Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Objectivity and Social Science 37
madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that
this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's
country. 14
It is necessary only to make a few substitutions such as that of
"science" for "nation" or "country" to see how closely this statement
made more than two thousand years ago fits the modern
case. Most of us today worship science. There has never been a
time when so many people-communists and anticommunists,
national socialists and antinational socialists-were joined in one
worship and so convinced that the thing they worship is the thing
that will bring everybody the good things of life and therefore
ought to be worshipped.
Herodotus, it is clear, would have understood how it is that the
problem of Antigone and Creon, which we have outlined above,
is a perennial problem and how this problem arises out of the
nature of society and the effort to create a rational social order,
with or without the aid of social science.
Now we cannot say that for a person to communicate with himself
or othe'rs he must have complete understanding of a subject,
for it is possible that every subject in the world is connected with
every other, and complete understanding or objectivity in this case
would call for knowing the whole truth about the world and
everything in it. But we can say and we can know as certainly as
we can know anything that we can't say something in one sentence
and deny it in another and make sense. If what we have said is
true, Miss Benedict does not make sense of a rational kind. The
kind of sense that she makes is of the irrational propagandistic
kind, a kind bound to lead away from rather than toward the
rational social order which Miss Benedict professes to want and
that all of us ought to want and work for.
IV
We do not have the space here to report and discuss in any
detail the allegations of social scientists concerning methods of
eliminating or counteracting bias in their work. The dodges are