In the quiet cavernous room of the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv is a chilling testament to the failed aspirations of people to rationally design a society with scientific precision.
The Marxist-Leninist vision began with hopeful intentions that arose from the optimism of Enlightenment science. With enough thought, so we believed, we could centrally plan a society, providing everyone with everything they needed. So-called “historical materialism” would mobilize the revolutionary capacities of the scientific method to usher in a new utopia of plenty, bolstered by insights on crop growth, medical developments, chemical manufacturing, power generation and all the industrial products and processes that were emerging from our grasp and control over Nature.
The ideas electrified the imagination. Could we, at last, discard millennia of uncertainty and our haphazard attempts to order society? Could we bask in a new era of certain outcomes, in which human lives could be given peace, stability and structure, thanks to our command of the laws underpinning the universe? There was no end of disciples, and eventually nations, willing to usher in this unlimited future of prosperity and equality. Many scientists were among them.
The disaster of revolutionary ambition
In short order there began to sprout, not fields of wheat, but a growing realization that the complexities of the human mind denied us exact predictions of what society required and that the successful planning of production without allowing for the vagaries of individuals and nature’s capriciousness was often impossible.
Quite apart from the technical problems of centralized organization, it was also clear to many, from the outset, that to implement a revolutionary program across the whole of society required unanimity. A singular social vision that claims to be supported by scientific objectivity will never tolerate dissent; you are either in favor of the plan, or you are the opposition. Disagreement is no longer a political matter; in being opposed to immutable “scientific laws” you are irrational. Thus, revolution becomes repression and its offspring, barbarity.
When Ukrainian agriculture began to fail in the early 1930s, rather than face the fact that science’s abilities were limited, the state resorted to lies, forced quotas, and eventually genocide. This was the acceptable price of ensuring that the scientific perfection of the Marxist paradise went unquestioned. It was inconceivable that humanity’s new tools to reveal the secrets of the universe and then direct them to the betterment of the common person could be flawed.
It could be said, I think without exaggeration, that one of the tragedies of Marxism, and the Holodomor, was the hubris and arrogance in our view that science is ultimately a revolutionary force. The Soviet fever dream lasted not much more than seven decades out of thousands of years of human communities – some testament to its astonishing implosion.
The Marxist experiment might be discarded if it was a one-off failure; science is full of experiments that don’t work. However, the bloodlust and depravity that engulfed revolutionary France as the instigators thought that all institutions could be swept away to build society anew using rational principles leaves us in no doubt that these are no mere quirks. This is where a blind reverence towards the revolutionary potential of science can take us. Where we once thought that the power of science would always lead society towards nirvana, when applauded too loudly it has often dragged us to destruction.
It should be said that these catastrophes are not arguments against science as an enterprise. The endlessly self-checking and self-critical nature of science make the disasters of central planning a failure born of the misapplication of science, and not the scientific method itself.
A society loyal to the precepts of science would have changed course when the desired ends failed to materialize. One might say that the planned society was not so much an overreach of science (or so-called “scientism”), but instead just poor science.
Nevertheless, the inspiration for these social upheavals was a conviction that fusing science with revolution could, with enough determination and a willingness to quash disunity, lead to a new type of civilization.
The advances and limits of our knowledge
There is no question that modern science has achieved prodigious advances. The discovery of physical principles that allow us to build airplanes and spaceships; unravelling the nature of the atom and the birth of industrial chemistry; the elucidation of the principles of evolution and the structure of DNA, are all impressive on the human scale.
The application of experimentation and observation, guided by scientific discipline, has achieved astonishingly rapid progress in our quality of life compared to the trial-and-error and supernaturally inspirited approaches of the ancients. Especially in medical science, just one hundred years later we have forgotten about a world in which women often died in childbirth and a trivial cut to the hand while gardening had a risk of leading to infection and death. Our health and life spans have improved immeasurably through the efforts of research.
Yet, the discovery of galaxies formed just after the birth of the universe billions of years ago, the appreciation of the minuteness of the Earth in the cosmic panorama, and the realization that an asteroid could render us extinct in an instant, discoveries which themselves are the product of science, remind us that our most magnificent achievements are small advances in a much more powerful cosmos in which human civilization is a vulnerable, and potentially transient, part.
There is still much that we do not know about the natural world. If revelations such as those of quantum physics and molecular biology have taught us anything, it is that discoveries which at once appear revolutionary are tiny chips on an edifice, the size of which we still have no comprehension.
Science as humility
The lesson of Holodomor rings clear. Science should never aspire to revolutionary progress, nor should it claim to have such power. Instead, in its cautious, thoughtful, and iterative evolutionary character lies its greatest promise. Our abject failure in achieving that apparently parochial and trivial ambition of choreographing a human society without killing millions of our fellow creatures is a reminder that science is, and should be, fundamentally anti-revolution.
The fruits of the scientific method continue, and will likely continue, to provide enormous strides in our knowledge as well as improvements in our lives. Physics, chemistry, biology and many of their allied fields expand with dazzling pace. Nonetheless, the uncanny ability of the universe to throw ever more perplexing oddities and mysteries at us, and our thwarted goals to corral and predict human behavior, have taught us that humility, not revolution, is science’s most excellent contribution to the human condition.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.