The American Crisis: Origins-
The Failure of Modern Science and Our Historical Dilemma
Miscellaneous Notes and Summary
Journal Entry #32

Animated by the uniquely Western idea of Progress, many now consider historical events as being predetermined or inevitable, whether we’re talking about technical innovations like the airplane and computer, or the establishment of political liberty and democratic government; given time these advances would eventually suggest themselves to someone’s mind, so it is thought. “A totally materialist conception of nature and man implies determinism” writes economist Thomas Sowell in his Marxism; Philosophy and Economics (1985). “If human thinking and feeling are nothing but mechanical responses to external stimuli,” he continues, “which are themselves determined by the laws of physics, then all of life and history are predetermined.”

In fact, there exists no rigid law of historical determinism. Whether beneficial technological innovation or fruitful political advancement, their existence is contingent upon specifically favorable historical circumstances. Of course, not the least of these circumstances would certainly include personal sacrifice, physical danger, creative inspiration, ingenuity and not a little perspiration. Insofar as historical events are concerned, America could very well have lost World War II even as it could have been vanquished in its infancy by an indomitable British empire in 1776. It is nowhere carved in stone that liberty and democracy will inevitably triumph, nor can we offer any future assurance these must necessarily endure throughout all generations- come what may.

Reasonably enough then, if there exist historical circumstances which give rise to political liberty and democracy- as there must have been- then there must also be circumstances which would bring about their demise. Consulting the turbulent history in the West in the revolutionary years 1776-1848, we find there was no political system exempt from the tremendous political tensions and profound social dislocation brought about as rapid industrialization challenged traditional institutions across Europe. And in antebellum North America we saw a growing industrialized North increasingly at odds with a traditionally rural South which resolved not only to maintain a slave-labor economy, but even to extend it to the new territories being absorbed into the continental Union- even if that threatened secession and Civil War. It is interesting to note here that the apparent cultural divide which separated the industrial North from the rural South was perhaps not quite as wide as we are made to think. Southern society was as much caught up in the maelstrom of rapid industrialization through technological innovation as any region within the Northern States.

In the American Heritage series, the esteemed, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton wrote in The Civil War (1960) that in 1793, “…Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin- a simple device which made it possible for textile mills to use the short-staple cotton which the Southern states could grow so abundantly- and in a very short time the whole picture changed. The world just then was developing an almost limitless appetite for cotton, and in the deep South enormous quantities of cotton could be raised cheaply with slave labor. Export figures show what happened. In 1800 the United States had exported $5,000,000 worth of cotton- 7 per cent of the nation’s total exports. By 1810 this figure had tripled, by 1840 it had risen to $63,000,000, and by 1860 cotton exports were worth $191,000,000- 57 per cent of the value of all American exports…By 1860 slave property was worth at least two billion dollars, and the abolitionists who insisted that this property be outlawed were not especially helpful in showing how this could be done without collapsing the whole Southern economy.”

Regarding European history, Professor Fischer remarks upon the sixty-year period just prior to Hitler’s 1933 ascension to the chancellorship of Germany in his book Nazi Germany; A New History (1995). From 1871 to 1933 the necessary historical conditions- in addition to Darwinian evolutionary thought- precipitating Nazism “included the establishment of imperial Germany, World War I, the German defeat and its aftermath (the fall of the monarchy, revolution, the impact of the Versailles Treaty, and catastrophic inflation), Germany’s ill-fated experience with democracy under the Weimar Republic, the Great Depression, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.” Interestingly, it was within Germany’s democratic experiment- the Weimar Republic- that the Nazi party went from 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 elections to 37% in 1932, becoming the largest political party in Germany. Democracy in Germany began to split apart in those years as voters rushed to the extremes, amidst massive unemployment and economic stagnation. By 1932- with 5.5 million unemployed, a sudden drop in world agricultural prices, the Wall Street Crash, and the failure of five major banks- the majority of Germans were voting for the Nazi and Communist parties. As is noted in the BBC History of World War II, the Nazi message hadn’t changed in those four years, it was just that more people were starting to listen to it.

And as they listened to that message of a greater destiny awaiting Germany through the Darwinian struggle for racial superiority and the survival of the fittest among nations, Western Civilization approached total war. There is little dispute that in World War II democracy and political freedom were in great peril and were very nearly extinguished by totalitarian ideology combined with the aggressive militarism of the heavily industrialized, highly educated, despotic powers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And Western democracy was certainly challenged in the subsequent Cold War era as People’s Revolutionary movements in Russia and China militantly sought to accelerate the class struggle and replace bourgeois Capitalism with Communist political, social and economic arrangements. Now as we have seen, the necessary condition common to the formation of the totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Communism was Darwinian evolutionary thought. And the sufficient condition for the relative success of these burgeoning ideologies was the intentional and systematic elimination of intellectual freedom- conspicuously evident in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany- and most commonly reflected in government policies of suppression through the banning of intellectual debate and dissent, careful government control and planning of civilian training and education, as well as Communist and Nazi party prohibitions on the printing, circulation and discussion of “unauthorized” books and publications.

These two conditions- the necessary and sufficient- figure substantially in importance for the development of American society as science and math curricula quickly gained emphasis in U.S. public education after World War II. As the nation anticipated a future shaped largely by space and the atom, science education in America’s schools also included the Darwinian evolutionary model in biology, growing in value after Crick and Watson published their scientific paper on DNA in 1953. Not unreasonably, it seemed as though the Nobel prize-winning construct of DNA dovetailed somewhat neatly with evolutionary theory. However tenuous the relationship the latter actually shared with the former, the scientific establishment did not appear too apprehensive about associating the DNA’s knack for transmitting genetic inheritance from progenitor to progeny with the transference of evolutionary adaptations, by means of Charles Darwin’s inevitable process of “descent with modification through variation and natural selection.”

Any dispute with Darwinian biological evolution would be viewed by the scientific community as a grave challenge not only to an accepted scientific theory, but also to the scientific method generally, thus discouraging debate and stifling dissent. Thereafter, biological evolution incrementally became exempt from criticism, even as freedom of thought moved, little by little, toward extinction. Illustrating this perception of the unassailable nature and expanding role for science, in a speech delivered in 1960 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and reprinted in his book The Physicists- A Generation that Changed the World, the physicist C.P. Snow boldly informed his audience that "scientists are the most important occupational group in the world today." Furthermore, this exalted status of the physical sciences was institutionally reflected in the legislative acts of the U.S. Government, intended to advance Cold War-era national policies. The idée fixe, or the Grand Delusion if you will, of 20th century Western thought- scientific certainty- was fast becoming a dominant reality.

In 1950 the U.S. Congress formed the National Science Foundation; in 1957 and 1958 it enacted the Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Defense Education Act. All of these acts represented a national effort reflecting both the recognition of the importance of science to national defense in the post-Second World War world, as well as the overwhelming need to train more scientists and engineers to negotiate what was certain to be a more scientifically oriented and technologically complex future. Indeed, it was in this historical climate that we witness the expansion of an organization that epitomized the close affinity between civilian scientific research, industrial manufacturing and military application and preparedness: that “research and development wing of AT&T”- Bell Labs.

In his exceptional book, The Idea Factory; Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (2012), Jon Gertner writes; “In the final days of World War II…the Army’s Ordnance Department, along with the Air Force, had selected the Labs ‘to determine the practicability of developing a ground based guided-missile system.’ The results- a concerted effort of the Army, Air Force, Bell Labs, Western Electric, and the Douglas Aircraft Company- were code-named Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory, and put into operation in 1953. ‘Essentially a defensive weapon,’ the Bell Laboratories Record explained, ‘the Nike system will provide defended areas with a far greater degree of anti-aircraft protection than was ever before possible with the more limited ranges and altitudes of conventional anti-aircraft guns.’ Nike ‘systems,’ essentially clusters of missiles poised for flight, were sited on the outskirts of major U.S. cities and near strategic locations, including Bell Labs’ Murray Hill [New Jersey] offices.”

Mr. Gertner further observes; “What made the Labs essential to the Nike program was an expertise in radar and communications. ‘Telephone technology has much in common with that of new weapons systems’…The new missiles, outfitted with several antennas, were guided by a complex control system, both in the air and on the ground, that involved radio detection and guidance…Though nuclear arms and communications were often perceived as distinct phenomena- one was military, the other was civilian; one was deadly, the other benign- it was becoming increasingly difficult to separate the atomic age from the information age…To counter communist intransigence…would require a ‘two-front defense’, each as important as the other. Americans ‘are faced with maintaining a military strength adequate to deter the Russians from a general war, while at the same time maintaining a civilian economy that provides our people with an increasingly abundant life.’”

With the National Defense Education Act, the promotion of science and math education in America’s public schools and universities was considered essential to the country’s material and social progress, in addition to its defense. However, because the natural sciences came to overshadow history and philosophy in the intellectual sphere, scientific ideas and methods would come to dominate the thinking and outlook of America’s students, producing in their minds an incomplete picture of reality, at best. Such an incomplete view of the world provides an inadequate basis upon which to form coherent ideas and make vital decisions, to say the least. A partial picture of reality also significantly impairs the individual’s ability to consult truth found in areas well beyond the boundaries of science and mathematics. This in turn fosters a cultural climate in which an imbalance in rational thinking prevents logical analysis and the comprehensive understanding critical to the stability of self-government and democracy. Basically, a strictly scientific mental picture of the world and of humanity is a severely limited- even stunted- order of understanding. Also obscured in the absence of philosophy is the intellect’s ability to perceive empirically that a strictly material definition of the universe is not only limited, but flawed and disprovable.

That there existed the potential of creating such imbalance and instability in democratic society was anticipated by President Dwight Eisenhower at the time this legislation was presented. Indeed, President Eisenhower was quite explicit in his warning to the American public concerning the National Defense Education Act, warning that such an emphasis on science and math education should not occasion a demotion for humanities-based education, nor should this new policy be made at the expense of the humanities in the long run. “Eisenhower reminded his fellow citizens that the real strength of American democracy came from ‘the quality of our life, and the vigor of our ideals.’ American education, then, had to produce ‘not only Einsteins and Steinmetzes, but Washingtons, and Emersons’ as well”, as recorded by Pach and Richardson in The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1991). We now know the President’s warning fell upon deaf ears and the exaltation of science and mathematics has since taken place and been registered in the public consciousness. Such is reflected in the considered opinion of the MIT historian Jacob Bronowski, offered in his intriguing book The Ascent of Man (1973), as he proposed that “the intellectual leadership of the twentieth century rests with scientists.”

President Eisenhower was rightly wary of the very real danger of promoting intellectual disequilibrium, an imbalance in Western thought and civilization, as a consequence of defining the universe in strictly scientific terms. From the President’s recent war experience as the Supreme Allied Commander heading up the desperate crusade to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he knew first-hand that where there exists intellectual disequilibrium there follows- by sheer proximity- societal disequilibrium; that is, instability. Such social instability can result in tyranny and can take many forms, be it the First World War era’s Bolshevik Revolution in post-Tsarist Russia, or the subsequent Nazi acquisition of power through the ballot box in interwar Germany.

Respecting historical precedent, Ike realized America was equally as vulnerable to such societal imbalance, or disequilibrium. President Eisenhower knew that an incomplete understanding of the world did not result from a greater or lesser amount of scientific knowledge, but rather viewing our world only through a scientific lens. General Eisenhower personally observed the horrendous carnage to a society guided by the views of those German thinkers and demagogues who saw in Darwin’s evolutionary theory nothing less than a new cosmic philosophy. Such philosophy united all aspects of nature with man and the State- rejecting theology and man’s status as a special creation- and proposing that humans were subject to the same evolutionary “laws” as any other organism. Hence, man was not far removed- nor distinct- from the animal kingdom. From here it was easy to characterize a race or nation as biologically superior or inferior to all others. To dehumanize other humans became a legitimate exercise in scientific classification therefore. By 1945, the tens-of-millions of human beings slaughtered, the near-total destruction of Germany’s cities, industry, and culture he witnessed- together with the innumerable Nazi SS death camps he liberated- convinced General Dwight Eisenhower that there must be more to humanity than its being the embodiment of a strictly material process of natural selection and evolutionary adaptation.

With the triumph in America’s schools of philosophic materialism and its various corollaries, students now receive a largely circumscribed education in which, increasingly since the 1950’s, “the methods of natural science [are] extended to the study of man and society, and the claim [is] advanced in some quarters that these methods constitute man’s only reliable access to knowledge of reality”. Even as American education is severely limited- even damaged- through the diverse and widespread application of the “methods of natural science”, so our ability to reason is likewise constricted and impaired, as it happened in Russia and Germany in the early 20th century. This descent into positivistic naturalism (as it is sometimes termed) is completed to the extent we vigorously insist upon the “fact” of biological evolution. “Darwin gave a powerful impetus to the social sciences and to these far-reaching claims for the all-sufficiency of [the] scientific method”, continues Professor John C. Greene in his excellent book, Darwin and the Modern World View (1961)- originally his Rockwell Lectures delivered at Rice University.

Certainly this generous opinion on the authority of science as being “man’s only reliable access to knowledge of reality” is in keeping with the views we cited earlier of the physicist C.P. Snow, who boldly informed his audience that "scientists are the most important occupational group in the world today", and the MIT historian Jacob Bronowski who proposed that “the intellectual leadership of the twentieth century rests with scientists.” Add to this the many amongst the general public won over by the continual advancements in the practical products of science and technology, and it would seem the opinion is virtually universal. It is, most assuredly, well beyond debate that the natural sciences have thoroughly transformed the world and advanced Western Civilization immeasurably.

Nevertheless, this exalted view of science is not quite shared by all, particularly those prominent in the business of science itself. For example, Stanley Jaki (Benedictine monk; PhD, Physics; visiting member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study) writing in The Relevance of Physics (1966), quotes the MIT- educated electrical engineer Vannevar Bush- father of modern computing- who observed that “Much is spoken today about the power of science, and rightly. It is awesome. But little is said about the inherent limitations of science, and both sides of the coin need equal scrutiny.” And then there’s the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, formulator of the theory of the electromagnetic field- whose work was described by Albert Einstein as “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.” Maxwell opined that "One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods.”

To the mind governed by logic, these opposing statements about the scope and power of the scientific enterprise are considered contradictories. Logically, even as the method of natural science cannot in fact be both limitless and limited in its reach, so both statements to that effect cannot be true nor can both be false; one must be true while the other must therefore be false. Extensive as the logical gulf appears between the two statements- between the limitless versus the limited method of science- it becomes ever greater in practice, in the conduct of society as the unlimited view of science gains dominance. Sadly, in this view regarding the scientific method as being “man’s only reliable access to knowledge of reality” and by which the world’s “intellectual leadership…rests with scientists”, there is found the greatest danger to our freedom of thought.

Only by recognizing a strictly bounded material universe (the uniformity of natural cause and effect in a closed material system) and by demanding an unyielding materialist philosophy can our scientific method claim to be the sole means to knowledge of all that exists. Only by the assumption all that exists is matter- or some function or property of matter- can science then say that all areas of reality fall within the explanatory range of the scientific method. In gambling this is known as “stacking the deck” or “loading the dice”- sleight of hand, that is. In logic it is a Fallacy of Relevance termed Petitio Principii. Without proper warrant, science then assumes the authority to exercise a prohibition on all other claims to truth. In this denial of intellectual freedom the sufficient condition now joins the necessary conditions about which we spoke- particularly the necessary condition of Darwinian evolution- and tyranny is established. For an illustration of this shift from intellectual freedom to the end of freedom of thought and its accompanying gradational descent into tyranny, we refer to the mathematician David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion; Atheism and It’s Scientific Pretensions (2009).

In it Professor Berlinski diagrams the first step in this descent, as he quotes Chemistry Professor Peter Atkins of Oxford University, who claims that scientists “are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality, and intellectually honest”. The next step is represented in the words of another Oxford scientist, Richard Dawkins, who says that “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.” The final step in the descent into tyranny is described by Klaus Fischer in Nazi Germany; A New History (1995), as he observes that “Hitler and other spokesmen of Nazi ideology were anti-intellectuals who were motivated largely by propagandistic purposes.”

“The bedrock of Hitler’s worldview, what he called his ‘granite foundation,’ was the belief in the biological and cultural superiority of the Aryan race. This belief formed the basis of his philosophy of history and his political ideology. Hitler was a crude naturalist who explained human nature on the analogy of nature. His concept of nature, however, was not the benign view of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but the cruel Darwinian view that nature is red in tooth and claw and always favors the strongest or fittest.” Let us now take a closer look at the change that has come over the scientific method, as it has all too easily (and subtly) transformed itself from a tool for the advancement of human knowledge, and become- however unintentionally- the sufficient condition for tyranny…

Montag