This is an abridged version of an essay by Metropolitan Paulos Mar Gregorios of Delhi who led the seminar on the subject in January 1989 at Trivandrurn.
The achievements of modern science and technology are truly enormous. They raise some major questions for humanity and its future in this Essay, we shall pick up three clusters of such questions all of which have some ethical import:
Two examples of decisions-making in science and technology;
(b) the problem of the kind of society in which science develops; and
(c) science as a problematic human instrument for fashioning the future.
There seems to be no fully scientific method by which we can arrive at a satisfactory answer to many of these questions.
Decision-making in Science and Technology
Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy
Let us take two examples to illustrate this cluster of problems: the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and genetic engineering, or the manipulation of living organisms. Both, as "we shall soon see, are really live issues for us in India, though the general public is only just beginning to awaken to the importance of these questions.
India has embarked on a determined programme .for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. There are two aspects to this. First, that of peaceful nuclear explosions, which we shall not discuss here. What we need to discuss are problems raised by our nuclear power projects in Tarapur, Rana Pratap Garh, Kalpakkam and Narora. Only in Tarapur do we use enriched uranium as fuel and therefore have to depend on the Americans with all the attendant problems that Carter and Morarji once discussed in that famous private conversation some years ago,problems which have not yet been settled.
ln the Rajasthan, Madras and U.P. projects we use natural uranium, enriched by moderators, or materials with light nuclei (like ordinary water, or heavy water in which the hydrogen is deuterium;, i. e., hydrogen with one proton and one neutron in its nucleus, rather than the single neutron nucleus of ordinary hydrogen) which can absorb fast neutrons emitted by radioactive materials and slow them down to thermal energy which is what is needed in reactors.
Now what is the problem? To put it briefly: ' the whole fuel cycle is full of problems. mainly radiation hazards. The mining of uranium ore, production of the yellow cake, disposal of the tailings left after production of the yellow cake (usually about 100 times as voluminous as the cake itself) the liquid waste from the caking process-all these are full of radioactive hazards. Many of the buildings in Colorado are still ' dangerous, because their basements are filled with trailings-sand. Just the ordinary functioning of a nuclear reactor lead to a lot of radioactivity escaping into the biosphere. Chief among these, argon-41, fortunately has a half-life of only some two hours. Impurities in the cladding, around the fuel rod, may also lead to radiation leaks. Iodine-131, often leaked by reactors and released in large quantities by the fall-out from atmospheric test explosions, is exceedingly dangerous. Its half life is eight days; enough to be absorbed by the grass and so into cows and through cows‘ milk into humans. And hence the risk of blood cancer in both children and adults. Dr. E. Sternglass. Professor of Radiation Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, read a paper in 1969 at a symposium "sponsored by the US Atomic Energy Commission, which stated that some 400,000 infants less than a year old, had probably died as a result of nuclear fall-out between 1950 and 1965.
The used fuel-rods are the most dangerous; they have to be disposed of or re-processed. At the British Windscale nuclear reactor, about 600 cubic metres of highly radioactive waste had been stored by the end of 1974. In the USA, the Hanford Reservation in Washington State had 250,000 cubic metres of high-level radioactive waste stored in ordinary steel tanks. More than a dozen leaks have already occurred. A leak in the large tank (No. 106.T) released approximately 435,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid into the earth before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its subcontractors decided to empty the tank into other tanks. This liquid contained 40,000 curies of Caesium-137, 14,000 curies of Strontium-90, as well as some plutonium. Most of this would have already reached ground-water levels and contaminated the water people use.
Even without leaks developing, some of these tanks, which are made of concrete with an inner lining of steel or glass. Can last only a few dozen years. Strontium 90 has a half-life of 28 years. This means that Strontium remains dangerously radioactive for at least 300 years.Plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years. New techniques of leak-proof storing have been devised in the last few years.
But waste management continues to be a problem, though experts, including our own in India, are loathe to admit this. Whatever the experts may say, people know enough about the accidents that took place on 3-mile island in Pennsylvania (two in 1979 and one in 1980), not to fully trust the experts.
If a future has to be fashioned for mankind, one which is not hellish, we will have to do something about nuclear testing, nuclear arms manufacture and its use, and even about the use of nuclear power- for peaceful purposes. To my knowledge, no scientific demonstration has proved that the increase in the incidence of cancer in our time is not caused, at least in part, by nuclear fallout and leaks. For the educated layman such an investigation seems necessary, though it is difficult to devise conclusive tests.
In India we have marched boldly forward in the construction of nuclear reactors, leaving it largely to the experts to worry about the ensuing hazards. There has been no public debate, nor a significant nuclear protest movement. The people are largely uninformed about the hazards of reactor accidents and of fuel waste-disposal.
We know little about the huge Windscale accident in the UK where one plant burned down, another had to be closed, and both entombed. What do we know about the military nuclear power Plant accident in Idaho in 1961, when the whole plant exploded releasing lethal levels of radioactivity, killing instantly several Americans? Or about the accident the Enrico Fermi Plant in Detroit in 1963 which led to its shut down? Why did Switzerland shutdown its Lucens reactor in 1969, when operations were at full steam for only a few months? The answer is: because of a major accident in the cooling system. What happened at the West German power station of Wuergassen on 12 April 1972? Again, a valve failure in the cooling system caused an accident which led to its closure.
Someone should collect the nuclear folklore of the last two decades, in order that we may better understand why there is a virtual nuclear power moratorium in the USA and Sweden, and also in order to see how we, in India, are fashioning our own future.
Someone should also tell us more about Plutonium the new-made element, which so far as we know does not exist in nature. It was first created by Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues around 1940 at the University of California. Today P239 is everywhere used or produced in reactors and nuclear weapons. The Rocky Flats fire in Colorado (1969) caused by the self-ignition of two tons plutonium in Building 776-777 has made people very wary. The immediate loss was estimated at$ 65 million. Plutonium had been released into the surrounding air, earth and water. One microgram of plutonium entering the human lung can cause lung cancer. Two tons of plutonium is enough to kill two billion of the world's four billion people, or half the world's population.
This raises three basic questions:
1. Do we have the right to play with such highly toxic materials which may endanger the health of people allover world now and for many generations to come?
2. Are we taking the option for using nuclear energy after due consideration oi all the factors involved?
3.”Do we leave such matters to the experts, or should the public be directly and actively involved in informed decision-making? Can Science answer these questions?
Genenic Mutation
The second example that I would like to offer in the problem of decision making in science concerns genetic engineering. Ever since 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick gave us the structural analysis of the compounds which form DNA (the master molecule in most genes), and Noble Laureate Har Gobind Khorana created a biologically active synthetic gene, humanity has been confronted with enormous power, the power to alter the basic structure of all living beings.
It is this capacity for gene mutation which gave us the green revolution with its high-yield variety of seeds. It is this technology which led to the interesting case of Anand Chakraborty developing an oil-eating bacterium for the General Electric Company in the US.A patent was then applied for in 1972, but this has been contested in the US courts for the last eight years. lt was only on 16 June 1980, that the US Supreme Court ruled by a majority of five against four, that man-made organisms like bacteria can be patented.
In principle, it is possible to produce in the laboratory a bacterium against which humantity has no resistance. You can then patent it under some pretext, you can store it and later use it for blackmail, sabotage and so on.
In the USA plant seeds can also be patented. Seed companies have been creating new high-yield or disease-resisting seed varieties by genetic mutation. ln Britain, for example, if a seed company has a plot of high-yield tomatoes, then people living in the neighbourhood are forbidden by law to grow any other variety of tomatoes in their back yards, ostensibly to protect the seed company's tomatoes from miscegenation. The fine for growing an outlawed variety of tomatoes can be as high as $ 400!
Biologist Garrison Wilkes in an article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (1977) expressed the fear that traditional varieties of vegetable and food grains may disappear through lack of use. Dr. Erna Bennett of the FAO in Home also estimates that by 1991 “fully three-quarters of all the vegetable varieties now grown in Europe will be extinct due to the attempt to enforce patenting laws." More recently, The Washington Post wrote an editorial on the ‘Seeds of Trouble‘, which said that farmers around the world are planting fewer and fewer varieties of crop. This decrease in genetic diversity may make crops more vulnerable to pests as well as to climatic changes and we may, as a result, face catastrophic famines in the future.
What is more worrying is that the big transnationals are buying up the seed companies Soon, companies such as Union Carbide, Shell, Pfizer, Ciba-Geigy, Purex, Upjohn, Sandoz, etc., may have a virtual monopoly on plant seeds.
These are all problems which scientists cannot solve by themselves. We cannot fashion the future unless ordinary people like us can begin to inform Ourselves and insist that decisions taken nationally, as well as internationally, are conducive to human justice and human freedom.
Science and Society
A UNESCO study estimated that, in 1974, global expenditure on Research and Development amounted to 101,785 milion of which only 2.6 per cent was spent in the developed countries.
Science develops in this loaded international science-technology order: those who have, can have more and more. Those who do not, will have less and less. The UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development, held in Vienna in the summer of’l979, failed to propose any real solutions. it could only call for the establishment of a 250 million R & D assistance fund for developing countries. to set right a gap of $96,500 million per year.
To put it another way: in a society where injustice dominates, science and technology instead of becoming instruments for the eradication of injustice have become efficient tools for further exploitation and a more deep-seated injustice.This is true both internationally and intra-nationally. Science and technology are not automatically and inherently good. If society is badly structured then science can become an enemy of the poor, the powerless and the exploited.
The manipulation of economic theory is another way in which science is used to perpetuate a situation of exploitation domination. The best recent example is Miton Friedman's book Free to Choose.Friedman sees inflation as the central problem of the economy and blames the government for printing too many currency notes. it is‘a simple theory: when there is more money printed than the value of goods produced. then the currency loses its value, or, prices increase in terms of the value of the currency.
But why does the government print more money? According to ‘Friedman. It does so for three reasons: rapid growth in government spending; government's policy of full employment; and the attempt by the Federal Reserve System to control credit supply by regulating interest rates rather than by curtailing the supply of currency. His solution is equally simple. I quote: "Just as an excessive increase in the quantity of money is the one and only important cause of inflation, so a reduction in the rate of monetary growth is the one and only cure for inflation." Of course, Friedman also admits that cutting down currency supply, and therefore a trimming of all deficit budgets and excessive government spending, will reduce the rate of growth and increase unemployment.
Economic theory, masquerading as science, has a great capacity for hood-winking not only poor consumers like ourselves, but also the planners of our economy. Our prevailing liberal-scientific economic theories, whether neo-classical or neo-Keynesian, contain ideological assumptions that distort the truth. To cite some points, as a non-economist. l would mention the following:
1. The growth-assumption or the nongrowth assumption, i. e.,either ‘more is better’ or ‘enough is best‘ (as in Steady State Economics).
2. The ‘invisible hand’ theory which makes the assumption-though mitigated by Keynesian recognition of governmental monetary and fiscal action as a necessary regulating factor~that justice need not be built into economic theory.
3. The "value-free assumption" that economics can be developed as a science quite independent of politics which is the science of power distribution e.g. the assumption that the important factors are inputs outputs or prices and wages, or inflation and employment or such value-free measurable entities.
4. The assumption that justice will automatically follow the increase of total production, without worrying too much about the distributional and organizational factors at the production stage.
The failure to recognize the fact that organized social labour is itself an epistemological category, powerfully influencing our perception of what is wrong and what needs to be done. The net result is that we propagate pernicious economic ignorance even among our intellectuals who are trained in economics. Economics as a science then stands in the way of economic planners proposing what is really necessary for a radical alteration of the social and political organization of human activity in order to reduce injustice and promote human welfare.
Economic science becomes, thus, an ideological tool of the exploiting classes; the rest of society is unable to trust its experts.
Science and Culture
The third cluster of issues has to do with the role modern science plays in our approach to reality and in our creation of culture. Modern science has replaced medieval religion not only in Europe. but also to a significant extent in India. Among the educated urban elite of our country, science, or the opinion of reputed scientists, has the power to influence both intellectual and spiritual authority. Especially after the launching of Rohini, the prestige of science has also sky-rocketed, if you will pardon the pun. In very complex issues like nuclear power, or the Silent Valley Project in Kerala, educated people are only too prone to ‘leave it to the experts’.
The myth that scientific knowledge is 'proved' and ‘objective’ has been exploded in the West.Scientific positivism may still be the structure upon which the thinking of many scientists and nonscientists rests. But as an intellectual position it has now been acknowledged by the best minds in the West, to be invalid.
In the English speaking West, the breakdown of positivism in all its forms has generated widespread despondency about the attainability of truth and has induced a general lack of confidence in the power of science to be the final arbiter of truth. There is a gnawing despair at the heart of Western civilization felt only by sensitive people, about the future of a civilization based on‘ the proven, mistaken assumption that science and technology could deal with all possible issues of knowledge and actual operation. Until recently, what was scientifically demonstrated was alone regarded as ‘truth’. But today two propositions, expressed by philosophers. seers, poets and literary figures and very seldom by scientists themselves, lie buried in the Western subconscious. These are:
1. Science cannot lead us to the ultimate truth for which we thirst and which alone can give us certainty, stability and security.
2. There seems to be no alternative to our kind of science, for arriving at the meaningful and valid truth, in our operations on the objective material world.
This pervasive doubt about the ultimate validity of science is not shared by the Marxist world of scientific and philosophical ‘thought. If there is a largely credible variety of Scientism going, then, one finds it only in the Marxist world. It is credible because it is not, as in Western positivism, obsessed with the ridiculous idea of an objectivity free from any trace of subjectivity. The Marxist philosophy of science has from the start, or at least beginning with Lenin, recognized the element of subjectivity in all knowledge. Marxism only refuted the Hegelian idealist principle, inturn based on Plato, that Consciousness or ideas alone were real; Engels, for instance, rejected all notions of mentalism or solipsism. The Marxists insisted that the external world ‘out there‘ is not a creation of man's mind: it is ‘there'-‘objectively’.
The fundamental question in Marxism concerns the relation between the reality of sensations, concepts and ideas which we experience, and the reality that supposedly exists 'out there.‘ In other words, it .concerns the relationship between the subjective experience of reality and the objectively existing reality. ‘Knowledge reflects the objects; this means that the subject creates forms of thought that are ultimately determined by the nature, properties and laws of the given object, that is to say the content of knowledge is objective.’ Marxism thus defends scientific knowledge as objective because it is a reflection in man's subjective consciousness of an objective material reality. '
This position gives rise to two difficulties: first, it is not scientifically demonstrable; second, it is inconsistent with certain other affirmations of Marxist philosophy.
The problem of undemonstrability arises primarily from the present limits of our knowledge. That range, in terms of magnitude, is of objects of the size of 10 to the power of 14 to -10 to the power of -28 cm. This is indeed a prodigious range, but it is not infinite.
According to Marxism, material reality is not only self-existent and eternal but also infinite. (Incidentally, religious people say something similar about God). If reality is infinite and if we know that only a finite part of it is now reflected in our consciousness,then, how can we, based on our limited knowledge of this finite range, pronounce judgement on the nature of the whole of reality?
The problem of inconsistency in Marxist thought arises because of the insistence on the one hand, that material reality is infinite and that it is a single-law governed system, and on the other, that in this system where all parts interact with each other the speed of such interactions cannot exceed ‘C’, the speed of light. The fact (-if it is one) that, within our range of knowledge, ‘C’ is not exceeded would not by itself be adequate for postulating ‘C’ as a strict upper limit for the whole of reality. Quite apart from the theory of tachyons (particles that move faster than light), in an infinite system, if its parts are fully to interact, the speed of reaction will also have to be infinite. How otherwise can two infinitely distant parts act and react with each other at a finite speed?
If he is honest, the religious person cannot claim to have answers to all these questions. Nor does he want to use the gaps in our knowledge in order to legitimize religious belief and practice. What he objects to is the habit of making absolute scientific judgments based on very partial knowledge. The honest, religious person does not claim that his understanding of reality is scientific in the sense that it is established by the canons of established scientific method. What he would insist upon as his fundamental human right is, simply, that he should not be bull-dozed by any dogmatism that masquerades as scientific certainty.
This insistence by the informed religious person has great relevance to the issues of fashioning a future, a relevance that can only be alluded to here. The concept of a ‘secular state‘, imported from the West; is a historically conditioned one; it arose. in the context of a revolt against the religious authority of the medieval Roman. Catholic Church which in its time dominated all civil and cultural institutions in‘ Europe. The early positivistic as well as the more recent post-positivistic, or critical-rational approaches to secular reality in Western liberalism, as well as the overly dogmatic ontology of social being in Marxism, are creations of that cultural milieu. While these are useful for us up to a point, they cannot be decisive either for the fashioning of our national future in India or the kind of contribution India could make to the fashioning of the future of humanity.
The least one can do is to promote conversations at sufficiently deep scientific and competent level among proponents of (1) the secular western liberal view, (2) the Marxist view and (3) the informed, honest religious view, in order to see how all three proponents, from their different perspectives, can jointly contribute to the fashioning of a future in the process of which they might, perhaps, be refashioned themselves.