Science and Serfdom: Thoughts on Hayek

I am thinking along a different track this morning, possibly because of the Obamessiah pulling the equivalent of an all-nighter for foreign affairs creds.

From one of the most important and influential books of the 20th century The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek:

Possibly we have not yet given enough attention to one feature of intellectual development in Germany during the last hundred years which is now in an almost identical form making its appearance in the English-speaking countries: the scientists’ agitating for a “scientific” organization of society. The ideal of a society organized “through and through” from the top has in Germany been considerably furthered by the quite unique influence which her scientific and technological specialists were allowed to exercise on the formation of social and political opinions (p. 208)

Hayek goes on to speak of the “intolerance of reason” which is quite applicable to our nation today.

Have you ever wondered how the culture that produced Luther, Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, and Schiller could have produce Nietzsche and finally Hitler? For one thing, it was not the same culture in the end. Hayek suggests that Germany moved from “humanities” to “realities”, then reminds us in a footnote that Hobbes in Leviathan wanted the study of the classics suppressed because they instilled a “dangerous spirit of liberty”.

Collectivists agree: society needs to be better organized. People, as Bill Clinton once opined, just have too much freedom. Al Gore wants government to control how much energy you and I are allowed to use. (Al, I’m sure, gets an exemption with his carbon-credit scam.) Obama and the current Democrat leadership will not allow more drilling for oil to increase supply, but instead want Americans to surrender their freedom of movement for the greater good of decreased demand.

It makes me sick to even think of this. Civilization struggled up out of the collectivist, tribal mind-set largely through the wisdom and insight of the Judeo-Christian religious perspective. America, the epitome of individual rights and freedom, is the result of that struggle upward. We have been the City on the Hill, the light for the rest of the world for two centuries.

I guess I just don’t understand people who want power and control over the lives and choices of others. I would like for my children and grandchildren to make good choices rather than bad ones, but I recognize that we learn from our errors. Despite my vast wisdom and encyclopedic knowledge, I do not know everything. I am particularly limited when it comes to seeing the positive results that can arise in the long-term from what looks like a bad situation in the short-term. I don’t think I am the only one with this limitation. Thus I feel it is fair to question the concept that government has any right to limit my freedom beyond the basics of requiring me to recognize and respect the rights of other individuals. The f’ning government, i.e., the collective, has no rights whatsoever; rights belong only to individuals.

Just as it causes concern that a lightweight like Obama could potentially be President, so, too, we should be concerned when science is elevated beyond its correct role. Hayek – who was there when it happened – says that when the Nazis came to power, scholars and scientists readily accepted the movement and were supportive of the state in its efforts to limit freedom. The Nazis did purge the universities, but the professors they eliminated were mainly the ones in the social sciences critical of the new state -- except, of course, for those who were Jewish. The non-Jews among the natural sciences, where thinking is supposed to be most rigorous, were the least critical of the Nazi regime.

When I hear people like the current crop of “militant atheists” advocating for a better science curriculum in the schools at the expense of the classics and religion, I wonder what it is that will guide society in the future. I am all for giving children a solid education in math and science. Mathematics, in particular, is a language that as many as possible need to know as well as possible. But mathematics is not a sufficient basis for civilization, not even when combined with physics, biology and chemistry. What and how may be important, but they are useless – no, worse, they are dangerous without why.

Science and technology are useful servants. They should not be allowed to master us.