SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Science and the war of the worlds
The Science Wars have been raging in conference halls across the West for the last decade. But the deep mistrust of modern `western' science and the consequent glorification of non-western, traditional knowledges, no matter how outdated and disempowering, was really spawned by a group of Indian intellectuals in Delhi, says this writer. This article examines the reasons for this resounding no-confidence vote against modern science,  and the dangerous consequences of such a complete rejection

by Meera Nanda

On behalf of all progressive science movements in my native India and elsewhere that dare to question the inherited traditions of their own society in the light of a modern scientific worldview, I want to return to their postcolonial sponsors the cluster of theories that go under the name of `ethno-sciences', `standpoint epistemologies', and `situated knowledges' -- theories that claim that modern science is simply an ethnoscience of the west, its truths not any more rational and universal than any other local knowledge of any other culture. I want to return to their postmodern authors the theories that claim that reason itself is constituted by arbitrary authority and Enlightenment itself a ruse for western colonialism.

These ideas -- one, that modern science is an ethno-science of the west, and two, that scientific reasoning and the very content of science are Eurocentric constructs complicit in western imperialism -- derive from the new, `strong' social and cultural studies of science that have come to dominate academic left thinking on these matters. This logic relativises the validity of scientific knowledge of the natural world, and even the kind of objects that exist in the natural world itself, to the prevailing social relations and cultural meanings. Instead of critically understanding how social institutions, power relations and cultural meanings bring us closer or farther from the facts of the matter, the constructivists claim to study how the social prejudices of the day make up the so-called `fact'.

But before I get to all that, I want to clear up a misconception widely shared by left-inclined intellectuals and activists. It is generally believed that to see truth as a social construct of the powers-that-be is somehow progressive, that it is a gift to the poor, the disenfranchised and the non-western `others'. The idea seems to be that once it can be shown how power creates truth, the disempowered will no longer feel compelled to live by the dictates of the powerful. They will create their own truths, and actually challenge the scientific objectivity with presumably `stronger' objectivity that seeks truths grounded in their own lives.

But there is poison in this gift. For all its radical bluster, the permission to be different is a big cop-out for left intellectuals, for it frees them from the hard, slow and patient task of helping the underprivileged `others' to critically examine and revise their own commonsense, taken-for-granted assumptions in the light of better, less false and yes, scientific knowledge. The idea that truth itself is a social construct undercuts the very grounds for any progressive social critique of the status quo.

There is a name for such a project: it is called treason of the intellectuals, treason against truth and universalism in favour of familiar, comforting and parochial stories which are useful to believe in. Lest I be misunderstood, let me emphasise that I am not saying that science should not be scrutinised for its ideological  biases, but only that biases should not be seen as constitutive of science. The whole exercise of detecting bias makes sense only if there is a possibility of correcting these biases and reaching a more objective, less biased knowledge.

This change in the project of the left intellectuals is most sharply critiqued by none other than Noam Chomsky. Chomsky points out, and I quote, "the left intellectuals deprive the oppressed people of not only the joys of understanding and insight, but also tools of emancipation." Indeed, if any evidence of the slide in the self-understanding of left intellectuals as educators to defenders of ignorance in the name of popular culture is needed, one has only to go through, say, the contributions of Andrew Ross in the recent issue of Social Text made famous by Alan Sokal. (Alan Sokal submitted for publication what purported to be a scholarly article on the postmodern philosophical and political implications of developments in quantum gravity to a special issue of the esteemed journal Social Text devoted to the Science Wars. After it had been published, Sokal revealed that his essay, liberally salted with nonsense that sounded good and flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, was actually a parody of the genre of science studies critiques. His revelation shook up the academic world.)

Or check out a recent issue of the  New York Review of Books in which Richard Lewontin dismisses the late Carl Sagan's life-long passion for popularising science. On Lewontin's reading, when science enthusiasts like Sagan try to exorcise the demons, the witches and UFOs, they only think they are replacing ignorance with truth, but they are actually only imposing physics' elite culture on popular culture. I bring up Lewontin here because, as we will see, a very similar reasoning operates in the Third World context where scientists are accused of bringing western, elitist ideas to the authentic culture of non-western people.

Lewontin is a representative -- a very moderate representative, I must add -- of the current mood of suspicion against science which writes off any attempt to bring science back into the public discourse as an illegitimate violation of people's `epistemological rights' to know the world from their own standpoints. This suspicion lies behind this curious phenomenon of giving modern science a middle name: modern `western' science, modern `patriarchal' science, modern `bourgeoisie' science, or `Indian' science, `Islamic' science, or what-have-you. These middle names are so many no-confidence votes against science's ability to tell us something that is valid across cultures.

I suggest that these `wars' currently shaking up the American academe be renamed the Second Science Wars. The first science war began almost as soon as decolonisation began in the Third World, and even sooner in some countries like China and Japan. Indeed, New Delhi and not New York has been the site of many more skirmishes in battle over the nature and meaning of science. It was from New Delhi intellectuals, more than a decade ago, that I first heard the ideas that are now exercising the New York science warriors.

To get a fuller flavour of how the debates over science and rationality have played out in the Third World, come with me to New Delhi, to a time when the earlier belief in the value of science for progressive change began to give way to suspicion of science.

It was in 1978 that I moved to New Delhi from a smaller and rather provincial city to do my PhD in biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology. In Delhi I found many like-minded, socially concerned scientists who were disturbed by the elitist nature of Indian science and society, and exactly as Chomsky describes it, tried earnestly to compensate for the class and caste character of our social and cultural institutions. I joined a group that called itself Society of Young Scientists which was based in the nearby All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Depending upon our area of expertise we did whatever we could to connect with the world around us, including running science (and general) literacy programmes for children and adults.

A critical attitude towards the traditional cultural explanations about social inequities was an article of faith for some of us. We believed that the findings of modern science had the potential to demolish the traditional justifications for caste, for inferiority of women and the belief in after-life, cultural attitudes that are deeply engrained in Indian society and contribute to injustice and oppression in our society. Of course, we were critically aware of the western origins of science, and its role in legitimising colonialism, racism and militarism. But we had not taken the next self-defeating step that our social constructivist and postmodern/postcolonial friends have taken: that is to say, we never confused science as a social institution for science as a method of arriving at partial and provisional but the best-corroborated account of reality.

It is precisely this critical dimension of science movements in India that has been silenced by the new critiques of science. Modern science has been given a middle name -- `western' -- which casts a long shadow of doubt on its validity and usefulness; the project of critically evaluating our own social-cultural realities has given way to glorifying non-western, traditional knowledges, regardless of how objectively false and incomplete these knowledges may be.

 As far as I can tell, the current phase of uncritical, almost celebratory nativism began way back in the early-'80s when a bunch of modernist intellectuals put together a `Statement on Scientific Temper'. The Statement reaffirmed Nehru's views on the need to bring scientific rationality to bear upon traditional cultural norms, something groups like SYS were doing. Bland and unoriginal though the statement was, it evoked a passionate and angry response from some well-known New Delhi intellectuals, including stalwarts Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva. They viciously attacked science, modernity, the west, reason, and Nehru and Nehruvian intellectuals as agents of a western colonial ideology that disparaged the consciousness of the Indian masses.

Big seminars were held, a couple of which I attended with my comrades from SYS. It is in these seminars that the basic anti-science and anti-modernity themes were first laid out, themes that have come to dominate the Indian left thinking on science. The proceedings of one such seminar were later published as a book that some of you may be familiar with -- Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity.  They were ready to bury science and dance on its grave way back in the early-1980s. This particular book, incidentally, has become the most highly-acclaimed, most widely-quoted `postcolonial text' by science studies scholars here in the US. It was in this seminar that Nandy laid down the new law: only those intellectuals who spoke in the categories of thought shared by the subaltern masses were to be seen as progressive, only they had the right to speak for the masses. Any time any idea clashed with the indigenous culture, the indigenous culture was to have the upper hand. It was at this seminar that I first heard Claude Alvares defend, much like Richard Lewontin and Andrew Ross, the epistemological right of ordinary  folks to believe in their village tantrik, a right that popular science movements were stamping upon.

Though you will never know it from this book, these ideas were resisted. My SYS comrades and I, and many scientists who participated in the scientific temper debate that raged on in the pages of Mainstream, tried hard to defend our right to use modern science as universally valid knowledge that can help our country. But we could not match the Nandy-Shiva combine, either in rhetoric or in numbers.

Many of the new social movements in environmentalism, ecofeminism, appropriate technology etc that bloomed during the 1980s followed Nandy's law: they were to kowtow to `local knowledges', regardless of how objectively false and subjectively disempowering these `knowledges' may be. And they were to ritualistically damn western scientific rationality as the source of all our problems, from the Green Revolution to you-name-it. Likewise, `modern western science' has come to be held responsible not just for legitimising colonialism but for legitimising the idea of development or modernity, which is itself seen as nothing more than a new colonialism.

For me, personally, the lowest point of the cultural nationalists came in 1987 when Nandy came out with this sophistry justifying the `authentic' sati, and attacked Indian feminists as westernised elites for opposing sati. Nandy was followed by the appearance of Vandana Shiva's book, Staying Alive, which as we know, has become the bible of North American science critics and ecofeminists. I remain convinced that Shiva's ideas, if they were ever to be put in practice, would drive Indian women back a few centuries and ruin the productive base of Indian agriculture. After these two landmarks, I became convinced that the patriotic rage against reason and the west are no mere academic fashions, but had the potential for legitimising reactionary political currents in India. For that reason, I became convinced that Indian science critics and the western anti-Enlightenment philosophies they derive inspiration from, must be philosophically refuted and politically challenged.

Let us move from the postcolonial New Delhi of the 1980s to the postmodern New York of the 1990s. There is a symbiotic relationship between the critics of the west back home and the postmodern critics of modernity and Enlightenment in American universities. In this symbiosis, Third World critics have put to work the anti-Enlightenment theories coming out the west, from Heideggar and Nietzsche, Foucault and a badly misunderstood Kuhn to the well-known feminists, Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway. For their part, the postmodern or constructivist theorists, located mostly in American and French universities, use the postcolonial critiques of science as case studies of the supposed disaster Enlightenment has been for the west's supposed victims.

Thus the cultural absolutism of postcolonial science is built upon the foundations provided by the postmodern critiques of science. The Nandy-Shiva-Alvares agitation for ethno-knowledge becomes a patriotic act, a call for `authenticity', an act of anti-imperialism only against the constructivist assumptions of science as a power-backed consensus around alien cultural values. Only against the constructivist assumptions I and my scientist comrades could look like toadies of the west to the champions of patriotic science.

Seen as a continuous, mutually self-correcting dialogue between an independent reality, and our stock of knowledge at any given time, science can give us not absolute truths but pictures of the world which are closer approximations to the facts and a picture which is more reasonable to believe. Seen thus, science is not inherently western, patriarchal or inherently anything, but simply the best mechanism that we have developed so far to constantly learn from experience by confronting experience, by challenging it with theories, biases, prejudices, conjectures and guesses. Sure, this method of learning can be obstructed by not allowing challenges from socially powerless groups. But the way out is not to give up trying, but to try harder.

In the heat of the current science wars there is a danger of forgetting the pre-postmodern intellectual and political scene. We forget that technocracy and scientism were the dominant trends in the advanced capitalist societies, the communist bloc and the modernising Third World. Modernising states, for instance, did not think twice before evicting masses of people from their homes for the sake of building dams, highways and other infrastructure of modern life. If progress clashed with an older, settled way of life, progress always won and there was hardly anyone to even register the pain inflicted on the losers. Scientific truths were accepted as dogmas.

The postcolonial science critics, to their credit, have changed all that: they have insisted that the voice of the displaced and the traditional be  heard, that culture not always give way to technocratic reason. Likewise, their insistence that traditional meanings that people live with have legitimacy that cannot always be overwritten by scientific reason. For all my criticism of their excesses, I applaud the science critics for bringing the repressed Other of modernity to centrestage.

I am all for challenging technocracy and scientism and, surprising though it may sound, even for defending traditional ways of relating to the world against scientific rationality. But I don't see why we have to reject science in order to do that.

I believe that science understood not as capital S, science as a dogma, but as scientific temper which John Dewey once described as `an attitude to inquire, to discriminate, to draw conclusions on the basis of independent evidence', is the best antidote not only to scientism and relativism, but also to the tendency of social movements to get caught in their own rhetoric. It is a legitimate task of science critics to critique, on a case by case basis, any social forces and prejudices blocking the full flowering of this spirit of science. It is, however, not legitimate to elevate prejudice and biases as founding principles of science. That way lies disaster. A disaster that those of us in the Third World can least afford.

Modern science without apologies
The need for critical introspection was never more acute than it is today, when we are faced with rising cultural and religious chauvinism. What are the critics affirming when they reject modern science as a violent and oppressive western ideology? They claim to affirm the `epistemological right' of non-western civilisations to understand the world in their own terms, from their own standpoint, rooted in their own cultural and metaphysical assumptions. Such an epistemological right, they claim, is not only politically desirable (that is, good for the people), but epistemologically necessary (that is, good for science) as well.

Now, the social constructivist and other radical critics are correct in insisting that the purely internal dynamic of science is not sufficient to root out cultural biases in scientific inquiry. The critics are correct in insisting that science is simply too important -- and powerful -- to be left to scientists alone. There is no doubt that radical social movements for civil rights, feminism and anti-colonialism -- in which, let us not forget, a large segment of the scientific community actively participated -- have been crucial for challenging the cultural biases of established science. But this dynamic between scientific knowledge and social movements only warrants demands of openness of scientific institutions to scientists from diverse cultural/social backgrounds so that such biases are more easily detected and challenged, and secondly, responsibility of scientists to take criticism from social critics seriously enough to test their theories for the presence of the biases alleged by the critics.

The critics err grievously in jumping from these justified demands for institutional changes and social oversight to demands for `alternative epistemologies' which would explicitly bring their progressive social values and their gender/race/class identities to bear upon how they classify the world, what models they use to design their experiments and how they assess the evidence of their experiments. Such  `alternative science' is not only possible, it has, unfortunately, become quite commonplace.

But the crucial point is, what is the status of this knowledge? The proponents of alternative epistemologies insist that the knowledge claims generated by `other ways of knowing' are at least as true, if not truer and more objective, than science as-we-know-it. This claim raises many operational and philosophical questions: what happens when there is a contradiction between, for instance, peasant women's understanding of, say, causes of crop failure, and the understanding obtained by using conventional scientific methods? Does the fact of the former being more grounded in everyday experience make it truer and preferable? Why? Why should explicitly and self-consciously political epistemology lead to `truer' science? This leads to even bigger questions: what if the world itself is such that it may not comply with our politically informed categories and models?

Constructivist science critics have not bothered to answer these questions with even minimal rigour and honesty. All `truth', the critics claim in a classic relativist vein, is truth from some perspective. But then, why should the alternative epistemologists expect `truth' from, say, a feminist, or  a Third World perspective, to be accepted as true by everyone, including mainstream scientists? The most common reason given for why `truths' generated by `other ways of knowing' are true for everybody is this: because they are produced either by politically marginalised groups (peasants, workers, women, etc), or by politically progressive groups (eg feminists). While all this may sound `liberatory' to some, what this position overlooks is that two can play the same game: what resources are we left with to combat the `truths' that are true from communal or fascist perspectives?

If the leading western theorists of radical constructedness of science have evaded these questions, Indian critics of science have shown no sign of even the awareness of these long-standing debates. Third World intellectuals who are interested in the science question from a progressive political perspective can play a positive role in the ongoing debate by persistently questioning the relativism that lingers in all constructivist and postmodernist critiques of science. But in order to play that role, they will have to read these radical critiques from their own Third World standpoint, determined not by a primary interest in defending some purported situated ways of knowing of the subaltern, but by a concern for creating a just, equitable and free society. There may, of course, be situations where traditional knowledge and social practices are adequate to the task. But then there are also many aspects of social life in India where human relations and cultural practices are legitimated by objectively false beliefs about the natural world. These beliefs need to be revised in the light of the scientific knowledge about the natural world accumulated over the last five centuries.

Let us move on to the next question and ask why affirmations of culture and identity as arbiters of knowledge have become so loud and intense among the left-inclined intellectuals, both in the west as well as in the Third World. Why now?

Consciousness of identities
To a large extent, the resurgence of consciousness of identities is a result of the actual thinking out of the local content of identities. The insistence on recognition of minority, ethnic and Third World cultures is only partly a reaction to past or present bias; it is also a result of the fact that these cultures are no longer self-sufficient and taken for granted by those living in them. The relative fading of cultural and ethnic differences caused by the forces of global modernity has created a politics of nostalgia. While I do sympathise to some extent with concerns about the loss of cultural identity (although I believe that these concerns deny the simultaneous synthesis of new cultural meanings which are not mere copies of the west), I am convinced that turning inward and pinning all our hopes on our own situated knowledges is the wrong response to the problem. Situated knowledges, as Alan Sokal correctly says, can often be another name for plain prejudice and ignorance.
The same forces of globalisation that have brought a concern with identities to the foreground have also created an institutional climate in the global network of universities, research centres and activist groups which encourages and rewards identity- and culture-based explanations and solutions. The entire thrust of postcolonial project has been to exalt differences over any universal explanations. This can only encourage parochialism and identity politics.

The rising tide of superficial, feel-good varieties of multiculturalism has created the conditions for a symbiotic relationship between the western critics of science and the intellectuals of Third World origin, living and working fully or partly in the west. Of the latter, intellectuals of Indian origin have been highly influential. Taking their cue from the postmodern turn in social theory in western academe, Indian intellectuals increasingly began to frame the dynamic of modernisation primarily in terms of cultural meanings and worldviews. They presented modernisation as a David and Goliath struggle between the presumably humane and whole local and situated ways of knowing, and its exact opposite, the presumably totalitarian, imperialistic `metanarrative' of modern science and reason. In study after study -- the Green Revolution, the Chipko movement, indigenous vs modern medicine, popular religiosity vs secularism, village republics vs individual freedoms -- the two were painted in stark contrast, as if the sole aim and result of science-based development and modernity was to annihilate all local traditions, and as if the biggest problem facing the majority of Indian people stemmed from excesses of a scientific worldview and a completely rationalised life. By ignoring the differential effects of modern ideas and modernisation of the productive forces on different classes and castes -- which would have shown the liberating force of modernising ideas as well for the disadvantaged groups -- these critics have painted a grossly exaggerated picture of unremitting and total doom, with the entire Indian civilisation facing a crisis of meaning before the forces of `western' science. Such `analyses' were eagerly pressed into service by postmodern theorists as evidence of the depredations and totalitarianism of modernity.

It does not take any great genius to see the glaring disjuncture between the anti-western, anti-modernity harangues of Indian intellectuals and the desperate struggles of ordinary working people to obtain for their children the benefits of modern education including, above all, training in sciences and engineering.

In India science still has an enormous untapped potential for  progressive social change. Those who claim to attribute all our social problems, from sati to communalism, to the `hyperrationality' of modernity, have only given us their own idiosyncratic and highly debatable neo-Gandhian-postmodernist interpretations that seem designed to find colonialism responsible not just for its own sins, but for our own as well. They have yet to offer any sociological evidence of these `excesses' of reason, of all things, in the public or private sphere or in India.

Be that as it may, these critics tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that for a large part, our personal relations -- with our family members, with our subordinates and our superiors -- are embedded in a largely Hindu metaphysics which, for all other virtues that it may have, lacks any legitimation for equality between human beings in life or even in death. Let us not ignore the fact that the kernel of inequality and injustice in our dominant cultural traditions has habituated our society to a high level of everyday violence and cruelties to our fellow beings.

And that is where natural sciences have a job to do in our culture. The historic role of scientific ideas has been to replace metaphysics with physics, to demolish the closed, hierarchical world and reveal the pre-social equality of all human beings, and to free the mind from fear of gods and djinns. The ability to rationally understand the natural and social forces that impact our lives frees the individual from the cruel obligation to live according to norms set by a predetermined and immutable cosmic order. A desacralisation of consciousness and secularisation of social relationships is a prerequisite for a truly democratic civil society to emerge in our country. Without a headlong challenge to the traditional social order and its cosmology, all the `new social movements' cannot together give us a just and democratic civil society; rather, there is a serious danger that they themselves will become the bearers of traditional patriarchy and caste hierarchies.

Many eminent Indian intellectuals, including Sumit Sarkar, Achin Vinaik, Aijaz Ahmad and  Balgopal have pointed out that the uncompromising opposition of our nativists to all ideas modern implicitly, if not explicitly, legitimises the agenda of the reactionary Hindu forces. Rationalism, Newton's physics and Thomas Paine's ideas of natural rights were the weapons of choice of the lower-caste social reformers including Dadoba Pandurang, Jotirao Phule and Ambedkar. These organic intellectuals of the downtrodden were perfectly comfortable with the ideas emerging out of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

There is no reason to suppose that scientific ideas cannot or should not play the same secularising and liberalising trend in our culture as they did in Europe during the Enlightenment.

This article first appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly. Meera Nanda teaches at the Deptt. of Science and Technological Studies, Rensselar Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York