NERVE OF SIDNEY HOOK
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chology, the engineering sciences, pedagogy, even the criticism of the
arts, which has more of science in it than its practitioners have been
willing to admit, these are all directed to making better men, and have
contributed to our ideas of what is the good individual.
The fact that scientific method in psychology and the social fields
may also be applied for fascist and counter-revolutionary ends, and that
a naturalist view of man, as free from religion and metaphysics as the
most advanced scientific thinking of the time, is compatible with reac–
tionary politics and oppression, should keep us from this empty venera–
tion of method. Even religious and irrational racial beliefs may be
propagated from above as "natural" means of befuddling people and
holding them in line. After all, hypnotism is also a scientific technique.
Some materialists of the eighteenth century approved of religion for the
people as an effective instrument of control. Comte, the founder of
positivism, supported the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon as a step toward
the fulfillment of his thought, and designed a future society ruled scien–
tifically by an oligarchy of bankers and experts. One of the leading
parties of reaction in France, the Action Francaise, includes a positivist,
unreligious wing, nourished by the political writings of Renan and Taine,
enthusiasts of science and great protagonists of scientific method in the
study of religions and the arts. To insist therefore, as Hook does, on
scientific methods in politics, in abstraction from class values (in con–
tradiction, we must note, of Hook's earlier writings), and according to
the criteria of universal assent, is to confuse the real issues and to conceal
from his readers the accomplishments of socialist thought.
Nor can we agree with Dewey that it is anti-naturalism that has
prevented "the application of scientific methods in the whole field of
human and social subject-matter". This is the liberal counterpart of the
reactionary view that the present conflicts are due to the naturalistic
philosophies.
The choice today is not between supernaturalism and naturalism,
irrationality and science. It is between the socialist program and the
half dozen schemes which are more or less naturalistic and scientific in
their economic and political calculations, but are designed to maintain
the present system with all its cruelties and chaos. The greatest enemy is
not the metaphysician or the priest, dangerous as he may
be,
but the
armed class opponent who uses the resources of science for his own ends.
DAVID MERIAN
