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

The Historical Construction of Knowledge

If that is the social model of science and technology in a dependent context, what is the model of knowledge in an 'organic' context? Recent research on the production of science in the West indicates that the scientific and technological enterprise is constantly buffeted by social forces at a series of levels. In short, scientific and technological output is at least a partial product of social forces in the environment. These social forces include micro level social and historical changes as has been demonstrated by Boris Hessen (1930) on the physics of Newton, and by Forman (1971) on quantum physics and Dickson (1979) on algebra. In addition, an intermediate level of social change also impinges on science through, say, the impact of national policies on funding of science and generally, economic, political and social interests at the national level. (For examples of these influences see Mackenzie and Barnes (1975, 1979) on the biometry/Mendelism controversy; Farley (1975) on spontaneous generation/ biology controversy; Mackenzie (1978) on statistics and Scharfstein (1979) on nineteenth century cerebral anatomy, Ezrahi (1971) on the political impact of

science in the USA and Rose and Rose (1976) on Lysenkoism.)

Science is also intimately influenced by the micro social world of the scientific community itself: especially at the micro level of the particular scientific group that is working on a problem. For examples of such social influences on science see Collins (1975) on lasers, Pinch (1976) on quantum mechanics, Wynne (1975) on the J Phenomenon, which cases describe the impact of the micro social environment of the scientists themselves on the output of science.

The process of knowledge creation is thus always influenced by the social environment, and what we experience as knowledge has been conditioned by changes in the social climate at three levels, namely at micro, at intermediate and at macro level. The flow of the stream of knowledge is governed and controlled at the personal level of the scientific worker by a process of detailed (social) programming individual scientists have been subjected to, such as in the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the given discipline. Thus a body of knowledge is created which is demarcated and legitimated by the social environment as being relevant, interesting and scientific. At the same time a delegitimizing process sets aside other 'knowledge' which is categorized as unscientific and irrelevant.

From this social historical perspective of knowledge, scientific knowledge, as it grows, takes the form and structure of an evolutionary tree of knowledge, social forces in the environment buffeting the trees and shaping the particular directions the branches of the knowledge tree develop into. The development and growth of the broad knowledge tree allows for bifurcations of its trunk into branches and the latter into yet smaller ones so that different scientific disci­plines and sub disciplines emerge.

The social output of knowledge results from what is essentially a worm's eye view engrained in a given discipline, brought through the detailed programming of the scientists, in their subject matter. A scientist at a knowledge frontier has almost by definition already crawled through the existing socially constructed knowledge tunnel of his predecessors and has acquired the knowledge of his predecessors. To this extent he can perceive only that which is immediately 'put' in front of him as interesting, and worthy of attention by the social process. The essential nature of science therefore becomes to a great extent relativistic in regard to different social contexts, different historical experiences giving differ­ent wormholes.

Thus, if we were to picture physical reality as a large blackboard, and the branches and shoots of the knowledge tree as markings in white chalk on this blackboard, it becomes clear that the yet unmarked and unexplored parts occupy a considerably greater space than that covered by the chalk tracks. The socially structured knowledge tree has thus explored only certain partial aspects of physical reality, explorations that correspond to the particular historical unfoldings of the civilization within which the knowledge tree emerged.

Thus entirely different knowledge systems corresponding to different histori­cal unfoldings in different civilizational settings become possible. This raises

the possibility that in different historical situations and contexts sciences very different from the European tradition could emerge. Thus, an entirely new set of 'universal' but socially determined natural science laws are possible. It should be noted that the social changes that took place under the dominance of western power, and the sciences that these gave rise to, cannot be considered universal. True alternatives in science, at least as a social and historical possibil­ity, exist for other different civilizational contexts too.

Our Modern Science and Technology Times

Outside the European periphery a dependency which continues to get its cues from the historically derived science and technology structures of Europe exists. This implies that historically speaking the knowledge structures of non­Europe have been marginalized, and its earlier searches for valid knowledge are not being incorporated in their current scientific and technical enterprises. Science and technology practitioners in the periphery are par excellence a class of historically marginal men   almost by definition. They live bifurcated lives, the earlier knowledge structure   even its valid areas of exploration   are laid aside, sometimes as an embarrassment, sometimes as an area to which ritual pooias are made about a past greatness.

However, the past of the civilizations about which we have evidence (that means only the cases of literate cultures), indicates that there was a virile, dynamic tradition of searching for knowledge. This has been shown, say, in the case of China, by the work of Joseph Needham and his co workers, in the case of South Asia by a bourgeoning set of researchers over the last fifteen years (Rahman 1975, 1977; Alvares 1979; Dharmapal 1971; Chattopadhyaya 1976 among others), and in the case of Islamic science an emergent literature which puts into new perspective the Islamic European connection (see for example Proceedings of the Islamic Science Conference 1983 Islambad).

This literature indicates that the science in these civilizational areas was, for its times, flourishing. Often, what has been ascribed to the European tradition has been shown on closer examination to have been done elsewhere by others earlier. (Thus Harvey was not the first to discover the circulation of blood, but an Arabic scientist was; Paracelsus did not introduce the fourth element 'salt' and start the march towards modern chemistry, but a twelfth century alchemist from Kerala did so teaching in Saudi Arabia.)

Further, the new bourgeoning literature on pre colonial non European sci­ence indicates that there were many areas of science and technology that could have been further developed, but were left unexplored and stagnant and then forgotten because of the later dominant impact of the western system. Such examples vary from effective plant based medicines drawn from the Ayurvedic and Unani pharmacopia (for example Raufalfia), to theories of psychology (for instance see the similarities with, and the tributes to, Asian psychologies by Maslow and other Humanistic psychologists), to different forms of logic

(Buddhist four valued logic and Jain seven valued logic vs. the traditional Aristotelian kind ).

The output of scientific knowledge in the developed world is increasing at a rapid rate. This increase is going to raise problems of limits to growth resulting from qualitative changes in science. De Solla Price has over the last three decades been documenting evidence showing that ever since the western scien­tific revolution in the seventeenth century, various indicators of science double every seven years or so. Thus, the number of scientists, the number of scientific papers, the number of scientific societies follow this trend. If these trends are extrapolated from today's figures, one notes that roughly within the first quar­ter of the twenty first century, (that is, within the life time of many scientists and would be scientists living today) certain strange features appear. Thus, the number of scientists becomes greater than the population of the earth, the total world science budget becomes greater than the total world gross product and finally the bulk of scientific publications would become more than the mass of the earth.

The electronic revolution would save mankind from the last fate by storing information digitally and it could even give lie to the first prediction by seeing that more and more artificial intelligence based analyses of data combined with robotic laboratories (both of which are now on the cards) would lessen the need for humans. This would either mean that within the next few generations human intervention in the scientific enterprise becomes qualitatively less important or that the human scientific enterprise will have to change in a more creative direction.

A significant characteristic of the science of our times is a crisis in epistemology that has occurred in two core areas of the scientific enterprise. For nearly two generations now, an epistemological crisis of a fundamental nature has haunted quantum physics. Reality as depicted in quantum physics has drawn away from the everyday experience of humankind to one depicted through the lenses of statistical abstractions. Thereby an ontological and epistemological Pandora's box has been created leading to raging debates on the fundamental nature of quantum reality. Secondly, ever since Godel's Theorem was postu­lated nearly fifty years ago, a similar crisis has gripped mathematics. Certainty has vanished leaving a fundamental crisis (Kline 1981).

The traditional nineteenth century derived science and technology which has spawned many of the industries is energy and pollution intensive and dehumanizing. Yet in many industrialized countries, the traditional nineteenth ­century image of smog ridden cities through which polluted rivers flowed has been erased by concerted action (London for instance is much less polluted today than in Dickensian times). On the other hand, pollution based industries have been exported to the Third World and in the absence of strong counter­vailing forces and regulating mechanisms, ecological disasters haunt the region.

At a global level more serious possibilities such as a greenhouse effect due to accumulated carbon dioxide melting the ice caps and devastating vast regions of

the earth exist. The current contraction of genetic diversity across the globe and the elimination of species has been estimated to be of the same order of magni­tude as the major catastrophes that occurred in the geological past.

The social sciences born largely in late eighteenth century and nineteenth century Europe   the conservative variety as well as the Marxist alterna­tives   are in a state of crisis. The crisis exists at the level of the fundamental conceptualizing of social forces and of their dynamics. The grand old laws of the motion of society seem today to reveal only creaking machinery seen through partially opaque lenses. The crisis in Marxism has become very appar­ent too within the last decade. With the rapid changes now occurring in China, Hungary, Poland and other Eastern European countries, Marxist orthodoxy as an explanatory tool and guide to action is under strain. (For a recent macro perspective illustrating this crisis on thinking see Wallerstein's paper (1986) titled 'Should We Unthink the Nineteenth Century?' or if you want a more 'native' and an earlier version of the same perspective see Goonatilake 1975, 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1984.)

Thus the world of science and technology is, in a fundamental epistemo­logical sense, in a state of crisis. This is occurring at a time when great shifts in economic power are taking place globally and also at a time when intellectual self awareness and self confidence is rising in parts in Asia. This fundamental uncertainty combined with the rising confidence clearly calls for a major 'project' for Asian creativity in science, bold in scope, fuelled by conscientized Asian scientific workers, launched with confidence and with the ability to hunt for and seek its goals.

The Search for Creativity

If the social structure of science in the Third World fits our description, how can we provide the social conditions for fundamental creativity in the Third World?

One method is of detaching a country from the existing international base of science. This had been attempted in varying degrees   in China during the cultural revolution and in a much more extreme form during Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia. However, at the time of detachment, the intellectual system is that of an imitative one and therefore a real danger of preserving fossilized handed­ down truths at the time of cut off exists. Revolutionary situations allow for internal social arrangements that could possibly restructure science. However, the existing literature on developing science in non European contexts, even in revolutionary regimes does not give adequate examples of creativity. In fact recent criticism and exposure of the cultural revolution indicates that a real alternative scientific community did not develop for a variety of reasons. As a reaction the Chinese scientific system seems to be attempting a wholehearted attempt towards relinking with the former centres.

Transcending the links could be another strategy for Third World research­ers. Such transcendence at the social psychological level would be to detach a

scientist from a given micro social structure of science. This routinely happens in the developed countries when new sub disciplines are formed with new sub­groups and corresponding sub cultures of science. Such detached scientists in a Third World context would operate outside the existing formal system and develop alternative scientific social linkages.

An attempt to break out creatively would also require psychological consid­eration. The present programming of scientists through the educational system in most Third World countries puts great emphasis on routine learning and mimicry. The intuitive and the aesthetic, which are vital for creativity, are often subsumed at the expense of the mechanical and the verbal.

I argued earlier that the different perceptions of science and its ruling paradigms in different disciplines give a particular tunnel vision of knowledge. If our efforts in creativity are to develop new modes of perceiving reality through science and new tunnels of knowledge, how does one escape out of the present structured field of knowledge onto new pathways of knowledge? Sev­eral writers have emphasized that multi  and inter disciplinary studies may be one such mode, but these attempts have their limitations. Multi disciplinarity is an attempt to bundle together, perhaps rather haphazardly, several disciplines. The constituent disciplines leave many areas of physical reality unexplored, thus multi disciplinarity and inter disciplinarity attempts at best to provide additional glimpses of physical reality largely through existing channels of perceptions with no fundamentally major breakthroughs or new structured knowledge.

We know that, unlike the assumptions of a conventional mechanistic view of science, cross flows of metaphors had often occurred in creative situations. Thus, specially at paradigm breaks, the intellectual elements that nourish a discipline constitute a surprising collection. These elements include a priori orientations of scientists which also encompass mystical and 'extra scientific' beliefs, modes, metaphors and orientations from other often unrelated disci­plines and perspectives, as well as beliefs drawn from the social ideas of the day. ( For example see Rattansi 1973; Debus 1973; Elzinga and Jamison 1981.) Dis­placement of ideas across disciplines has been recorded by many. The impact of Malthus on Darwin and Darwin on Social Darwinism, social ideas on organic chemistry (Slack 1972), thermodynamics (Brush 1967), and relativity (Feuer 1971) are a few. However, it should be noted that although science in its growth takes in external elements outside a discipline, it is structured socially and a social perspective governs implicitly the process of discovery.

Drifts of metaphors from one discipline to another, a very fruitful source of new ideas, should not be confused with the relative aridity of conventional multi disciplinary and inter disciplinary studies. Drifts of metaphors could also arise from one's own culture, even from its past. Thus scientists from Dolton, Schrodinger (1958) to Heisenberg (1973) have mined the western past for new breakthroughs in their discipline.

To give an example from the South Asian region, the past traditions have a

wide variety of schools that describe the nature of matter. Some deny atomism, while the Charvaks, and Jains and the Buddhists subscribe to many varieties of atomism. Some allow for particles to exist, while others extend the atomic view to time, time being viewed as quanta. Here is a rich minefield of metaphors that could be used to build new views. Holton (1973) has pointed out that from Greek times the theories of science have been built up by a small collection of what he calls themes and anti themes. Examples of these are complexity­ simplicity, reductionism holism and continuity discontinuity. If these consti­tute some of the ultimate building blocks of existing theories of science, further themes and anti themes or derivatives thereof could be found from other cul­tures. This would give a larger thematic mix which would provide for a greater variety of building blocks for new concepts and theoretical frameworks.

Searching for the past should not be confused with efforts by apologist writers from the East who attempt to show that the eastern is contemporary and modern. This defensive attitude is often confusing and contradictory. Thus a cosmology of the big bang, the steady and oscillating state, have been shown to exist in Indian writings. Similarly writers have sought to demonstrate that Buddhism is equivalent to logical positivism, idealism, that it is progressive and close to Marxism as well as reactionary. (Goonatilake 1984: 162). In contrast, western writers have at times used the East to provide metaphors for new developments. This is a more fruitful exercise and one that is not taken seriously by Asian scientists.

Transport of metaphors and formal knowledge is easier in applied knowledge systems where local variables of ecology, climate and art meet with science. A clear example would be architecture where new formal architectural disciplines to replace the dominant European twentieth century tradition are waiting to be developed. Such disciplines would bring in local climatic situations, the socially determined local silent language of spatial arrangements and sitting and living modes, as well as local aesthetics that could be transferred into a new synthetic mode of knowledge combined with existing western knowledge in engineering.

In a similar vein of thinking one could suggest other possible attempts drawn from Asian roots even in such areas as quantum physics and artificial intel­ligence. Thus quantum physics has particular problems of conceptualization which defy everyday western conventions, possibly because the given math­ematics of the western tradition is based on a two valued Aristotelian type logic which does not fit into such quantum phenomena as 'a particle is there/is not there'. Here, some of the multi valued logics developed in the Asian tradition   especially' aspects of Buddhist logic   have the potential of formalizing themselves into a mathematics that would take into account the peculiarities of twentieth century physics.

Possible Asian inputs into artificial intelligence could make use of the fact that Asia has a vast store of knowledge on 'thinking about thinking'. The argument goes as follows: existing efforts at artificial intelligence have been at least partly attempts to operationalize formal descriptions of human thinking

(for example, the 1950's attempts at deductive logic in the form of programmes to prove geometry theorems and 1970's attempts at inductive logic, for example the Bacon Programme). Programmers who are knowledgeable about eastern thought could abstract and formalize 'thinking about thinking' into actual artificial intelligence software.

The social science that was born in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu­ries used as independent variables such factors as technology, the existing and past social relations of Europe, on which to build the major social theories. Whether the theories were those of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, the ghost of European experiences haunted the subject mat­ter, the explanatory variables used, as well as the particular trajectories within which the flow of history was traced. Whether the dichotomies were Gemein­schaft or Gesse1schaft or feudalism vs. capitalism or other categories, the Euro­pean experience was considered universal. The need to rethink this ethnocentric social science is acutely felt today.

The social sciences were particularly governed by subjective perceptions when viewing non European peoples. Subjects such as Indology, Sinology and Anthropology formalized the study of supposed inferiors. This was the neces­sary accompaniment to a self confident, aggressive view of the world that was internalized in the European psyche. European man was using the rest of the world as raw material for his advance and these studies, which were ideological developments paralleling the European advance, explained the rest of the world in terms of the need to dominate.

New social sciences from an Asian perspective would necessarily have to look at and explain Europe from a fresh perspective. And just as European formal studies of other cultures used a self serving viewpoint, any study of Europe by other cultures should likewise incorporate ipso facto such a self serving view­point. Such an area of study would rightly have to be called   paralleling the nomenclature of Indology and Sinology   a Europology, a self serving sub­ject for non European peoples. I have used the word Europology here heurist­ically to refer not only to geographical Europe but also to its settler bastion and cultural outposts in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

At the moment Europe and European culture have symptons of self doubt: parts of the periphery are intellectually waking. The economic world has been shaken by geo political tremors. Such events as the Soviet and Chinese revolu­tions, the Middle East oil boom and the emergence of successful capitalist states in East Asia have made for certain shifts in centres of economic power. The centre of the capitalist world according to many accounts is now shifting towards the Pacific belt with the possibility of East Asia playing a dominant role in the future.

The topography of the world of knowledge before the last few centuries could be delineated as several hills of knowledge roughly corresponding to the regional civilizations of, say, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Europe. The last few centuries have seen the levelling of the other hills and from their

debris the erection of a single one with its base in Europe. This however, is not a 'world' hill, it is a very particular hill, not a universal one. The topography that should now emerge is again one of several hills. The search for a truly universal hill and of a truly 'universal' global science can begin only after this re-emergence. The project for our times is to create the new hills, in our own backyard.