Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

152 Scientism and Values
It is practised, and it has always been practised, by conservatives
as well as by progressives. To deduce from our "fallible understanding
of a largely imaginary past or a wholly imaginary future"
... "some fixed pattern" in reality dictated by "absolute categories
and ideals," is (I am paraphrasing Isaiah Berlin in his recent
inaugural oration) "an attitude found in equal measure on the
right and left wings in our days." 9 Comte's immediate progeny
consisted largely of left-wingers, but I mentioned Taine, who, in
the name of science, denounced the French Revolution. And I
have before this called attention to the .absolutistattitude of mind
as well as to the deceptive appeal to science in writers like Sorokin
and Toynbee, neither of whom can be regarded as left-wingers.
The system in which Sorokin ranges the civilizations rests on the
distinction between ideational and sensate characteristics. In order
to carry through and support that distinction, he shows tables for
which, as I wrote in my essay "Prophets of Doom," 10
the numbers of casualties in wars over twenty-five centuries have been
estimated and compared; and so have the' numbers of books or of
paintings showing a prevalent percentage either of sensate or of ideational
characteristics in any given period.
I must say that these immensely elaborate tables strike me as entirely
unconvincing. To me it· seems an illusion to think that so complicated,
so many-sided, so protean and elusive a thing as a civilization
can be reduced to the bare and simple language of rows and figures.
The idea that by such a device the subjective factor in the final judgment
can be eliminated is the worst illusion of all. The criteria by
which the classifications are to be made cannot really reduce the humblest
assistant to a machine (for much work is often left to assistants
as if it were something mechanical or impersonal). When it comes to
comparative statistics ranging over the whole history of the human
race, does not Sorokin forget how scanty are the data for some periods,
how unmanageably abundant for others? Is it possible, in using the
statistical method, to guard against the difficulty presented by the
fact that what survives from the remote past are mostly the thoughts
and works of art of an elite, while in our view of our own age the
activities and idiosyncrasies of the multitude take an infinitely larger,