The Role of Science in Society
Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios
[At the
Fourth Indira Gandhi Conference on October 30, 1993. The theme of the conference
was Redefining the Good Society]
Contents
Introduction to the General Theme
-
Science in Society
-
The Public Character of Science in the Past
-
Science in the Service of War and Profit Today
-
Hopes and Despairs of Science
-
Unexamined Assumptions of Science
-
The Development of Modern Science
Conclusion
Introduction to the General
Theme
The theme as formulated seems to imply certain
assumptions which need to be examined.
First, can the Good Society be defined at all, not to speak of
any redefinition? What is the prevailing definition of the good society which
we are now seeking to redefine? Certainly there never has been one precise
model of the good society which would fit at all times and in every given
situation. Several possible models can at different times be constructed,
depending on a people's historical experiences, geo-political situation,
geography, population, cultural development, technological resources, advancement
and several similar factors prevailing at a given time in a given situation.
But right now we have no one agreed upon definition of the good society.
We are all largely adhoc-ists and pragmatists, when it comes to defining
the good society. We will take this job of redefining as more meaning reorienting
ourselves on the pathway to the future, rather than precisely defining or
redefining.
Second, do we construct societies after a mentally conceived model,
as we seem to do in the case of buildings, roads, dams, or a piece of clothing
or a work of art? Of course there is what is known as planning, which sets
targets and schedules, provides resources and personnel, and achieves or
fails to achieve certain specific goals. Social engineering has often tried,
but in fact failed, to follow the methods and models of civil engineering.
Societies are not made out of whole cloth, or out of building materials readily
available in the market, but out of existing socio-economic and cultural-scientific
conditions, of course bringing in such elements from outside as deemed necessary
and available. The platonic ideal of mentally conceiving the best society
and then sitting down to construct it, does not seem to work. It did not
work in the days of Plato or Plotinus (Platonoplolis, 3rd century AD) either.
All we can hope to do is to chart some points on the horizon, and to find
ways of moving in that direction, starting from where we are and not from
a tabula rasa. This demands first of all a fairly thorough analysis of where
we are today, how we got there from an earlier starting point, what prevents
us today from moving, and of the forces pulling society in directions other
than the one she should be pursuing. The best analysis in the world would
not get us far, if we do not fully understand the forces fighting against
the good society, because they think they can profit better from a bad society,
and develop an adequate structure of countervailing power.
It is also an important question to ask: who defines the good
society in each situation, and who sets common goals? India was not born
out of a nation-wide consultation among all the people of our land. Our Founding
Fathers, as was also the case in the USA, were a noble, humanitarian team,
though there were some exceptions. In India, some of the interests of Dalits
and other backward classes were ably safeguarded by personalities like Ambedkar.
But who was there to articulate and defend the needs and aspirations of the
many communities of Girijans, Adivasis and Tribals? The majority or "Main
stream" opted for commodity development, thinking primarily in terms of GDP,
jobs, loans, savings, investments and the lot. The Adivasis, left to themselves,
would have, in choosing national goals, emphasized living close to nature,
curbing one's needs and our greed for commodities, putting the accents on
peoples' community development, rather than on largely wasteful and sometimes
useless commodity development, which can serve only the interests of the
trading, business and finance communities. So, who are we here defining the
Good Society for others? What is our representativeness in relation to the
people of India, and in relation to the global human community. Can a nation
like ours choose what western liberals choose, and leave the Girijans to
the awfully unkind choice of either joining the mainstream and thereby losing
their identity, or being confined to unnatural habitats and there going to
seed. The people as a whole, if they are truly to make
a common choice , can do so only through a people's "revolutionary movement
sweeping the nation as a whole in a wave of people-led reform and social
renewal, and not under government or ruling party aegis.
The present document has chosen six aspects of the good society
as objectives to be pursued: Liberty, Equity, Fulfillment, Community, Science
and Non-violence. Somewhat arbitrary, but still a great improvement on the
French Revolution's liberte, egalite and fraternite. Replacing fraternite
by the four new concepts of meaning, community, non-violence, and the right
use of science, should be welcomed. But are we stuck with some of the concepts
thrown up by the specificities of western liberal-capitalist development?
Some of these very categories and concepts themselves carry over aspects
of their peculiar western historical development, the struggles among feudal
nobility, the industrial bourgeoisie and the working people in farms and
factories. Our own history is different, and we need fresh categories for
choosing national goals. Take concepts like democracy, development, liberty
and freedom. These concepts have substantially different content in their
situation and ours. The concept of freedom, for example, is a richer, nobler
concept, but the west still likes to talk about liberation than about freedom,
a concept with which the West seems uncomfortable.
And equity, which now replaces the French egalite cannot be a
sufficient substitute for the richer concept of justice which many would
regard as the essential foundation of the Good Society. Peace and Security,
Ecological health, etc. could of course come under "Non-violent and Humane
World Order", but could have been made more explicit in our sub group titles.
At this stage all that is meant is a warning about the perils involved in
"category choices". The categories in which we think often decisively affect
the nature of our conclusions.
It seems that there are two ways of structuring the paradigm for
our discussion here. The first is the one which most such conferences follow,
and which we ourselves at this Fourth Indira Gandhi Conference are likely
to adapt. This method consists in basically accepting the western liberal
democratic ideology and categories by making some slight changes here and
there, often from a western Marxist perspective, but without stopping to
ask any fundamental questions about the philosophical foundations of that
very ideology and category structure, accepting the prevailing pragmatic
method of not asking questions one is afraid of asking because one’s training
as an academic has not equipped one to do so adequately or with confidence.
The second method is infinitely more difficult and time-consuming
as well as being beyond the competence of most of us, and therefore hardly
likely to be adapted here. This is to begin by asking some simple but profound
fundamental questions, as our great Indian ancestors taught us to do. Begin
with questions like: What is there? How do we know? And where do we, as human
beings, fit into that Reality? What is real fulfillment for human persons
and communities, or in more traditional (and, as is to be anticipated, male-chauvinistic)
language, what is the true end of Man?
Science in Society
After these pre1iminary remarks, let me confine
myself to some reflections on one of the sub-themes: "Science in Society".
This is a topic on which I have been privileged to work for several years
with some of the leading scientists of all countries. (See my Science
For Sane Societies, Paragon, New York, 1987). Modern Science, as
distinguished from pre Newtonian science, is a specific outgrowth of western
socioeconomic history, and bears the marks thereof. We have space here only
to highlight some features of this "modern science".
The concepts of science and scientific method are notoriously
difficult to define. The precise contours (demarcation criteria) of the dividing
line between science and non science simply cannot be determined. There is
no a priori definition of science and scientific method, beyond simply denoting
what is generally accepted by the prevailing scientific community which happens
to have certain given ways of working together, and certain norms for certifying
scientific propositions.
The Public Character of Science in the
Past
There may have been a time in the past when
the distinction between pure science and applied science had some relevance.
Today more than 95% of science is applied, and scientific research is so
bound up with technological prowess, that the distinction between science
and technology is difficult to maintain. The cutting edges of scientific
research are so bound up with sometimes unaffordable, and often unpurchase-able
or unavailable high technology. This is so in High Energy Physics, in Super-conductivity,
and in biology, biochemistry and genetics. Scientific research is no longer
an open possibility for all societies. Science, having lost its innate public
character, becomes inauthentic, and something less than its original true
self.
There was a time when it was part of the Canon of Science that
all scientific knowledge should be public knowledge, open to experimental
confirmation or refutation by any competent scientist. This is no longer
so. The world scientific community today is divided into two classes: One
class of scientists are employed by defense or military establishments and
large profit-oriented corporations, who are sworn to secrecy and are not
allowed to share their scientific knowledge with others, for security reasons
or for monopoly patent/copyright considerations.
Science in the Service of War and Profit
Today
This has at least two major consequences:
First, war and profit minded establishments, notoriously unpublic and thus
undemocratic, can afford to corner the best scientific talent in the market
by paying them extra incentives; the cutting edge of current scientific research
thus goes in search of greater killing capacity or greater profit and power
for the few. Science is thus prostituted and misused in large part. So little
of science, and that too not the best talent, is available for humane purposes
like healing, healthy and economic housing development, non-monopoly non-chemical
food production, and for good education in a healthy environment.
The second consequence is that science/technology itself becomes
commodity and private property. Since high-tech is much in demand by the
poor, for good or bad reasons, its high marketability becomes a new tool
of exploiting and oppressing the poor. The whole corpus of patenting and
copyright laws leads us to a situation where knowledge itself becomes a commodity
for trade and profit making, and also for exploitation and enslavement. This
commercialization of science and the prostitution of science/ technology
for mass murder and easy profit detract from the original nobility of science
and technology.
There can be no doubt about the immense magnitude of the achievements
of modern science and the technology based on it. In the evolution of the
human species, there have been several quantum jumps in human capacity for
good and evil with the advent of modern science/technology. Since higher
capacity for good and evil is a top class challenge to the human will (both
individual and social) to direct its abilities towards the good and not towards
evil, the age of modern science-technology demands from humanity greater
moral and spiritual effort; instead we are on the whole letting ourselves
morally disintegrate, by choosing a culture of meaningless affluence, instant
gratification of all urges, and flabby moral vigor. Here even religion and
its leadership, instead of setting standards as they should, seem to fall
below the prevailing moral standards of ordinary people. Scientists themselves
had at one time an enviably high moral level, in their commitment to the
truth and in their pursuit of knowledge. We have a situation now where those
high standards of scientists are being eroded by the blandishments of power,
pelf and paisa. The link between science and integrity seems to grow weaker
day by day.
Hopes and Despairs of Science
The hopes pinned on to Modern Science were
many, but most of them have come to grief. Once it was thought by some at
least that Scientific Rationality would provide us with the right morality.
Every attempt so far has failed to yield the desired fruit. Again, once it
was thought that scientific reasoning would open all the doors to all knowledge.
We now know that science has its limits, and that much that we know does
not come from science, but from other forms of experience, including human
relations, art and music, literature and drama, pain and pleasure, and perhaps
even what is termed religious experience. It quite foolishly was believed
by many once that scientific knowledge is objective and therefore true, while
other convictions in so far as they are subjective, are prone to error. Today
we know that totally unsubjective objectivity is unattainable, since subjectivity
is an essential aspect of all knowing. And we know that current scientific
knowledge is subject to revision in the light of future knowledge, and that
there is no "finally proved" status to any scientific proposition.
Even more pernicious was the ridiculous dogma propounded by 19th
century European Positivists to the effect that all human knowledge invariably
passes through three stages: theological, metaphysical and scientific, and
that the latter is the only true knowledge which supersedes the two previous
infant (theological) and adolescent (metaphysical) stages of human evolution;
the conclusion was that science makes all theology and metaphysics obsolete.
Today this is recognized by sensitive people for what it is -- a dogma produced
by the European Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries with the comic
effort of European thought to do away with all external authority. But many
of the culpable attitudes stemming from this European hubris still prevails
among many scientists.
Unexamined Assumptions of
Science
Perhaps the most damaging caveat against
modern science is that its gnoseological technology not only distorts reality,
but even deforms the human person. It starts from many unexamined assumptions:
for example, it dogmatically and unscientifically assumes the givenness of
a self-existent entity called 'Nature' which is not contingent upon anything
else; the frequent assumption that things are what they appear to be; the
Naive or Constructive Realism which refuses to ask questions about the ontological
status of phenomena because such questions cannot be answered by science;
worst of all, the mistaken assumption that man, the knowing subject, can
stand outside the world and objectify, know and manipulate it. Science has
tended to distort human personality by overvaluing objectivity and underplaying
subjectivity, which is by far the richer aspect of human existence. The long
years of disciplining oneself to be always objective renders human beings
very inhibited in their subjective human relations.
The Development of Modern
Science
The uncritical devotion of both scientists
and lay people to Modern Science and Technological Rationality as the ultimate
arbiter of truth, bears some resemblance to the uncritical obedience of Medieval
European society to the Roman Catholic Church as the ultimate arbiter of
truth in all fields. The notorious medieval dictum: Roma locuta est, Causa
finita est (Rome has spoken, the matter is settled) has today become: Scientia
locuta est, Causa fini ta est. Medieval priests in their black robes, Cross
in hand, have been today replaced by Modern Scientists in their white smocks,
computer at hand.
The questioning of the Medieval church’s arbitrary authority took
a long time to become effective. There were the pre-Renaissance protests
of simple peasants against the exploitation and domination by the Church
as major landholder. Then came the European Renaissance which counter-posed
the authority of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Greek Classics to the
authority of the Church, as an alternative to the authority of the church,
especially in art, music and literature. The Renaissance Popes, many of them
both erudite and self-indulgent, managed to domesticate the Renaissance within
the Church. Then came the Protestant Reformation which pitted Scriptural
authority against Papal authority and broke lose from the Roman Catholic
Church in the 16th century developing its own forms of non-responsible authority.
Only the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment of the 18th and
19th centuries, finally triumphed by repudiating the authority of King and
Priest, of Church and Tradition, and setting up human rationality as the
final arbiter of truth. It is in that ethos that Modern Science developed
and flourished. Man became the measure and centre of a1l things, with Humanism,
whether liberal or Marxist, became the dominant ideology of our own era.
Human reason gave sufficient evidence of its own omnipotence or omni-competence.
Conclusion
We are in the post-modern era, where intellectuals
want to go beyond the norms of modernity. This is not the occasion to propound
the doctrine of the post-modernists or to refute it. The main point is that
the people's revolt against scientific rationality, against the Urban-Industrial
Technological Society, and the Europe-generated model of the modern nation-state,
has only begun to be heard by the academics.
The protest will take at least several decades to mature and gain
sufficient momentum to compel attention. I firmly believe that when the protest
matures, the foundations of a new society will also come to light.
Since the purpose of this exercise here is not the denigration
of science, but seeking for some reliable foundations for the good society
which we seek to redefine and reconstruct, the thrust of this paper is to
warn against any facile assumptions about science and technology being the
major tool for such definition and construction. Neither can the task be
done by putting together Science/technology and a packet of specially chosen
moral values.
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