Science Matters, Ideology Matters More

Sumit Bhaduri

Whether or not the laws of nature matter to human beings is a philosophical question with a long history that goes back to before the time of Galileo Galilei, the astronomer and the father of physics, or even the origins of the words science and scientists. Individuals who discovered such laws, or developed the impractical applications to change the world, would have been known as natural philosophers in their time, their fields of enquiry as natural philosophy. William Whewell, a polymath, whose expertise ranged from poetry to mathematics, coined the term “scientist” less than 200 years ago in 1833.

Today, the same question may be rephrased as “Does science matter”. This indeed is the first part of the title of a book published 35 years ago in America. The title, “Science matters: achieving scientific literacy” (SM) spelt out what the authors, two university professors, wanted. They were motivated to publish the book because according to them this was a time (1990) when “More than ever before, scientific and technological issues dominate, from global climate change, to the teaching of evolution, to the perceived gradual decline of American competitiveness”.

Addressing high school and college students they further said such issues “directly affect your life–issues about which you, as a citizen, will have to form an opinion if you are to take part in our country’s political discourse” (italics added). This, however, was not the first time that scientific literacy became a hot topic to advocate in America.

The status of and unhappiness with science education in America came to a head with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957. Paul DeHart Hurd, an educationist published an influential essay “Science Literacy: Its Meaning for American Schools”. He called for a new, more general kind of science education for all students.

The background of Hurd’s essay was the Cold War. The race for supremacy between the USA and USSR in rocket science and ever more powerful nuclear weapons was at its peak. It was also a race for supremacy in ideological debates about the relative merits and demerits of socialism and capitalism, the role of the state in a planned versus market economy, etc. Such debates, discussions, and propaganda were aimed at moulding, what could be broadly called culture.

It has been thirty-five years since SM was first published, but the issues mentioned by the authors in it are still there. Alarmingly quite a few new and serious ones such as another possible pandemic, abuse and misuse of artificial intelligence, environmental pollution by micro-plastics and “forever chemicals” have been added to the list. If what they said was a correct assessment in the USA at that time, it is more so for the whole world today. The importance and relevance of science in today’s globalised world is not limited to one single country or the American society.

In a plenary lecture at a literary festival this year, Venki Ramakrisnan, an Indian origin Nobel laureate scientist made this point. He advocated what he called broad literacy. According to him, broad literacy will act as a bridge between two cultures, the cultures of science and humanities. It will stop the spread of “misinformation, disinformation, prejudice and conspiracy theories” which has made the worldwide rise of “populist movements” possible. It will enable citizens to take scientific evidence seriously and not be deceived by the lies and propaganda of “demagogues” [1].

Unfortunately, no literacy, broad or otherwise will work unless that literacy addresses the role of ideology in moulding culture. An ideology basically stabilises and perpetuates cultural dominance through masking and illusion. The science and Technology (S&T) related issues mentioned above are complex, and to succeed any implementable solution must have societal acceptability. They will need S&T driven innovations where delivering societal well-being and not quick profit is the main objective. This in turn will require an understanding of what innovation meant in the past and what it has come to mean now.

Innovation in essence means new products or new ways of doing things that lifts the economy to a higher level. Big innovations in most cases depend critically on earlier and incremental innovations. They all disturb power balances between social groups, institutions, and nations but also deliver benefits to humanity as a whole. Profits generated by industry through successful small or incremental innovations are, supposed to be rewards sanctioned by society to the entrepreneurs for their successful efforts in delivering societal benefits.

The creation of “more massive and more colossal productive forces” that Marx had talked about more than 150 years ago, was the essence of a series of innovations that were based on machine manufacturing, followed by the use of steam engine as a general-purpose technology. In Marx’s words those innovations enabled capitalism to put an end to “The feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry”. In the early days of the industrial revolution, the French revolution of 1789 did disturb the social equilibrium massively. The word “ideology” was invented around that time by the French aristocrat Antoine Destutt de Tracy.

In the first half of the 20th century, the political economist Joseph Schumpeter contextua-lised the innovations of the late 19th and early 20th century as “creative destruction”. Schum-peter was not a Marxist and had views on democracy that would probably be considered as elitist today. He did not think that capitalism can survive its criticism by the intellectual class. On capitalism’s possible future he said “Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can”.

It would appear that Schumpeter and Marx might have underestimated capitalism’s longevity and seductive hold over culture. In the 1980s, Reganomics and Thatcherism in the USA and Britain respectively, were made respectable by economists such as Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Whether or not the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” added to their academic reputation or the ideology that they represented is a mute question.

The disintegration of the former USSR that started in the 1990 contributed enormously to boost the myth of an all knowing, self-correcting market that thrives on innovations. It was around that time, that “innovation” became a fashionable word among management gurus, politicians, and bureaucrats. An ideological perspective of where anything went in the name of “innovation” and success was measured by solely short-term profit, was aggressively promoted.

The lessons from great innovations, such as batteries, birth control pills, DNA forensics, penicillin, MRI scan, computers etc., all of which originated in non-market laboratories, were conveniently forgotten. As were the facts that converting science into safe technology takes time, and therefore genuine innovations must have a longer term horizon were forgotten. The critical roles of the entrepreneurial state, and the academic or non-profit laboratories in the innovation process, were totally ignored.

The fact that nobody owned the web or the internet was ignored. Even today, the fact that the much-touted m-RNA based vaccine against COVID, and artificial intelligence both originated in State-sponsored laboratories as parts of government funded projects are rarely mentioned. While mind-boggling profits have been made from these innovations, very little if anything has come back to the State as a part of the reward.

The “catastrophic market failure” of 2008 should have been but was not an eye opener. The “self-correcting” market turned out to be a myth, and the ‘innovative” products of the financial world, derivatives etc. fictitious, if not downright fraud. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve of the USA from 1987 to 2006, was asked why he failed to regulate the market. His answer was “you need an ideology… the structure that defines how the world works… free… markets are… the way to organise economies”. He “found a flaw in the… structure” only after the event.

What he left unsaid is obvious, ideology determines the contours of economic as well as political power in a society. “Does innovation breed innovation”, is a question that was posed just before the market crash in an economics text called “The free-market innovation machine: analysing the growth miracle of capitalism”. After the crash it could be answered unequivocally: only in a market where the society has a major say in its affairs but not in one where it is disembodied from society.

Soon after the “great recession”, it came to light that to maximise profit large multinationals that boast of innovations, had in fact manipulated, fabricated and suppressed scientific data and evidences. Such corporates were spread across all major industries: oil, automotive, pharmaceutical, finance etc. They all got away by paying paltry fines [2].

In the last century a market disembodied from the society triggered the two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the revolutions in Russia and China. Today as the world lurches from one crisis to another, the ideology of “quick profit” remains unchallenged. Restoring the cultural authorities of science and humanities in such a world will only be possible if there is a change in ideology [3]. Scientific or broad literacy will be effective only when the existing ideological limitations are clearly acknowledged and rectified.

Referece:
1   https://madrascourier.com/opinion/the-culture-of-technology/
2   S. Bhaduri, Curret Sciece, Vol. 113, No. 1, 10 July 2017; 0018.pdf
3   Science, Society, and Technology—Three Cultures and Multiple Visions, Journal of Science Education and Technology.

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