… is from page 257 of Thomas Sowell’s December 22nd, 2009, National Review essay titled “The ‘Science’ Mantra” as this essay is reprinted in Sowell’s 2010 collection, Dismantling America:
Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few – like themselves – can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.
DBx: Indeed so.
Modern science is indeed a remarkable and wonderful human achievement. Yet it loses all claim to objectivity and to the noble name “science” the moment any of its conclusions are regarded as incontestable justifications for using state power to engineer society. “Science” so used is a synonym for “god.” And the politicians, bureaucrats, and “experts” who today seek to rule according to such “science” differ in no intellectual or ethical way from the chieftains, monarchs, and apparatchiks in the past who coercively lorded over others in the name of fulfilling the will of god or of achieving what is ordained by “History.”
