mentioned scientistic attempts to equate production with physically measurable phenomena, such as energy consumption, which of course reinforce the idea of so-called "limits to growth"). From which socialists are all to eager to conclude that governments should act to prevent economic and population growth. As in the case of "scientific" economic prediction, massive empirical evidence to the contrary will never provide ultimate proof that the idea is false. Only logical, that is philosophical thinking, demonstrates the absurdity of the idea.

[13] It could be said that, in their (in)capacity as irresponsible public agents, Government people are "functional Untermenschen posing as Supermen". To paraphrase Hayek: "Government people do not adopt silly rules because they are stupid. They become stupid because they have to abide by silly rules".

[14] The so-called "theory of market failure" thus appears as a rationalization for theocracy, but as a quite heretical one : it implies an even greater distance between the Government and other economic agents than between God and His human creature. Orthodox (at least Catholic) theology holds Man to have a(n albeit secondary) causing capability. No such thing exists in an otherwise mechanistic model which introduces Government as the only entity that really acts.

[15] It might well be argued that genuinely free-market conclusions can be drawn from such assumptions, which is actually what Hayek did, in order - hopefully - to make his views more palatable to adherents of the dominant socialist creed. It could be granted, as Louis Pasteur said of God, that "a little economic science estranges from the market, and much science brings back to it". But since most intellectuals are half-trained and rather unlikely to acquire "much" economic science, this is no serious challenge to the point I wished to make, that scientism must lead to a predominance of socialist prejudice among would-be rationalists.

[16] If we had more time, I could explain that the absurd belief in so-called "free-market monopolies" is not a mere consequence of the pseudo-experimentalism of hastily applied empiricist methodology. It is also inspired by a definite, if implicit conception of morality and Original Sin, which could be connected to Ricardo's error concerning land rent.

[17] Since the only observable instance of "final equilibrium" is death, you may imagine what "General Final Equilibrium", even if supposedly "Pareto-optimal", would look like.

[18]"Production of commodities by means of commodities" could be the most symbolic slogan for that harrowing regressio ad infinitum to which materialism must lead in economics.

[19]"Tolerance", or more accurately the violent denunciation of "intolerance", repression of "extremism" or the promotion of "pluralism" are also Social-democratic favourites : once the misgivings inspired by their obvious self-contradictory nature as values have been overcome, they provide governments with marvelous, all-purpose substitutes for reasoned arguments and excuses for suppressing all articulate opposition.

[20] That is all what utilitarianism is about. Utilitarianism rests on the sometimes implicit but nevertheless essential implication that man's value judgements, that is, acts of thought, could "somehow" be measured. This is all one needs to secure the ignorance of the nature of human thinking which is necessary to underwrite the utilitarian's "tinker's licence" on society described by Anthony de Jasay. But would utilitarianism, whose inconsistency - as de Jasay reminds us - was readily acknowledged by Bentham himself, have survived so long without the need of mathematical economics to treat value judgements "as if" they were implicitely measurable in order to include them in its equations?

[21] A progress for which politicians have always been claiming credit, while confiscating an ever larger part of its proceeds.