10
PARTISAN REVIEW
challenge of poverty, unemployment, distribution of raw materials,
the impact of technology? Attempts to grapple with these prob–
lems in relation to human needs in a rational and scientific spirit
have run squarely against class interests and privileges which cut
savagely short any inquiry into their justification. What has con–
trolled our response to basic social problems have been principles
drawn from the outworn traditions or opportunist compromises
that reflect nothing but the shifting strength of the interests behind
them. In either case the procedure has had little to do with the
ethics and logic of scientific method. It is only by courtesy that
we can call them principles at all. Drift and improvisation have
been the rule. Enthusiasm for the bare
results
of the physical
sciences-which undoubtedly did reach a high pitch in the 19th
century-does not betoken an acceptance of a scientific or experi–
mental philosophy of life in which all values are tested by their
causes and consequences. The cry that a set of "laboratory .tech–
niques" cannot determine values in a philosophy of life betrays
the literary man's illusion that the laboratory procedures of the
natural sciences are .the he-all and end-all of scientific method
instead of restricted applications of it in special fields.
The truth is that scientific method has until now been regarded
as irrelevant in testing the values embodied in social institutions.
If
one accepted the religionists' assumption that values can be
grounded only on a true religion and metaphysics, together with
their views about the ideal causation of events, it could be legiti–
mately urged against them that the bankruptcy of civilization
testifies to the bankruptcy of
their
metaphysics. For if science is
irrelevant to values, it cannot corrupt them; and if theology and
metaphysics are their sacred guardian, they are responsible for
the world we live in.
Theology in a Crisis
The social principles of Christianity have had almost two
thousand years in which to order the world on a moral basis. It
is not likely that anything new can be discovered from its prin–
ciples or that its social gospel will succeed better in eliminating
war, social distress, and intense factional strife, than it did during
the historical periods in which religious institutions enjoyed chief
authority. And when we examine the behavior and doctrines of
different religious groups as they meet the trials of our world
