Ignis Fatuus
How Karl Marx used science to convince the world that Communism would be the salvation of humankind...
Look, I can’t prove anything I’m about to layout. But if you’re interested in the line of thought I spit up in my last post, then stick around, kids, ‘cause I’z gonna make the case that our modern faith in the bona fides of science is what is leading more and more modern civilizations to actually WANT Totalitarianism in their backyard.
And yes, I’m going to discuss Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Communism. But not to promote or criticize them. I’m sure you have your OWN thinking around the ideology of Communism as expressed by Karl Heinrich Marx. I’m just going to make the case that science (and really, Scientism) is what engendered the eventual onslaught of the ideology of Communism in so many nations (i.e., People’s Republic of China, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, North Korea, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and the Republic of Cuba).
Note: Though still maintaining many Soviet-era bureaucracies and centralization strategies, the Russian Federation isn’t a Communist nation (technically). They’re considered a Federal Constitutional Republic (semi-Presidential) with a mixed economy.
Hobbes and Totalitarianism
The philosophy of Hobbes is a vivid illustration of how the materialistic denial of all the nonmaterial we emanate, the deterministic denial of human freedom, and the relativistic denial of universal values are all logically implied in Scientism. For Hobbes, Totalitarianism was the natural political corollary of his doctrine.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher in the 1600s and, to some, could be considered the first Scientolator (another term for the worshippers of science). He did turn the hypotheses of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, which applied only to nature, into dogmas that applied to the whole of reality. The whole of the 17th Century European wisdom centered on a revolutionized concept of nature—one that is entirely explicable in terms of “atoms moving by specific mechanical laws of motion.”
Hobbes insisted that all activity, including human behavior, could be explained similarly. According to Hobbes, all reality is physical and mechanical in behavior. Human behavior is ultimately due to the same laws of motion which govern the universe and which, in the case of humans, exercise their power through the feelings of pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion.
But what of consciousness? Can consciousness be explicable in terms of matter in motion? What of self-sacrifice? Stewardship? Love? Are these conceptions reducible in nature to matter in motion?
Hobbes responded to each of the above challenges with the following reasoning:
Each person desires power for themselves.
Life is a war of every man against every man.
Humans are natural brutes, dominated by lust; we are anarchic animals.
An absolute State strong enough to impose peace and order must be established to domesticate humans.
Once humans have agreed unconditionally to obey a central political authority, such authority should be vested in one person who, alone, determines social values. Therefore there can’t be any appeals against it on moral ground.
These assumptions of the scientific tradition, the tradition Hobbes is asserting, when dogmatically applied to humanity, lead to Totalitarianism. They are based on a materialistic denial of the nonmaterial in society, the deterministic denial of human freedom, and the relativistic denial of universal values1—all logically implied in Scientism.
So how do physics, chemistry, biology—a.k.a. science— explain our species’ age-old experience of the nonmaterial? They can’t. The scientific principle is entangled with materialism. Therefore, to satisfactorily explain the nonmaterial or phenomenal, the scientific tradition simply denies their reality or attributes them to primitive mistakes/ignorance. The dogma of materialism can’t admit the reality of spirit.
These men of the scientific tradition held that us primitive humans don’t understand the natural causes of events in nature. Therefore, we ascribe the phenomenal to invisible powers. Marx, and to a lesser degree, Auguste Comte, explicitly expressed that all religious belief is superstition and will gradually disappear as science discovers the proper explanations of natural occurrences.
Marxism
The scientific method begins with observed facts, then the formation of hypotheses based on those facts, and finally, the testing of the hypotheses by observation. That’s what the empirical principle of science is. But Karl Marx, being a child of the Scientific Revolution, disregarded the limitations inherent in the principles of science by taking the position that the general assumptions of the scientific climate of opinion are actually universal and final truths. He referred to his conception as “Scientific Socialism.”
Around the 1850s, the philosophy of Karl Marx was the most systematic, widespread exposition of the materialistic Scientism and the most consistent application of its dogmas to the problems of human society. Here was a well-respected social scientist who was disregarding the limitations inherent in science principles and turning the general assumptions of the climate of opinion into universal and final truths.
Let me explain…
Marx (and, with him, most of the western intelligentsia) went off-kilter with the very application that made him so well respected—the application of the scientific method to the study of the problems of human society and history. He amassed tons of sociological data and elaborated statistical analyses of them to establish theories of power in the social field. By way of his methods, he nearly single-handedly invented the principle of Communism.
But Marx disregarded the limitations inherent in the principles of science and turned the general assumptions of the scientific climate of opinion...INTO UNIVERSAL AND FINAL TRUTHS.
I’ll say it again. Marx abandoned the simple empirical principle of the scientific method. He wasn’t concerned with absolute truth or justice. He was interested in beliefs that were more true and a society that more just.
This flaw required the first founding head of government of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin, himself, a staunch Marxist, to speak of Marxism as…
…all-powerful…
…complete…
…the only consistent philosophy…
…the greatest of all instruments of understanding…
Soviet propaganda was in full swing when Engles and Marx published the Communist Manifesto.
The publication of the text, coupled with Lenin’s rise to power had a MUCH more ominous outcome on world events than the legacy of Communism and the Soviet Union. It established, across the world, the empiricist assumption that science alone gives truth.
Further, to keep to his scientific theme (bona fides?), Marx adopted a definition of Materialism based on the work of one of his contemporaries—Charles Darwin. Marx took over the scientific hypothesis of the evolution of organisms and characteristically applied it—to the whole of reality!
Thanks to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, reality was no longer being regarded as analogous with a machine, but rather, more comparable to an organism—eternally evolving. Lenin embraced Marxism with even more sincerity and cast the philosophy out across Russia as the fullest, most profound, and most universal aspect of existence.
So, a materialistic dogma was the fundamental doctrine of Marxism. But what Marx, Hobbes, Darwin, Lenin, and Hegel all missed is the primacy and ultimately the efficacy of the spirit—both in and over humans.
Can human thought and behavior be explained in exclusively materialistic terms?
Hostility Toward Religion
There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.
Hobbes and Comte had already established a hostility toward Christianity in their philosophies. But with Marx, it developed into aggressive atheism, which insisted that religious belief is false in its essence and vicious in its effects. Marx stated that religion survived in strength, despite the rise of science because it serves the purposes of the exploiting class.
He then advocated and predicted the inevitable, the complete abolition of religion in every form. He believed that science must replace religion as the controlling factor in human life and that the controlling science must be the science of social behavior or sociology. He wanted his Scientific Socialism to be the religion of the new age, providing the world with its creed, standards, and salvation.
Because of its materialistic basis, Scientism can’t admit the validity of any religious belief postulated on the non-physical reality. Such belief is ruled out a priori and not due to any impartial examination.
Communism and Totalitarianism
Marxist Scientism is not only a theory. It has become the basis of the current Communist state and other governments, worldwide. Here in the 21st century, Communism has now assumed a religious guise. Hostility to the superstitions of the old theistic religions have led to the introduction of the superstitions of a new humanistic religion; in one case, the state worshiped as a god, and in the other, humanity apotheosized.
Communism, established by Karl Marx, based on Scientism, or the deification of sociology, IS a religion: it has its sacred scriptures, its dogmatic creed, its hierarchy, its promises for the future, and its way of life. Its holy scriptures consist chiefly of the writings of Karl Marx, which are regarded as the infallible and final truth. The attitude of Communists to these works is fundamentalist in the extreme.
Lenin, who occupied the same place in the early days of Communism as Saint Paul in the apostolic age of Christianity, reminded the faithful that there must be no departure from this foundation—the gospel, according to Saint Marx.
If the emergence of a humanistic religion is ordinary in Scientism, then so must be the inevitable development of a Totalitarian political system in its wake. Therefore, Totalitarianism is, undoubtedly, inherent in Marxism.
In the first place, as materialistic sociology, Marxism is heavily weighted on the side of economics. The assumption is that if the economic conditions of life are perfected, then, by the doctrine of economic determinism, everything else will follow suit2. This means that the nature of the political structure is unimportant, provided only that it is capable of introducing and maintaining the proposed economic system. If it turns out (as, in fact, it did) that a Totalitarian political system is the only one that can perform this task, then such a structure must be imposed, according to this Scientism worldview. In the Marxist or any other materialistic theory, there are no other considerations which can be brought to bear on the question.
So, Totalitarianism is essential to Marxist philosophy….
“The revolution will be followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat; this dictatorship will have to be exercised, on behalf of the people, by a few men, who will have to centralize everything in the hands of the stage; and despotic inroads will be unavoidable.”
Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
Totalitarianism is the logical political consequence of the dogmas of Scientism (i.e. materialism and determinism). These dogmas deny the validity of universal human values and the reality and freedom of the human spirit; this denial leads in only one direction.
Suppose the obligation due to moral principles is rejected. In that case, the only realistic alternative for maintaining law and order is that the state should become the absolute arbiter of what is right and wrong. The state, in turn, in making its decisions, can look only to the achievement of its own purposes, the pursuit of which justifies the use of any means whatever. Lies, treachery, ruthlessness, and wholesale murder become entirely respectable provided they serve the ends of the powers that be. This is Totalitarian morality, which puts into effect the implications of ethical relativism.
Further, as we see in modern America over the past near-decade, suppose the idea of universal objective truth is abandoned. In that case, while it is realized that shared beliefs are the only natural cement of a society, it follows that the state must also determine what is true and false. Beliefs will be imposed on us all by the techniques of scientific conditioning, enforced by the ubiquitous activity of machines of loving grace.
In Totalitarianism, the state becomes omnipotent, omniscient, and the source of all law and truth. In other words, the state replaces god. The abolition of god leads to the deification of the state; the deification of the state results in the dissolution of humans.
The dogmas of materialism and determinism entail not only atheism but also anti-humanism.
To deny the primacy of the spirit and the reality of freedom in humans is to strip us of our specifically human attributes and deprive us of our rights, dignity, value, and status as human. Then, it becomes quite fitting that the individual should be reduced, as he is in the Communist state, to a soulless cog in a soulless economic machine.
It is Scientism that has brought us to this end. It begins by disregarding metaphysics and the realm of the spirit; it concentrates attention on the physical world; it interprets man in the materialistic and mechanistic categories appropriate to nature; it advocates a scientific society in which there is no room for humans beings.
Universal values = respect for the autonomy of others; benevolence; preventing harm; caring for the infirm; confidentiality; social responsibility; environmental stewardship; interdependence; reverence for locales
See Smith, 1759; Mill, 1848