Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

46 Scientism and Values
support of the Carnegie Corporation, one of the country's wealthiest
foundations. The Carnegie Corporation gave Myrdal a commission
to produce a "wholly objective and dispassionate" 30 study.
Myrdal accepted the Carnegie Corporation's commission, but produced
a work in which he says correctly that objectivity achieved
in the conventional ways, that is by rituals involving assertions and
resolutions, is not trustworthy.31 Myrdal, flouting his commission
-which certainly deserved to be flouted-argues. that it is the
duty of the social scientist to serve the ends chosen by the society
of which he is a member; he assumes that the United States is one
society; and he argues that the United States has chosen equality
as one of its ends. The difficulty with Myrdal's argument is that
in the context of modern science, a context which Myrdal accepts,
an appeal for equality is an appeal to power. Most of us want
equality, and the meaning that we give to equality is, all the power
that we have the power to get. We work for or against equality as
we think it works for or against getting power for us. Modern science
has made power and only power the supreme and the only
reality. All else is illusion. Freedom, equality, justice are in its
scheme only means of deception, and necessarily so. It would be
necessary to change the foundations of modern science in order to
have any other possibility. The social scientist in this view does
not necessarily engage in deception by intention. His use of deception
may be a consequence of his ignorance, or it may be a
consequence of his willingness to playa Machiavellian part.
It should not be surprising, when we have some understanding
of this problem, that in the two most destructive periods. in the
history of mankind, the periods of the two world wars of the twentieth
century, modern social scientists generally supported the
ends of their own societies and in doing so supported the destruction.
The perennial enactment within and among societies of the
parts played by Antigone and Creon goes on and on, and the
meaning of the parts is utterly lost.
In summary, our argument reaches further than proof that the
social scientist's idea that he knows how to proceed impartially is
an illusion. It raises the question whether there is any illusion in