Albert Einstein, Science and Socialism

The very first issue of the Left journal "Monthly Review", published in 1949, featured an article written by Albert Einstein - yes, the scientist we all know and love - entitled Why Socialism? In it one not only finds a well composed appraisal and argument for socialism, but what I believe to be some crucial points about the nature and role of science. For me, re-reading this article was quite literally refreshing, as I have currently been embroiled in a number of debates with socialists who are openly hostile to religion, mostly on the grounds that it is "anti-science".

Einstein begins his article by taking up these very issues, by recognizing what is appropriate for scientific investigation, and what is not:

"[S]ocialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends."

I was delighted to read these lines, for what I will readily admit to be a rather sophomoric reason. A while back I had made the same claims about science, and denounced by hacks of a certain political party for being an irrational idealist. It is beyond all doubt, however, that these same people would not have hurled their invective at Einstein. At the very least they would have disagreed with respect.

Science cannot create ends - this to me has always appeared to be an elementary, self-evident truth. Science is a means to an end, which is another way of saying that science is wholly subordinated to our values, to our "social-ethical end". The problem perhaps is that not all socialists share the same ethical vision. Some have elevated science into an end itself.

Einstein warns us of the dangers of a technocratic approach to social problems:

"[W]e should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."

Do these lines require further comment? Apparently for Einstein there was in fact a whole realm of "human problems" that may be beyond the scope of scientific methods. "On guard against overestimation" - this was surely asking too much. People are always on guard against those they perceive to be their enemies, but rarely is that disposition turned inward. Pride and arrogance are easier emotional states to attain than introspection and self-criticism.

What Einstein has to say about socialism throughout the rest of the article, I will not comment upon here, although I encourage everyone to read the full article. I just wish to say to anti-religion socialists that it was a common agreement on core values with the Church, and not "scientific" evidence or any other sort of evidence that reconciled me with it.

My "faith" therefore is of a different kind. I am willing to look at an institution whose values I share in large part, and take their spiritual claims seriously. The logic I employ, and it may not be free of fallacy, is as follows: if I believe the Church has the right values, then it would seem that I should also adapt its beliefs, from which those values are derived. If I were facing an organization which was unashamedly anti-science, I would have my doubts about joining it. My decision to rejoin the Church was made infinitely easier by the mere fact that it embraces science. What it rejects, and what I began to reject long before my reconciliation, is philosophical materialism.

Economics can be studied scientifically. But socialism as a "social-ethical ideal" is outside of the scope of science. Science cannot create an ethical system - it can tell us what "is", but never, at least on its own, what "ought". At the same time, all human beings have biases, and in the field of economics, positivism (value-free science) is virtually impossible. Marxists have always known this and embraced their "partisan science", while accusing bourgeois economists and social scientists in general as presenting their science as falsely "impartial".

Social scientists must strive to give us as accurate a picture as possible of history and society. But it is up to all of us to clearly demarcate the scientific claims from the moral or ethical claims, which can become tangled and confused with one another. Marx never made a moral claim - directly. But moral claims inevitably follow from his work. In fact, as I argued in my master's thesis, Marxist economics would have been impossible without the moral claims made by previous bourgeois theorists regarding labor and natural law, and the conclusions can be interpreted as continuing the natural law tradition.

But Marx, and many Marxists, refused to acknowledge these claims - there is a strange mixture of reverent awe for "objective truth" alongside a sloppy mish-mash of moral certainty regarding their own views on what the working class is owed, and moral relativism whenever morality threatens to tell them that something they choose to do in their own lives is wrong. Fear of being wrong, or being thought wrong, of having done wrong, seems to animate so many of these paranoid polemics against religion. I think true wisdom begins with getting over this fear.