Materialism and the Contemporary Natural Sciences (page 6)

Robert Steigerwald

There is no need for a miracle, for a divine, supernatural act to explain biological development. The only possibility of avoiding this conclusion would be the statement that the laws ruling it have been created together with the world by an extrahuman force. But then reasonable arguments for the possibility and necessity of this extranatural power must be found, and that cannot be established by scientific means.

The question then arises: Does this conception of evolution not also imply the impossibility of predicting the future development of social systems, since at such a bifurcation point the system staggers, fluctuates, tries to replace the old order by a new one, but with no certainty about what will be chosen? Does this not disprove the materialist historical conception that socialism is the system that follows capitalism? This question alone is challenge enough for materialism in historical and social theory.

Wherever the materialist historical conception is viewed as a theory of an unalterable, mechanical sequence of several social systems, that at bifurcation points only a predetermined, one-dimensional process could develop, then this theory has been made into a monster, deserving the criticism it receives. Hawking correctly warns against the arbitrary application of natural laws to society: “One has to keep the investigation of the fundamental laws of science and the study of human behavior in separate compartments” (1993, 136). Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate in physics (creator of quark theory), referring to the terms chaos and energy field, writes that such conceptions of modern theories and hypotheses of natural sciences have turned originally “useful concepts into meaningless clichés” (1994, 27).

I also wish to recall the consequences of trying to transfer perceptions from biological evolution theory, especially Darwin’s, to society. It is true that theories that contradict fundamental physical laws cannot be correct. Higher forms of systems that have undergone evolutionary development such as biological and social systems have in common the tendency to reproduce themselves. Self-organization is an especially high level of development, possible only if in such a system changes do occur (for example, mutations in biological systems), otherwise the systems would stagnate. These changes are the material of evolution, leading to a competition among viable systems. In this competition, the systems that survive are those that are best able to adapt to the conditions in which they exist.

Yet important differences exist, as has been pointed out by Ebeling:

The “testing” of different principles for the activity of nonhuman living organisms is not subject to the moments of consciousness that occur among humans in a social context as they seek ways for optimal satisfaction of certain needs.
In the social sphere, technical or social variations or mutations begin in the mental sphere with thought experiments that can be combined with real experiments. This we do not find in prehuman evolution.

In the social sphere, the selection among possibilities of development already begins during a stage in which actions are planned on the basis of values that follow from theoretical and ethical standards, unlike biological systems (the simulation of chances of survival of prebiotic or primitive biotic systems follows other norms).
These valuations in the social sphere utilize collective knowledge, which today increasingly has a worldwide nature, with the result that on the one hand, development is accelerated, while on the other isolation causes great harm to the isolated system (1990, 671ff.

With this background, let us look at what happened in 1989 and the following years. Was there a multiplicity of choices for the systems that were collapsing? Was it really impossible to foresee what would follow the breakdown?

Despite somewhat different conditions and despite differences in the quality of the leading persons in most of the state systems that collapsed, the question of property became the pivotal factor, so that the former socialist ideological-political superstructure was destroyed and replaced with a capitalist one. At the bifurcation point that was arrived at in the social sphere, not only did unforeseeable processes take place, but class forces encountered each other in a struggle for their interests, as is projected in the materialist conception of history and the theory of scientific socialism.

Notes

1. Reference to a German poem by Christian Morgensternm “Die unmögliche Tatsache” (The Impossible Fact) in which a man named Palmström is run over and killed while improperly crossing an intersection. Upon contemplating the circumstances of his death, he reasons that the car that ran him over should not have legally been there. He then concludes that he is not dead because “what must not be, cannot be.”—Ed.

2. Translation of quotations from non-English sources in the Reference List were made by the translator.

3. In the discussion that follows, I do not deal with differences in the kinds of models or the difference between material and theoretical models.

4. The author is referring here to the historically dominant variety of critical realism in Europe, which is akin to a form of neo-Thomism. See Hörz, Röseberg, et al. 1980, 165-77).

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