A twentieth century newspaper will brazenly devote a whole page to presenting, with pictorial illustrations, alleged recently discovered proofs of the truth of that Genesis legend which has done such loyal service to the ruling class by stultifying the brains of its victims. These hypocritical displays are never publicly contradicted, although every man with the least smattering of scientific knowledge, including the editors, knows how utterly false they are. These worthies indulge in a sly grin and lower one eyelid, for it is generally understood among them that the great donkey--the working class--will only consent to carry everybody’s burdens in addition to its own, just so long as it is kept in childish ignorance of everything it ought to know.
And this is not all. Now that a great body of workingmen are discarding these ancient lies, and groping for those great truths that contain the germs of their redemption, the official savants, true servants of the ruling class, twist and warp their own science in order to make it contradict every working class idea.
This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse--it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. It is an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one’s best friend because of the groundless calumnies of an interested enemy.
This terribly mistaken antagonism to science has unfortunately found its way, in some measure, into the Socialist movement, though happily, increasing acquaintance with Socialism’s classic literature is breaking it down. In this connection the following passage from the pen of Isador Ladoff is very pertinent:
“Rationalistic modern Socialism is based, not exclusively on certain economic theories and maxims, as some narrow-minded ‘Socialists pure and simple’ think and would fain make us believe, but on the broad foundation of modern science and thought. The economic theories peculiar to modern Socialism are derived from the application of the results of the achievements of modern knowledge and philosophy to the field of social economics. The trouble with the ‘Socialists pure and simple’ is in the extreme limitation of their mental horizon. They happen to know, or rather imagine they have mastered Marxian economics, while modern science and philosophy remains to them a sealed letter. That is why they get irritated whenever and wherever they meet in the socialistic press an article containing something else than the everlasting parrot-like repetitions of pseudo-socialistic commonplaces and shibboleths. Every attempt to present to the attention of the readers of socialistic publications, glimpses of the radiant world of science and philosophy, leading up to socialistic ideas and ideals in all their world-redeeming significance, appears to the simpleminded and superstitious simon-pure Socialists as an attack on somebody or something, as a heresy and heterodoxy of some kind. To such people the religion of science is the religion of ignorance and vice versa, ignorance is their religion and science.”