Part I: Socialism and Science
As a PhD who spent over 40 years in the academy, I would be the last to deny the great and enduring benefits to society of man’s successful application of the scientific method. What mankind has achieved through science and technology has been truly awesome. There is, of course, still much to learn and anyone who knows anything about science is aware that our scientific efforts are hardly perfect. Our knowledge, growing admirably, is still limited. Our methods of gaining and applying knowledge still need time to grow.
Interestingly, some are ambiguous about the potentialities of science. Many of us are fond of the scientific method without being willing to see it as more than a very human technique for seeking knowledge and understanding. We see nothing magic about it. Others, who have adopted science as their personal religion, nevertheless seem willing to doubt the power of science when doubt is convenient. For example, at this writing the country is locked in a struggle about the usefulness of a barrier on the southern border of the U.S. While the political left makes science its religion, it still insists that all the forces that science can muster do not render science capable of building a wall that, combined with available technologies, will make the border more secure.
Returning, however, to the above observation of the role of science, it has been noted that over the past century and more, many in society have bartered their trust in religion for an academic hope in science. In doing so, they may have lost for themselves and for mankind more than they have gained. I wish to address this issue and examine its relation to socialism. To do so, I shall review four cases in which science failed us miserably. I want to address some of the implications of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, the science of climatology’s early annunciation of an ice age, some of the facets of global warming or “climate change,” and the very current opioid crisis.
The Impact of Politics on Science
Case I: Limits to Growth.
The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 to address problems of our planet’s resources and their use. In 1970 a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology undertook an analysis of the implications of continued worldwide economic growth. They examined the basic factors determining and limiting growth on our planet: growing population, agricultural production, depletion of nonrenewable resources, industrial output and pollution. They concluded that numerous of our vitally necessary raw materials were about to disappear. Extrapolating from the known quantities and deposits of vital resources and the rates at which they were disappearing, they were able to calculate with their computer models that on some given date, say 1985, we would pull our last pound of copper from the ground. I was impressed when reading these findings approaching fifty years ago, so I don’t remember the exact dates of the disappearance of critical resources, but the format was as shown with copper. And on July 17, as a second example, at 2:36 pm in 1988 we would pull our last aluminum out of some mine. The disappearance of petroleum would follow on the heels of other precious resources at a very specific time that has now long since passed, of course.
Can you guess that as time passed their dire predictions did not prove accurate? Since they consulted with no economists, apparently, they could not deal with some imponderable, awesome complexities such as the following: As the use of gasoline begins to deplete the total quantity of crude oil available, the price of gas rises. As the price rises, suppliers are motivated to search the world for new sources of supply and develop new technologies to get oil harvested and marketed. Buyers look for substitute products when the price of an important one begins to rise. In this case, they would look for alternative sources of energy and they would carefully conserve energy by trying to get more mileage out of each gallon of gasoline. We see from the failure of the MIT scientists even to come close to the reality of resource depletion in this example that scientists, who are also just people, don’t always successfully manage an analysis of problems through time. This is especially true when extant market forces drive production, sales and consumption of scarce products and the physical and computational scientists involved know little if anything, apparently, about the economics pertaining to this issue.
Case II: Predicting an Ice Age
In an article by Betty Friedan, “The Coming Ice Age,” Harper’s Magazine announced in its September, 1958 issue that the onset of a new ice age had been predicted by climate scientists. Geophysicist Maurice Ewing, Director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and geologist-meteorologist William Donn claimed to have found why the giant glaciers had advanced and retreated over the earth in the last million years. It was their conclusion that the world was heading into another Ice Age as part of a process that had already begun.
Contemporary climatologists assure us that this is now well understood as a forgivable mistake. The science of climatology was young then and more work needed to be done. But here were two leading scientists of the time making claims that were published widely for a short period of time.
Part II: Science Politicized
As mentioned above, the past century or so has seen many barter their trust in religion for an academic hope in science. Many have shown a proclivity to reject religion out of hand and seek for humanity’s redemption from ignorance and incapacity in the realm of science. I wish to relate the issue of secularism to socialism. To do so, I have reviewed two cases in which science failed us miserably. I addressed above some of the implications of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and the science of climatology’s early annunciation of an ice age. In this part I want first to discuss some of the facets of global warming or “climate change,” then I shall turn to the very current opioid crisis.
Case III: Global Warming
We are informed that the debate over global warming is over. Scientists now agree uniformly, it is alleged, that man’s carbon footprint has irrevocably changed our climate and will play an ever-more-debilitating role in the future. Since I am not a physical scientist I am not in a position to evaluate the science underlying these predictions or forecasts. As an economist, however, I am convinced that regardless of the rate of warming, previous policies in the United States have been shortsighted. Specific economic policy measures undertaken in response to an actual crisis of global warming would need to be subjected to formal and more realistic benefit/cost analyses. If global warming is in fact occurring, the U.S. will have a far less negative impact on it than will China and India. If those countries were to continue to industrialize with the same environmental serenity that the U.S. did when we were at their stage of industrial development, there is nothing we could do to avert some of the disasters that have been predicted. Nevertheless, such a scenario would call for a policy of accommodation rather than panic.
What I wish to address here, however, is how to develop a skeptical view of the science that drives the panic in our country. As I indicated at the outset, science is wonderful, and science is great. But science is a crowd of people that are still learning and changing long-held perspectives and beliefs as they do. The objectivity science is supposed to display suggests the necessity of finding reasons to revise our perspectives as research discovers new facts and principles. But some perspectives and scientific beliefs bring classes of people windfall gains that they do not wish to relinquish to changing views. In current science, we have thousands of professors at universities who gain their living and their reputations by their published findings. Many of these are full of integrity; others would sell their mother’s soul to increase the likelihood of future income and prestige. They are perfectly willing to do what they feel they must do to gain tenure and promotion, income, and prestige. That includes getting grants to do research. They insist in their research applications that they are going to bring new light to the current dogma, which gradually takes on all the glitter rendered by the politically correct interpretation of current scientific dogma. They learn quickly that “climate change deniers” generally do not receive grants.
Some university scientists promote global warming just as liberal political indoctrination is promoted by their non-scientific colleagues. There are some scientists with excellent reputations who have been attacked by their more orthodox colleagues because they were not in line with the official doctrine. One of the two smartest individuals I have ever known personally in a long academy career is a nuclear physicist. His research has been on physics rather than climate science, but he has taken time to review the literature and the mathematical models underlying the conclusions of global warming science. Those models, he insists, are simply flawed and he doesn’t buy their conclusions at all. We have seen from the history of the Club of Rome as well as from the viewpoint of climate scientists back in the 1970s that scientists can be dead wrong, especially those who have been dead for a while.
Part III: A Medical Science Tragedy
Case IV: The Current Opioid Crisis
The opioid crisis (or epidemic) refers to the rapid increase in the use of prescription and non-prescription opioids in the United States. Overdose deaths, especially from prescription drugs and heroin, have reached epidemic levels. In 2015 of the total of 52,000 American deaths from all drug overdoses, two thirds (33,000) were from opioids. In 2017 there were more than 72,000 deaths from opioids. Those deaths exceeded the total number of deaths in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. The New Yorker writes that by 2010 the U.S., with around five per cent of the world’s population, consumed 99 per cent of the world’s hydrocodone (the narcotic in Vicodin), eighty per cent of the oxycodone (in Percocet and OxyContin), and sixty-five per cent of the hydromorphone (in Dilaudid).
How did doctors, who pledge to do their patients no harm, let the use of prescription narcotics get so out of hand? Traditionally, American doctors have prescribed narcotics almost exclusively for short-term pain (to recover from surgery, or for cancer victims soon to become terminal). But some time ago medical journals published two short accounts that helped promote an expanded role for prescription narcotics. The first of these, a 1980 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, claimed that less than one per cent of patients at Boston University Medical Center who received narcotics in hospitals became addicted. The second, a 1986 study in the journal Pain found that for non-cancer pain, narcotics can be prescribed “with relatively little risk of . . . opioid abuse.” The authors advised caution, and called for longer-term studies of patients on narcotics. In a follow-up report, the New Yorker pointedly observed that they hadn’t found any such studies.
The main manufacturers of narcotics –Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and Endo Pharmaceuticals thereafter aggressively marketed their products through ads in highly regarded publications, and through medical continuing-education courses. Once doctors knew that other doctors were supplying opioids to about anyone requesting help for pain, the use of these prescription drugs skyrocketed. Today, thousands are dying from overdose every month. It is now more dangerous to ask a doctor for pain relief than to travel on our highways.
Part IV: Socialism and Science Today
Without trying to take time to build a logical case for the beneficial contributions of religion in a world captivated with the potential of science, permit me to close with just a few thoughts about religion and its past role in the modern world. The enemies of religion will not be particularly receptive, but one would hope reason would suggest that an adversarial position against religious thought really isn’t appropriate.
Back around the First World War, the western world and its culture, especially in large urban centers, began quite rapidly to reject the Christian religion and to promote a purely secular society. Karl Marx and his socialist followers had already rejected belief in God and their atheism was seen as “scientific,” just as Marx’s socialism was deemed to be “scientific socialism.” Academic and urban types were anxious to replace religion with science.
On the farms and in many families back in those days, Bible reading was a daily practice of believers. Many believed the Bible can open people’s eyes to the natural and spiritual realities of our lives and some of us still do. When one does not open one’s eyes to the many miraculous things around us, one can begin to see life as a sequence of random happenings that can’t be explained well. The presence of “scientific theories” relieves us of the necessity to think about what the purpose of our lives might be. The New Testament gospels, written by honest, sincere, and intelligent people, report that many of their contemporaries were eyewitnesses of the living Savior, Jesus Christ, after he was resurrected. Historically, that fact caused people to stop and think, but Bible reading gradually ceased.
Such reading and study was not replaced, of course, by the primitive theories of Darwin. The world didn’t read his Origin of Species, so nobody seemed to notice an issue that Darwin knew could destroy his theory. The slow process of evolution, from the providential, or rather, fortunate mutation through the survival of the fittest species, failed to litter the planet with billions of skeletal remains of intermediate species between mutations and new species. Some of those who notice this are nevertheless unwilling to give up the rationale it provides for being an atheist. Thus, one simply doesn’t discuss this problem, or several other major issues with the theory of evolution, in the public realm.
Part V: Weltanschauung, the New World View
Science gradually became the new deity for the human race, and scientists sometimes feel obliged to sustain the belief that we need no God to live happily. There were many fine philosophers both before and after the onset of the renaissance, but none of their philosophies has served as a general philosophy of life or as a world view to serve as the foundation of our post-religious era. It would take much space and some expertise I lack to document properly the gradual evolution of our contemporary attitudes and culture in post-modern or other philosophical terms. But it is quite apparent that the philosophy that has served the role of underpinning much of our culture’s biases was the work of an economist philosopher, Karl Marx. He was the driving force of socialism, which has prevailed since the time of Marx, although people have ceased to read the holy writings of Capital.
We have ceased to understand most of the elements of Marx’s philosophy, which are treated at length in my book, Socialism. The world’s greatest minds on that topic would make it easy for us to reject socialism root and branch. I reviewed in detail their analysis and cited their conclusions in the book. In spite of the flaws and inadequacies in theoretical Marxist economics, many have nevertheless retained Marx’s hatred for capitalists, corporations, markets, and the freedom that undergirds all of the institutions of the market system. Anger that some have less of life’s material goods than more fortunate individuals, whether that results from lack of education, lack of motivation, lack of creativity, lack of persistence, lack of health, or just simply lack of good fortune, is the heritage of Marx’s hatred.
The persistent pursuit of socialist solutions has spawned social experimentation, social tyrannies, and perverse social outcomes that divide societies and generate new hostilities. We have failed to understand the natural benefits of market systems, as explicated by Adam Smith. Nor are we cognizant of the developments of science and technology which have enhanced market developments where they are not choked out by socialist ideology. And because of socialist suspicions and animus we have lost much of the spiritual and humane side of life.
A previous blog showed that modern societies are in the secular, very long-term process of disappearing. That can occur quite naturally as population growth ceases and as birth rates fall below replacement levels. Socialists, who teach women they have value only in competition with men in the work force and in management positions, seem to leave the future of humanity in the hands of the diminishing number of people who love children and families. Those are usually religious families. Thus, from the standpoint of humanity as a whole, the religious groups of the earth have definitely lost culture battles, but are certainly in a position to win the cultural war of survival as their adversary group strives diligently in the long term to become extinct.