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class; but they also are absolutists, holding that German or proletarian
values are best.
Some of Mr. Viereck's other allies are much worse: they are the
people he has singled out as his greatest enemies. So, for example, he
is at one with what he calls "the Communazis" when he says, "One
boast made of science by one kind of pragmatic liberal is that it is
'ethically neutral.' This is supposed to be science's greatest achievement.
The supposition illustrates the value-denying standard-destroying, and
therefore freedom-destroying character of one kind of relativistic liber–
alism. (I am not attacking and never intend to attack liberalism in
general.)
It
is easy to figure out the political consequences if 'scientific
mind' means 'ethical neutrality.''' The last sentence is sheer non se–
quitur. To say that science is ethically neutral is not to say that the
"scientific mind" means "ethical neutrality." Pragmatists, who would
characterize science itself as ethically neutral, would also urge that
values be thought about scientifically. And they would, rightly, see no
contradiction in a scientist's having all kinds of values. Typically, Mr.
Viereck leaves the real argument so that we have no idea what ethics
he finds in the content of science, and goes on to talk of the· "liberal
scientific mind as believing that justice, liberty, and ethics "are mere
symbols of 'ego insecurity,'" or rationalizations of self-interest, sex, or
inferiority complex. This sounds like an example of the unscientific
mind hard at its usual work of total confusion.
The chief attack in our day on the ethical neutrality of science
comes from the Communists and the Nazis; the Communists ridicule
bourgeois science and extol proletarian science (as though there were
such things); the Nazis argued that truth was what was good for a
people or race and that there was German science, American science,
Jewish science, Chinese science, etc. Relativity physics, indeed all theo–
retical physics, was denounced in the Third Reich as Jewish science in
contrast to sober German experimental physics.
Perhaps the difficulty is that Mr. Viereck cannot make up his mind
what he means and what he loves. There is contradiction at the core of
his
thought. Basic to his conservative position is his belief that human
nature is not to be trusted and that there is, as he puts it "(politically
speaking) . . . Original
Sin,
which must be restrained by the ethical
traffic-lights of traditionalism." He is so sure that this is the fundamental
issue that he continues,
"If
human nature were naturally good, then I
would join the left-liberals and democratic socialists of the west in trust–
ing a party power-machine to regiment a country's economy without
eventually creating a political dictatorship to enforce such vast con-
