Science as Ideology

Light of Truth

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) said about his wife in the last days of his life, “Grazia is with me in the hospital, which is a great joy, and she fills the room with light.” Human relations and values of life are so very important. “My life has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intellectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are criminals, not the leaders of mankind.” Feyerabend’s best-known work is his book Against Method. Here Feyerabend argued for ‘epistemological anarchism.’ Challenging science and the absolute claim to objectivity he tells stories, fairy tales, which have vaguely historical foundations. He dares to call scientific theories stories. Feyerabend was not, as he is sometimes portrayed, an ‘enemy of science.’ He was an enemy of some kinds of science. In Against Method, he declares that society now has to be freed from the stranglehold of a domineering scientific establishment, just as it once had to be freed from the grip of the One True Religion. Science today has become like religion making absolute claims to truth and objectivity, which is simply a myth. “Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense.” Scientific “facts” are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious “facts” were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly… But science is accepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards “demythologization,” for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.” The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.

The semblance of Absolute Truth in science is nothing but Absolute Conformism.

The sciences of today no more an interest free enterprise but a business enterprise that runs on business principles. Research in large institutes is not guided by Truth and Reason but by the most rewarding fashion, and the great minds of today increasingly turn to where the money is.

“A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centres of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were it has for outsiders, but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it.” ‘TRUTH,’ written ‘in capital letters,’ is an orphan in this world, without power and influence…

“I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an attitude that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in the treatment of minorities in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists of turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance.”

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