The dream of the new man
Totalitarian ideologies are not content with ordering how people live together. They want to change human beings themselves. To do so, they need not only political power but also a doctrine that makes their claim to power appear to be scientific knowledge.
National Socialism based its racial policy on a “scientific” racial theory. People were classified, assessed and ranked in a hierarchy according to supposedly biological characteristics. Political arbitrariness thus no longer appeared to be arbitrary, but the necessary consequence of alleged laws of nature. In the eyes of the regime, anyone who questioned the ideology was not merely contradicting a political conviction, but an “objective truth”.
Communism declared the class struggle to be the irrefutable law of history. The division of people into oppressed and oppressing classes was not regarded as a political interpretation but as scientifically proven knowledge. Anyone who belonged to a class defined as exploitative was declared an enemy of historical progress. Expropriation, persecution and violence could thus be justified as necessary steps on the way to a classless society. Like other dictatorships, communism gave its ideological value judgements the appearance of objective science.
These ideologies differed in their goals, their enemy images and their historical crimes. What they had in common, however, was a particular method: the politically desired result was fixed from the outset, and the so-called science had to “confirm” it. Contradictory facts were ignored, terms were ideologically reinterpreted, and critics were not refuted on the merits but cast under moral and political suspicion.
This is precisely where the difference between science and pseudoscience lies. Science puts forward a hypothesis and tests, with an open mind, whether it stands up to the facts. It discloses its methods, allows counter-arguments and must be prepared to correct or abandon its assumptions. A scientific statement must be testable and, in principle, refutable.
Pseudoscience takes the opposite path. Its result is fixed from the outset; facts are selected, ignored or reinterpreted until they fit the desired statement. Contradiction does not lead to a re-examination of the theory but to the disparagement of the critic. Pseudoscience adopts the language and prestige of science but replaces its open search for knowledge with the confirmation of a predetermined world view. It thus no longer serves knowledge, but the justification of political goals.
Today's queer and identity politics also takes on pseudoscientific features when it declares contested assumptions about sex and identity to be inviolable truths. When political assumptions about sex and identity may no longer be openly examined, biological facts give way to linguistic definitions and contradiction is already regarded as an attack on people, a debatable hypothesis becomes a creed with scientific pretensions.
Pseudoscience fulfils a crucial political function here: it transforms demands and value judgements into seemingly compelling necessities. Whoever disagrees no longer appears as a citizen with a different view, but as backward, ignorant or dangerous. In this way, language rules, checks on people's convictions and institutional coercion can be presented as the mere implementation of scientific findings.
Here, once again, the old dream of the new man shows itself: politics, education and the media are no longer merely meant to inform or to convey rules for living together peacefully. They are meant to change language, thought and perception. Desired attitudes are morally rewarded, while dissenting views are not regarded as legitimate disagreement but as a flaw of character.
New social theories, social change and the protection of minorities are by no means totalitarian in themselves. The crucial line is crossed where a political doctrine may no longer be questioned and the state begins to impose it as a binding view of humanity through schools, universities, the media and the administration. It then no longer merely regulates the behaviour of its citizens but lays claim to their thoughts and their consciousness.
Free human beings do not need a state that recreates them according to a “scientific formula”. They need the freedom to think for themselves, to examine, to doubt, to disagree and to make mistakes. History teaches us to be particularly wary of those political doctrines that pass off their value judgements as scientific certainties.