For the purpose of this article I shall focus on only two aspects of modern science, which I, like several others, find particularly revolting and unacceptable. One is the mindless overt violence associated with the practice of modern science. This is not an unintended feature. The second is its capacity for causing large-scale ecosystem distress, which is mostly an unintended feature.

A few words about each in turn. Since its early beginnings in Europe in the 16^th century, the modern science tradition has cultivated and deployed a rather specific attitude of violence towards nature. Such violence has been justified on the grounds of gaining knowledge that would accrue to the benefit and welfare of human beings. J.K. Bajaj (1985) has shown in a perceptive essay on Francis Bacon (one of the founders of the modern science tradition) how even the language Bacon used for his description of scientific method reflected such extreme violence.

The assumptions under which modern science is willing to operate may not be acceptable to the practitioners of other science traditions under discussion. For instance, vivisection is standard procedure in modern science. But knowledge gained from experimentation requiring suffering of other living beings would be unacceptable to other science traditions. These, like the Jaina, for instance, would preclude scientific activity of this kind from the very start. It is not that the Jainas do not have a science tradition: they have one as well as anyone else, which is based on valid knowledge. Only, their science tradition is based on non-negotiable respect for all living beings, for other species, and on the scrupulous avoidance of suffering caused to other sentient beings. True and useful knowledge – particularly for the soul – cannot be gained by causing hinsa or violence.

This manner of thinking is a commonplace assumption within such indigenous traditions, which can doubt whether knowledge won after torturing helpless creatures can be of any fundamental use to human beings. Hindu cultural traditions represented in Lord Ganesha, for example, exhort all to win prosperity, but require that it shall be obtained without harming others. Riches (wealth or knowledge) generated by such means are undesirable. In contrast, modern science has come up in life largely due to vaunted unconcern with any suffering caused by its actions. It is the symbiotic association of modern science with economic and political power that permits the generation of such knowledge at all. The powerful have always been known to torture the weak (or powerless) with impunity. The use of unprivileged people as guinea pigs for new drugs, particularly contraceptive drugs, is well documented. But the violence in western science is pervasive and unquestioned: from the mass killing of other species dubbed ‘pests’ in agriculture to the eradication of soil bacteria by synthetic fertilizers or the benign organisms in the gut by powerful antibiotics. About vivisection, the mass torture and infliction of pain on millions of animals in laboratories, the less said the better. But that is the river on which mainstream science flows. It can be carried on ruthlessly, mindlessly, monotonously, since that is one of the fundamental assumptions on which the modern science tradition is based, rooted in the ancient, biblically inspired view that man is the master of all creation or all creation was made for his pleasure. This is a theory created by a specific religious tradition, the Judeo-Christian one. In this radical sense, modern science is a creature of Western culture and cosmology. However, there are no indications that this theory is either warranted or that it has any rational basis. It is in fact profoundly anti-ecological and for that reason unsupported by other traditions.

Let me go, then, to the second feature: the ready ability of modern science to cause mass ecosystem distress. This is not often emphasized in the literature, which often exclusively focuses on the alleged positive contributions of the tradition to human welfare. This is largely because the literature on the greatness of modern science is actually generated by the practitioners of modern science: judges in their own cause.¹ For this reason, the distress caused by modern science is rarely given as much credence, or discussion of it is avoided altogether. In fact, the modern science lobby and its technological manifestations are liable to generate large-scale mass havoc without fearing any serious challenge rebounding to their prevailing orthodoxy.

Earlier genocides and mass killings were associated with wars, conquests and other inter-human conflicts. But ever since the advent of modern science, they have closely been associated with the expansion of the influence of the scientific world-view – the thoughtless and nonchalant invention of toxic chemicals, including persistent organic pollutants, which are threatening the planet’s various species (including the human) in profoundly disturbing ways, is part of the active legacy of modern chemistry. So are Bhopal, Minamata and Seveso. In physics, count the creation of plutonium and the deadly harvest of radiation from nuclear testing, nuclear warfare and nuclear accidents (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Chernobyl). These were once considered the results of successful science, but today they are seen as the opposite. And what colossal failures! The destruction they have caused is enormous and the suffering inflicted is on a scale that could never be matched by all the butchers of world history acting in concert. Yet this does not function as a challenge to orthodoxy in any fundamental sense. (In contrast, even a small failing in other science traditions will often be used to damn the entire tradition). Therefore, I would like to reiterate my profound sense of doubt and unease in the modern scientific enterprise. The alleged virtues on which modern science is based – to my mind and to the minds of several others – in fact has no earth-shaking basis except in a few people’s heads. The enterprise is profoundly immoral and anti-nature. Best we were never associated with the circumstances of its birth, even if we are forced to associate with it for political reasons today.

How scientists in India have viewed modern science

The modern science tradition has long mesmerized the people within the industrialized world. It was bound to impress the influential people in the former colonized countries as well. It is, therefore not surprising that around 50 years ago, when India became an autonomous republic, the educated elite in charge of India’s administration preferred to adopt Western science lock, stock and barrel as they identified genuine scientific activity almost completely with it. While several features of Western culture – including the religion of the colonizers – were found by the colonized to be alien and unattractive and therefore rejected (even technology was sometimes confronted or fought), the modern science tradition seems to have been exempted from this general hostility. So while they entertained no doubt about kicking out the English, they embraced the science tradition that had come along with the British with great determination, for they saw in it their only hopes (or opium) of collective salvation. The modern science tradition generally received positive reception among intellectuals and political leaders in all cultures everywhere, even when the more prescient of them acknowledged that it carried that fatal seeds of destruction of all perceptions and cosmologies except its own. This well-garnished image of science had not changed over a hundred years and it bore, in fact, very little relation to the barbaric conduct of modern science in the real world symbolized in the two World Wars and the testing of atomic bombs on the human populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, the science tradition we fund, research and rule by continues to be an imported, borrowed, second-hand tradition. By saying so, we are also categorically submitting it is not part of our tradition of acquiring knowledge. The common people of this country – in contrast to its ruling intellectual elite – at least appear to have a better control over their brains. They continue to organize their lives by firm allegiance to cosmologies that owe nothing to modern science.

The general ignorance of the contributions of the indigenous science traditions within our ruling intellectual class need not be condemned too severely since much prevailing wisdom was actually thrust down their throats by the existing colonial system of education, which was designed to extend the range of one knowledge system and to eradicate the others. The colonial system of education impregnated large numbers of minds with a thoroughly useless arts education so that generations of historians who passed out of it had little or no competence or mental equipment, and thereby inkling or inclination, to understand the history of either Indian science, technology or even mathematics. Here we are at the heart of the matter. Why did the modern science tradition in the West ignore or marginalize knowledge that human beings in other cultures accumulated in a diverse variety of fields when it claimed that it respected all useful and valid knowledge? Modern science itself did not spring into existence one fine morning in Galileo’s head. It bears emphasis that it emerged from existing bodies of knowledge (including the Islamic) one calls traditional science. For thousands of years human being survived well enough with traditional science. It is not that any of the practitioners of modern science would even today deny that a good deal of the modern science tradition came from science and technology traditions outside Europe. So it could never be denied that there was also valid knowledge gained by scientific methods outside Europe.

Scientific temper

This brings us nicely to the issue of scientific temper. The discussion of scientific temper in this country in the recent past has manifested a great deal of patronizing. Scientific temper is associated or identified exclusively with modern science to show that scientists themselves are often rarely devoted to the practice of scientific temper in their own dealings, laboratories, personal affairs or community, since no man really lives by science alone. The argument assumes that scientific temper is an exclusive quality of the modern mind. The scientific temper debate is often ludicrously reduced to a proselytizing programme in which those steeped (or in-doctrinated) in modern science information feel it is their bounden duty to see that others who do not have it also have it even if it is of doubtful value or relevance. In exchange for this gilded gift of modernity, the latter are persuaded to give up their allegiance to ‘non-scientific’, ‘superstitious’ beliefs, like astrology, the use of mantras or even religion. In this sense, the conduct of those who propagate scientific temper is not much different from that of Christian missionaries who are also motivated by similar assumptions. One can only assume that the reason for this appalling irrational attitude of modern science practitioners or devotees to other intellectual traditions was the real fear of competition and the possibilities of rival theories of knowledge reducing their own sphere of influence. There was also the emerging new papacy of science (the Royal Society was formed in 1662), which was keen on establishing its own dogmas and myths, and enforcing its own paradigms and theories, certifying knowledge and decertifying what it would not accept as knowledge.

The colonial conquests gave practitioners of modern science unremitting faith in their own science tradition and they were able to rule that this would be applicable elsewhere, without challenge, because of the circumstances of the colonial period, which we all well know. I am not stating here that modern science has not in its 400-year-old history produced valid knowledge of a special category, but that other systems too have produced valid knowledge and it is interest in the pursuit of objective knowledge that is of benefit to the human species or enhances our understanding of the world, and there is no reason why one method of knowledge should be rejected wholly in favour of another, why others should be suppressed or merely used as hunting or foraging ground. Till today, the practitioners of modern science have no plausible explanation as to why they ignored valid knowledge from other science traditions or abused such knowledge as outdated or invalid without investigation, especially when they claim the patrimony over scientific temper.

We have to concede the influence of the ‘power is knowledge’ principle – that those who exercise clout also decide what is to be known, and when violence resulting from modern science can be ignored. I would like to suggest that if the world does modern science today, it is largely due to the power play of modern science practitioners and not to any inherently compelling attraction of its method. When we in fact see the close association between modern science practitioners and political power in our times, the argument becomes all the more irresistible. Scientists today revel in political power. They are often closely consulted on major political decisions and often are not accountable after the decision has been taken. The close association of scientists with the war goals of the United States led to enhanced funding for nuclear research and the invention of atomic bombs (which has now been repeated in India). Eventually, however, it can be seen that their contributions are not as impartial as they would seem, but can often be seen as contributing to their culture and economies having greater influence in the way the globe is organized or manipulated. In addition, they are often personally cash-enriched as well. Critics will say that even in traditional societies, knowledge and power have been closely associated. Knowledge is and always has been power. This is today’s dictum, too: those who have knowledge also will have power. Guilds maintained their power by refusing to divulge secrets for that would mean the elimination of their trades.

Brahmans disallowed knowledge of the scriptures to those outside the pale of caste rights. Even so, in all these cases, enlightenment arrived first, followed by the exercise of power. However, the in­version, ‘power is knowledge’ is relatively new. By it, politics defines knowledge, science, the manner in which nature must be perceived and organised. The inverted principle actually differentiates modem science squarely from traditional science. For us, such attitudes ought to be difficult to accept or allow. In ancient India such were the canons of fairplay (or scientific temper) among intellectuals that we know of arguments of learned scholars of some of the schools of thought if at all largely from their opponents. For example, we know of the philosophical positions of the Carvakas largely from their opponents who first laid them out fairly and then sought to refute them. If one were to use the same method to reconstruct indigenous science history from the observations or representations about it associated with the modem science tradition and its ideolo­gies, it would appear as if indigenous sciences either never existed or had produced no valid knowledge in their entire histories or merely deal with mysticism or myth. Or if they did, they existed merely as ‘proto-sciences’. If indigenous science is ‘proto-science’, how do we explain recent attempts to wholly colonise and pirate indigenous medical knowledge relating to turmeric and neem by powerful American corporations? Would one call the breeding or conservation of 300,000 documented varieties of rice by farmers­ – who never went to modern agricultural universities – also ‘proto­science’? On what basis? Today votaries of Ayurveda like Deepak Chopra are best-selling authors. And the corporate world is agog with the millions it can make by patenting indigenous knowledge.

This profoundly antagonistic attitude towards other indigenous science traditions has had undoubtedly profound implications for the perception of what these sciences really stood for, their method­ologies, goals and the achievement of valid knowledge. First, they were neither well studied nor well represented. Worse, such phenom­enal ignorance led to seriously deficient policies. In the case of public health, for example, due to the dominance of the western science of allopathy, health policies abandoned Ayurveda and other Indian medical systems despite the latter’s enormous store of knowledge and expertise. It is generally conceded that most of the material that would constitute a proper history of scientific ideas and practice is still to be brought into the public domain, for it is not yet translated. Despite this enormous gap in exposure, efforts to dismiss it were routinely and successfully made.

Revaluation of indigenous science traditions

Despite the suppression discussed above, there are several reasons why interest has resumed today in indigenous science traditions. As dissatisfaction with modern science (agriculture, medicine) has spread, the ready availability of their obvious utility to the common folk has resurrected options that had been blanked out before. There is added awareness that such wholly indigenous traditions work, often in areas where the modern science tradition is wholly incompetent or has failed. So the conviction has gained ground that valid knowledge is not the exclusive prerogative of one science tradition alone and others, too, are associated with valid and useful knowledge. In India, with more than five decades having passed by since independence, there is scope for a more balanced view. In other cultures, too, the debate on indigenous science traditions is resuming with increasing vigour and intensity. Even in the United States, for example, and also in South America, there is a great deal of study of indigenous philosophies, languages, arts and science of the native American Indians. Such recoveries are well nigh im­possible in the original European culture area, where it is a case of absolute hegemony of the modern science tradition and where alternatives – and competing knowledge systems – have long since been suppressed to the point of extinction.

This is as much true of their minds as it is of nature, where bio­diversity has long been extinguished and replaced with monocultures. Even today, as the patenting by multinational corporations of indigenous knowledge from Asia referred to earlier generates contro­versies, and as the West forages within indigenous science traditions, it is clear that modern science practitioners acknowledge that valid knowledge is still available in other culture areas and can be used with profit in their own system. They do not even claim that they have generated this knowledge on their own. Their own claim is that this valid knowledge has not been patented for exploitation in the market and hence the general rush to do so. So we must conclude that it was actually modern scientific temper that prevented our own scientists from approaching these knowledge resources with an open mind.

An equally important aspect of this discussion, which could bear with some repeating because it is so easily forgotten, is that traditional science is also valid scientific method. It is only a bigot who will hold that scientific knowledge can only be achieved with modern science methods or only the knowledge won or vindi­cated through modern science methods (dependent on violence) is valid knowledge. This is easily demonstrated by parading numer­ous examples from history itself: till the time of the Galilean revolution and the inauguration of the modern science tradition, arts and technique were based on profound and competent knowledge of materials and living systems. Steel was made in India that was of a finer quality than any steel produced in England without Indian artisans having learnt the secret of modern metallurgy. Plastic surgery originated in India and the context within which it evolved was completely alien to the Galilean framework of under­standing of nature. These are but two examples and one can literally give hundreds. The reader who wishes to have a good sampling should consult the recent Kluwer publication edited by Helaine Selin, Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in non-Western Cultures.

Only those with minds profoundly damaged by colonial education will refuse to see the obvious. Indigenous science traditions – es­pecially those that have existed in various parts of the globe outside the jurisdiction of the western/European world, what is generally identified as the modern science tradition – is characterised by quite distinct and mutually irreducible ways of perceiving nature and the self. For these reasons, despite 400 years of it existence, and despite its obvious clout and power, modern science has remained largely extraneous to societies, cultures and indigenous science traditions in the rest of the world – a foreign implant, not rejected for who can reject the powerful, but not wholly accepted either. Its claims of providing a substitute for other world-views (religious or metaphysical) have long since evaporated like some modern politician’s electoral promises. Even in societies like ours where it continues to operate like an inconvenient lump in the throat, it remains happily restricted to mental compartments, at the cerebral level, sometimes not even at that level, merely as a humdrum and rather pointless activity whose principal justification is it can get you a livelihood. It is not associated with creativity in any funda­mental way. Even the successes – like the generation of nuclear weapons – are based on close imitation and not originality. We can also kill as ruthlessly, blindly, heartlessly as anyone else! In fact, without the support of the state, modern science in India would be gladly dead.

Conclusion

Often a set of ideas may continue to hold sway over people’s minds and beliefs long after their truth value has been seriously eroded. This seems to be the case with many aspects of the modern science tradition. Its failures are now conceded more matter-of-factly than earlier. Its successes are being increasingly qualified. The problems its tunnel vision has engendered are proving to be more numerous and intractable than the problems it helped solve. Only the absence of any alternative in the centres in which it has held power – like a papacy – for centuries and its association with economic power prevents large-scale desertion from its ranks. That, fortunately, is not a limitation set on us, with considerable access still available to a different way of thinking and doing science. We would be foolish to let the opportunity go by. Let us by all means be open to everything, including modern science, but let us also build a sustainable fire fully under our control, which we can use to temper the new myths we desperately need.

Note

1. Bronowski’s (1973) work is a fine example

References

Bajaj, J.K. (1985). ‘The Roots of Modern Science: An Appraisal of the Philosophy of Francis Bacon’, PPST Bulletin, 4(2): 155-74

Bronowski, Jacob (1973). The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown.

Selin, Helaine (ed.) (1997). Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Dordrecht: Khuver.

(This essay is part of the book, Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India, edited by Kamala Ganesh and Usha Thakkar, Sage Publications, 2005. Pp.235-245)