Clergyman's

The case of Otto Neurath, first author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto, is a revealing one. In the years before the First World War, the young Austrian economist became interested in eugenics, translating Francis Gallon's Hereditary Genius for the first time into German. His most important early work, however, was his analysis of the war economy. War economics, in his view, was a science with well-defined laws and principles which, like ballistics, are ""independent of whether one is for or against the use of guns.
- Robert N. Proctor

Neutrality and objectivity are not the same thing. Neutrality refers to whether science takes a stand; objectivity, to whether science merits claims to reliability. The two need not have anything to do with each other. Certain sciences may be completely ""objective"" — that is, valid — and yet designed to serve certain political interests.
- Robert N. Proctor

The ideal of value neutrality is not a single notion, but has arisen in the course of protracted struggles over the place that science should have in society.
- Robert N. Proctor

It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences.
- Robert N. Proctor

One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest anti-smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe -- Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco -- were all non-smokers
- Robert N. Proctor

We live in a golden age of ignorance, and Trump and are part of that.
- Robert N. Proctor

The appropriate critique of ... sciences is not that they are not ""objective"" but that they are partial, or narrow, or directed towards ends which one opposes. In general, knowledge is no less objective being in the service of interests.
- Robert N. Proctor

Why do we know what we know and why don't we know what we don't know? What should we know and what shouldn't we know? How might we know differently?
- Robert N. Proctor

Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have ""depoliticized"" science . The Nazis depoliticized science by destroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the ""Fuhrer principle"" replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis ""depoliticized"" problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical terms ... politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal.
- Robert N. Proctor

In March 1937 the reported on the case of a farmer who had shot to death his sleeping son because the child was ""mentally ill in a manner that threatened society
- Robert N. Proctor