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TECHNOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY


	Why aren't political decisions made with the same objectivity
as engineering decisions?

	Marxists used to say that Marxism provides a basis for objective
political decisions and some of them still say it.  Christian fundamentalists
and Mohammedan fundamentalists say that their sacred books provide the
a sure guide for these decisions.

	The most common answer among Westerners, whether they be intellectuals,
academics, or politicians is that there is an intrinsic difference between
political decisions involving human conflicts of interest and purposes and
engineering decisions.  There is a recent trend towards denying even the
possibility of making engineering decisions objectively, because they always
involve conflicting interests.

	My own position is that political decisions can be made just as
objectively as engineering decisions, but not yet, because the necessary
science has not been developed and is not immediately about to be.
Marxism represented an attempt to wish such a science into existence, and
once Marxism had a scientific style even if it often reached wrong
conclusions, because its theories were inadequate.  However, its objective
character was not strong enough to withstand the demands put on it by
seekers of political power, and its practice lost almost all of its
original proto-scientific character.  A new attempt to base political
practice on a science might suffer the same fate if the science was
too weak to provide truly objective answers by widely understood methods
and if power struggles strained objectivity too much.

	Given then that there is not a science of political decision, how
are these decisions made?  What are the harmful consequences of a lack of
science and how can they be mitigated?