Science, hegemony and violence : a requiem for modernity

Abstract

ion involves restricting experience to zero. Abstraction means zero history. The other features of abstraction are mediacy and communicability. Plato's World of Ideas is pure abstraction. The Galilean experiment, or scientific rationality, merely purified such abstraction to a further extreme. The experiment ideally restricts: it first eliminates historicity. The scientific experiment is, in fact, an exercise in pure abstraction. This may sound strange to many, since what is really supposed to distinguish modern science from metaphysics or religion is precisely the idea that it alone is empirical, that it appeals to fact as the final arbiter. It is when we examine closely the nature of this fact that we discover something seriously amiss: the scientific 'fact' is not the ordinary historical event or object, with all the relevant historical forces acting on it at the moment. It is a theory-laden fact, a fact created out of a certain metaphysics. The empiricism is not the empiricism of the ordinary English language, but carries its own stipulated meaning. The main feature of the experiment is that it is devoid of historicity, of uniqueness, of time. In order to experiment, one has to create one's facts to fall in line with certain postulates. These postulates themselves are not subjected to 'scientific' scrutiny nor to any systematic reasoning as to why one postulate is preferred to another. A scientific fact has to be stripped of all its unique features, its essential nature has to be abstracted, to make the new information fit other similarly anaesthetized events. The fact that an experiment distorts reality is no longer doubted: what is striking is that such 'objective knowledge' is still passed off as the final and the only reality. The method thus becomes the sole criterion for truth. It makes possible the invention of a specific category of truth, 'scientific' truth. The point can be elucidated by a simple comparison between two western thinkers, Aristotle and Galileo. Aristotle determined that if one were to drop a stone and a feather from a height, the stone would fall faster than the feather. And in reality, in history as a rule, stones do fall more rapidly than feathers. Galileo's invention of scientific rationality eliminated all the possible historical forces acting on both stone and feather: if all such influences were removed, he hypothesized, both stone and feather would fall at the same speed. Toricelli later constructed a vacuum to prove him right. A vacuum is total emptiness, zero experience; the scientific fact created by Galileo and Toricelli was not a natural fact, it was an artificial fact. The argument of this paper is that violence results when 'artificial' or 'perfect' nature is imposed on 'natural' or 'imperfect' nature (seen as being in an unscientific state). Modern science is therefore not a presupposition-less activity, though it may often pretend to be. It seems to start from scratch, from empirical fact, and its postulates seem to deny all metaphysics. Nevertheless, its postulates function as a front for a new metaphysics, and because they, like all other kinds of postulates, are assumed, they distort reality and define it selectively. There is a metaphysics that enables scientists to detonate an atomic bomb over a human population purely as an experiment, or to endorse the planting of a monocultural forest under the garb of scientific forestry. One common strand runs through all the perverse manifestations of science in our world. Our business must be to locate it and to determine how it can be progressively ruined. The postulates upholding science are not the consequence of critical scrutiny, nor are they the result of any democratic process. The scientific worldview argues that there is no real need for democracy in science, as personalities, history, time, have all been exorcised. Here lie the origins of modern intolerance. On the scale of restrictions, an event of pure experience, because it is unique, is incomprehensible and often incommunicable. For this reason, it is quite tolerant of other unique events. Abstraction demands the reverse set of qualities. It provides a basis for communicability precisely because the irreversible, unique, historical character of any event has been eliminated, and this placing of the event outside time and other historical forces enables public agreement on what modern science is about. The event has been reduced in status from the unique to the non-unique and repeatable. In the Indian tradition, there was no basis for such a view, as reason itself was considered defective as a method for reaching truth. The postulates were different, and while they permitted earlier science, they effectively and fortunately inhibited the rise of Galilean science. One of the qualities of abstraction, communicability, also lays the basis for a close alliance between science and authoritarianism. The scientific worldview is a totalitarian worldview: it compels universal acceptance of its postulates, without providing an equivalent 'scientific' argument for such acceptance. While the method demands that teleology must be kept out of experiments, the general culture of science correspondingly urges that societies too should operate as if teleology were a figment of the imagination. Science claims for itself a method for arriving at indisputable knowledge, knowledge that is not the result of negotiation, bargaining or choice, and that has no basis in politics. One is not free to choose scientific knowledge on principle. That is a given, declared final after the efforts of thousands of researchers. One is free (and often encouraged) to reject the statements of religion or art but he who refuses to accept the basic scientific worldview runs the risk of being labelled ignorant, insane, or irrational. Science has redefined the rational to mean only its own method, excluding all else. The implications for a democratic order are obvious. Science, to be science, concentrates all knowledge within itself while access to scientific knowledge becomes itself a matter of privilege. The non-scientist is then seen as an empty receptacle into whom is poured the benefits science confers; and he must ask no questions. But democratic rights include the right to assess, or claim, true knowledge, and to reject impersonal knowledge. The right, in other words, includes the power to certify knowledge on any scale. Under the dominance of science, such rights have been eroded, and ordinary people (those who do not wear white coats) are no longer considered able on their own authority to provide true knowledge of the world. Nature acts according to her laws. The scientist wishes to discover these laws. He may discover a few, but the totality eludes him and will always do so. Despite this, his effort is to substitute his knowledge of natural laws for such laws themselves. The scale of restrictions could be rewritten, therefore, as a scale stretching between organism/nature and machine/science. The transformation of medieval man into modern man is now clear: the movement of western society has taken it from an organic base to a machine base, while the earlier reliance on natural principles has been supplanted by one on principles invented by modern science. For western man, the mechanization of the world image is diametrically the opposite of what constituted the earlier organic perspective. A caveat. Is modern science merely a reading of natural principles, of how nature works? This is the theory; this is the profession. Actually, what is achieved is a distorted view of the operation of natural principles. If a correct picture had emerged, there would have been no pollution or ecological imbalance on the application of such scientific knowledge. The negative consequences indicate that the picture does not fit with the demands of nature. Nature is the primary scientist, but she functions responsibly. The consequences of her inventions, so marvellously described recently by Felix Paturi and Karl von Frisch, are absorbed by self-closing natural processes. Modern man creates objects artificially, but he can produce no equivalent process for the absorption of these goods post-use, or for their breakdown into elements. They then begin to clog the arteries of nature like a clot in the bloodstream. This has an even more serious implication. The attempt of the machine to replace the organism, of science to replace natural principles, cannot remain confined to a particular culture or society. A civilization driven by a theory of science/machine ipso facto becomes a colonizing force, and aspires to bring under its sway every other culture that has based its survival on a natural relationship with its surroundings. Returning to the scale of restrictions, human beings or societies that move beyond the homeostatic balance that civilizations construct, are usually vulnerable. The organic, because it is unrelated to colonization, is always open to attack. A tribal community, very closely integrated with its environment, is for that very reason prey to colonizing forces, as history has so clearly shown. The abstraction is also not self-limiting, except in an ultimate sense. As we are no longer dealing with organic elements which have an in-built limitation, or termination at the close of their cycle, there are no limits to abstraction. The compulsion towards it becomes overwhelming, and no practitioner has any clue as to how to shut this Pandora's box. Abstraction, uncontrolled, becomes a threat to life and, as a consequence, to science