Science, Perfect Knowledge and Fixing the Human Environment
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science.
Engels
Marx and Engels believed that society and economics forced the human mind to move. As they wrote of their enemies in the Communist Manifesto, “Your very ideas are … determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property … this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.”[1] Thus, there were no absolute moral laws but only laws that changed with economic circumstances.
The contradiction here is not hard to see. Marx’s argument is that individual thinking is the product of the economic conditions of the day. Thus, capitalist responses to the communists are a product of economics, environment, and self-interest. This means that the capitalist cannot be trusted, and their replies are empty. This style of attack has remained powerful. One author summarizes Marx’s tactic this way:
It proved to be a most convenient tool in political conflicts: it allowed discrediting one’s opponent without entering into … argument. There was no sense in analyzing the opponent’s views on their merits ... It was much better to show that his views represented his interests and were conditioned by his social and economic position.
Yet that same criticism Marx used would have to be applied to Marx’s own thinking. He, too, was just the product of his economic and social environment.[2] Thus, by his own ideas, his arguments carry no weight. Here he violates the law of noncontradiction. Somehow Marx and Engels were no longer limited by the ideas of their economy and society while everyone else is. To return to a prior quote, Marx and Engels “exempt themselves from the critique they use to discredit everyone else. They act as if they are not blinded by the same irrational forces that distort and bias everyone else’s views—they are mysteriously able to rise above the forces that enslave everyone else—they alone are capable of achieving an untainted insight into reality.”[3] Chesterton, as always, humorously points out the foolishness of Marx and Engel’s own position when he says, “no sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically … No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind.”[4] Despite this error, many people continued to build on this contradiction. Only later would the implications of this error become clear.
While other people remained under the influence of their environments, Marx and Engels thought they had moved beyond these limitations because they had discovered the key to history. “The final causes of all social changes and political revolution are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s insight into eternal truth and justice ... but in the economics of each particular epoch.”[5]Economic determinism was the key to making history a science which could predict and control the future.[6] Therefore, Marx and Engels advocated a change in economic structure as the only way of improving society and refining humanity.[7] This task would most easily be done through the state, and while Marx and Engels did not advocate violent overthrow of the current political institutions, many of their followers would. It is not hard to see how their followers ended up with this view. As Engels wrote: “Once we do understand … [social and natural forces], once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only on ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends.”[8]
They felt it was their obligation to influence the economic system and government to free others from economic and societal oppression and thus create a higher type of human nature and happiness. This followed from their philosophic assumptions. They could not believe in the improvement of individual humans to improve society, because they believed human beings are not the creators of society but its products.[9]
Here again we find this dangerous idea, the belief that some set of people have broken free from the restraint of the environment and thus must become the saviors and shapers of their fellow human beings. They must do this to bring others to their level. In Marx’s own words, “the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances, and that the educator himself needs educating.” This idea, although at first seeming to leave room for free thinking by individuals, must inevitably arrive at dividing society into two parts, of which “the educator” is superior to society.[10] Only some can change the circumstances but this ability is not open to all people. Freedom to shape life is only available to the wise leadership, not to those the leaders supposedly represent.
Marx believed that for all problems there was a solution which could be found by science, and that when found this could be put into effect by the state.[11] This scientific solution implies a knowledge that is complete and perfect.[12] The world is an incredibly complex place but Marx and Engels believed humanity had the highest intelligence in the universe. Thus as leaders of humanity, they needed to use their insight to impact the environment. At the time, the idea of human omniscience had some credibility by speaking of it as being scientific. Indeed, many want to claim their ideas are scientific, but Marx was merely the first of many to mock his enemies by this method and thus make people think that he truly had more knowledge than he did. As one critic put it: “The strategy of the materialists was to appropriate to themselves the toga of ‘science’ and take credit for all scientific accomplishments. Then they determined to ridicule and rationalize away all the things which they opposed by pronouncing them ’unscientific.’”[13]
Even the most capable and intelligent person is inherently limited in their knowledge. There are in this world millions of facts which cannot be known in their entirety by any individual or group of individuals. No doctor is able to infallibly diagnose and treat every condition, even with objective measurements that point to what may be the cause. No weatherman on television can predict with absolute accuracy whether it will rain tomorrow despite large amounts of data. They can only give probabilities, which is to say an educated guess. The limits of our knowledge are painfully obvious here, yet Marx like many today presumed it was possible for the state to perfectly organize human beings and their behavior. Again, individual imperfections in knowledge are not automatically overcome by taking more and more people and putting them in a group called government. They might be able to share information with slightly more ease, but they are not all-knowing, especially about the mundane aspects of the life of an individual who may be thousands of miles away. Marx and Engels failed to recognized that human beings and their organization are perhaps the most complex systems of all. When this theory of scientific planning of everything by government was put into effect in the Soviet Union, the results were poverty and a malfunctioning government bureaucracy.
The social sciences often attempt to claim the infallibility of science without the rigor of the physical sciences. It should be noted, before accepting the claims of the social sciences—like sociology, psychology, or anthropology—that there is far less resemblance to the physical sciences than meets the eye. A science of humanity cannot be carried out the same way a failed chemistry experiment can. The chemicals can be thrown out, new chemicals readily acquired, and the experiment rerun if the first attempt fails. This is not possible with humans, though many scientists have treated human beings as if they were chemicals in the name of scientific progress. Still, adopting the pretense of science has been a powerful means of gaining power. Many who wish to see their ideas imposed on the world often claim to be scientific and rational. They sought to be praised by association with science though they were not scientific. However, these limitations never really made a dent in the confidence of Marxists and others who thought they could come up with a science of human beings. Still, we must follow the implications of this belief. This includes the question, If we think that we have perfect knowledge which science claims is possible and such insight will make the world better, does it not become an obligation to use it? The answer is that people must be made to follow this new and better way.
But what if people have an honest disagreement on how life should be conducted? What if their views are not changed by this so-called scientific discoveries of the wise few? This is no small question. For the claim of those like Marx and Engels is that they can develop a way of organizing all individuals, which will take all knowledge into consideration, and will be for the good of all. But they do not address what will happen when this way is applied to flesh and blood people whose desires might be different than theirs. When their scientific model did not square with real people living in the real world, they ignored the desires of others and labeled those desires as simply products of economic and social conditions, “class interest” in their lingo. As Marx and Engels wrote about the common man in their manifesto, “His relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common … Law, morality, religion, are to him so many … prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many… [selfish] interests.”[14] They began with the assumption that what people expressed was only a mistaken assumption. Restricting other people’s freedom and choices is inevitable under such assumptions because ordinary people lack the special knowledge to fix their lives. Someone wiser must do it for them since what is done to them is for their own good. As one observer noted:
The Jacobins, Robespierre, Hitler, Mussolini, the Communists all use this very same method of argument, of saying that men do not know what they truly want … [therefore] when I bend human beings to my will … I am not merely doing something which is good for them … I am doing that which they truly want, though they may deny it … Therefore I speak for them, on their behalf … They do not know what their true self is, whereas I, who am wise, who am rational, who am the great benevolent legislator—I know this.[15]
For a long time, many people have trusted too much in their own knowledge and thought they could fix the world. They have often seen themselves as the wise few who need to direct the lives of the foolish many. Chesterton accurately diagnosed this kind of flaw in another author, but the criticism applies to Marx as well:
Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin … the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men ... And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle’s pathetic belief (or anyone else’s pathetic belief) in “the wise few.” There are no wise few.[16]
To try to fix all the problems of the world is to be taking on the powers of God. This is precisely what Marx thought he was able to do because he thought he had discovered laws of history that were akin to the laws of science.[17] This should not come as a surprise given his animosity toward God and his belief that human consciousness is the highest intelligence in the universe. What is surprising is how his assumptions played out in both his own life and the countries which were most eager to put his ideas into action. Examining how his ideas worked in practice is something we will look at in the next section, but first, we should examine how Marx and Engel’s ideas affected those closest to them.
[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (A Public Domain Book), loc 254, Kindle Edition. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (Wallachia Press, 2015), loc 1395, Kindle Edition. [2] Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth (Colorado Springs: David Cook, 2015) Pg 185, Kindle edition. [4] G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas (Business and Leadership Publishing, 2015) loc 3874, Kindle Edition. [5] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 31, Kindle Edition. [6] Peter Kreeft, Socrates Meets Marx (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), loc 207-209, Kindle Edition. [7] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 31, Kindle Edition. Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 191, Kindle Edition. [8] Ibid, pg 89. [9] For an example of this thinking in the US see Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés (New York: Sentinel, 2012) pg 53, Kindle Edition. [10] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 41. Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 116, Kindle Edition. [11] Robert Conquest, Dragons of Expectations (New York: WW Norton an Co, 2005), pg 12-13. [12] Paul Kengor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), pg51, Kindle Edition. [13] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 203, Kindle Edition. [14] Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (A Public Domain Book), loc 162, Kindle Edition. [15] Paul Hollander, From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University press 2016), pg 299, Kindle edition. [16] G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (A Public Domain Book: Amazon, 2011), pg 71, Kindle Edition. [17] Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 164, Kindle Edition.
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