A friend of mine just sent me a page on a Conservative website, Human Events Online, which lists the top ten “most harmful books of all time.” Oddly, the Bible did not make their list, but a predictable blend of Communist, Nazi and other ideological books did.

The item that I found particularly interesting though is number eight, which is a book I have been hearing a lot of lately in the course of my research. It is Auguste Comte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy. Their summary of it goes like this:

Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

This is, from what I can tell, the root philosophy behind the scientific technocratic worldview in it’s pure form. I think I am finally beginning to understand what it is that Conservatives fear in relation to this sort of philosophy. I have actually been engaging in a discussion over on the Canadian Technocracy, Inc forums which may be highly relevant to this.

I found some statements in the Technocracy philosophy which say that humans are no different from animals or machines, and can be conditioned and manipulated as such. As people there have pointed out, this is a fairly typical view taken by science. From what I can tell, the Technocratic philosophy teaches that human society should be managed by a team of qualified experts, operating according to the principles of science. So my thinking goes like this:

If humans are no different from machines and Technocracy exists to manage machines, then Technocracy exists to manage humans as though they were machines. Any moral or ethical system used in a Technocratic then are simply a tool to manage the human machine - a program designed to make the society and individual run smoothly. If that’s the case, then there’s nothing to stop Technocratic managers from modifying how that program (ethics/morals) works so as to improve the operation of the human machine. Thus, one’s morals can be invalidated and violated at any moment by those who manage the society. If a rule can be violated or nullified at any moment, then it is not a rule at all and can hardly be counted on as a guiding principle for the living of life.

This, if I’m not mistaken, is probably rather similar to the argument that Conservatives and Christian fundamentalists are trying to make when they talk about the bugaboo of moral relativism. Or maybe it’s not. But if it is, then I can understand why they see a threat from someone like Comte’s philosophies, and from the advances of science in general.