The Revenge of Athena Science, Exploitation and the Third World The Revenge of Athena

Bibliography

Barnet, Richard. The Lean Years, London, 1980.

Brandt, Willy. North South, a programme for survival, London, 1980.

Brown, Lester. State of the World 1984, Worldwatch Institute Report,

New York, 1984. Eyre, S. R. The Real Wealth of Nations, London, 1978. Myers, Norman. The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management, London, 1985.

Part Three
Third World Possibilities
Critique and Direction

14

New Paradigm Thinking
We Have Been Here Before

Claude Alvares

WESTERN institutions of philosophy and epistemology have a set pattern of destroying traditional world views. They have either ridiculed them and 'proved' that they are insignificant, as anthropology has tried to do with 'other cultures'; or in traditions which have proved to be more resilient, they have intellectually co opted and colonized them. Many prophets of the new para­digm, wittingly or unwittingly, are trying to colonize the 'ancient wisdom of the East' in an effort to rescue their intellectual tradition from bankruptcy. The work of Fritj of Capra, the doyen of the new paradigm movement, illus­trates how the methodology of co option works in practice.

Fritj of Capra's first successful book, The Tao of Physics (Wildwood House, London, 1975; Flamingo, London, 1986), created an intense feeling of euphoria among us 'orientals'. It seemed as if we had unexpectedly won an astonishing prize on a lottery ticket we had invested in centuries ago. Theoreti­cal physicists from the advanced West, Capra reported, returning bewildered from the unfamiliar, weird terrain of the quantum world, and groping for words to describe the new landscape, had found a gratifying way out by falling back on the concepts and images of the speculative texts of the Hindus and the Chinese Taoists. Intellectual elites in Asia murmured silent approval of this confirmation of hoary wisdom. The shastras were right after all: the mythic dance of Shiva mirrored the actual behaviour of the elementary particles' path­ways through the void.

Rumblings, premonitions of some of these connections between modern science and eastern mysticism had appeared before. Einstein, for example, had been attracted to the Indian metaphysics of Jagdish Chandra Bose. Oppenheimer, Heisenberg and Schroedinger had all mumbled vague vendantisms from time to time to describe the awesome and audacious worlds

they had created with their mathematical models. And at least one major Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, had attempted a grand synthesis between evolu­tionary theory and Indian metaphysics. What Capra did was to put all the allusions together in a fairly readable volume. The results turned out to be mixed. For laymen, the book provided fresh legitimation for ancient ritual. Scientists, however, found the comparisons Capra made between ideas in modern science and eastern mysticism appalling. Nobel Laureate Abdus Salarn suggested that such comparisons cheapened both science and metaphysics.

In The Turning Point (Wildwood House, London, 1982; Flamingo, London, 1985) Capra admitted: 'None of [the book's] elements is really original ... the interconnectedness and interdependence between the numerous concepts repre­sent the essence of my own contribution.' The closest predecessor to the new book was The Greening of America by Charles Reich. In fact, the parallels between The Turning Point and The Greening of America are striking. Charles Reich was a sociologist, whereas Capra is a theoretical physicist, but both promise new, idealistic futures, brought in by what seem to them inherently compelling trends and forces. In The Greening Reich prophesied a takeover of American society by the flower generation, or Consciousness 111. In his new book, Capra predicts a gradual but inexorable erosion of a world dominated by reductionist science, and a resurgence of a new society (a new America, actu­ally) based on a holistic attitude towards all being.

'Capra begins The Turning Point by writing the obituary of the classical­ physicist's approach to nature, after having interred Descartes, Newton and Galileo. But the ghost of a mechanical world picture continues to prevail in biology, psychology, medicine and economics: in these sciences, Capra finds reductionism triumphant. His principal aim is to show in detail the dire, nega­tive implications of policies based on such science.

Thus, we have a biology without reverence for life, psychology without a psyche, medicine militating against health, economics with little common sense, and populations desperate for relief from the tyrannies of modern sci­ence. Yet, Capra observes, if one looks at the scene carefully, one can see a new vision emerging that seems capable of transcending the reductionist swamp. As evidence of this, he draws attention to the new systems' view of life, mind and consciousness, holistic methods of health care, fascinating integrations of west­ern and eastern psychotherapies, new paradigms in technology and economics. This vision is also profoundly ecological, incorporates the demands of femi­nism, and is spiritual in its core. It will lead to profound changes in the organization of society and politics. What is also significant, writes our physi­cist, is that such a holistic vision comes closest to the metaphysics of non­western cultures.

The point could have been mad*e more briefly. Capra can be dull and repeti­tive, for after all, what is being offered are essentially digests of books written by other western authors, including the ever popular Teilhard de Chardin, R.D. Laing, the Simontons (cancerologists),

Rene Dubois, Gregory Batesom, Carl Jung,

Hazel Henderson and Ivan Illich.

Capra's proposal that the new physics looks similar to non western philosophies earned him an invitation from the India University Grants Com­mission to deliver the Sri Aurobindo Memorial Lectures in 1980. This resulted in the publication of The New Vision of Reality (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1985) which comprises the three Sri Aurobindo Memorial Lectures. The book is actually a fairly useful summary of both Capra's earlier bestsellers, being brief, tightly written and cheap.

It is important to go back in history to a period before Capra's arrival, to that other great synthesizer of western science and eastern mysticism, Sri Aurobindo himself. In Aurobindo's time, evolution was the dominant focus of the scien­tific world. With great self confidence rooted firmly in Indian thought, the Pondicherry sage attempted to incorporate evolutionary insights within an Indian metaphysics of knowledge and experience. Before him, Jagdish Chandra Bose had attempted his own brand of synthesizing activity and had failed.

It is important to emphasize here that for both Aurobindo and Bose, the integrity of Indian metaphysics was never in question. After them, however, the state sponsored legitimacy that western science was able to acquire in the Indian subcontinent led to a rapid devaluation of important constituents of Indian tradition. It is surprising but true nonetheless, that Indian tradition remained honoured more abroad than at home. The arrogance and clout of science ­believers provided a further excuse to dismiss Indian metaphysics, as Macaulay had done a century earlier, labelling it all superstitious, irrational and evil. Gandhi's was the first major effort to raise the dignity of indigenous thinking.

Capra's effort differs from Aurobindo's in this significant sense: his base is not in Indian tradition, but in western science. He does not reject western science, but continues to hold modern physics as a reasonably reliable theory of knowledge. But like Aurobindo, his effort is to relate Indian thought once more to a dominant obsession of his time   this time, sub atomic physics. Is Indian thought dignified or degraded as a result of the exercise? Aurobindo's efforts to marry western science and Indian thinking produced a result that was unrecognizable as either modern evolutionary theory or as Indian tradition.

A theory of knowledge that can suit different empirical facts, relating to different periods in man's history, has no truth value. Certainly Aurobindo's grand synthesis has mercifully passed into oblivion. If one ignores his disciples, we find that he has become for most others merely on additional fossil in India's intellectual history: there are some formidable glimpses or insights in his phi­losophy that still dazzle the mind, but the grand theory lies in shambles. Whilst his effort did no harm to evolutionary theory, it brought Indian tradition into grave danger by surrendering its claims to permanence or timelessness in exchange for a dubious claim of being fashionable and relevant to a particular scientific theory at a particular period in time.

The irony of Capra's invitation to Bombay, however, lay in the fact that it

was now the land of 'eternal wisdom' that was calling in a mind with little evolutionary experience in that department, in order to shore up its own, more solid edifice of thought. It should actually have been the other way around. Massachusetts Institute of Technology should have invited a Sanskrit pandit to discourse on a possible new philosophical background to the new physics, if what Capra had written was plausible. And who knows, if Capra had not written his books, or if he had not been a theoretical physicist, we might have continued to regret our heritage in metaphysics, and carried on seeing it as an impediment to developing a great science and modern economy.

But there are some compensations in the Capra episode. We must remember that science in the Third World is seen as having almost divine qualities, and that even crimes can be justified as long as they are done in the name of science. How ironical then that our distinguished Indian scientists should now find their western colleagues, whom they held in higher regard than themselves, foraging in what they scorned as a rubbish heap! Here was a western theoretical physicist claiming that the most appropriate descriptions for the cosmology of the sub­atomic world were those used by Nagarjuna and Aurobindo.

For if Capra believed what he wrote, our science dogmatists and propagan­dists would have had no alternative but to call him a renegade, since they continued to assume that modern science remained the highest, the most reli­able, in fact, the sole epistemology. If I abuse Capra in this essay this is because I have the contrary opinion: it is just not proper to make Indian metaphysics squat with a seventeenth century, ethnocentric methodology. The values of both are directly opposed: they do not cancel out, but stand as two fuming bulls in the ring.

What does Capra specifically claim? There are three major ideas he broaches. First, he says, the notion of modern physics that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing, final, indivisible units, is not alien to Indian or Chinese traditions, both of which teach that it is the relations between things that constitute the real identity of things. As we are often told, the Tao is but the interconnectedness of things. Capra quotes atomic physicist Henry Stapp; who says: 'An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalysable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.' Now compare this, Capra says, with what Nagarjuna has said: 'Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.'

The second point concerns relativity theory. When mystics intuit reality, says Capra, they seem to cross over in the fourth dimensional reality of Einsteinian space time. How do we know, however, that reality has only four dimensions, or that the experience of mystics can be limited to such a four dimensional reality? Capra does not elucidate. Abdus Salarn has suggested that unification theory may eventually demand the assumption of a thirteen dimensional real world. Finally, a dimension is an analytical tool: do such mental constructs mean anything to mystics at all?

The third major point that Capra makes is concerning the dance of Shiva:

modern physics proposes the notion of a continuous and dynamic interplay of primal forces manifest in the creation and destruction of sub atomic particles/ events. This is precisely what the mystic dance of Shiva, the simultaneous creator and destroyer of the world, symbolizes. 'We can say with considerable confidence,' concludes Capra, 'that the ancient wisdom of the East provides the most consistent background to our modern scientific theories.'

In his second lecture, Capra poses the 'systems' view of nature against the reductionist dogma patronized by modern science, at least until the recent revolution in physics. Such a systems approach, he observes, is closer to the organic attitudes of most eastern traditions towards nature, or reality.

On closer examination, however, one discovers that the dichotomy between the systems or holistic approaches on the one hand, and reductionism on the other, is false. A systems or a holistic approach is still an approach of the mind, the latter an imperfect instrument that can never functionally match the capacities of intuition, mysticism or nature. In non western cultures, in fact, the mind is barred effectively and rightly from pretending to be the primary epistemological medium:it is considered second class, a status that well befits its instrumental nature. Unless this is recognized, fundamental errors are going to be made. A mystic distrusts reason, recoils from discrete phenomena, resents separation. More important, mysticism directly encounters the ultimate, a claim from which science must methodologically bar itself.

For Capra, holism on the one hand and reductionism on the other are differ­ent extremes of a spectrum. 'We can see,' he writes, 'reductionism and holism, analysis and synthesis, are complementary approaches.' But this is nonsense. Both reductionism and holism are the constructions of science. And thus when one claims that the systems approach is a better scientific approach, and that it is also very similar to the organic view of life of the eastern philosophers, one is still exercising reductionism, reducing mysticism now to an understanding articulated by an analysing mind. Whereas the so called mystical, tribal or metaphysical qualities of eastern traditions have one feature in common: they are a scientific or, better still, trans science.

What Capra is proposing then in his 'complementary' solution to the crisis in modern science is a totalitarian hypothesis. On the one hand, what he thinks is a reasonably reliable interpretation of reality, fabricated by analysis, by scientific method. On the other is this other view that has always issued from eastern traditions, which seems to be in agreement with the scientific picture today. Capra is not providing merely a new view, but a final picture of the world.

This is a tempting extrapolation from science. Aurobindo fell for it, and in the process laid the grounds for the rapid obsolescence of his philosophy. It is fairly clear that in a few decades our present understanding of reality will be quite different from what it is now. When such an occasion is reached, science, which maintains its right to modify, update or transform itself without compromising its capacity for 'truth', will continue on its enterprise, while the eastern traditions will have to suffer from being considered obsolete.

Capra's enterprise should be refused legitimacy for this one reason alone. Indian tradition has always ignored the claims of the analytical mind to achieve integral images of reality. Capra is overruling that same tradition when he proposes that the results of analytical thinking in modern science now equal the direct intuition of Indian (or Chinese) philosophers. In this sense, his disservice to India is greater than he realizes.For in his analysis, one is offered a final onslaught on the permanent qualities of Indian metaphysics   by having them rooted to the parochial, idiosyncratic perceptions of our era. The cosmic dance of Shiva will be frozen, like any figure in bronze, its timeless, enchanting imagery considerably diminished.

The attempt to bring western science and eastern tradition in agreement is an attempt to improve science. The metaphysical bleakness of science encourages constant foraging in other traditions. In that sense, Capra is basically using science in a fresh phase of colonization: whenever science is caught in a dead end, it looks around for new terrain. It usually overpowers other epistemologies by incorporating them. Thus, the systems view is not against the reductionist view: it merely makes up for the latter's crudity or deficiencies. It does not seek to displace reductionist knowledge, but uses it. This is obvious from the fact that modern science has respected neither mysticism nor the insights of non­western cultures overtly. The crisis today is a crisis of science, which is desper­ately looking for a humane metaphysics, not a crisis of Indian tradition: the latter hardly requires certification by what is, to its eyes, a lesser epistemology.

As Capra undertakes to examine a basically western pathology from a west­ern standpoint and method, he can provide only false solutions. The West either cannot understand or concede that there are realities that are trans science and trans technique. This is its fundamental tragedy: reason's hubris. 'It is possible,' says Capra, 'to use a "bootstraps" methodology in a systems' approach': integrate various systems studies into a coherent method, so that they are internally consistent and provide an approximate understanding of reality or processes. But the mind itself again is a part of the bootstrap: being so, it must obtrude on any effort to approximate the whole. This it does because of its total dependency on presuppositions or assumptions. The mind cannot work without assumptions. But all assumptions must always distort reality. The West's efforts to work without assumptions, from Descartes to the Pheno­menologists, have all failed.

'The current crisis therefore,' writes Capra, 'is not just a crisis of individuals, governments or social institutions; it is a transition of planetary dimension. As individuals, as a society, as a civilization, and as a planetary ecosystem, we are reaching the turning point.' The turning point imagery is taken from Toynbee's theory of the rise and fall of civilizations. As cultures mature into civilizations, they invariably stiffen and become more and more inflexible, unable to take on fresh challenges to their hegemony. At the same time, qualifies Capra, from within the womb of stratified societies, creative minorities can arise to take over the direction of consciousness, while the petrified majorities collapse.

This again is a crude form of reductionism, presupposing once again the predictive powers of reason. The western mind must forever remain trapped within the determinism of its own method and The Turning Point is an indica­tion of this rather than any refutation of it. False prophets can prescribe only false therapies.

15

A Project for Our Times

Susantha Goonatilake

The flow of history opens windows and possibilities. It gives opportunities, propels movements forward and sometimes makes certain structured events seem almost inevitable. This apparent logic of history has given way in certain periods to the flowering of intellectual thought, as for example in the period circa the sixth century BC in the Gangetic Valley or during the period of the Renaissance. A particular conjuncture of socio economic circumstances, a par­ticular questioning of the givens of both history and reality makes such episodes almost a necessity. If we look at history from this perspective, is there a project for our times and for our place? The place being the broad continent of Asia and the time, the late twentieth century. What characterizes our times?

The world system, having acquired a momentum towards global hegemony from around the sixteenth century, is now undergoing considerable readjust­ment. Initiated by mercantile capitalism, then industrial and finally financial capitalism, the world system drew a near total social, economic and cultural blanket over the globe. Before completion of this process however, major fissures began to occur.

After the First World War, the Soviet Union detached part of its economic, social and cultural system from the global system though not its scientific and technological subsystem. Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan   under the slo­gan Wakon Yosai   has undergone a transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial polity and economy which have been closely intertwined, without going through the full bourgeois democratic experience of the western Euro­pean countries. The slogan Wakon Yosai, 'Japanese spirit, western civilization' largely meant the uncritical absorption of western science and technology into an inegalitarian social system which was undergoing a relatively smooth transi­tion from an unequal feudal society to an unequal capitalist one.

The period since the Second World War has seen the detaching in a formal political sense of chunks of Asia and Africa from the world system, a process Latin America had undergone in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The degrees of separation and of linkage depended largely on the internal socio political dynamics that gave rise to the detaching process as well as to the external global environment. These dynamics varied widely in the different contexts such as those of say China, South Asia, West Asia and Africa.

Yet, in all these cases of separation from the hegemonic structure, the rupture has not been complete. Links, conscious and unconscious, have continued. On the economic front, planned economies based their prices partly on their exter­nal trade, taking cues from prices set by the world capitalist market. Although the product structure that was produced by these economies varied from one particular internal social system to another, they were by and large governed by the technological processes of manufacture which existed in Europe and America at the time.

Technology and science were generally considered by planning authorities as asocial and neutral. In socialist countries such figures as Boris Hessen in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or Mao during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, took into account the social and cultural underpinnings of science and technol­ogy. Yet, the given existing science and technology was pursued as a desirable means or as a desirable end or both. In the capitalist countries of the developing world that disengaged in a political and economic sense, western capitalist science and technology was generally absorbed without question. In India, for example, Nehru perceived the new scientific establishment as the new temples of India; and in Japan science and technology was absorbed as constituting western civilization. Allowances were sometimes made for the organizational and social environment of the recipient countries, to enable the technology to be assimilated more easily. Thus, in the case of Japan, feudally derived structures such as lifetime employment and lifetime commitment to the company existed in the larger companies, leading to a distinctive internal social organization.

By and large this transfer of science and technology occurred on the assump­tion that they were both acontextual and asocial. The transfer was rooted by a process almost reminiscent of reverse engineering. That is, the given package of science and technology was sometimes dismembered (albeit sometimes only at the conceptual level), analysed and re absorbed into the local system. Re­absorption took place at various levels; at school and university through the syllabus, at the blue print or factory work bench or at the research level, implic­itly and often explicitly by research programmes modelled after those used in the West. Thus the new science and technology was bought unquestioned.

Although social sciences in the West did not constitute a unitary frame and often separate themselves into various ideological strands, they were also by and large absorbed uncritically. The social sciences, we should recall, were derived from Enlightenment influenced nineteenth century social theorizing and their twentieth century offshoots, which were all real

intellectual responses

to the historical experiences of one area   namely Europe.

Yet, in the developing countries they were internalized, unbundled as virtual acontextual 'technology' transfer packages. The result was that in capitalist or mixed economy countries, the social thought which was by and large sympa­thetic to the capitalist system was absorbed, whilst in the socialist countries the Marxist orthodoxy was internalized although variations of interpretation were allowed. In larger countries in the periphery, and especially in those where exposure to non orthodox European thought such as that of Marxism had occurred, the several strands were internalized by different intellectual groups. Legitimation of knowledge in the developed centre takes place by and large through debate and social interaction whereas legitimation in the periphery is largely by imitation. Knowledge in the centre therefore takes a creative form, whereas in the periphery the social system of science tends to suppress creati­vity. Furthermore, because knowledge is mapped one to one in the periphery from many intellectual schools of the centre, various schools of intellectual fashions and models are absorbed in successive waves. They later settle as fos­silized layers, incorporated in different groups which do not often interact organically across the layers.

These are some of the negative restraining features that characterize researchers and scientists and scientific knowledge in the Third World. It should be noted that these are social characteristics borne out of the Third World situation and not individual failings of the scientists themselves. Unpro­ductive individual scientists from the Third World, once set in a productive First World research milieu, often break through their restraints. (For more details of how this functions, see my Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World.)