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"A more fundamental project now confronts us. We must root out sexist distortions and perversions in epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of science-in the “hard core” of abstract reasoning thought most immune to infiltration by social values."
Discovering Reality, Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (1983)

Until roughly the mid-twentieth century, liberal feminist politics had little apparent impact on American universities. But thereafter the transformation was swift. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, student demographics shifted, women’s studies flourished, and remarkable reforms to the liberal arts curriculum became entrenched. There was no surprise when feminist theory moved into the humanities or the “soft” sciences. And, these days, the radical edge is worn off the idea of departments and faculty lines devoted to women’s studies. Indeed, the curricular shifts in academe that are associated with the rise in the feminist profile are by now hardly more radical than our expectation that women shall enjoy equal protection under law.

But all is not entirely well with feminist theory and the academy, as can be seen with the curricular reforms at the intersection of feminist theory and the “hard” sciences. For some of us, it is a surprise to be told that science, mathematics, and technology are fundamentally androcentric and in addition that this hard core of abstract reasoning is, in principle, deleterious to women. But for most of us, it is something of a shock to our epistemic sensibilities to be told that the “hard core”, knowledge itself and the methods by which it is to be achieved, require a feminist shake up.

Let me emphasize: It is one thing to digest that literature or religious practice is shot through with androcentric bias and systematic mistreatment of women, but it is quite another matter to grasp that serious scholarship in science, across the so-called hard core, and the application thereof is a sham, in thrall to prevailing social values and controlled by a self-interested, white male elite.

Of course, the fact that all of this is a surprise, a shock, or just plain bemusing, fails to tell us anything one way or another about the merits of feminist theory. To assess the theory, we need a clear statement of this feminist challenge to traditionally conceived methods of good reasoning.

The Fundamental Project

In the introduction to their influential book, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (1983), editors Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka warned readers of the failure of feminist efforts to bring liberal reform (a concern for fair play) to science and announced the radical feminist project for philosophy of science:

The attempt to add understandings of women to our knowledge of nature and social life has led to the realization that there is precious little reliable knowledge to which to add them. A more fundamental project now confronts us. We must root out sexist distortions and perversions in epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of science-in the “hard core” of abstract reasoning thought most immune to infiltration by social values. (ix)

This is a noteworthy moment in feminist epistemology, especially the remarkable claim “that there is precious little reliable knowledge” in the targeted hard core. This is to deny the epistemic progress marked by blinded trials, advances in statistical measurement, even the rather low level theoretical applications of Newtonian physics. All of which makes one wonder what the fundamental project is all about and how we are to make the most charitable sense of its formulating thesis.

I may be in full agreement with arguments for a level playing field. I may even have a tendency to appreciate a wide range of the more radical conclusions the fundamental project would propose, if not the premises used to reach those conclusions.

But, as an epistemologist of science, I am bound to respond to the feminist project, that is, to feminist theory as it moves out of humanistic studies and extends itself to science and the foundations of knowledge, by which I mean: to assess the validity and the soundness of the arguments for the conclusions feminists purport to show. Conclusions may be grand, but one ought to accept conclusions on the basis of good arguments only. And my remarks are directed, in the first instance, against the arguments. But it would be impossible for me, in the scope of a single essay, to assess the full range of the feminist project, or even the complete array of feminist arguments concerning science and knowledge.

So I propose to limit my remarks to the best arguments. By best, I mean to pick out arguments based on two criteria:

(1)Arguments which are well-formulated. (This rules out a certain swathe of the feminist critique, namely feminist contributions that self-consciously eschew argumentative form.)
(2) Arguments that present a serious or a radical challenge to the epistemic foundations of knowledge. (After all, if not a serious challenge, i.e., if not genuinely different and demonstrably better, then why bother?)

Based on these criteria, I focus on Professor Sandra Harding’s arguments, particularly as found in her recent book Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (1988). Harding’s arguments have the benefit of being prominent among those arguments most often cited by feminists themselves as evidence for the thesis that this fundamental project will make a significant contribution to philosophical foundations. In other words, what I am trying to do now is an initial step, namely, to motivate the fundamental project. This requires proponents to show evidence of the alleged distortions and perversions. If we cannot establish first that there are distortions and perversions, then this fundamental project is a non-starter.

As we will see, Professor Harding’s ideas about the foundations of knowledge range from the sociopolitical to the high arcana of haute epistemics. At the moment, we are concerned with the latter end of the spectrum. This is to say that at this end, or in this mode of argumentation, Harding questions the very rationality of knowledge claims in the “hard core”, and so her work is a fitting place to begin.

The Feminist Challenge

Harding’s arguments about the very nature of science and rationality concern me here exclusively. In other words, I want to emphasize the disclaimer: I am not considering any range of Harding’s arguments that may serve to garner fair play for women. This is important, but it is not my brief here.

Given the impressive range of Harding’s publications (which began to make their mark by the 1970s), my concern is narrow, but justified, on the basis of Harding’s own insistence that she intends to address fundamental epistemic categories at the hard core, and to do so in a manner she takes to be friendly to science and rationality. By this, Harding means to say that her argumentation is a friendly critique that aims to improve the “hard core” of knowledge.

Harding contends that the feminist project will do better than extant methods to achieve common cognitive aims. By way of an example, the particular cognitive aim that is a steady focus in Harding’s critique (and in her replacement epistemology) is the cognitive aim for beliefs and theories that have high evidentiary warrant based upon objective standards of rationality.

The feminist project then, at least for Harding, does not question either the possibility or the desirability of scientific rationality. The project does question the notion that philosophy of science has embodied or can embody rationality, unless those aims and epistemic goals associated with the feminist project embody the fundamental nature of the epistemology of science. Expressed in this way, as a dichotomy, it is plain that Harding intends to argue that the feminist project provides necessary conditions for science and rationality. And, I will try to show that Harding intends also to state sufficient conditions (namely, being a woman, and thus having a woman’s standpoint on nature).

To begin to assess matters, let me scale down the ambitions of the grand feminist project. Let us focus the discussion solely on Harding’s express aim (and promise) to improve science. As I take it then, with respect to this slightly streamlined goal, the feminist project makes two promises:

Promise (1): The feminist project will provide a comparatively better theory for the justification of scientific belief.

Thus, we ought to expect the feminist project to have a distinctive and demonstrably improved means for warranting sentences that purport to reflect features of the world.

Promise (2): The feminist project will provide a distinctive and demonstrably better methodology aimed to guide future inquiry toward its epistemic aims.

Thus, we ought to expect the feminist project to retain and satisfy the epistemic and methodological value placed on a normative role for any theory of knowledge. This reminds us to invoke a criterion of minimum adequacy: that the theory gives standards that justify what is believed and what should be believed in science. We – epistemologists of science – want more than merely correct descriptive accounts of scientific belief and method. Correct descriptive accounts surely are necessary, but they are not sufficient to fill out the epistemology of science.

With this backdrop of epistemic desiderata, here are important points for consideration, that are made in Harding’s (1998) book:

Women and men in the same culture have different “geographical” locations in heterogeneous nature, and different interests, discursive resources, and ways of organizing the production of knowledge from their brothers. Here [in this book] the focus is on gender differences, on the reasons why it is more accurate and useful to understand women and men in any culture as having a different relationship to the world around them. (90)

The issue is…about the resources that starting off research from women’s lives can provide for increasing human knowledge of nature’s regularities and the underlying causal tendencies anywhere and everywhere that gender relations occur. (90)

In many ways they [women and men; or perhaps I should say, persons of different gender] are exposed to different regularities of nature that offer them different possible resources and probable dangers and that can make some theories appear more or less plausible than they do to those who interact only with other environments. (96)

When science is defined in terms of these linked meanings of objectivity and masculinity,…science itself is distorted. (139)

Standpoint approaches can show us how to detect values and interests that constitute scientific projects…Standpoint approaches provide a map, a method, for maximizing a “strong Objectivity’ in the natural and social sciences. (163)

Based on these passages, I take it that Harding hypothesizes that women have a special insight into causal regularities, the very bedrock of science, which can improve science by boosting objectivity. As we read, it is “more accurate” to understand persons of different gender as “having a different relationship to the world”. This different relationship, in the case of women, “can provide for increasing human knowledge”, and we are told specifically that the kind of knowledge Harding has in view is “nature’s regularities and underlying causal tendencies”. So, the different relationship to the world enjoyed by women and on the basis of which knowledge can be increased is set in a different causal nexus where women are “exposed to different regularities of nature”. And, finally, we are told that the different, gendered geography, will “detect values and interests”, presumably otherwise not detected, and this in turn will produce “a strong Objectivity”, “in the natural and social sciences [emphasis added, for the reason that many interpreters of Harding say that Harding’s hypothesis does not encompass natural science, yet here Harding directly belies claims to narrow the scope of her project].”

There are many interesting issues embedded in the hypothetical expressed here (that women have a special insight into causal regularities in virtue of their geography/gender), and the arguments that surround it. The point I want to call attention to, is that throughout these passages Harding’s substantive content asserts an empirical hypothesis about women and knowledge, or – because the fundamental project is about science – about women and the epistemic goals of science. (For the purpose of this essay, we will have to not raise the question of how it is that the fundamental feminist project speaks for women or for feminists. It is a murky issue to understand how the categories of women and feminists do, or do not, overlap.) After all, as Harding writes, if we start off research from women’s lives, then the promised result is “knowledge of nature’s regularities and their underlying causal tendencies.” It seems only right to assess these theory-linked events as an empirically testable, hypothetical statement about a means-to-end relation, that asserts there to be an emergent, epistemic boost, to be gained by the feminist project. And remark carefully: the scope of the hypothetical (linking women, insight, causal regularities, boosted objectivity) is not across anything so narrow as “women’s issues”, but instead to nature’s regularities across the natural and the social sciences. Ambitious. But, so any challenge to traditional epistemology ought to be.

Recall that, as we understand the feminist project, the cognitive aims of science, are not in question. However, the feminist project questions the efficacy of traditional methods to achieve these aims. Harding is explicit about this: the feminist project will change methods, doing so by an infusion of “women’s standpoints on nature.” To consider how the feminist project fares then is to assess the strength of the claim that women’s standpoints promote a (comparatively) better methodology to achieve just those cognitive aims that traditional epistemology itself values. Understood in this manner, that women’s standpoints promote a comparatively better methodology – Harding’s arguments are impressive for the methodological promise they make that the very goals and values enunciated by traditional epistemology are better served by the feminist project.

So then, how fares this project? There is just one point to make. The sole point is that we must remain agnostic about its evidentiary merits or demerits. This is because we are without evidence to test the hypothesis: certainly, we have no data that would test the strength of the hypothesis as asserting a causal relationship between women and cognitive ends. Thus, any self-respecting epistemologist who places a premium on evidence-driven belief and justification ought not to accept the hypothesis. By extension, there is no reasoned basis to draw any definitive conclusion about the project itself. No matter how self-evidently correct or right-headed the project may appear, epistemic propriety demands that doxastic commitment be delayed, one way or another, until there is data. At this time, there is none. (Querying exactly why adherents to the fundamental project have not engaged in empirical trials that might provide support for the thesis that feminist epistemology of science should replace traditional epistemology of science is not an easy task, and a task made all the more difficult when, as too often is the case, feminists claim to provide such support when, in fact, purely descriptive narratives are all that are provided. Given the time frame, some argue that the complete lack of normative support for the thesis is sufficient to reject it. At any rate, I prefer to maintain the moderate, agnostic stance toward the thesis and toward Harding’s hypothesis.)

Special Cases

So far, my reservations concerning the feminist project may appear to be selective, based on a too narrow range of feminist argumentation. Or, my reservations may appear too broad, in that I have not taken into consideration what is said to be a rich, widely ranging spectrum of particular arguments that either individually or as a programmatic group prove the hypothesis that underlies the fundamental project and, doing even more, trace the new, and improved, epistemology that the fundamental project makes possible.

I surely have no intention to give short shrift to the argumentative strength of the full range of feminist critique of science, in so far as arguments are provided. And it is argument that we need, not either anecdotal report or historical narrative (which is not to deny that in the long run anecdote and history are important elements of a philosophy of science; but these elements must not substitute for the usual apparatus of epistemology that supports methodological advice and a means to justify belief). So to forestall the charge that I fail to do justice to the feminist critique, let me now cite noted feminist contributions other than Harding’s.

Lorraine Code and New Epistemological Categories

The first set of arguments I wish to examine are those by Lorraine Code (What Can She Know? Cornell University Press 1991). Here we get something slightly different from Harding.

As long as ‘epistemology’ bears the stamp of the postpositivist, empiricist project of determining necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and devising strategies to refute skepticism, there can be no feminist epistemology. [These conditions] are inimical to feminist concerns on many levels: ontological, epistemological, moral, political. Ideals central to the project-ideals of objectivity, impartiality, and universality are androcentrically derived. Their articulation maps onto typical middle-class white male experiences…(314)

This of course is blatant heresy, in its implicit recommendation for a nearly unrecognizable theory of knowledge. But that does not mean it is wrong. (Nonetheless, I am reminded of a remark that if science is androcentric, then this is the best endorsement for androcentrism that one can find.) In any case, noting that Code’s view audaciously rejects pretty much all that is near and dear to the heart of epistemologists, does not duly respond to the implicit challenge Code makes as against traditional epistemological categories. so, let us now look with seriousness.

If Code’s reasoning intends to support the conclusion that the epistemology of science ought to be based on feminist categories (for now, let us leave this to be defined as the negation of whatever belongs to white male categories), then Code’s reasoning commits a patent non sequitur. This is because, even if epistemology is exactly as Code says it is, it does not follow that feminist epistemology must or can replace it; perhaps astrology ought to replace it. But Code has more to say:

I contend that mainstream epistemology, in its very neutrality, masks the fact of its derivation from and embeddedness in a specific set of interests: the interests of a privileged group of white men. (ix,x)

There is no arguing against the claim that men, in general, are guilty of oppressive practices as against women, in general. But from this truism, how are we to demarcate a “white male point of view” regarding either women or epistemological principles? We can state facts about white men as a group, but where is the evidence to warrant assertions about white men and epistemic categories, or about white men, epistemology and women? We would be better off looking to link members of identifiable economic groups with corresponding ideologies, although even success in this kind of project notoriously falls short of showing causal connections. Still, overall, socioeconomic categories are better predictive factors than gender.

A point in Code’s favor is that she rejects any turn to essentialism, because to do so, she writes, “would risk replicating the exclusionary, hegemonic structures of the masculinist epistemology…”(316). However, here too, Code’s reasoning moves to an irrelevant conclusion. For where is the evidence to show that a single theory of knowledge, even hegemonic male epistemology, does always and will always exclude real alternatives to it? Instead, science or its history seems to be punctuated by white males as agents of scientific change, if not progress.

Perhaps Code’s remarks are intended to be a call for sensitivity to various kinds of knowers (what Harding, for example, calls a multicultural standpoint). Perhaps women have distinctive capacities (such as, as some have suggested, a generalized, special sensitivity to distress calls), unique developmental circumstances that we are able to show are not shared by males. (These developmental circumstances would map nicely onto Sandra Harding’s concept of “different geographical locations” as between genders.) Gender differences may be a significant mark in human knowing: (some) women may exemplify a distinctive mode of knowledge. But how distinctive? Is this what it says it is, women’s way of knowing, or may men aspire to it? Is its presence, or non-presence, uniform across gender categories? The difficulty is this: how do we know? which is to ask: how can we test, one way or the other? One looks in vain for an answer.

Helen Longino and Communitarian (Intersubjective) Epistemology

Now, let me next turn to arguments by philosopher and historian of science Helen Longino. I would want to make clear that my remarks are directed to Longino’s contributions to philosophy and epistemology of science only, not to her involvement in any historical projects concerning science, where she has contributed a rich, and richly done, variety of materials.

Helen Longino’s recent book, The Fate of Knowledge, is advertised as proceeding on the premise that philosophers downplay social forces, whereas sociologists emphasize them, but that both assume mistakenly that social forces are solely a source of bias and irrationality. As all philosophers of science know, it is sheer caricature to presume such a dichotomy, as between philosophers and sociologists, although I have not the time in these remarks to argue this point. (It is worth noting that philosophers have themselves been the ones to spill much ink over the role that may be played by arational factors in science.) However, more importantly, the book is advertised to do far more than rehearse a potted story about philosophy of science.

Helen Longino challenges this assumption [that is, the propriety of the questionable dichotomy, not that there is a dichotomy], arguing that social interaction actually assists us in securing rationally based knowledge. This insight allows her to develop a new account of scientific knowledge that integrates the social and cognitive. (Princeton University Press advertisement, Philosophy of Science, Vol69 No. 1, March 2002, p171)

I want to focus my remarks on the putative insight, viz. “that social interaction actually assists us in securing rationally based knowledge” and that this insight allows Longino “to develop a new account of scientific knowledge”. If successful, Longino will satisfy one of the early adequacy conditions we placed on the fundamental project.

There are two claims here. In the first instance, Longino appears (as stated in the quote from the blurb) to have resolved the question that most vexes me, namely, how, if at all, do social factors boost our efforts to justify scientific belief? But let me delay discussion of this point for a moment and turn to the second instance.

Let me make a brief interjection. I hasten to say that not all communitarianisms in science are a bad thing. Francis Bacon made a valiant effort to incorporate community into the new learning with his New Atlantis. And even Charles Sanders Peirce placed special epistemic and methodological emphasis on the community of scientific believers.

Returning to the blurb. In the second instance, we have the assertion that Longino develops a new account of scientific knowledge. Just as before (when we considered Harding), we want to know how the new epistemology does a better job of justifying science and its practice. This is to ask questions such as, what old problems does the new epistemology resolve? what comparatively better predictive force does the new epistemology have? and so forth through the familiar range of questions about science and its practice.

However, in this book, it appears that Longino continues to work with a communitarian epistemology, or what she calls an intersubjective basis for the methodology of belief justification. This is to say that, in her view, the ultimate justifier for any claim to know is the community of believers. The difference to remark upon is that Longino’s epistemology of science is one where consensus is community-driven, whereas the epistemology that Longino’s arguments aim to replace is one where consensus is evidence-based. This ought to bring into sharp contrast the difference. For, regardless of how a communitarian style epistemology may be dressed up, in the end, the community is the final arbiter of belief. There is, even in the long run, no objectively compelling ground for belief, only grounds for a particular community. In her own words: []justification is] “dependent on rules and procedures immanent in the context of inquiry” (92). This stance evades a pernicious relativism (if, in fact, it does) not by appeal to normative epistemology, but by appeal to normative sociology.

In any case, does Longino show that social interaction assists us in securing knowledge? To say, merely, that social interaction contributes to the success of science is an idea that is neither new, nor the special provenance of persons outside philosophy. (Cf. David Hull (1988), Science as a Process. Larry Laudan (1984), Science and Values.) David Hull, and others, all have worried about the ways in which sometimes grubby motives produce scientifically noble ends. This is to say that over and over again, philosophers of science such as Hull, Laudan, Lakatos, and even Feyerabend, all worry the question of how historical and cultural contexts have contributed to the development, evaluation, and acceptance of theories. (Indeed, in 1984, only one year apart from the “fundamental project” manifesto, Richard Boyd dubbed this kind of philosophy “social constructivism”.)

But if we want to understand “contributes to” in the sense of providing an epistemic boost, then we need to show that we do (or can do) better science by means of this intersubjective deliberation. And we would show this on the basis of isolated and tested-for social factors. In other words, we have to once and for all place this idea, that there is some new epistemological category, into our epistemic cross-hairs, and then see what the testing process reveals. It has not been done.

Let me mention briefly a recent effort to argue that social interaction contributes in a positive way to science. This is K. Brad Wray’s essay, “The Epistemic Significance of Collaborative Research”, published in Philosophy of Science last year. (Philosophy of Science, V69 No. 1, March 2002, pp150-168.) Here Wray attempts to test the causal role that collaboration plays in science, by testing the epistemic effect that collaboration has in accessing the scarce resources that are needed to carry out research. Wray’s test thesis is that collaboration ought to demonstrably boost realizing epistemic goals over scientists or teams that do not collaborate. (This is, in addition, a nice take on a communitarian thesis.) Wray intends to show that by collaborating as research teams, scientists have greater success in accessing scarce resources needed to carry out research and this success in turn enables them to realize the epistemic goals of science more effectively than scientists who do not collaborate.

Wray’s arguments bring together a vast array of research. To summarize the aim of his project, he writes:

Ideally, it would be useful to have information on specific research groups, showing increased productivity after collaboration, followed by greater funding, which in turn would be followed by continued collaboration. Unfortunately, at present, such data are not available. (158-9)

So, in the end, Wray is able to trace a social trend in the practice of science, but not able to show an epistemological effect based on the trend. He admits that he finds no evidence for boost due to collaboration. Indeed, despite valuable insights brought together in this essay, Wray’s conclusions float completely free of the epistemology of science. While Wray makes a fairly interesting case that there is an identifiable, and even well-tracked, causal connection between a rise in collaborative research and funding success, this conclusion does not run to the epistemic import of collaboration and scientific aims.

Let me recapture now the focus on Helen Longino’s arguments. Longino provides a pretty good case study for feminist epistemology of science. And here I do not want to be misunderstood: for on one hand, we have Longino qua philosopher of science, on the other hand we have Longino’s philosophical arguments qua feminist. Considered in the latter guise only , how, if at all, do Longino’s arguments boost the epistemic success of science?

Longino’s focus is on evidence and the concept of objectivity. She relativizes evidence to background beliefs and on this basis says that she shows both the opportunity and need for a feminist critique of evidence. In other words, Longino argues (1) that background beliefs are tainted with bias, but (2) if we were to use better background beliefs, then we will likely have better science.

But, how is it peculiarly feminist to decry (distorting) bias in background belief? Everyone allows that our beliefs are warranted against a background, and everyone aims for this background to be unbiased to the extent possible (or, of course, if the bias boosts, then to maximize its presence and impact).

Moreover, the history of philosophy of science simply does not support the claim that feminists, or women, have any special claim on “rooting out sexist bias’ in science.

Along with other feminist philosophers of science, Longino needs to show what remains still not done: that our scientific understanding of objects in the world is improved (boosted) when voices from a specific political or social-or gendered, or marginalized–position participate.

Conclusion: A Plea for Methodology

Despite volumes written in the name of the feminist project, and conclusions drawn on the strength of the hypothesis that the feminist project will boost progress toward cognitive aims associated with science and rationality (and, one might add, policy decisions enacted in the name of these aims), the whole rationale for the feminist fundamental project remains (after twenty years, plus) wholly unsubstantiated.

Since that time when advocates of the feminist project claimed to discover that “there is precious little reliable knowledge” at the “hard core,” and they then began to advance what I have called the boost hypothesis, no tests have been made to support the hypothesized connection as between women and the cognitive ends of science.

Without question, there is a wealth of anecdotal reportage, and a whole lot of desire to promote women’s involvement across all fields of inquiry, in particular within science. But anecdote and desire do not provide the kind of evidentiary warrant that should be relevant to an assessment of the feminist project. As matters stand, the hypothesis rallies only those already converted to it – a situation that is no boon to rationality!

More, reliance on anecdotal reportage represents a step back by way of testing hypotheses. And, as for the sociopolitical gains made to secure a level playing field on behalf of women, these gains were achieved on the basis of compelling data. It would be nothing short of a self-defeating maneuver for women to advert to standards of proof that undercut the reasoned grounds for these past gains.

I return again and again to questions about methodology and justification, and raise and re-raise objections about lack of empirical support, just because feminist philosophical arguments make empirically based assertions about science and women or gender.

In one sense, my refrain is made in the interest of a simple concern for good scholarship: if any author makes an empirically based claim, then the author is bound to provide supporting evidence. I fail to find substantiating, empirically based evidence, anywhere in this literature.

But, so what? Why ought this to be of any great concern? The reason is this:

Science is not so much a particular subject matter as it is a kind of methodology for obtaining reliable knowledge. And it is when we are concerned with methodology: ‘what methods ought we adopt to achieve our aims?’ that the fundamental feminist project is so unimpressive.

On its face, there is a whole lot of common sense to the notion that more women doing science will make science better. But intellectual history is riddled with commonsensical notions that careful scrutiny reveals to be misguided. And, even worse, intellectual history includes an encyclopedia of public policy decisions, taken on the basis of misguided common sense or skewed evidence, most often to the detriment, the peril even, of society.

For myself, I have the usual level of self-interest: I delight at the prospect that public policy be rewritten to encourage and to privilege women in hard core disciplines. However, my self-interest is tempered by a sense of epistemic value, namely the value of evidence-based public policy. So, before endorsing public policy that would flow logically from the feminist fundamental project, the evidence base that would undergird the fundamental project must be available to be assessed. Yet, it is not.

And so, we are back to our starting point. If it is correct to view science as a methodology, then it follows that this fundamental project is a dismal failure, for the reasons that there are no results unique to it (which is to say that there are no new facts) and that there surely is no new, even different, methodology that is correctly said to be uniquely feminist.

This article originated as a lecture for the Fifth International Conference of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy and will be published by MENTIS in the GAP.5 Volume (forthcoming, 2004). Cassandra Pinnick is a professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University and Executive Secretary of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. Her book (edited with Noretta Koertge and Robert F. Almeder) Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology, has recently been published.

Postcolonialism and the myth of Hindu “renaissance”

The roots of “Vedic science” can be traced to the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist constructions of Vedic antiquity as the “Golden Age” of Hinduism. Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism, important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta, key Hindu nationalist reformers – from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – began to find in it all the elements of modernity. Vivekananda took the lead in propagating the view that the monism of Advaita Vedanta presaged the future culmination of all of modern science. Since modern science denied the role of any supernatural force outside nature, Vivekananda claimed that only Vedantic monism was truly scientific for it treated God as an aspect of nature and did not invoke any force external to nature.

A slight digression on the subject of Indian “renaissance” might be appropriate here. Through constant and loud repetition, neo-Hindu thinkers have created a myth that Brahminical traditions of learning represent the golden age of science and reason in early India. The Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to Hindu “renaissance”, which they claim to be similar to the European Renaissance that ushered in the modern age in the West. What they forget is that the Renaissance in the West re-discovered the humanistic and naturalistic sources of the Greek tradition that had been overshadowed by the Catholic Church – the Renaissance humanists rediscovered this-worldly philosophy of Aristotle and critical-realist Socrates over the other-worldly philosophy of Plato. The neo-Hindu “renaissance”, in contrast, re-discovered the most mystical and anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic inheritance – Advaita Vedanta – that had always overshadowed and silenced the naturalistic and scientific traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. Neo-Hinduism is no renaissance, but a revival.

There is no denying that the neo-Hindu “discovery” of modern science in ancient teachings of Vedas and Upanishads had a limited usefulness. Since they had convinced themselves that their religion was the mother of all sciences, conservative Hindus did not feel threatened by scientific education. As long as science could be treated as “just another name” for Vedic truths, they were even enthusiastic to learn it. The Brahminical traditions of learning and speculative thought served the upper castes well, as they took to modern English education, which included instruction in scientific subjects. Those who would explicitly use scientific learning to challenge the traditional outlook were either lower down on the caste hierarchy or “godless Communists” anyway, and could be safely ignored. The great neo-Hindu “renaissance” succeeded in turning empirical sciences into the handmaiden of the Vedic tradition – the role reason has performed throughout India’s history. This is the tradition that the Sangh Parivar is institutionalising in our schools, universities and the public sphere.

Let us see what India’s best-known contemporary public intellectuals have to say on this matter. As it happens, the emergence of neo-Hinduism in 19th century Bengal has perhaps been the most written about episode in modern India’s intellectual history. All our best-known intellectuals whose names are practically synonymous with postcolonial theory around the world – Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Subaltern Studies historians – have cut their scholarly teeth on the emergence of neo-Hindu thought in the Bengali bhadralok circles. These intellectuals stand out because they work with a post-structuralist rejection of the very possibility of the idea of dispassionate and objective knowledge of the real world in any domain, natural or social. Following the political writing of French philosopher Michel Foucault, made popular among the historians of colonialism by the writings of Edward Said, these scholars see Western sciences as serving colonial interests in defining the non-West as inferior, irrational and unscientific. Indian intellectuals have both contributed to the development of this critique of colonial knowledge and applied it to the Indian condition.

By and large, these postcolonial scholars have criticised the neo-Hindu penchant for scienticising the Vedas, but for reasons that actually open the door to an even more radical defence of Vedic science that is now emerging in Hindutva literature. Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee, both writers of international best-sellers on the emergence of modern thought in India, condemned the emerging Hindu modernists all across the political spectrum – from the apologists for Hinduism such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to the liberal, secular-humanist Nehru – not for so falsely and so self-servingly appropriating modern science in the service of propagating religious orthodoxy and not for confusing myth and science in order to defend their mythology. No, that kind of critique of nativism that would defend the distinctiveness of science and insist upon its potential for demystification of religious reason was considered too passé, too “positivist” by our avant-garde theorists. Rather, Nandy, Chatterjee and their followers condemned Indian nationalists for even daring to apply alien, colonial categories of thought to India’s own traditions and ways of knowing.

For these postmarked intellectuals, the cardinal sin of Hindu nationalists was not their defence of the high-Hindu tradition – a tradition which has for centuries contributed to the worst kind of ignorance and social inequality. Their cardinal sin was their capitulation to modern scientific thought itself, which they tried to appropriate for Hinduism (as in the case of Vivekananda, Bankim Chandra and even Nehru), or which they tried to use for secular Enlightenment (as in the case of Marxist and socialist humanists like Nehru). Incidentally, these two positions seem to exhaust the entire range of nationalism. The valiant attempts of Dalit and non-Brahmin intellectuals such as B.R. Ambedkar, E.V. Ramaswamy Periyar, Jyotiba Phule and Iyothee Thass to use the new knowledge to liberate themselves from the shackles of tradition are simply invisible in the postmodernist literature which is keen on showing modern science as an agent of oppression and mental colonialism. As long as Indian thought was being measured in modern scientific terms, whether to praise it, or to demystify it, the Indian mind was being “colonised” and it was denied the “agency” to define its own agenda and its own solutions. Both the Hindu right and the Nehruvian left, as long as they remained prisoners of modern scientific ways of thinking, were equally “derivatives” of their colonial masters.

Authentic national liberation, on this account, can only come with the rediscovery of authentic traditions of India which, apparently, were only understood by Mahatma Gandhi. For all their nods to the anti-essentialism of postmodernism, Indian critics of modernity practise a sly form of “strategic essentialism” (Gayatri Spivak’s term) that treats Indian traditions as unique to India which cannot be understood by outsiders. True national liberation will mean a rediscovery of India’s unique gestalt, which, in the postcolonial narrative, lies in its holism, monism or non-dualism, as compared to the tendency of the Western science towards separation of objects from their context. Indian thought is not to be seen either as a copy of modern science, or somehow lacking in empirical sciences, but as encoding a wholly different kind of science altogether, which is the duty of post-secular, postmodern intellectuals to discover and cultivate. Coming from the traditions of the Gandhian and populist left, the postmodernists tend to find these alternative traditions among the non-modern habits of the heart of the humble, folk traditions of women, peasants, village folk and assorted subaltern groups. Gandhi became their patron saint of this uniquely Indian, non-modern way of life. “Real India” equals Gandhi equals “innocent traditions” of non-modern “communities”. Anyone challenging any of the factors in the equation was declared to have a “colonised mind”.

This critique of modernist nationalism-as-mental-colonialism has come to serve as the fig leaf for the postmodernists as they scramble to dissociate themselves from the contemporary Hindutva movement, which has also nailed its colours to “decolonisation of the Indian mind”. Nandy and his many admirers are trying to distance themselves from it by continuing with their critique of the Hindu nationalism as being wedded to modernism. They point to the modernist, scientistic rhetoric of Hindutva propagandists and proclaim Hindutva to be just one more symptom of modernity. The problem is that using modernist rhetoric does not make one modern. On the contrary, by framing the traditional Hindu worldview in a modernist vocabulary, Hindutva is co-opting modern ideas, giving traditions a modern gloss to make them palatable to the educated middle classes. Hindutva is a reactionary modernist movement that accepts the instrumental uses of science (that is, technology) but resists the secular enlightenment that is a necessary precondition of modernity. Hiding behind the great mascot of postmodern scholars, Gandhi – supposedly the guardian angel of the “innocent” folk traditions – does not work either, for Hindutva also claims Gandhi to be its own mascot. Hindu nationalists have no problem with Gandhi’s deeply anti-secular and anti-modern world-view; they “only” dislike and disown his pacifism.

Postmodernism and “alternative sciences”

Yet, one could argue that just because postmodernist intellectuals have taken a position against the Enlightenment-style use of science as a cultural weapon against the authority of the traditions does not automatically make them an ally of the religious right. One could, after all, justly criticise the role of science and technology in furthering Western exploitation of the colonies and perpetuating patronising attitudes toward the natives. Science is not beyond criticism, and critics of science do not automatically deserve condemnation.

The problem is that postmodernist intellectuals do not stop at criticising any specific political abuse of scientific knowledge. Instead, they attack the very idea of objective knowledge as a myth of the powerful who want to claim the status of truth for their own self-serving social constructions of reality. Likewise, postmodernist attack on the “Western-ness” of science goes beyond pointing out any specific linkages between science and Western/imperialist interests. Instead they attack the claim of universalism of science as a cover for Western dominance.

Once they decry the very idea of objectivity and universalism, the critics open the gates wide to the idea of “alternative sciences”. The idea is that modern science offers only one way to classify, observe and understand the regularities of nature: there is nothing inherently objective and scientific about it. Other cultures, the argument goes, if they want to really “decolonise their minds”, must develop their own scientific methods which are in keeping with their own religion and culture – “different cultures, different sciences”, is the postmodern slogan. Since all knowledge rests on the shifting sands of myths, models and analogies (or “paradigms”, as the more technical name goes), which scientists just pick up through their textbooks, there is no reason why sciences of non-Western cultures cannot constitute new “alternative universals” that can be taught in textbooks and laboratories around the world.

These radical critiques of objectivity and universalism have become so popular that they have acquired a ring of truth among social critics. But all these arguments denigrating the rationality of science are based upon a flawed understanding of science that has been rejected many times by working scientists and prominent philosophers of science. A complete debunking of post-modern misunderstanding of how science actually works and why objectivity is possible despite the deeply social nature of science will require a different set of articles. Suffice it to say, the radical denigration of science has very little following among the mainstream of scientific community and in the mainstream of philosophy and history of science.

I now examine three distinct arguments that have emerged in the Indian postmodernist literature which converge almost exactly with the Hindutva’s defence of the superiority of Vedic sciences. These three are the decolonisation argument, the anti-dualism argument and the symmetry argument.

The decolonisation of science argument

Hindutva ideologues see themselves as part and parcel of postcolonial studies. Decolonisation of the Hindu mind, the Hindu Right claims, requires understanding science through Hindu categories. Echoing the postcolonial critiques of epistemic violence, Hindutva ideologues such as Murli Manohar Joshi, Konrad Elst, Girilal Jain, David Frawley, N.S. Rajaram and others see any scientific assessment of the empirical claims made by the Vedic texts as a sign of mental colonialism and Western imperialism. Many of these Hindutva ideologues cite the work of postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said, Roland Inden, Ashis Nandy, Claude Alvares, Gayatri Spivak and subaltern studies historians with great respect.

The Hindu Right combines this demand for authenticity with an essentialist understanding of culture borrowed straight from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which holds that each culture has an innate nature, a temper, which must guide all its cultural products from mathematics and physics to painting and poetry. This view of the innate nature of nation – the nation’s svabhava or chitti – is propounded by Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s theory of “Integral Humanism”, which constitutes the official philosophy of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In fact, it is part of the BJP’s official manifesto that it will use India’s innate Hinduness as a “touchstone” to decide what sciences will be promoted and how they will be taught. Using this touchstone of an innate, timeless Hindu svabhava, Hindutva literature still holds on to the defunct theories of vitalism as valid science. (Vitalism in biology holds that living beings require a special vital force, variously termed prana or shakti in the Indian literature, over and above “mere” atoms and molecules. In India, Jagdish Chandra Bose first claimed to find evidence of consciousness in plants. Bose’s work was falsified and rejected by mainstream biology in his own life-time. It is still touted as India’s contribution to world science in Hindutva literature.) Again, it is against the touchstone of Vedanta that Hindu apologists feel justified in interpreting the paradoxes of quantum physics in a mystical manner. There are perfectly realistic explanations of quantum mechanics, which are sidelined in Vedic science literature, to claim that modern physics “proves” the presence of mind in nature, just as claimed by Vedanta.

Reductionist science vs holistic science

The gist of this argument, as it appears in Hindu nationalist writings on Vedic science, is simple – all that is dangerous and false in modern science comes from the Semitic monotheistic habit of dualistic and “reductionist” thinking, which separates the object from the subject, nature from consciousness, the known from the knower. All that is truly universal and true in modern science comes from the Hindu habit of “holistic” thinking, which has always seen the objects in nature and the human subjects not as separate entities but as different manifestations of the same universal consciousness. For the non-logocentric Hinduism, reality is not objective, but “omnijective”, a co-construct of mind and matter together. While Western science treats nature as dead matter, Hindu sciences treat nature as a sacred abode of gods. Thus Hindutva scholars claim that traditions of yoga, transcendental meditation (TM) and Ayurveda are sciences of the future, for they bring matter in alignment with the “cosmic energy” that permeates all matter. Moreover, Hindu approaches to nature are seen as ecological by definition as they do not treat nature as mere matter to be exploited for private use.

This view of superiority of Hinduism’s “holism” rests upon the strange and totally mistaken assumption that Hindu chauvinists share with left-wing critics of science – that the fundamental methodology of modern science, what is called “reductionism”, is not just mistaken but politically oppressive. Reductionism in science simply means a bottom-up approach to understanding complex natural phenomena by first isolating the lower-level constituents and studying their interactions under controlled conditions. Reductionism seeks the explanation of the whole by eliminating the need for postulating any extra forces ( that is, consciousness, vital force and so on) over and above the relationships between the building blocks that can be experimentally tested. Far from being simple-minded or sinister, as critics assume, nearly every advance in understanding complex systems – from the DNA replication at the cellular level to ecological systems – owes its success to a reductionist approach to the fundamental building blocks of nature.

Owing to a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually works, coupled with a great deal of cynicism, many left-wing critics among feminist, environmental and anti-imperialist movements have developed a knee-jerk condemnation of reductionism. Reductionist science is considered bad science with politically oppressive implications. Feminists, including such world-renowned feminist icons as Carolyn Merchant, Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, see it as a masculine way of breaking the unity between the object and the subject. Environmentalists, including India’s own Vandana Shiva and like-mined eco-feminists, see reductionism as opening the way to ruthless exploitation of nature by divesting it of all sacred meanings. (Eco-romantics ignore all counter-examples where sacredness of nature serves to control access over sacred groves, rivers and other resources of the commons.) Postcolonial critics, in their turn, see reductionism as a result of Western and capitalist habit of thinking in terms of opposed classes of `us and them’.

These kinds of ill-understood and politically motivated challenges to a fundamental methodological norm of modern science have prepared the ground for Hindutva’s claims that Hinduism provides a more “holistic”, more complete, more ecological and even more feminist way of relating with nature. Most of the claims of superiority of “holism” are unsubstantiated. On closer examination, they end up affirming pseudo-sciences involving disembodied spirit acting on matter through entirely unspecified mechanisms. Most of the claims of greater ecological and feminist sensitivity in the Hindu practice of treating all nature as a sacred and interconnected whole turn out to be empirically false. In fact, quite often the faith in the divine powers of some rivers and plants serves as an excuse not to care for them adequately, precisely because they are considered to share God’s miraculous powers to recover and stay pure. For all the falsehoods and obscurantisms, the claims of Hindu (or Eastern, more broadly) holism thrive in the academia because of the radical academics’ own mistaken and overblown critique of the reductionist methodology of science.

The symmetry argument

The symmetry argument claims that all local sciences are equally “scientific” (that is, rational, coherent and able to explain observed phenomena) within their own cultural contexts. Modern science, the argument goes, ought to be treated “symmetrically” with all other ways of knowing. As we have seen, this is the crux of the social constructivist and postmodern attacks on modern science.

This argument lies at the heart of the theories of “Vedic physics” and “Vedic creationism”. That the verses of the Rig Veda are actually coded formulas of advanced theories of physics has been recently claimed by Subhash Kak, an engineer working in the United States. And a Vedic alternative to Darwinian evolution by natural selection is being pushed by Michael Cremo and his fellow Hare Krishnas in the U.S. What sets these newer theories is their unabashed and bold defence of Vedic mysticism as a legitimate scientific method within the Vedic-Hindu metaphysical assumptions, as rational and empirically adequate as the best of modern science, and as deserving of the status of universal objective knowledge as the conventionally accepted theories of matter and biological evolution.

In a barrage of books and essays, most recently summarised in the 1995 publication, In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation, Subhash Kak has claimed to find, in a coded form, advanced knowledge of astronomy and computing in the Rig Veda. According to Kak, the design of the fire altars prescribed in the Rig Veda – how many bricks to put where and surrounded by how many pebbles – actually code such findings of modern 20th century astronomy as the distance between the sun and the earth, the length of solar and lunar years and the speed of light. All the Vedic values match exactly with the values we know through modern 19th and 20th century physics. The number of bricks and pebbles, moreover, corresponds with the number of syllables in the Vedic verses. The conclusion: “the Vedas are books of physics.”

Finding relatively advanced abstract physics in the Rig Veda, the earliest of the four Vedas, is of crucial importance to Hindutva. There is a concerted attempt to prove that the Rig Veda was composed at least around three millennia B.C., and not around 1500 B.C as previously thought. There is also a massive effort afoot in Hindutva circles that the Aryans who wrote the Rig Veda presumably in 3000 B.C. were indigenous to the landmass of India. Under these circumstances, finding advanced physics in Rig Veda will “prove” that India was truly the mother of all civilisations and produced all science known to the Greeks and other ancient cultures.

But anyone making such dramatic claims has to answer the question: How did our Vedic ancestors know all this physics? What was their method?

Kak and associates (including David Frawley and George Feuerstein, co-authors with Kak of In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation) answer, incredibly, that the Vedic scientists found out the laws of physics through deep introspection. Yogic meditation allowed Vedic sages to see in their minds’ eyes, the likenesses, homologies and equivalences between the cosmic, the terrestrial and the spiritual. This method of seeing analogies and equivalences may be considered magical in the West, they argue, but it is perfectly scientific within India’s non-dualist, monist metaphysics which allows no distinctions between matter and spirit, between physical and the psychic, between animate and the inanimate – all are united by the same spiritual energy that is in all. Within these assumptions, yogic introspection is a method of science. Because all science is paradigm-bound, Kak et al insist, citing the authority of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, the much-misunderstood gurus of postmodernists, Vedic science is perfectly scientific within the paradigm of Vedic assumptions.

In fact, Kak et al are not alone in defending the scientificity of yogic meditation as a valid scientific method. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s “unified science” is based upon this logic. This kind of cultural defence is routinely invoked by those defending such esoteric pseudo-sciences as Vedic astrology and paranormal beliefs (past-birth memories, out-of-body experiences and reincarnation).

A similar defence of the method of bhakti yoga as a legitimate source of holistic knowledge lies at the basis of the enormous mass of writings coming out of the Bhakti Vedanta Institute in the U.S., the headquarters of the Hare Krishnas. In a new book, Human Devolution, Michael Cremo, a devout Hare Krishna, has boldly proposed a Vedic alternative to Darwinian evolution. Cremo claims that human beings have not evolved up from lower animals, but rather fallen, or devolved, from their original unity with pure consciousness of Brahman. (In a previous book, Forbidden Archaeology, Cremo and his associates tried to prove that the fossil record actually supports the Vedic time scale of literally millions of years of life on earth, including human life.) As evidence, Cremo cites every possible research in paranormal ever conducted anywhere to “prove” the truth of holist Vedic cosmology which proposes the presence of a spiritual element in all matter (which takes different forms, thereby explaining the theory of “devolution”).

This remarkable compendium of pseudo-science is premised upon the assumption that modern science is a prisoner of Western cultural and religious biases and, as a result, Western scientists have created a “knowledge filter” which keeps out the evidence that supports the Vedic cosmology. Their point is that once you remove the Western assumptions, the method of yoga can be treated as a legitimate source of scientific hypotheses. These Vedic knowledge-claims can be verified by the community of other yogic knowers who have “purified” their sense through meditation to such an extent that they can “directly realise” those signs from the spirit-world that are looked down upon by Western-trained scientists as “paranormal”.

Utterly incredible though they are, and utterly devoid of any empirical support, Vedic physics and Vedic creationism are being touted as serious scholarship based upon the assumption that different cultural assumptions sanction alternative methods as rational and scientific.

Postmodern intellectuals have taken their disillusionment with the many shortcomings of the modern world into a radical denunciation of modern science itself. They have denounced the status of modern science as a source of universally valid and objective knowledge as a sign of Western imperialism, patriarchal biases and Christian dualist thinking. Many prominent public intellectuals in India, sympathetic to populist, indigenist currents in left-inclined social movements, have embraced the postmodernist suspicion of science, and called for “alternative sciences” which reflect the cultural preferences of India’s non-modern masses.

The question before the defenders of “alternative sciences” is this: What do they have to say to the defenders of “Vedic sciences”? For example, what reasons can they give against the supposed scientificity of Vedic astrology? Can they hold on their relativist view of all sciences as social constructs and yet challenge the scientisation of the Vedas that is going on in the theories of Vedic physics or Vedic creationism?

Any erosion of the dividing line between science and myth, between reasoned, evidence-based public knowledge and the spiritual knowledge accessible to yogic adepts, is bound to lead to a growth of obscurantism dressed up as science. It is time secular and self-proclaimed leftist intellectuals called off their romance with irrationalism and romanticism. It is time to draw clear boundaries between science and myth, and between the Left and the Right.

Meera Nanda’s book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, has just been published.

The Vedas as books of science

In 1996, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) of the United Kingdom (U.K.) produced a slick looking book, with many well-produced pictures of colourfully dressed men and women performing Hindu ceremonies, accompanied with warm, fuzzy and completely sanitised description of the faith. The book, Explaining Hindu Dharma: A Guide for Teachers, offers “teaching suggestions for introducing Hindu ideas and topics in the classroom” at the middle to high school level in the British schools system. The authors and editors are all card-carrying members of the VHP. The book is now in its second edition and, going by the glowing reviews on the back-cover, it seems to have established itself as a much-used educational resource in the British school system.

What “teaching suggestions” does this Guide offer? It advises British teachers to introduce Hindu dharma as “just another name” for “eternal laws of nature” first discovered by Vedic seers, and subsequently confirmed by modern physics and biological sciences. After giving a false but incredibly smug account of mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine and evolutionary theory contained in the Vedic texts, the Guide instructs the teachers to present the Vedic scriptures as “not just old religious books, but as books which contain many true scientific facts… these ancient scriptures of the Hindus can be treated as scientific texts” (emphasis added). All that modern science teaches us about the workings of nature can be found in the Vedas, and all that the Vedas teach about the nature of matter, god, and human beings is affirmed by modern science. There is no conflict, there are no contradictions. Modern science and the Vedas are simply “different names for the same truth”.

This is the image of Hinduism that the VHP and other Hindutva propagandists want to project around the world. The British case is not an isolated example. Similar initiatives to portray Vedic-Aryan India as the “cradle” of world civilisation and science have been launched in Canada and the United States as well. Many of these initiatives are beneficiaries of the generous and politically correct policies of multicultural education in these countries. Under the worthy cause of presenting the “community’s” own views about its culture, many Western governments are inadvertently funding Hindutva’s propaganda.

But what concerns us in this article is not the long-distance Hindutva (or “Yankee Hindutva”, as some call it), dangerous though it is. This essay is more about the left wing-counterpart of Yankee Hindutva: a set of postmodernist ideas, mostly (but not entirely) exported from the West, which unintentionally ends up supporting Hindutva’s propaganda regarding Vedic science. Over the last couple of decades, a set of very fashionable, supposedly “radical” critiques of modern science have dominated the Western universities. These critical theories of science go under the label of “postmodernism” or “social constructivism”. These theories see modern science as an essentially Western, masculine and imperialistic way of acquiring knowledge. Intellectuals of Indian origin, many of them living and working in the West, have played a lead role in development of postmodernist critiques of modern science as a source of colonial “violence” against non-Western ways of knowing.

In this two-part essay, I will examine how this postmodernist left has provided philosophical arguments for Hindutva’s claim that Vedas are “just another name” for modern science. As we will see, postmodernist attacks on objective and universal knowledge have played straight into Hindu nationalist slogan of all perspectives being equally true – within their own context and at their own level. The result is the loud – but false – claims of finding a tradition of empirical science in the spiritual teachings of the Vedas and Vedanta. Such scientisation of the Vedas does nothing to actually promote an empirical and rational tradition in India, while it does an incalculable harm to the spiritual message of Hinduism’s sacred books. The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both science and spirituality.

In order to understand how postmodern critiques of science converge with Hindutva’s celebration of Vedas-as-science, let us follow the logic behind VHP’s Guide for Teachers.

This Guide claims that the ancient Hindu scriptures contain “many true scientific facts” and therefore “can be treated as scientific texts”. Let us see what these “true scientific facts” are. The prime exhibit is the “scientific affirmation” of the theory of guna (Sanskrit for qualities or attributes). Following the essential Vedantic idea that matter and spirit are not separate and distinct entities, but rather the spiritual principle constitutes the very fabric of the material world, the theory of gunas teaches that matter exhibits spiritual/moral qualities. There are three such qualities or gunas which are shared by all matter, living or non-living: the quality or guna of purity and calmness seeking higher knowledge (sattvic), the quality or guna of impurity, darkness, ignorance and inactivity (tamsic) and the quality or guna of activity, curiosity, worldly gain (rajasic). Modern atomic physics, the VHP’s Guide claims, has confirmed the presence of these qualities in nature. The evidence? Physics shows that there are three atomic particles bearing positive, negative and neutral charges, which correspond to the three gunas! From this “scientific proof” of the existence of essentially spiritual/moral gunas in atoms, the Guide goes on to triumphantly deduce the “scientific” confirmation of the truths of all those Vedic sciences which use the concept of gunas (for example, Ayurveda). Having “demonstrated” the scientific credentials of Hinduism, the Guide boldly advises British school teachers to instruct their students that there is “no conflict” between the eternal laws of dharma and the laws discovered by modern science.

One of the most ludicrous mantras of Hindutva propaganda is that there is “no conflict” between modern science and Hinduism. In reality, everything we know about the workings of nature through the methods of modern science radically disconfirms the presence of any morally significant gunas, or shakti, or any other form of consciousness in nature, as taught by the Vedic cosmology which treats nature as a manifestation of divine consciousness. Far from there being “no conflict” between science and Hinduism, a scientific understanding of nature completely and radically negates the “eternal laws” of Hindu dharma which teach an identity between spirit and matter. That is precisely why the Hindutva apologists are so keen to tame modern science by reducing it to “simply another name for the One Truth” – the “one truth” of Absolute Consciousness contained in Hinduism’s own classical texts.

If Hindu propagandists can go this far in U.K., imagine their power in India, where they control the Central government and its agencies for media, education and research. This obsession for finding all kinds of science in all kinds of obscure Hindu doctrines has been dictating the official educational policy of the Bharatiya Janata Party ever since it came to power nearly half a decade ago.

Indeed the BJP government can teach a thing or two to the creation scientists in the U.S. Creationists, old and new, are trying to smuggle in Christian dogma into secular schools in the U.S. by redefining science in a way that allows God to be brought in as a cause of natural phenomena. This “theistic science” is meant to serve as the thin-edge of the wedge that will pry open the secular establishment. Unlike the creationists who have to contend with the courts and the legislatures in the U.S., the Indian government itself wields the wedge of Vedic science intended to dismantle the (admittedly half-hearted) secularist education policies. By teaching Vedic Hinduism as “science”, the Indian state and elites can portray India as “secular” and “modern”, a model of sobriety and responsibility in contrast with those obscurantist Islamic fundamentalists across the border who insist on keeping science out of their madrassas. How useful is this appellation of “science”, for it dresses up so much religious indoctrination as “secular education”.

Under the kindly patronage of the state, Hindutva’s wedge strategy is working wonders. Astrology is flourishing as an academic subject in public and private colleges and universities, and is being put to use in predicting future earthquakes and other natural disasters. Such “sciences” as Vastu Shastra and Vedic mathematics are attracting governmental grants for research and education. While the Ministry of Defence is sponsoring research and development of weapons and devices with magical powers mentioned in the ancient epics, the Health Ministry is investing in research, development and sale of cow urine, sold as a cure for all ailments from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to tuberculosis (TB). Faith-healing and priest-craft are other “sciences” receiving public and private funding. In the rest of the culture, miracles and superstitions of all kinds have the blessings of influential public figures, including elected Members of Parliament.

There are two kinds of claims that feed the notion that the “Vedas are books of science”. The first kind declared the entire Vedic corpus as converging with modern science, while the second concentrates on defending such esoteric practices as astrology, vastu, Ayurveda, transcendental meditation and so on as scientific within the Vedic paradigm. The first stream seeks to establish likeness, connections and convergences between radically opposed ideas (guna theory and atomic particles, for example). This stream does not relativise science: it simply grabs whatever theory of physics or biology may be popular with Western scientists at any given time, and claims that Hindu ideas are “like that”, or “mean the same” and “therefore” are perfectly modern and rational. The second stream is far more radical, as it defends this “method” of drawing likenesses and correspondences between unlike entities as perfectly rational and “scientific” within the non-dualistic Vedic worldview. The second stream, in other words, relativises scientific method to dominant religious worldviews: it holds that the Hindu style of thinking by analogies and correspondences “directly revealed to the mind’s eye” is as scientific within the “holistic” worldview of Vedic Hinduism, as the analytical and experimental methodology of modern science is to the “reductionist” worldview of Semitic religions. The relativist defence of eclecticism as a legitimate scientific method not only provides a cover for the first stream, it also provides a generic defence of such emerging “alternative sciences” as “Vedic physics” and “Vedic creationism”, as well as defending such pseudo-sciences as Vedic astrology, palmistry, TM (transcendental meditation) and new-age Ayurveda (Deepak Chopra style).

In what follows, I will examine how postmodernist and social constructivist critiques of science have lent support to both streams of Vedas-as-science literature.

But first, I must clarify what I mean by postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a mood, a disposition. The chief characteristic of the postmodernist disposition is that it is opposed to the Enlightenment, which is taken to be the core of modernism. Of course, there is no simple characterisation of the Enlightenment any more than there is of postmodernism. A rough and ready portrayal might go like this: Enlightenment is a general attitude fostered in the 17th and 18th centuries on the heels of the Scientific Revolution; it aims to replace superstition and authority of traditions and established religions with critical reason represented, above all, by the growth of modern science. The Enlightenment project was based upon a hope that improvement in secular scientific knowledge will lead to an improvement of the human condition, not just materially but also ethically and culturally. While the Enlightenment spirit flourished primarily in Europe and North America, intellectual movements in India, China, Japan, Latin America, Egypt and other parts of West Asia were also influenced by it. However, the combined weight of colonialism and cultural nationalism thwarted the Enlightenment spirit in non-Western societies.

Postmodernists are disillusioned with this triumphalist view of science dispelling ignorance and making the world a better place. Their despair leads them to question the possibility of progress toward some universal truth that everyone, everywhere must accept. Against the Enlightenment’s faith in such universal “meta-narratives” advancing to truth, postmodernists prefer local traditions which are not entirely led by rational and instrumental criteria but make room for the sacred, the non-instrumental and even the irrational. Social constructivist theories of science nicely complement postmodernists’ angst against science. There are many schools of social constructivism, including the “strong programme” of the Edinburgh (Scotland) school, and the “actor network” programme associated with a school in Paris, France. The many convoluted and abstruse arguments of these programmes do not concern us here. Basically, these programmes assert that modern science, which we take to be moving closer to objective truth about nature, is actually just one culture-bound way to look at nature: no better or worse than all other sciences of other cultures. Not just the agenda, but the content of all knowledge is socially constructed: the supposed “facts” of modern science are “Western” constructions, reflecting dominant interests and cultural biases of Western societies.

Following this logic, Indian critics of science, especially those led by the neo-Gandhians such as Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva, have argued for developing local science which is grounded in the civilisational ethos of India. Other well-known public intellectuals, including such stalwarts as Rajni Kothari, Veena Das, Claude Alvares and Shiv Vishwanathan, have thrown their considerable weight behind this civilisational view of knowledge. This perspective also has numerous sympathisers among “patriotic science” and the environmentalist and feminist movements. A defence of local knowledges against rationalisation and secularisation also underlies the fashionable theories of post-colonialism and subaltern studies, which have found a worldwide following through the writings of Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. All these intellectuals and movements mentioned here have their roots in movements for social justice, environmental protection and women’s rights – all traditional left-wing causes.

Social constructivist and postmodernist attacks on science have proven to be a blessing for all religious zealots, in all major faiths, as they no longer feel compelled to revise their metaphysics in the light of progress in our understanding of nature in relevant fields. But Hinduism displays a special resonance with the relativistic and holistic thought that finds favour among postmodernists. In the rest of this two-part paper, I will examine the general overlap between Hindu apologetics and postmodernist view of hybridity (part I) and alternative sciences (part II).

Postmodern “hybridity” and Hindu eclecticism

THE contemporary Hindu propagandists are inheritors of the 19th century neo-Hindu nationalists who started the tradition of dressing up the spirit-centered metaphysics of orthodox Hinduism in modern scientific clothes. The neo-Hindu intellectuals, in turn, were (consciously or unconsciously) displaying the well-known penchant of generations of Sanskrit pundits for drawing resemblances and correspondences between religious rituals, forces of nature and human destiny.

Postmodernist theories of knowledge have rehabilitated this “method” of drawing equivalences between different and contradictory worldviews and allowing them to “hybridise” across traditions. The postmodernist consensus is that since truth about the real world as-it-is cannot be known, all knowledge systems are equivalent to each other in being social constructions. Because they are all equally arbitrary, and none any more objective than other, they can be mixed and matched in order to serve the needs of human beings to live well in their own cultural universes. From the postmodern perspective, the VHP justification of the guna theory in terms of atomic physics is not anything to worry about: it is merely an example of “hybridity” between two different culturally constructed ways of seeing, a fusion between East and West, tradition and modernity. Indeed, by postmodernist standards, it is not this hybridity that we should worry about, but rather we should oppose the “positivist” and “modernist” hubris that demands that non-Western cultures should give up, or alter, elements of their inherited cosmologies in the light of the growth of knowledge in natural sciences. Let us see how this view of hybridity meshes in with the Hindutva construction of Vedic science.

It is a well-known fact that Hinduism uses its eclectic mantra – “Truth is one, the wise call it by different names” – as an instrument for self-aggrandisement. Abrahamic religions go about converting the Other through persuasion and through the use of physical force. Hinduism, in contrast, absorbs the alien Other by proclaiming its doctrines to be only “different names for the One Truth” contained in Hinduism’s own Perennial Wisdom. The teachings of the outsider, the dissenter or the innovator are simply declared to be merely nominally different, a minor and inferior variation of the Absolute and Universal Truth known to Vedic Hindus from time immemorial. Christianity and Islam at least acknowledge the radical otherness and difference of other faiths, even as they attempt to convert them, even at the cost of great violence and mayhem. Hinduism refuses to grant other faiths their distinctiveness and difference, even as it proclaims its great “tolerance”. Hinduism’s “tolerance” is a mere disguise for its narcissistic obsession with its own greatness.

Whereas classical Hinduism limited this passive-aggressive form of conquest to matters of religious doctrine, neo-Hindu intellectuals have extended this mode of conquest to secular knowledge of modern science as well. The tradition of claiming modern science as “just another name” for the spiritual truths of the Vedas started with the Bengal Renaissance. The contemporary Hindutva follows in the footsteps of this tradition.

The Vedic science movement began in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) addressed the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In that famous address, he sought to present Hinduism not just as a fulfilment of all other religions, but also as a fulfilment of all of science. Vivekananda claimed that only the spiritual monism of Advaita Vedanta could fulfil the ultimate goal of natural science, which he saw as the search for the ultimate source of the energy that creates and sustains the world.

Vivekananda was followed by another Bengali nationalist-turned-spiritualist, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). Aurobindo proposed a divine theory of evolution that treats evolution as the adventures of the World-Spirit finding its own fulfilment through progressively higher levels of consciousness, from matter to man to the yet-to-come harmonious “supermind” of a socialistic collective. Newer theories of Vedic creationism, which propose to replace Darwinian evolution with “devolution” from the original one-ness with Brahman, are now being proposed with utmost seriousness by the Hare Krishnas who, for all their scandals and idiosyncrasies, remain faithful to the spirit of Vaishnava Hinduism.

Vivekananda and Aurobindo lit the spark that has continued to fire the nationalist imagination, right to the present time. The Neo-Hindu literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the writings of Dayanand Saraswati, S. Radhakrishnan and the many followers of Vivekananda, is replete with celebration of Hinduism as a “scientific” religion. Even secularists like Jawaharlal Nehru remained captive of this idea that the original teachings of Vedic Hinduism were consonant with modern science, but only corrupted later by the gradual deposits of superstition. Countless gurus and swamis began to teach that the Vedas are simply “another name for science” and that all of science only affirms what the Vedas have taught. This scientistic version of Hinduism has found its way to the West through the numerous ashrams and yoga retreats set up, most prominently, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his many clones.

All these numerous celebrations of “Vedas as science” follow a similar intellectual strategy of finding analogies and equivalences. All invoke extremely speculative theories from modern cosmology, quantum mechanics, vitalistic theories of biology and parapsychology, and other fringe sciences. They read back these sciences into Sanskrit texts chosen at will, and their meaning decided by the whim of the interpreter, and claim that the entities and processes mentioned in Sanskrit texts are “like”, “the same thing as”, or “another word for” the ideas expressed in modern cosmology, quantum physics or biology. Thus there is a bit of a Brahman here and a bit of quantum mechanics there, the two treated as interchangeable; there are references to “energy”, a scientific term with a definite mathematical formulation in physics, which gets to mean “consciousness”; references to Newton’s laws of action and reaction are made to stand for the laws of karma and reincarnation; completely discredited “evidence” from parapsychology and “secret life of plants” are upheld as proofs of the presence of different degrees of soul in all matter; “evolution” is taught as the self-manifestation of Brahman and so on. The terms are scientific, but the content is religious. There is no regard for consistency either of scientific concepts, or of religious ideas. Both wholes are broken apart, random connections and correspondences are established and with great smugness, the two modes of knowing are declared to be equivalent, and even inter-changeable. The only driving force, the only idea that gives this whole mish-mash any coherence, is the great anxiety to preserve and protect Hinduism from a rational critique and demystification. Vedic science is motivated by cultural chauvinism, pure and simple.

What does all this have to do with postmodernism, one may legitimately ask. Neo-Hinduism, after all, has a history dating back at least two centuries, and the analogical logic on which claims of Vedic science are based goes back to times immemorial.

Neo-Hinduism did not start with postmodernism, obviously. And neither does Hindutva share the postmodernist urgency to “overcome” and “go beyond” the modernist fascination with progress and development. Far from it. Neo-Hinduism and Hindutva are reactionary modernist movements, intent on harnessing a mindless and even dangerous technological modernisation for the advancement of a traditionalist, deeply anti-secular and illiberal social agenda. Nevertheless, they share a postmodernist philosophy of science that celebrates the kind of contradictory mish-mash of science, spirituality, mysticism and pure superstition that that passes as “Vedic science”.

For those modernists who share the Enlightenment’s hope for overcoming ignorance and superstition, the value of modern science lies in its objectivity and universality. Modernists see modern science as having developed a critical tradition that insists upon subjecting our hypotheses about nature to the strictest, most demanding empirical tests and rigorously rejecting those hypotheses whose predictions fail to be verified. For the modernist, the success of science in explaining the workings of nature mean that sciences in other cultures have a rational obligation to revise their standards of what kind of evidence is admissible as science, what kind of logic is reasonable, and how to distinguish justified knowledge from mere beliefs. For the modernists, furthermore, modern science has provided a way to explain the workings of nature without any need to bring in supernatural and untestable causes such as a creator God, or an immanent Spirit.

For a postmodernist, however, this modernist faith in science is only a sign of Eurocentrism and cultural imperialism. For a postmodernist, other cultures are under no rational obligation to revise their cosmologies, or adopt new procedures for ascertaining facts to bring them in accord with modern science. Far from producing a uniquely objective and universally valid account of nature, the “facts” of modern science are only one among many other ways of constructing other “facts” about nature, which are equally valid for other cultures. Nature-in-itself cannot be known without imposing classifications and meaning on it which are derived from cultural metaphors and models. All ways of seeing nature are at par because all are equally culture-bound. Modern science has no special claims to truth and to our convictions, for it is as much of a cultural construct of the West as other sciences are of their own cultures.

This view of science is derived from a variety of American and European philosophies of science, associated mostly with such well-known philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, W.O Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. This view of science has been gaining popularity among Indian scholars of science since the infamous “scientific temper” debates in early 1980s when Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva and their sympathisers came out in defence of local knowledges and traditions, including astrology, goddess worship as cure for small-pox, taboos against menstruation and (later on) even sati. Over the next two decades, it became a general practice in Indian scholarly writing to treat modern science as just one way to adjudicate belief, no different from any other tradition of sorting out truth from mere group belief. Rationalism became a dirty word and Enlightenment became a stand-in for “epistemic violence” of colonialism.

According to those who subscribe to this relativist philosophy, the cross-cultural encounter between modern science and traditional sciences is not a confrontation between more and less objective knowledge, respectively. Rather it is a confrontation between two different cultural ways of seeing the world, neither of which can claim to represent reality-in-itself. Indeed, many radical feminists and post-colonial critics go even further: they see modern science as having lost its way and turned into a power of oppression and exploitation. They want non-Western people not just to resist science but to reform it by confronting it with their holistic traditional sciences.

What happens when traditional cultures do need to adopt at least some elements of modern knowledge? In such cases, postmodernists recommend exactly the kind of “hybridity” as we have seen in the case of Vedic sciences in which, for example, sub-atomic particles are interpreted as referring to gunas, or where quantum energy is interpreted to be the “same as” shakti, or where karma is interpreted to be a determinant of biology in a “similar manner” as the genetic code and so on. On the postmodern account, there is nothing irrational or unscientific about this “method” of drawing equivalences and correspondences between entirely unlike entities and ideas, even when there may be serious contradictions between the two. On this account, all science is based upon metaphors and analogies that reinforce dominant cultures and social power, and all “facts” of nature are really interpretations of nature through the lens of dominant culture. It is perfectly rational, on this account, for Hindu nationalists to want to reinterpret the “facts” of modern science by drawing analogies with the dominant cultural models supplied by Hinduism. Because no system of knowledge can claim to know reality as it really is, because our best confirmed science is ultimately a cultural construct, all cultures are free to pick and choose and mix various “facts”, as long as they do not disrupt their own time-honoured worldviews.

This view of reinterpretation of “Western” science to fit into the tradition-sanctioned, local knowledges of “the people” has been advocated by theories of “critical traditionalism” propounded by Ashis Nandy and Bhiku Parekh in India and by the numerous admirers of Homi Bhabha’s obscure writings on “hybridity” abroad. In the West, this view has found great favour among feminists, notably Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and among anthropologists of science including Bruno Latour, David Hess and their followers.

To conclude, one finds a convergence between the fashionable left’s position with the religious right’s position on the science question. The extreme scepticism of postmodern intellectuals toward modern science has landed them in a position where they cannot, if they are to remain true to their beliefs, criticise Hindutva’s eclectic take-over of modern science for the glory of the Vedic tradition.

Meera Nanda’s book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, has just been published.

Shanghai in January 1993 was hardly the Shanghai it had become a decade later, but most people – including me, a first-time visitor – had an inkling of the great flourish that was to come. It was a freezing Chinese Spring Festival, and although the streets were largely empty and most of the shops shut, one sensed its coiled, irrepressible energy. The flurry of commercial development and the boom in the city’s real estate market would begin later, and the vast, space-age business district of Pudong was still in its infancy, but the city was on its way to becoming the cornerstone of the new “China Century”.

Wandering through the streets, dazed by the cold and looking for breakfast, we eventually bumped into an old man, convivial almost to the point of desperation, welling with curiosity and expectation. It didn’t take him long to announce that he was a devout Christian, and that he had learnt English just to read the Bible. Seeing two foreign faces, he had hoped to find two like minds. He invited us back to his apartment, drawing our attention to his sick mother, a 90-year old mound of bones and blankets sprawled out on an old brass bed in the corner of the room. Boiling noodles on a filthy stove, he began to allude to a life beset by injustice and misery, including his experiences during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By now, I can only remember my feeling of disappointment – that four decades of Maoist struggle should have somehow come to this, and that the appalling violence of the revolution had all been in vain, a short, agonizing suspension of the inevitable. It felt like a great leap backwards, an insult to the idea of human progress.

Marxism, I was idealistic enough to think, was in part a struggle against superstition, and it had failed. In most cases, it had in fact become a new source of superstition, a dialectical-materialist cargo cult. In almost all of its manifestations, mass hysteria and leader worship had prevailed.

It is a truism to say that religion means different things to different people, and it is hard for some of us to give credit to how fashionable it can be, brought up – as I had been – on the image of crinkly vicars in their dog-collars and cardies. After school, I would usually join my friends in throwing stones at the solitary bell in the local churchyard. When we finally got the bell to chime, the vicar would emerge from his quarters, fuming and stumbling over his cassock. That was the level of respect accorded to the Church in my neck of the woods.

Christianity in China occupies a different set of cultural coordinates. Countless small churches, commonly on the edge of heresy and beyond, have been emerging for centuries, fed and nurtured by a multitude of European missionaries and subject to varying levels of official disapproval.

The most famous result of the clash between China and Christianity was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which came close to overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. A curious combination of circumstances created Hong Xiuquan, a lowly teacher with boundless ambition. After flunking the examinations that would enable him to join the government, Hong lay for weeks on the verge of death. Lost in hallucination, he claimed to discover his exalted destiny. He was introduced to religion by a missionary pamphlet, and took the message across southern China, driven by hubris and superstition, picking up converts in villages wracked for years by disaster and neglect. Hong eventually became the leader of a peasant uprising, sustained in his rampage by the belief that he was the second son of God, the brother of Jesus.

The historian and biographer of Hong, Jonathan Spence, wrote that there was “no denying the strength, the inspiration, and the sense of purpose that Hong derived from the Bible, even though his response was intensely personal.” His experience of Christianity came from a number of “random acts of translation, with all their ambiguities, errors and unexpected ironies”. Because his acquaintance with God was personal, “he felt free to alter it”.

That the original Christian identity of oppression and persecution, of Daniel being thrown to the lions, was given new resonance in Russia or Poland, is hardly a surprise. These were traditional Christian societies, and there are countless examples of nobility and courage in the persecuted Russian Orthodox communities that matched the stories in the Bible itself.

Christianity had now gained a sort of counter-cultural kudos. In Poland, where the official Church had played a significant role in the persecution of the Jews, Catholicism had been transformed by Communism into “practically the only defender of identity and freedom,” in the words of one Polish bishop. After centuries of burning heretics and resisting reform, even Catholicism was able to rebrand itself.

But why China? China was targeted by missionaries for about 3 centuries. Christianity was surely tainted by its associations with foreign imperial powers, and subject to the same hostility that Chairman Mao had harnessed when he finally unified the country behind the Communist Party in 1949. At that point, native church leaders were imprisoned and “re-educated”. China became officially atheist, but Christianity still flourished. One estimate suggests that there are currently 50 million Christians in China, compared to 4 million in 1949.

Some of the conversions are harrowing. Repentant Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution – tormented by guilt – would often take solace in the Church. Having denounced their parents and persecuted their teachers in a blaze of revolutionary fervour, they sought to make amends, and Christianity certainly pushes all the right buttons, with its stress on atonement and redemption. Maoism was, quite rightly, interpreted as one more false idol.
The rise can also be attributed to a new wave of Christian activists, flooding into the poorest regions of China from the late 1970s. Usually working as English-language teachers, they have been accused of buying support with food aid. The authorities have branded the converts as “rice-Christians.”

And so, as many might have predicted, 40 years of aggressive, official atheism enshrined in the national constitution was wholly counter-productive. Christianity somehow became the movement of choice for a nation’s young rebels. It serves to prove that repression is not only wrong in itself, but also gets you nowhere. The biggest mistake the Chinese leadership made over the last decade was its decision – a very close-call in the Party’s Central Committee – to crack down on the Falungong, an eccentric sect of qigong practitioners which has since earned far more renown than it deserved.

The Falungong – which began, apparently, as a commercial self-help organization established by a qigong master and instinctive entrepreneur named Li Hongzhi – is just one of a number of troublesome “evil sects”. All kinds of oddities have been reported throughout China’s countryside. Time Magazine recently described one such movement in central China’s Henan Province, known as the Lightning from the East, said to have as many as 300,000 followers. Jesus, according to the sect, has returned in the guise of a 30 year old Chinese woman, and the apocalypse is nigh. Like the Taiping Rebels, the crux of their popularity is the translation of Christianity into a traditional Chinese context. Their strength, like the Taipings, also derives from the desperation and anger that still prevails in many of China’s impoverished rural communities. The sect has alarmed more traditional Christians in the country, Time Magazine reported.

This isn’t just a Chinese problem: the big idea of Marxism was that economics ruled. Give everyone a decent standard of living, and all this nonsense was supposed to go away. It didn’t work in the case of Scientology, of course, and many members of the Japanese Aum Shimriki cult were engineers and computer boffins, but the sophistication of productive forces was supposed to overwhelm backward social relationships.

This, at least, is one of the reasons why you can believe in the sincerity of the Chinese government as it tries to improve the lot of the nation’s sizeable rural population. The “well-off society”, one of the slogans of the last Party congress, has good old-fashioned political motives. Improving the standard of living, and widening the range of opportunities open to the masses, is expected to reduce the possibility of mass cults and movements. Time Magazine quoted one missionary at China’s biggest seminary in Nanjing, who estimated that seven out of ten converts in China were prompted to join the Church because of illness, and the unavailability of rural health care. Prayer was their last throw of the dice.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that suggests that it is the lack of freedom, and the abuse of human rights, that throws many people into the arms of religious extremism. The phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” might spring to mind, but the repression inherent in Islamic Fundamentalism, for example, is somehow internalized, and can be refashioned as the freedom to become what one ought to be. It is somehow more tolerable than the external violence and subjugation perpetrated by Communists, mainly because you have bought into the truth of the religion and the necessity of its moral pronouncements.

You can read more by David Stanway at Shanghai Eye.

Women’s studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies programs, and the moving of non-western and non-“traditional” studies in general out of the anthropology and sociology departments and into the academy on their own terms is the great success story of contemporary higher education. This advance has come along with, and in large part happened because of, the rising influence outside of philosophy departments of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler who pull on insights derived from the writings of Nietzsche. Nietzschean perspectivalism lies at the heart of the standard justification for culture studies. While the desire for the intellectual egalitarianism that accompanies perspectivalism comes from a good place, perspectivalism has well-known problems at its core that stand broadly opposed to the entire purpose of culture studies. Perspectivalism succeeds at making all viewpoints equally cogent, but through its incommensurability thesis, it makes cross-perspective discussion impossible. The exclusion of the testimony of those outside the power elite is justified since it is not in the language of the elite to make sense of the insights of the other. This worry is kept as a dirty little secret out of the quite appropriate desire to maintain the value of non-standard perspectives.

But it is a case of false alternatives to hold that this is the sole possible justification. A better vindication of these studies which avoids all of the problems of perspectivalism is found in the last place most advocates would think to look-the works of the logical positivists.

It has been unfortunately lost to contemporary discussion that the analytic philosophers of the first half of the 20th century were quite progressive in thought and action. As a result, their social and political writings have been neglected. This is unfortunate because an examination of the social and political thoughts of these thinkers unveils a justification for the need to engage in widespread discussion of non-standard perspectives. I will examine one such piece, Hans Reichenbach’s 1918 essay “Die Socialisierung der Hochschule” and argue that its central arguments are easily and naturally extended from opening the universities of post-World War I Germany to culture studies in the contemporary state of the academy.

A Genealogy of Quarrels

To be an outspoken member of the fashionable part of the left is to pledge allegiance to the perspectivalism of Nietzsche and the quest for human authenticity found in Heidegger in one of their contemporary incarnations. To admit admiration of social thought deriving from the logical positivists is to willingly embrace hegemonic, patriarchal evil. To be analytic in one’s social and political bent, to search for objective truth in matters of justice, which extend to all independent of viewpoint, is to deny the deep moral truths which, because they are untranslatable into the incommensurable language of the advantaged members of the power structure, are unknowable to the privileged except through epiphanies derived from the piercing of certain sensitive parts of the human anatomy. To pursue justice through analysis is to place oneself firmly away from everything that is left-leaning. So it is with some.

The works of such Continental philosophers, whom we must thank for the only attempts to actively accommodate the wisdom of a diversity of perspectives hitherto ignored, pose no easy riddles. But these works possess one essential virtue over many of their authors-at least they are tolerant. These authors say of the analytics that they are white and male and some thankfully dead. If I may express a conviction, where I also possess an argument: I contend that they may be the reverse of this-that these investigators and deniers of the existence of a soul may be fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who know how to keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bonds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, scientific, mathematical truths-for such truths do exist.

If we were to ask for a genealogy of such quarrels one might hear a story quite standard in some parts of the academy. Nietzsche and Heidegger urge us to be active in living, to see political power as the real underpinning of all that is supposedly epistemological, and then to seize and to value that which is personal and thus not forced upon us by the powers that be, such power being necessarily subverting and oppressive. The positivists, in their search for objectivity and truth, beg the questions “Whose objectivity?” and “Whose truth?” continuing a ruse long perpetuated by the powerful for their benefit only. In the gradual process that has seen at least the partial liberation of formerly ostracized social groups, it is the vision of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the replacement of the results of the positivists which we should thank for the freeing of people, if not their minds.

All hail the beneficent spirit that motivates these historians of social ethics! One thing is sure, however, that the true spirit of history has deserted them. As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all of them is by nature unhistorical. In times not long past, Nietzsche was to the Third Reich what Aristotle was to the Schoolmen and Heidegger was the Nazi’s willing St. Thomas, while the logical positivists, imprisoned and/or in fear for their lives, were some of the loudest voices on the socialist left. In all three of the foci of early analytic philosophy-Cambridge, Vienna, and Berlin-resided bands of thinkers, leftist to a person. This held especially true of those who found themselves at the center of each of these groups.

In Cambridge, Bertrand Russell used his nobility against the structure which provided it, standing for parliament three times before becoming a peer: twice for labor, and once under the banner of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. His first publication in 1896 was not one of logical analysis, but a political analysis, entitled German Social Democracy. Russell’s outspoken left-wing activism spanned his entire life spending six months in prison convicted of libeling the American army during World War I and a week in a prison hospital for inciting civil disobedience in support of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1961 at age of 89.

In Vienna, leadership of the Circle upon the untimely demise of Moritz Schlick was assumed by Otto Neurath who wrote extensively on leftist politics and economics and sought to make the Circle a source of political activism in addition to a philosophical movement. He refused a prestigious university post with Max Weber to aid the newly installed Social-Democratic government in Bavaria. After the right-wing overthrow of this government, Neurath was imprisoned, freed only by Austrian diplomacy. But his return to his homeland was short-lived. When the clerical government of Dollfuss overthrew the Socialist Municipality of Vienna, he was exiled to Holland.

In Berlin, Hans Reichenbach, in close contact with the Circle in Vienna, organized his group of logical empiricists. He had been a central figure in the socially progressive Freie Studentenschaft and head of the Socialist Student Union Berlin. In addition to his courses in philosophy of science and mathematics at Berlin, Reichenbach offered courses on the philosophy of socialism until he was forced to flee for Turkey and then the United States in the wake of rising Nazism.
If contrary to the present, Nietzsche and Heidegger were the darlings of the most repressive and powerful, and the positivists were those people actively risking their lives and well-being for the emancipation of humans from tyranny, the real question now emerges: “Why did the logical positivist mode of valuation branch off from the fashionable left and become considered its opposite?” Why are the words, deeds, and risks ignored and these brave figures of the left at such a dangerous time vilified?

Granting that political supremacy always gives rise to notions of philosophical superiority, it is not necessarily an exception if the politically powerful are themselves philosophers. Our question is how those now in control of the fashionable academic left have achieved their power and why they, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the positivist value equations good/just/objective/universal and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent that “only the poor at mathematics, the powerless with equations, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly when it comes time to balance a checkbook, truly blessed. But you scientific and mathematical ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!” Many of us on the left have lost sight of this inversion today simply because it has triumphed so completely.

The revolt in social ethics begins when ressentiment turns creative and gives death to values-the ressentiment of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of creativity, compensate by an all too real vengeance. But what is the source of this ressentiment?

World War II ended with the most significant and worrisome application of scientific knowledge in the history of mankind. The resulting Cold War’s appetite for technological advancement in the shape of the arms and space races demanded a maximization of people pursuing all avenues technological and scientific. The language of these pursuits is mathematics; a language of unparalleled power to express, but which possesses an intensely intricate grammar. Those who mastered this language were praised. To exceed one’s peers was to be an Einstein. The archetype of the successful mind was the scientific genius whose insights led to the bomb itself, the raison d’etre for turning institutions of learning at every level into the farm system for the industrial-military complex-never mind Einstein’s actual pacifist and socialist words and actions.

Those who devoted their lives to the pursuit of science or applications in technology were given well paying jobs leading to houses in the suburbs with good schools to allow their children a chance at a successful mathematical/scientific education. Thus the mathematically inclined considered the concept “good” essentially the same as the concepts “useful,” “practical,” so that in the judgements “good” and “bad” mankind has summed up and sanctioned precisely its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences regarding what is useful-practical and what is harmful-impractical. The mathematically-inclined did not deem a person “bad,” but “bad at math”; they used “good” and “bad” in a fashion much more crude, narrow, superficial, and non-symbolic than we are able to imagine today.

The mathematically-inclined valuations grow out of technological self-affirmation. The current ethics, on the other hand, begin when those of other, non-mathematical turns of mind, who found difficult mastery of the mathematical language and the accompanying science and technology, are told “no” on assignments and assessments during their educational process. This “no” is its origination. Their lack of mathematical acumen is taken by parents and teachers as evidence of laziness, of sloth. Failure to achieve mathematical success becomes internalized as a failure of character. This projection of failure back onto oneself is the essence of ressentiment.

When these non-mathematical minds become professors of philosophy, English, or critical studies, truth becomes non-existent. “Objectivity” is deemed meaningless. Mathematics is seen as a tool of oppression. To request verification of testimony becomes hegemonic. The reader will have some notion of how readily the new system of valuations can branch off from the mathematically-inclined system of valuations and develop into its opposite. An occasion for such a division is furnished whenever the mathematically and non-mathematically-inclined jealously clash with one another in department or faculty meetings and are unable to come to terms. The mathematical valuations presuppose a rational, logical thought process, together with all the conditions that guarantee its preservation: argumentation, truth, validity, etc. The valuations of the non-mathematical are founded upon different presuppositions. So much the worse for them when it becomes a question of fallacies! As we know, non-mathematical people are the worst enemies to have. Why should this be so? Because they are the most logically impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so irrational and poisonous.

By the non-mathematical valuations, it is the subjective only that meaningful. Languages of those in different parts of the power structure are incommensurable making conversation across lines impossible. To speak of that which transcends place in the structure is to speak nonsense. These valuations have opened an abyss between person and person over which an Achilles of free thought could not leap, shutter how he may. In all fairness, it should be added, however, that it is only on this soil, the precarious soil of relativism, that humans have been able to understand the importance of the roles played by class, race, gender, and sexual orientation; that only here has the human mind grown both profound and isolated; for if I cannot understand the other, I cannot learn from her.

Also Sprach Reichenbach

The writings of the positivist left, woefully ignored, possess valuable insights and deserve revival. In that light, the socialist writings of Hans Reichenbach are some of the deepest buried. Reichenbach took his Ph.D. in 1915 from Erlangen in the philosophy of science after studying at Berlin, Munich, and Göttigen with Max Planck, David Hilbert, and Ernst Cassirer. He was one of eight members of Albert Einstein’s first seminar in relativity theory in 1919 at the University of Berlin where he was appointed to faculty seven years later thanks to the joint efforts of Plank and Einstein whose active lobbying were needed to avoid rejection on the grounds that Reichenbach had been elected chairperson at the founding of the Socialist Student Party Berlin.

From Berlin, he maintained close contact with the Vienna Circle and started his own Berliner Gesellschaft für Empirische Philosophie which included Richard von Mises, Carl G. Hempel, and Herbert Feigl and he joined Rudolf Carnap started the journal Erkenntnis to function as a vehicle for the writings of the Vienna and Berlin Circles. Reichenbach’s most well-known works concern the determination of the foundations of relativity theory and quantum mechanics and his attempt to partition the basic statements underlying these theories into sets of empirical, logical, and conventional propositions.

Less well known are Reichenbach’s social/political writings which advocate a non-Marxist socialism. Most germane to the current discussion is his 1918 piece “Die Socialisierung der Hochschule” in which he sets out the egalitarian goals of a socialist society and the central role that must be played by institutions of higher learning. While the academia of today is certainly different than that of post-World War I Germany, the arguments offered remain relevant and insightful.
Reichenbach grounds his social philosophy with the fundamental understanding of the existence of the other.

The thinking subject’s awareness of self constitutes the starting point of all laws governing the external world. Yet, in saying this, we must note that among the object of the external world, there exists one special class that can never be fully exhausted with the concept of an ‘object’, that can never be adequately characterized through observation of the object. Invariably, this remains a phenomenon that cannot be further analyzed, that can only simply be pointed out: that in addition to our own ‘I’, our own self, there exist individuals that are centers of consciousness in the same sense but which are nonetheless eternally separated from consciousness of our own self (136-7).

Objectification of the other is thus to be considered a foundational flaw, a most radical error in any social philosophy that entails or allows it; the goal of social philosophy is to determine which potential structure of relationships between selves maximizes the instantiation of spiritual [geistige] values for each self.
Such relationships amongst selves must be understood, Reichenbach argues, in terms of the fundamental distinction between Community and Society. Community is based upon the commonality of wills.

Community consists in that unification of human beings grounded in the experience of a common content of wills. Resting upon friendships between individuals, it is a bond in which spiritual values can become directly creative and which, exercising an outward influence, is able to bring about the extension of spiritual values to other persons. Cultural development will always rest basically upon community, and all creative periods will find their support in communities (137).

It is only by coming together with a common purpose that cultural progress may be made, but this coming together must occur in a larger context alien to the will of the community. But, Reichenbach argues,

[i]t would be a mistake to conceive of this surrounding environment as an enemy to the community. On the contrary, the efficacy of the community presupposes the existence of ordered relations in the surrounding environment and between it and the community. Society is the name for such an ordered association of people, mutual respect the basis upon which intercourse between various willing subjects is possible (138).

Society, therefore, stands as a precondition to the existence of community. It is only out of an ordered collection of different wills that commonness of vision may draw people together and this unifying vision yields friendship and cultural advancement.

This distinction is not a partition dividing groups of individuals into one or the other class, but rather is a duality of viewpoint from which to understand the relationships of the group members and the larger collection of selves. Groups are not absolutely determined to be communities or societies; rather, this distinction is one of perspective that may be assumed in appreciating a group, all groups being both communities and societies.

Every human association seeks, after some fashion, its justification in a goal, feels itself to be a band of warriors battling for its realization and, as such, set aside from the great mass of humanity, to which its members are bound solely through legal forms and to whom they stand in the relation of a community to a society. This community itself forms, in turn, a small society within which still smaller circles may be marked out as communities . . . .The clearest illustration of this duality is found in the party system in the state and the consequent endless subdivisions. A political party may be conceived of as a community with respect to the totality of the population, yet it separates into innumerable separate factions, from these intermediate steps it is still a long way to that narrowest form of relation that we designate as a circle of friends, as a community in the strictest sense. Society and community, then, are correlates. Every society requires a separation into communities; every community must be subject to a society if its existence is to be sustained (138-9).

Social interactions are complex and a full comprehension of the dynamics truly at work in society requires seeing how groups are structured both internally and externally, with internal structure giving rise to yet another layer of communal and societal interaction. Society on Reichenbach’s view is like a set nested Russian dolls which may be taken apart in several different ways, each means of division giving rise to dolls of different shape.

It is in oversimplifying the ways in which human societies divide up into communities that we see a fundamental flaw in Marxism. Marx used class as the sole means of establishing communities out of the larger society. The inequity in the distribution of social goods and the alienation of selves from their spiritual values are thought to spawn directly and solely from economic inequities. Prima facie, there is good reason to think this the case.

The materialist conception of history is the view that the evolution of spiritual and intellectual values is a direct function of economic conditions. Politicians who espouse its principles rest content with improving economic conditions, for they are convinced that a spiritual transformation then will follow and that battles for intellectual reform are therefore superfluous, serving merely to dissipate available forces. Their outlook begins with the fact that stratification of human beings according to their education and culture essentially coincides with stratification according to their standard of living; and they seek to employ for purposes of social reform the sociological law which gives _expression to this fact. That the existing state of affairs is as described must be conceded (140).

When we look generally, we do see, by in large, society divided into economic class-based communities and among these communities similarities among individuals. We do see, for example, in the materially less well-off a rampant hopelessness and the social effects that come along with it.

But this is a very broad-stroke generalization. Reichenbach, having just completed his dissertation a few years earlier concerning the physical interpretation of probability in cases of statistical mechanics, sees the Marxists as trying to achieve Newtonian certainty where only statistical correlation exists.

[E]xception must be taken to the way in which it is interpreted in historical materialism, for this sociological law has validity only as a proposition about average conditions. The intellectual and spiritual variety within each social stratum is so great that a poverty of intelligence and cultivation is encounter as frequently among the rich as cleverness and creativity among the poor-not to mention moral qualities, which are surely not a function of material possessions. Thus the relation between economic well-being and culture, insofar as it exists at all, is comparable not to an unambiguous one-to-one functional relation in physics, but to a law of probability which is compelled to reckon with a broad distribution of individual results. The economic leveling of human beings will not eliminate the differences in their worth (140).

Like many opposed to the standard socialist line, Reichenbach cites the existence of anomalous individuals as a problem for Marxism. There are bright members of the proletariat who will lift themselves up. But unlike opponents of economic redistribution and programs like affirmative action, who contend that these individuals prove the system with its inequities to be thereby just, Reichenbach contends that the economic aspect is a contributing factor but not the only factor. One’s place in a number of communities within the society at large must be understood. By limiting the scope of discussion to economic class, Marx has a successful first-order approximation-but it is only successful as an approximation.

The achievement of a society nurturing the spiritual and intellectual values of its people must have as one of its central institutions the university. The utilitarian value of the university as the educator of future leaders and as the producer of technology “is incidental.” Education, for Reichenbach, is an end in itself that is inexorably tied up with the well-being of the members of society.

However, Reichenbach saw the schools of his day failing the students and the society at large. The central problem is that the powers that control the university, the church and the capitalist, strive to make the university into a community, i.e., a homogenous group of faculty and students designed to perpetuate the status quo and eliminate all avenues of investigation deemed dangerous to the community and its values.

Under the influence of the ideology of this class, a certain caste mentality has developed in academic circles, excluding from universities certain intellectual schools of thought that undoubtedly possess proper scientific qualifications. I am thinking, e.g., of Freudian psychoanalysis and socialistic theories of political economy. Their exclusion is not grounded upon scientific objections, but on objections of morality or taste derived solely from the class attitudes of this narrow bourgeois stratum (147).

Reichenbach here does not advocate the truth of Freud’s theory or of socialist economics, but demands that all ideas be open to critical analysis within the university and that proponents of all ideas have a place at the academic table.

But this academic freedom requires a radical shift in the operations of the university. The vision will never be actualized until the model of university as community of scholars is replaced by the notion of a university as a society of scholars. The university must be socialized, i.e., turned from a club into a broad-based society maximizing internal diversity. The university must not be based upon the picture of a harmonious homogeneity, but upon people of wildly differing goals and beliefs.

Such a change at the very heart of such a longstanding institution will require foundational change in several ways. First, it will require economic changes with regard to students, “by eliminating, at least for poor students, all forms of university fees, that is, those for matriculation, registration, attending lectures, and sitting for examinations (155).” Second, for faculty-in both appointment, “men lacking in all scientific ability have frequently attained academic positions while those who are qualified have had to stand back (147-8)”, and compensation, “we demand that all teachers [including Privatdozenten] be paid full salary. They must also be included in retirement pension schemes, as long as old age pensions are not universally mandated (155)”; and for teaching assistants, “[w]hat applies to lecturers and students applies equally to assistants. While they are not yet actual university teachers, they are employed in teaching-far more in the modern university than they were in the past-and must therefore be paid (157).”

In addition to economic changes, political changes are required. First, is autonomy of the university “from surveillance of the state or any political party.” More important, however, to establishing a society within the university is diversity: “[w]e demand that all academic rights be made independent of class, party, church, sect, race, sex, or citizenship (158).” We cannot overcome the state of community in higher education unless the homogeneity of those who make up the university is destroyed.

Because of the times, Reichenbach felt compelled to elaborate upon his inclusion of sex in the above list. What results is the 1918 version of the debate over gender essentialism.

Equal rights for women are widely opposed, and alongside the crude objections of the ‘women-belong-at-home’ variety some serious grounds of opposition have been offered. Recently, some young intellectual radicals, calling themselves the anti-feminists, have formed a movement for the exclusion of women from science and learning. Hans Blüher, its leader, makes a distinction in principle between intellect and Eros and calls intellect a secondary sexual characteristic of men, while reserving for women the realm of Eros (158).

Reichenbach’s response is reminiscent of his rejection of Marx. We do see broad-stroke differences between the sexes, but that does not mean that to belong to one sex is to determine the nature of one’s self.

If we scrutinize Blüher’s representation of the male spirit more closely, we find that for him such secondary qualities are identical with the concept of the intellectual spirit. For him, the intellect is productivity, creative experience, imagination, artistic creation; a sum of characteristics that could, perhaps, be called masculine, but which are found in only a few individuals, even among men…If the anti-feminists would restrict themselves to bringing together in an intimate community people of their persuasion, they might succeed in creating something of cultural value, but their conception can in no way bring about a fundamental division of society. We must add that there is by no means an invariable and univocal connection between the artistic, creative spirit and the male as a sexual being. Insofar as it exists at all, it is merely a probability relation which may fail to hold in numerous cases: a wide distribution of results in to be expected with such laws of psychological correlation. Thus, a law of this nature may in no way serve as a basis for a division of society into classes. The exclusion of women from certain social functions would mean repression of a class in just the same sense that exclusion of the proletariat has amounted to repression heretofor (159).

Reichenbach freely grants that there are differences which one may point to in psychological disposition and perhaps even intellectual bent that can be correlated with gender, but at best this is a statistical relationship that requires examination of other social factors for its effectiveness as an approximation, should it be so effective. More importantly, establishment of such a law of sexual difference would still be, in principle, unable to justify officially sanctioned sexism.

Such sweeping changes in the academy are understood to be unlikely. But Reichenbach sees one force that is working in favor of socializing the university, the alienation of the bourgeoisie from the university and the alienation of the faculty from the bourgeoisie.

A certain favorable circumstance in prior sociological developments come to our assistance here. Industrial development has increasing deprived capitalists of peaceful enjoyment of their surplus value, forcing them to frenetically increase their capital, so they have had no spare time for the pursuit of intellectual occupations and have abandoned education and culture to their children and their children’s teachers. Gradually, capitalists and culture have become alienated; the administrators of education have become functionaries of the capitalists and have, generally speaking, been the architects of the ideology proclaimed and upheld by capitalism as the necessary form of society, yet in this process a part of the social stratum dispensing education have themselves become proletarians, that is, have become workers who are paid no more than the minimum required for subsistence. This intellectual proletariat, which is gradually becoming conscious of its position, will join the industrial proletariat wage class struggle to the end along with them (151).

Because of the time crunch involved in need of the capitalist for ever-growing affluence, the advantage of opulence, luxury, will be lost, taking with it education and culture. These will be left solely in the hands of a new breed of proletariat who will use these for their own purposes. And so were born, despite the distaste of administrators and boards of directors, women’s and cultural studies.

The Birth of Gravity

The addition of women’s studies, African-American studies, queer studies, Native American studies, and their relatives in the last twenty years have enriched the academy in a fashion so important that one must go back to the separation of psychology from philosophy to find a comparison. The standard justification for the value of such courses is given in terms of a Nietzschean perspectivalism focused through the lens of Foucault. The insight at the root of this move is that the overemphasis on the works of the privileged, coupled with a devotion to objective truth, has eliminated the insight of those not privileged by the power structure. The proposed remedy is to reject objectivity and with it the whole tainted traditional project of discovering the mind of God, i.e., eternal unchanging truth. Perspectivalism puts all perspectives on an equal footing, thereby satisfying our egalitarian intuitions and accounting for the previously ignored wisdom.

The problems with this view are well-known. Perspectivalism, with its incommensurability claims, does level the playing field, but at the cost of making cross-cultural dialogue impossible. If I cannot understand the other, then the other has nothing to teach me. We are reduced to subjectivism, or at least relativism, which leads to at intellectual solipsism that is self-defeating at best, simply not the case at worst. There is much to be learned from the experiences and perspectives of one another and to not do so is not merely tragic, but dangerous to us all. This gravity requires a new foundation for justifying women’s and cultural studies that opens the door to the value of multiple perspectives, but which does not shut off the lines of communication between human and human-lines which do exist. Such an understanding may be found in an extension of Reichenbach’s work in “Der Socialisierung der Hochschule”. His duality of community and society gives rise to a more nuanced position than either closed minded objectivism or dogmatic relativism and this may be used to explain why gender and cultural studies are vital to the success of the university.

It may be tempting to argue that we must separate Reichenbach’s political philosophy from his epistemology, but an investigation of his work during this period shows a firm connection. His argument for the need to turn the universities from a closed community of scholars into a broad-based society of scholars, and the epistemological foundation of his wissenschaftsanalytische Methode that forms the Grundlage of his logical empiricism are both grounded in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the relativistic theory of gravitation.

Superficially, resistence to Einstein’s theory within the university did put it on par with Freud and socialist economics as an academic theory non grata, but it is not the non-acceptance of relativity, but what Reichenbach sees as its application of a foundational insight into the nature of knowledge which contributes the formal basis of his thought.

At the center of early positivism, in the writings of both Reichenbach and Schlick, is the notion of eindeutig Zuordnung, or univocal coordination. This is a concept borrowed from David Hilbert’s axiomatic project. Hilbert distinguishes intrinsic definition that gives a term meaning internal to a language in virtue of its relation to the other terms in the language, and extrinsic definition which coordinates the language with the world outside. Reichenbach considers truths derivable from intrinsic definitions only truths of mathematics, while truths that rely upon extrinsic definitions are truths of physics. We see a distinction between truths of a system and truths of the world.

We see a similar internal/external division of truths surface in the theory of relativity. Einstein’s invocation of a principle of relativity as one of the two foundational elements of his theory show the importance that Einstein placed on the distinction between covariant laws and invariant laws. A law is covariant if it changes in form upon a change of reference frame, i.e., view point, and a law is invariant if it does not vary with frame of reference. For example, if I am talking face to face with a friend holding a mug in one hand and a cookie in the other, I will see the mug to left of the cookie, but she will see the cookie to the left of the mug. Statements of left and right covary with relative position. If she is instead holding just the mug between both hands, both of us will see the mug between the hands. Statements of betweeness are invariant.

In the theory of relativity, there are both covariant and invariant laws. The special theory of relativity is notorious for positing laws that turn what we thought were invariant quantities, e.g., length, duration, and mass, into covariant quantities. When we change reference frames from one to another in more rapid relative motion, lengths shrink and time lapses lengthen. This is what gives rise to puzzles and seeming contradictions such as Langevin’s famous twin’s paradox. These are not, of course, true contradictions unless we want to doggedly hold onto our basic observable notions as not being observer dependent, i.e., perspectival.

While there are, then perspectival truths in relativity theory, not all truths are. There are laws governing invariant quantities. The most important is the so-called space-time interval. While lengths and durations change, there is a particular mathematical combination of them that does not. If we add the distance and time lapse between two events together in a certain way, the resulting number-the four dimensional distance between the events-will be the same for all people no matter their reference frames. The components will change from perspective to perspective, but the combination of them-the four dimensional measure-is the same for everyone.
So there are both covariant truths, i.e., truths that exist only relative to a reference frame and invariant truths, i.e., truths that hold regardless of reference frame. It is absolutely true that for you the time between flashes of lightning was exactly one second, but it is not absolutely true for all people as some are in relative motion. That is not to say that all is relative, quite the opposite.

What Reichenbach found important in this theory, as he set out in his first book Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori, is that the covariant quantities of the theory-mass, length, duration, speed-are the ones that are observable, that form the world of experience, while the invariant quantities are governed by mathematical laws. We have the equations that take us from the individual’s perspective with the truths that only hold within that perspective to the truths that hold independent of perspective. For special relativity, these are called the Lorentz transformations. What these equations do is explain how every perspective is connected to each other and how one must translate experiences to be able to speak from one perspective to another. If one only uses the language of one’s own perspective, then the statements which are obvious truths of direct experience will be false in the experience of the other in her reference frame. But once we understand how all of the perspectives fit together in the overall geometric structure of spacetime, we learn to talk between reference frames. But the only way to find this overall structure is to begin by considering as equally valid the different and seemingly contradictory measurement experiences of different observers. By accepting them both as true, as mandated in the principle of relativity, we may learn of the bigger picture.

The weakness in the theory that led Einstein on to expand from the special case of the special theory to the general case of the general theory of relativity is that the equations governing the transition from covariant to invariant truths only hold for a group of reference frames, not all possible viewpoints. This limitation he thought insufferable and sought to generalize the covariance of the theory so that the laws of nature would hold for all, regardless of perspective. And thus we have the birth of relativistic gravitation theory.

We see this notion of individual and universal truths in Reichenbach’s notion of eindeutig Zuordnung. Coordination of concepts are univocal when they hold regardless of perspective even though the basic observed truths of the individuals world and environment must be relative, covariant truths since we live and experience the world through covariant qualities only. We may look at the world in a dual nature, what we experience as individuals apart and what we experience as individuals together and it is the job of science to figure out how the two fit together. That is why Einstein is Einstein, because he made the move to connect these two, the internal and external.

Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori was published in 1920. The year before Reichenbach was a member of Einstein’s initial relativity seminar in Berlin and the year before that saw the writing of “Der Socialisierung der Hochschule” also in Berlin. It is reasonable to hold that the mathematical duality between covariant and invariant laws, the epistemological distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic definitions, and the social duality of community and society were all in Reichenbach’s head simultaneously. The similarities should be striking. The thought, therefore, of looking at groups from different perspectives; an internal perspective granting truths to the group in its own language, but also an external perspective granting objective truth that is parsed differently by different social observers in different social reference frames.

If we take this duality seriously, we now have the justification we seek. The other has experiences that differ from mine. Both are equally valid according to a principle of social relativity, but occurring within the same world, the experiences are connected. It is only by analyzing my own experiences and those of the other that I may come to see what in my experience is a relative truth within my perspective only, what transcends my perspective, and what requires translation for understanding those in a different reference frame. We must come to understand how the reference frames fit together in the geometry of social space. We are connected, sharing environment and vital causal influences in the social, political, and economic spheres. These influences affect us differently, separating us into our reference frames, but an analysis of all reference frames will allow us to understand how they relate and with this understanding allow us to relate our experience to the other in the language of the other. With this understanding there is the promise of learning from one another. It is this promise that gives value to gender and culture studies.

For this project to succeed, these studies must be taken away from the sociology department. The social project, as the physical project did, starts with experience. The experience must be analyzed, at least at first, by those on the inside. Women must begin women’s studies; gay men and lesbians must begin gay studies; African-Americans must begin African-American studies. And so for the work of the university to be successful, we must echo Reichenbach’s call, “We demand that all academic rights be made independent of class, party, church, sect, race, sex, or citizenship.” We must become a society and not a community of scholars.

This essay first appeared in Studies in Practical Philosophy
which is here

Those of us in the “flyover” region of the Midwest were treated to a horrific spectacle yesterday clearly illustrating how sick our “culture” (and I use this word in its broadest possible sense) has become. Dennis Greene, 31, was convicted by a jury of murdering his 28 year-old wife, Tara. Greene was sentenced to life in prison for nearly decapitating the junior high school math teacher and mother of their seven-year old son, Chi’An, who witnessed the murder.

If this is not enough, there is more to the story. After the murder, Greene fled to his hometown of Chicago hoping to evade authorities. There he shot a “rap video” where he boasted of “killin’ da bitch” and “cut her neck with a sword”. A much-edited version was released last night on the local evening news, including the following lyrics:

I was waiting on Tara. The (expletive, expletive) made me mad.
I had to end her life. Now I’m sad.
I really don’t care about tomorrow. The bitch made me mad.
She kept at it and I had to take her (expletive) life.
It’s just Dennis Greene and I ain’t got a (expletive) wife.

Notwithstanding Mr. Greene’s Shakespearean flare for lyrics, we also were invited to view the irritable throat-cutter smoke a joint, dance, and wave his arms in the infantile manner so germane to this particular genre of “music”. After all, the “bitch” had made him angry. What else could he do?

According to the Cincinnati Post’s report his attorneys attempted to prove he acted under extreme emotional disturbance, which would have dropped the charge to first-degree manslaughter and his sentence to 10 to 20 years. But the jury of eight women and four men after viewing the videotape refused to buy that argument. Apparently, they had trouble with the “authenticity” of Greene’s “urban” experience, and decided life in prison might be in the best interest of everyone, including Greene’s young son, who according to the grandparents and parents of the victim is said to be in fear that Greene might return to do him harm.

Perhaps one of the more disturbing and depressing aspects of this tragedy is that it should not serve as an impediment in Mr. Greene’s pursuit of a music career.

If you think this is far-fetched, think again; the November 17th issue of Advertising Age, a trade magazine in the marketing and advertising fields, recently honored “The Ad Age Marketing 50, 2003: The Top Brand Success Stories Of The Year” where “Since 1992 the editors of Advertising Age have identified and profiled a select group of marketers whose vision, drive and innovation are major milestones of the year’s brand success stories.”

One of those honored was Steve Berman, senior executive – marketing and sales, Interscope, Geffen, and A&M Records. If you are not familiar with Mr. Berman, he is the man largely responsible for inflicting the paragon of virtue and model citizenship known as “50 Cent” (known to his mother as Curtis Jackson) on the listening public:

‘He had done so much to heat up the streets,’ says Mr. Berman, one of the architects of 50 Cent’s ascent. ‘He was well on his way.’

[Berman] says the meteoric rise of 50 Cent began with authenticity. 50 Cent has it: rap sheet, former second-generation drug dealer and multiple gunshot survivor (nine times at last count, leaving one to lament the decline, like so many other things, of marksmanship in this country). He also helped to build his own buzz before he’d ever put out a record, by circulating his mix tapes and working the hip-hop circuit as his own goodwill ambassador.

Even the writers at Advertising Age join Mr. Berman in taking every opportunity to employ the argot of convicts and illiterates in their praise of his marketing coup:

You can buy advertising, but you can’t buy street cred.

While I am still trying to process the cognitive dissonance of trying to imagine 50 Cent as a “goodwill ambassador”, it has become plainly evident that there is no dark corner of the psyche our consumerist culture will not plumb in order to make a buck.

Or is there?

Take the case of one Anerae Brown, who styles himself “X-Raided”. Brown has managed to produce several albums, all but the first from his prison cell where he is currently serving a 37 year sentence without possibility of parole for the savage, cold-blooded murder of Patricia Harris. Harris, a middle-aged school employee and grandmother active in the PTA had held a birthday party for her grandchildren earlier in the day. In the early hours of March 15th, 1992 after William, her husband of twenty-five years, left for work, Harris encountered four youths in her hallway including “X-Raided” and was shot in the chest and subsequently died.

For those who might have doubts as to Mr. Brown’s guilt, it appears he shares a penchant for the confessional with Mr. Greene:

Letting fools know X-Raided ain’t playing
Tha Murder, yeah, I got something to do with it
Cause I shoot cha punk ass in a minute.

Welcome to the nihilist void of the violent, misogynistic, and racist lyrics of rap. This Miltonian endeavor was recorded on his second album “Xorcist” over the telephone from his current residence in a California correctional facility. Still, this hardly curbs the enthusiasm of his fans and critics:

If you’re a fan of hardcore/gangster rap and want to hear some true heartfelt music… pick up Unforgiven! Possibly the best rap CD of 1999!

Now this is one rapper who hasn’t recieved (sic) the props he deserves. X-Raided is the siccest rapper on the West Coast since Pac. He keeps it real, that’s why he don’t get no radio play. The man’s in the pen, steady thuggin, puttin it down for that G life.

Heartfelt music? And where does one go to buy the works of this steady thuggin Cole Porter of the penal system? Why Amazon.com, of course! And, I suppose any other major record chain in the United States. It would appear there is gold in murder and mayhem – capitalism in its finest hour.

While “street cred” and “authenticity” are fine, there’s nothing quite like the veneer of respectability academia can bestow. For several years now, classes in hip-hop have been integrated into university curricula across the country with course titles such as “Hip-Hop Artistry and Social Activism” offered at the University of Illinois.

The defenders of this artistry of social activism often display the convoluted intellectual and moral contortionism of the hard-line Stalinist. bell hooks (aka Gloria Watkins), Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York, offers one of the more tortured defenses of “gangsta rap”:

Gangsta rap is part of the anti-feminist backlash that is the rage right now. When young black males labor in the plantations of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, their right to speak this violence and be materially rewarded is extended to them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Not to be outdone, Cornel West, currently the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University and rap artist, defends the rapper R. Kelley:

Our Brother R. Kelly has some issues, and we will pray for him, but he is a musical genius. He is aware of his history. Throughout his “Chocolate Factory” album, you can hear Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye.

Has some issues, does he? The “musical genius” in question, R. Kelley has now been indicted twice for child pornography. West wrote in the introduction to his Cornel West Reader:

I am a Chekhovian Christian…By this I mean that I am obsessed with confronting the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery.

Apparently Dr. West has a rather fluid notion of just exactly what constitutes evil and “unjustified” suffering. Rational individuals find child pornography repugnant and most would refrain from declaring its perpetrators geniuses. I would be curious to hear what the esteemed Princeton professor would have to say about Patricia Harris or Tara Greene’s murders; would it be construed as “unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery?”

My opinions will be countered with the objection that I am a middle-aged, white male and I simply “don’t get it.” After all, I am part of the “ongoing hegemonic appropriation” of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and therefore not entitled to an opinion. It will surely be remarked my assessment of Tupac Shakur’s “poetry” is unduly harsh and Eurocentric in its focus because I do not believe it stands on the same level with Auden, Eliot and Yeats.

But, think before you answer.

The point is that I do get it. As a reporter, I have had the misfortune of encountering the victims of assault, rape and murder through my work in the past. Harder still, I have spoken with the loved ones who survived them. Only the most depraved among us could possibly glory in the devastation this violence leaves in its wake. Membership in the human race is certainly questionable when one profits from this misery and degradation of others.

With that said, I have no doubt that Mr. Greene’s future is assured. He certainly has the “street creds” now and is empowered to the hilt with the “authenticity” marketers find so essential. I ask only one thing of you when you purchase his first “breakthrough” CD with all its “authenticity” and “urban” grittiness, please try to imagine the horror of seven-year-old Chi’An Greene watching his mother’s throat slit from ear to ear.

It is a story worthy of a great Romantic pen, how a few Celtic monks, cloistered on remote, wind-blown islands with only their prayer beads and a few nervous sheep for company saved Western Civilization. It was nothing less than a miracle that as the darkness descended upon Europe, Greek and Latin manuscripts were being first introduced to the Emerald Isle where generations of monks would dedicate their lives to copying and preserving the ancient texts. Later, descendents of these selfsame clerics would carry their precious cargo to European monasteries where the Italian, the German and the Frenchman waited to be enlightened.

A pretty idea, as I say, but about as genuine as the jackalope. A truer picture would show our medieval monks to be rather superstitious fellows, highly suspicious of anything that did not explicitly smack of the spiritual. “In [the monks’] view, knowledge crafted by human means, by unaided reason…was more likely to lead to the devil,” writes the eminent historian Dr. Stanley Chodorow. There is good reason the “Age of Faith” and the “Dark Ages” are interchangeable terms. The leading ecclesiastical figures of the day Pope Gregory the Great (called the “Stalin of the early church” by Trevor-Roper), and Augustine of Hippo condemned outright the study of pagan or profane literature. For Saint Augustine, the monk who sought knowledge in the Greek or Latin authors was no better than the Israelite who plundered Egyptian treasures in order to build the tabernacle of God.

The sad truth is that monks and scholars were more likely to be persecuted than rewarded for preserving pagan literature and traditions, holding progressive views, or espousing ideas not specifically stamped by Rome. Such was the fate of Peter Abelard, one of the most brilliant of medieval men, forced to burn his books and imprisoned at the insistence of the good monks of St. Denis. No less a personage than Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, according to my copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia, found “Abelard’s influence dangerous, and in 1140, prevailed upon Pope Innocent II, to condemn Abelard for his skeptical and rationalistic writings and teaching. The monks opposed Abelard and convinced the Church to condemn him—twice—and the papacy periodically fulminated against the rationalist discourse carried out in [his university] classrooms.”

Well into the time of Aquinas, the first of the sanctified to adopt Aristotle, Greek and Roman literature was taboo. While ample evidence exists that Irish monks copied many ancient manuscripts, there is less reason to think that they read, understood, or learned anything from them. Often these monks sanitized the texts by littering the pages with generous amounts of Biblical allusions. Because few monks could read Greek, less Greek literature survives. One estimate suggests a third of all Latin literature survived compared to only ten percent of the ancient Greek. But even in the Irish monasteries the ancient texts were far from safe. “As parchment became very rare and costly during the Middle Ages,” says the Encyclopedia, “it became the custom in some monasteries to scratch or wash out the old text in order to replace it with new writing.”

Down the Dark and Middle Ages there continued a constant struggle by enlightened men to use their minds without losing their heads. Europe’s universities were more often than not governed by Rome’s inquisitors, men of dubious intellect of the likes of Jacob Sprenger, co-author of the infamous Witch’s Hammer, the original handbook for witch hunters. When he wasn’t roasting heretics, Dean Sprenger oversaw the University of Cologne, where he carried on a culture war against the northern humanists. The few, true renaissance men were not to be bullied by Rome and are to be celebrated, men like King Francois I, who, in 1532, agreed to subsidize chairs of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic. But this too had to be done outside the grounds of the University of Paris, which was controlled by the Church.

Ironically it was to the very seat of the papacy that humanist scholars flocked to study Latin and Greek amidst the general revival of ancient literature and art based largely on the newly discovered Greek texts, while holy men, like the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, found Italy not a seat of learning, but den of sin, corruption and perversion. The humanists alone understood the importance of rescuing the rotting Greek and Latin manuscripts from the damp monasteries and getting them into the hands of printers and scholars. And by far the majority of that unearthing was done, not in Ireland, but in Constantinople, Greece, and nearby Muslim countries.

Chief among those treasure hunters was the poet Petrarch (1304-74), who went doggedly from monastery to monastery, convent to convent searching for lost treasure, and the printer Aldo Manuzio, whose Venetian press published the first inexpensive editions of Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Xenophon, Euripides, Demosthenes, Plato, and Pindar. Aldus’s house was soon a gathering-place for Greek and Latin scholars, and included Erasmus’ whose Proverbs Manuzio published in 1508. It was Manuzio who reestablished Plato’s Academy in Venice nearly a thousand years after the Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian shut it down claiming it was a pagan establishment.

In The Renaissance, historian Paul Johnson writes that:

Constantinople was known in the West to contain great depositories of ancient Greek literature and a few scholars familiar with it. In 1397, the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence, and it was from this point that classical Greek began to be studied seriously and widely in the West. Guarino de Verona went to Constantinople and returned to Italy not only fluent in Greek, but with an important library of 54 Greek manuscripts, including some of the works of Plato, hitherto unknown in the West. The rest of Plato was brought from Constantinople in 1420s by Giovanni Aurispa. This was the first great transmission of Classical Greek literature.

For half a millennium Irish monks warehoused rare classical texts, but the great wealth of knowledge they contained was largely wasted on them. It was left to a handful of fifteenth century poets and humanists to free the texts from the dark monastic libraries. Only then would Western Civilization’s Renaissance truly commence.

Christopher Orlet’s home page is www.Christopherorlet.net

Religious Fundamentalisms, Modernist and Postmodernist

Recently I was invited to a conference of scholars of science-studies at the beautiful, lake-side campus of Cornell University. The agenda of this conference was to examine the influence of science studies on the wider “polity and the world” outside confines of the Ivory Tower. The conferees considered the influence of their discipline on just about every social movement that dealt with such things as biotech and computers to music (or rather, sound, as in “sound studies”). Completely missing from the agenda, even in this post-9/11 world that we live in, was any reference to the family of reactionary social movements that is making full use of the core ideas of science studies. I refer here to religious fundamentalist movements that are growing in all major faiths all around the world. I ended up having to remind the gathering that the key idea of their discipline may have some rather unanticipated and serious consequences outside the Ivory Tower.

Now, this academic discipline called “science studies” is not your average academic discipline. It is a discipline that evokes great passion, for and against it. It is a discipline that was parodied by Alan Sokal in his famous hoax in 1996, the hoax that sparked the “science wars” that rocked the American academia. For the sake of full disclosure, let me admit that I was a party to the science wars, from the side of Sokal and other scientists and philosophers of science who find science studies to be both wrong and politically dangerous. What I find deeply misguided and politically dangerous about science studies and postmodernism in general is the subject of my forthcoming book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. To understand the significance of science studies to the issue of religious fundamentalism more broadly, and Vedic science in particular, an explanation of what science studies teach is in order.

Science studies, as I said, is not an ordinary academic discipline. It constitutes the beating heart of postmodernism, for it aims to “deconstruct” natural science, the very core of a secular and modern worldview. Since its inception in the 1970s, the discipline has produced a sizeable body of work that purports to show that not just the agenda, but even the content of theories of natural sciences is “socially constructed.” All knowledge, in different cultures, or different historical times – regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, successful or not in producing reliable knowledge – is to be explained by the same causes. This demand for “symmetry” between modern science and other local knowledges constitutes the central demand of the “strong programme,” the central dogma of science studies. One cannot assume that only false beliefs or failed sciences (e.g., astrology) are caused by a lack of systematic empirical testing, or by faulty reasoning, or by class interests, religious indoctrination or other forms of social conditioning. A truly “scientific” approach to science requires that we suspend our preconceived faith that what is scientific by the standards of modern science of our times brings us any closer to truth. In the spirit of true scientific impartiality and objectivity, science studies demand that modern science be treated “symmetrically,” as being “at par” with any other local knowledge.

In principle, there is nothing whatsoever wrong in the agenda of science studies: modern science is not a sacred form of knowledge that cannot be examined skeptically. Science and scientists must welcome a skeptical look at their enterprise from social critics. The problem with science studies comes in their refusal to grant that modern science has evolved certain distinctive methods (e.g., controlled experiments and double-blind studies) and distinctive social practices (e.g., peer review, reward structures that favor honesty and innovation) which promote a higher degree of self-correction of evidence, and ensure that methodological assumptions that scientists make themselves have independent scientific support. Science studies start with the un-objectionable truism that modern science is as much a social process as any other local knowledge. But using radically relativist interpretations of Thomas Kuhn’s work of science as a paradigm-bound activity, science studies scholars invariably end up taking a relativist position. They argue, in essence, that what constitutes relevant evidence for a community of scientists will vary with their material/social and professional interests, their social values including gender ideologies, religious faith, and with their culturally grounded standards of rationality and success. Thus, scientists with different social backgrounds, from different cultures and from different historical periods, literally live in different worlds: the sciences of modern western societies are not any more “true” or “rational” than the sciences of other cultures. If modern science claims to be universal, that is because Western culture has tried to impose itself on the rest of the world through imperialism.

This, in a nut-shell, is the state of scholarship in science studies. It carries a reasonable idea too far. Its skepticism regarding science is so radical that it does not allow any distinctions between science and superstition. No wonder it excites great passion among supporters and detractors. While science studies practitioners see themselves as brave iconoclasts, those of us who have criticized the field see it as promoting an ‘anything goes’ kind of relativism which helps no one.

This, then, is the contentious history behind the conference that I was invited to. This conference was a kind of stock-taking of the influence of science studies on the larger society. In keeping with its tradition of extreme charity toward all sciences, this gathering came up with a generous and inclusive definition of who belongs to science studies. Sheila Jasanoff, doyenne of science studies, formerly from Cornell and now at Harvard, told the gathering that whoever sees the world through the conceptual framework of science studies, is a part of the science studies community, and has a claim on the discipline. All those, in other words, who see the content of science as a “co-construct” of the dominant interests and values of their respective cultures, are part of this movement of science studies, regardless of whether they are located in the academy or in the world and the polity outside.

But when I pointed out to the gathering that by this definition, the growing movements of religious fundamentalisms in all major faiths also deserve to be admitted to the guild of science studies, the suggestion was not well received. After all, I argued, the contemporary religious political movements use social constructivist arguments when they put aside whatever scientific theory conflicts with their religious faith, as a social construct of godless, Western secular-humanist atheists who have been ruling world since the Enlightenment. Moreover, I argued, if all sciences alike are social constructs, then why shouldn’t the “sacred sciences” propagated by religious fundamentalist movements be admitted as bona fide “local knowledges” or “standpoint epistemologies” of the community of believers?

I was not being facetious, nor was I stoking the “science wars” when I suggested that there was a dangerous convergence – unintended, surely, but not entirely coincidental – between the social constructivist views of science routinely taught in science studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies and allied disciplines, and the views of those who defend creation science, Islamic sciences, or, as in the case of India, Vedic sciences. The point I was making was not that the foot-soldiers of religious fundamentalist movements are sitting and poring over the works of David Bloor, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway or even of that great simplifier, Sandra Harding. They are not – although the more sophisticated among them do cite the classic works of (a hugely misinterpreted) Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and those of local post-colonial and feminist scholars who have popularized the social constructivist critiques of objective knowledge and reason at home. I wanted to show how the promotion of an anti-secularist, anti-Enlightenment view of the world by well-meaning and largely left-wing scholars in world-renowned centers of learning has ended up affirming a view of the world which constitutes the common sense of the rather malign, authoritarian and largely right-wing fundamentalist movements. I wanted to show that that having invested so deeply in anti-modernist and anti-rationalist philosophies, the academic left has no intellectual resources left with which to engage the religious right.

Nowhere is the influence of social constructivist and postcolonial critiques of science more evident than in India, where these ideas have become indistinguishable from the Hindu nationalist promotion of assorted “Vedic sciences.” As anyone familiar with global academic trends can attest, ostensibly secular, left-wing intellectuals from India have played a leading role in debates about the nature of knowledge that have raged during the last two decades in American and other Western universities in science studies, feminist epistemology, eco-feminism, postcolonial studies and allied disciplines. Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva, Claude Alvares, Gayatri Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakravarty, Gyan Prakash, Veena Das, Chandra Tolpady Mohanty and many others have been guiding lights of university humanities departments in America. Not surprisingly, the global prominence of Indian scholars in the assorted postmodernist debates brought them enormous prestige back home. Their critique of “mental colonialism” and their promotion of local knowledges found a strong echo in literally thousands of “alternative development” NGOs and social movements.

The anti-Enlightenment seeds they sowed are now ready for harvest: the cultural authenticity of the non-Western “other” that our radical intellectuals were looking for, has become the official ideology of the Hindu nationalists that have ruled India for a decade. The postcolonial theorists looked to women, working classes, and other marginalized groups to provide more adequate alternatives to Western knowledge. The Hindu nationalists use the same postcolonial arguments against “mental colonization” to find a more adequate alternative epistemology in the most orthodox and mystical core of Hinduism, namely the Vedas and the Upanishads. These nearly three-millennium old Sanskrit texts are being introduced in schools and colleges as “just another name” for modern scientific knowledge including 20th century physics, biology, medicine and even engineering. Conversely, modern sciences are being peddled as “just another name” of the perennial wisdom of the Vedas and the Upanishads. Notwithstanding the deep hold of all kinds of dangerous superstitions in India, Hinduism is being portrayed as the most hospitable of all religions to the spirit of scientific inquiry. All in all, the idealistic view of nature and the mystical mode of knowing taught by the Brahminical texts of India are being whitewashed into a valid – nay, preferred – way of learning and doing science, not just for “Hindu India” but for the whole world.. Two unequal and very unlike methods and view-points are being declared to be equal and alike to the point of being interchangeable.

One could say that this is simply the Indian way of embracing the new by first turning it into an aspect of its own tradition – “traditionalizing the innovation,” as it is referred to in the Indological literature. Others like Nandy and his followers who see themselves as the defenders of a popular, folk Hinduism scoff at the Vedic science project as another example of “hyper-modernity” of Hindu nationalists who are accused of “distorting” the living religion and local knowledges of the masses. For my part, I believe that both of these “explanations” of Hindu nationalist eagerness to appropriate modern science for Vedic Hinduism miss the point entirely. Because Vedic Hinduism has perpetuated itself for centuries by claiming its teachings are in accord with “laws of nature,” modern scientific understanding of how nature actually works poses the greatest challenge to its credibility. Developments in natural science have finally made it possible for the suppressed native materialistic and rational traditions – from those of the ancient Charvakas, the original Buddha to the Deweyan, secular-humanist interpretation of Buddhism by Ambedkar – to finally come into their own against the mystical, elitist and superstitious worldview of Vedic Brahmanism. If the defenders of the faith are allowed to “traditionalize” this one innovation — namely, the modern science of nature — that will amount to yet another defeat of those who have stood for reason and social justice in India. Hinduism, it is true, has always perpetuated itself not by suppressing the innovations by force of arms, but by traditionalizing what is innovative. What the Hindu nationalists are doing to science, is what Hinduism has always done to all that is new, foreign and threatening, i.e., pretended that it has always been a part of the tradition. But this kind of self-perpetuation ends up perpetuating the worst elements of the tradition. This kind of “traditionalization” of science will disarm the one innovation that has the potential to challenge the core beliefs of the faith, insofar as they gain their credibility as being consonant with the laws of nature. That is why any philosophy of science that denies the clear cognitive progress modern science has made in demystifying the workings of nature, or any philosophy of science that denies the distinctiveness of the scientific method in comparison with other ways of knowing, ends up aiding and abetting the forces of religious conservatism in India. And that is why the romance of Indian intellectuals with social constructivism and postmodernism has been so harmful to the fight for the development of a secular worldview in India.

In this essay, I will be examining at length the arguments Hindu nationalists mobilize to justify the Hindu high-holy books as scientific treatises. How these arguments mirror, and often directly borrow from, the postmodernist attacks on the universality and rationality of modern science will become obvious as we go along.

Postmodernist religious fundamentalism

But before I explore the Indian material, I want to briefly examine the emergence of a postmodern or post-foundational apologetics that is emerging in all major religious- political movements. Hindutva is a prime example of a fundamentalist movement that indulges in this kind of postmodernist apologetics. Hindutva is postmodernist both in the kind of perspectival epistemology and the in the kind of enchanted, holistic understanding of nature it promotes. (To a large extent, the perspctivalism and holism are a part of the teachings of high-Hindu Sanskritic sacred texts. To use them to justify the religious core of Hinduism as “scientific” is the achievement of Hindu nationalists.)

What do I mean by a postmodern style of religious fundamentalism? I mean simply those elements of religio-political movements that deploy the logic of postmodernist deconstruction of natural science in order to defend their use of God, Spirit and other supernatural forces as legitimate sources of scientific explanation. To use Karen Armstrong’s vocabulary from her popular The Battle for God, postmodernist fundamentalists insist upon defending their right to employ the mythos of their faith (i.e., all that was meant to be a source of intuitive meaning and experiential insights) to redefine the logos (all that is rational, empirical) of natural science.

Postmodernist defenders of the faith demand the right, to quote Alvin Plantinga, a well-known philosopher of religion, “to pursue science.. as Christians, starting from and taking for granted what we know as Christians.” Structurally similar arguments appear again and again in other faiths, defending their right to pursue “Vedic science” or “Islamic sciences,” complete with miracles and other manifestations of the supernatural. Indeed, among Hindu and Islamic faithful, the right to their “own” science is asserted with a special vehemence, because it is mixed up with anti-colonial and anti-Western rhetoric.

All of these militant demands for “equal rights” to pursue their own version of theistic or sacred science take it for granted that it is no longer necessary to grant science the status of objective and universal knowledge. Science, it is assumed in true postmodernist fashion, no longer poses a challenge to the metaphysical assumptions of their own faiths, because scientific knowledge is itself is a construct of a wide variety of contested terms, held together, ultimately, by cultural power and social interests which define a given paradigm or an episteme. Take away the godless, materialist assumptions of modern scientists (who happen to be overwhelmingly male, white, imperialists Westerns anyway), and the given scientific evidence can actually serve as evidence for other kinds of theories about nature which do not exclude God as acting in nature or do not deny the existence of consciousness in matter. Different social values and cultural meanings can produce equally convincing maps of the world of nature. This has been the central dogma of science studies and has found numerous formulations in all kinds of “radical” defenses of alternative sciences. Religious fundamentalists are simply taking a page out of the social constructivist book.

More specifically, these movements are opposed to a naturalistic worldview which happens to be fundamental and necessary for science-as-we-know-it. They are keen on asserting their right to their own sacred sciences because they want to bring in the supernatural as an explanation of natural phenomena. All religious fundamentalists want a full-blooded version of their faith, which is there not just for spiritual solace (which would make faith not different from poetry), but which can make propositional claims about the world. They want to believe in a God that actually does some work in this world, both at the level of nature and at the level of social life of men and women. Naturalism as a worldview, and as a method, makes God, or Spirit, irrelevant and unnecessary to explaining the workings of nature, human beings and society. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that naturalism is the biggest threat there is to a strong version of their faith.

What do we mean by naturalism? Basically, naturalism is the antonym of super-naturalism. Naturalism denies supernaturalism in all its forms, whether the supernatural is seen as a transcendent God over and above this world who can abrogate natural laws, as in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions; or as a spiritual force or energy that resides in nature, but is able to exist separately from it as well, as in the case of Hinduism and Taoism. There are at least three senses of naturalism all of which are vehemently opposed by religious fundamentalists:

First, methodological naturalism is committed to a methodological principle within the context of scientific inquiry; i.e., all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events which can be apprehended by sense experiences. (In contrast, theistic or idealistic philosophies hold that there are more valuable avenues of knowledge than “mere” sense experiences.)

Second, ontological naturalism is a generalized description of the universe. According to the naturalists, nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles, i.e., by mass, energy and physical-chemical properties which have been described by sciences employing naturalistic methodology. Naturalists deny the existence of soul and the belief that it can survive death.

This belief that there is nothing but nature – matter and energy – developed as a metaphysical belief and can be found as a minority position among all philosophical and religious thought (e.g. among the Charvakas in India, or among the pre-Socratic philosophers among the Greeks). But today, it is possible to defend this view on solid empirical grounds. There is no defensible evidence for the existence of supernatural forces anywhere in nature. Naturalism is the only possible inference from all the scientific evidence available to us, up to this moment.

Third, naturalism is humanistic in its ethical dimension. It simply rejects the idea that you have to believe in God in order to live an ethical life.

All major religious fundamentalist movements decry all these three senses of naturalism. The mostly Christian “intelligent design” movements decry naturalism of modern science as a “religion” of secular humanists that have, apparently, ruled the Western world since the Enlightenment. Islamic fundamentalists have their own grievance against naturalism, for it tears apart the unity or tawhid between the divine, the affairs of men, and the realm of nature. The assorted Hindu swamis, gurus and their political acolytes who champion “Vedic sciences” decry the idea of nature without Atman, matter without spirit, as a product of Semitic “dualism” between a transcendent God and dead matter. They promise to heal the wounds caused by Semitic dualism by unifying spirit and matter, as taught in the Vedas. On matters of methodological naturalism, Hindu apologists take a very curious stand, which is quite fundamental to their claims of Vedas being “books of science.” Because in Hinduism the spiritual element is immanent in the world, i.e., resides in natural entities, living or non-living alike, many Vedic science proponents claim that they are not invoking anything supernatural: references to gods are actually references only to forces of nature. (This kind of defense of the inherent scientific of Hinduism was first made by Swami Vivekananda and has become an integral part of the neo-Hindu tradition.) But this is really hair-splitting, for the fact is that Vedic Hinduism is a spiritual monism: it sees objects of nature as secondary manifestations of Atman. Thus to say that Vedas are “naturalistic” is simply not tenable, for in fact the Vedic teachings make no room for an autonomous, independent, un-designed, unsupervised and un-enchanted existence of matter which naturalism demands.

In the militantly conservative movements in all major world religions, then, the secularization of science — the hard-won freedom of science from the churches, the Brahmins and the mullahs – is seen as a modernist error that needs to be corrected. These calls for various sacred sciences are religious versions of the postmodern arguments against the “logocentrism” of modern knowledge which strips objects of their subjectivity, turning them into mere objects of domination and even rape. To see further parallels with postmodernism, let us follow the modernist and postmodernist impulses in the “Vedic science” movement in India.

Modernist Apologetics: Hindu Examples

In India, knowledge of modern scientific developments in the West led to similar splits, but with one crucial difference: the conservative apologist camp won hands down and has been ascendant right through India’s modern history to the present date. While in the US, mainline Protestant churches themselves and some of the most influential public intellectuals of the era took up the cause of naturalism and secularism, in India only the marginalized and powerless dalit and non-Brahman intellectuals took on the cause of secular reform of religion. The Indian response to science was predominantly conservative and like their Christian counterparts in the creationist movement, neo-Hindu apologists also tried to fit science into the Vedic view of the world.

The Vedic science movement began in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902 ) a Bengali Vedantist and an ardent, reform-minded nationalist, addressed the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. His address sought to present Hinduism not just as a fulfillment of all other religions but also as a fulfillment of all of science. In the spiritual monism of the Vedas which teaches that the spirit, Atman, that animates man also animates all the rest of the creation, Vivekananda claimed to find the ultimate unity, the ultimate source of all energy, which creates the universe and keeps it going, without a beginning or an end.

Vivekananda was followed by another Bengali nationalist turned spiritualist, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). Aurobindo proposed a divine theory of evolution, an alternative to Darwinism, which treats evolution as the adventures of the World-Spirit finding its own fulfillment through progressively higher levels of consciousness, from matter to man to the yet-to-come harmonious “supermind” of a socialistic collective. Indian intellectuals thus have had “their own” theory of evolution for a very long time. Newer theories of Vedic creationism, which propose a “devolution” from the original one-ness with Brahman are now gaining popularity.

Vivekananda and Aurobindo lit the spark that has continued to fire the nationalist imagination, right to the present time. Even ostensibly secular and modernist intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru paid homage to the “scientific spirit” of Vedic Hinduism. Countless gurus and swamis took Vivekananda’s lead and began to teach that the Vedas are simply “another name for science” and that all of science only affirms what the Vedas have taught. Quite like the American Institute for Creation Research, the religious order started by Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Mission, has been producing booklets, and arranging lectures propagating Vivekananda’s “synthesis” of reason and faith. This scientistic version of Hinduism, also called neo-Hinduism or neo-Vedânta, has found its way to the West through the numerous ashrams and yoga retreats set up, most prominently, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his clones. Neo-Vedantist defense of Hinduism mostly invokes extremely speculative, largely unproven theories from modern cosmology, idealistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, completely discredited theories of vitalism and parapsychology, and other such fringe science to prove that the mythos of Hinduism is verified and affirmed by the methods of modern science.

In standard books on the history of the Bengal Renaissance or Indian independence movement, it is quite often made to appear that that is all there was, that Indian intellectuals found “no contradiction,” “no conflict” between Hinduism and science, and welcomed science with “open arms.” In the Hindutva literature, the neo-Hindu distortion of science to make it fit into the Vedântic world view is celebrated as “evidence” of the rational spirit of Hinduism. Unlike “those” bigoted Christians who oppose science, “we” enlightened Hindus embrace it as our own.

What is carefully hidden from such readings of history is that there were many who challenged this ideologically motivated and false “harmony” between science and Hinduism. Like the liberal, secular humanists trends in the US, in India too there were intellectuals who took the revolution in thought that science represented extremely seriously. The most sustained attempts at a liberal, secular use of the modern science of Newton and Darwin came from intellectuals and leaders of the non-Brahman and “untouchable” castes. The most important among these liberal modernists, Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891-1956), turned to the historical Buddha to defend a naturalist and skeptical worldview that denies the presence of Atman or consciousness in matter, and consequently, demolished the cosmology which supported karma, rebirth and caste distinctions. Not coincidently, Ambedkar was a student of John Dewey, the best known philosopher of a naturalistic, liberal Christianity. ( I offer a detailed account of Ambedkar’s secular thought in my previous book, Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays, 2002. A very thorough and critical review of this book by S. Anand is included in this book.)

Coming as they did from the oppressed and powerless sections of Indian society, these non-Brahman and dalit rebels against Brahminical Hinduism were no match for the neo-Hindu apologists that swelled the ranks of the Indian nationalist movement led by Gandhi and Nehru, which sheltered all varieties of Hindu chauvinism. They found sporadic and half-hearted support from humanists and socialist writers, artists and activists, but by and large, Indian intellectuals (including most Marxists) did not actively take up the battle for secularization. Most of them considered fighting the scourge of colonialism and capitalism their chief priority. The non-Marxist intellectuals, mostly of Gandhian persuasion, remained committed to an essentially anti-modernist, Hindu view of “harmony” and “community” which they preferred to the spread of industry and capital. In the main, it is these Gandhian anti-modernists who took to postmodernism like fish to water, and became the conduits of this reactionary academic fashion in India. Overall, the spell of dharma over the hearts and the minds of the Indian people was never challenged. Science was instead turned into an affirmation of the Vedas.

The contemporary Vedic science movement, led by militant Hindu chauvinists, carries on this task of modernist apologetics. Under the BJP’s dispensation, this neo-Vedantist project is enjoying a revival. With full blessings of the state, new foundations and “research institutes” have sprung up defending every miracle and every superstition as “science.” Even dangerous frauds like “cow urine therapies” and faith healing are being sponsored by government funded groups. Hindu customs, from the four-fold Varna hierarchy and patriarchy, are still being justified as being in accord with “laws of nature” which were known to the Vedic sages and were now confirmed by modern physics. This scientific gloss has always been most appealing to the English-educated, upwardly mobile middle-class Indians, including those living in the West, who wanted modern reasons to be proud of their heritage.

The project of yoking modern science to conserve and propagate Hindu metaphysics shares the spirit and the tactics of the creation science movement. Since this scientific defense of the Vedas is enmeshed not just with defense of the metaphysics of Hinduism, but also with a very militant, chauvinistic variety of nationalism, Vedic sciences are potentially more dangerous than their Christian counterpart. And given that the Indian Constitution does not prohibit religious education in public schools, Hindu nationalists have had not any problems propagating age-old superstitions in the guise of science, and conversely, science in the vocabulary of vitalism and other varieties of supernaturalism.

All this may sound rather alarming – and it is. But this is not the last of it. Indeed, this kind of modernist apologetics is quite old-fashioned and passé. Both Christian and Hindu apologists are adding a far more radical weapon in their arsenal, a weapon which launches a frontal attack on the universality and objectivity of science. For this radical attack on science, they have found unlikely allies among the academic postmodernist critics of science and modernity. To understand the radical threat of postmodernist apologetics, it is important to understand what the modernist apologists are up to.

Even though vastly different in the content of their “sciences,” creation science and Vedic science have one thing in common: Both movements take modern science seriously enough to try to claim the rigor, objectivity and universality of science for their own tradition- sanctioned metaphysics and methodology. The far-fetched claims of finding their own gods through the evidence of fossils (as in Christian and Vedic creationism) , or through the developments in quantum mechanics (wildly popular among the defenders of the God of the Vedanta), are nothing more than a pathetic attempt to borrow the authority and prestige of science for their own outdated metaphysics.

Moreover, for all the difference in their conception of God and nature, the Christian and Hindu apologists share a thoroughly modernist epistemology: that is, they see the enterprise of modern science as resting on firm and universally shared foundations of logic and empirical observation. They see scientific knowledge as advancing an objective knowledge of the actual entities in nature. That is why they are keen on showing that the facts about nature contained in the Bible or in the Vedas converge with the facts revealed by the application of scientific method. By this reasoning, they are “merely” translating the ancient texts into a modern vocabulary that can be easily understood by modern men and women who are more used to thinking in scientific terms.

Modernist apologetics, then, in both the Christian and Hindu guises, are back-handed compliments to the universal power of conviction of the enterprise of science. But in their great “love” for science, religious fundamentalists of all stripes are subverting the very ideals of a scientific method which abjures making untested connections between evidence and hypotheses purely by analogy. As we have seen above, creationists and Hindu fundamentalists defend their respective “sciences” by arbitrarily extracting the existing body of scientific evidence, which supports Darwinism, quantum mechanics and other such well-established sciences, and cite it as evidence for their own “theory” about the world. Moreover, in their great stampede to get certified as “modern,” the fundamentalists are subverting the very ideas that make the modern epoch distinct: namely, the freedom to refuse God.

Just because fundamentalists use modern sounding vocabulary, that does not make them scientific or modern in any meaningful way. It is not enough, therefore, to scoff at them as “another manifestation of the modern mindset,” and move on. (This is the strategy of those like Ashis Nandy and other professed Gandhian anti-secularists who are now scrambling to establish anti-Hindutva credentials. After years of haranguing the secularist currents in the India society, Nandy and other nativists now have this impossible task of distinguishing their own calls for “alternative modernity” from a full-blooded “Hindu modernity” favored by Hindutva). Hindutva is only camouflaging itself in modern colors, while actively subverting the spirit of modernity. Real opposition to the fundamentalists in our midst will come by actively drawing distinctions between what is science and what is pseudo-science, between what is modern and what is modern only in name. Intellectuals will have to show their colors, stand up and defend the spirit of scientific inquiry and modernity against the many pretenders.

Postmodernist Apologetics: Christian and Hindu examples

But theologians and other defenders of the faith are waking up to postmodernism. Postmodernism, as the name suggests, refers to an era beyond modernism, an overcoming of the modern mind-set which was dominated by a search for objective and universal knowledge claims of science. Conservative religious movements fear it – for its threat of relativism. But they also love it – for it promises to demolish the secular Enlightenment, the Enemy Number One of all religious conservatives everywhere.

Christian believers in the West are realizing that, as Stanley Grenz, an evangelical theologian puts it, “the rules of the game have changed.” Grenz and other conservative evangelists exult over two main changes that they see as giving Christian faith a new lease on life in the culture of the West. One, they claim that the secularized, disenchanted view of nature popularized by the Enlightenment has been discredited by developments in modern science itself, and in the postmodernist theory emerging from within secular academia itself. Two, they see that modern science, the Chief Accomplice of secularization, has been severely “chastened”: its realist view of truth having given way to a constructivist view, the ideal of the dispassionate individual knower has given way to a community of knowers. Social constructivist theories have demolished modern science’s claims to provide an objective and true “God’s-eye view” of the real world, opening the way to bringing back the real God’s eye view, revealed by God himself in the Bible. This, in short, is the source of cautious optimism that many conservative evangelical Christians derive from postmodernist fashions in the academy, even as they fear that carried too far, postmodernism can encourage nihilism and total relativism.

Similar sentiments that the “old” mechanistic science of Newton has been “overcome,” that the secular worldview is being rejected “even in the West,” that “Western science is the source of all the world’s problems” abound in the Hindutva discourse as well. Like the Christian conservatives, Hindu apologists also make use of this “end” of Newtonian science to build a case for a specifically Hindu science that can accommodate such unorthodox sciences as astrology, yoga, reincarnation and many such phenomena which are declared to be beyond the realm of possibility in the kind of natural world we live in, but phenomena which have to be true, if the Vedic view of God and nature is true.

The idea of science as a social construct made popular by science studies provides the philosophical argument for “chastening” the claims of science, cutting them down to size and making room for other ways of looking at the world that may not meet the standards of modern science but are scientific nevertheless — in their own social context, that is. This is just the opening postmodernist apologists need for asserting the reasonableness of “theisitic science” or “sacred science” which allows for supernatural forces to enter scientific explanations.

Postmodernist apologetics, to go back to our definition, are simply those by religious fundamentalists who accept the chastened, socially constructed view of modern science, seeing it as just one way, among many equally valid ones, to interpret the book of nature. (Modernist apologetics in contrast do not question the legitimacy of science, nor plead for special sciences of their own. They “only” claim the existing scientific evidence is compatible with their view of god and nature. ) Postmodernist apologetics in both Christian and Hindu fundamentalism take aim at the naturalist methodology and worldview of science. Their aim seems to be to make room for a “theistic science” or a “sacred science” that openly brings in their conception of the divine as a cause of natural phenomena.

How is the case for “theistic science” or “sacred science” argued? The following is a succinct summary of the argument for a specifically and self-consciously Christian scholarship that is emerging from the school of “reformed epistemology” that includes such prominent philosophers of religion as Alvin Plantinga, Nancey Murphy, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Under the new norms of chastened rationality, science stands on no more universally convincing foundations than any other knowledge system, including theology. There is nothing but a place-, time- and language-specific tradition that constructs what we take as “facts.” Empirical evidence itself can easily be fitted into a variety of theories. What makes one theory more probable and more plausible than another is the set of contextual assumptions provided by the rest of the culture, including, above all, the culture’s views of god and nature.

Once you accept this picture of science, the reformed epistemologists argue, there is no rational compulsion for the believers to change their understanding of the world in the light of scientific findings. It makes as much rational sense for believers to actively bring in their own contextual values – all that they know as believers – into their scholarship. Indeed, mainstream naturalistic science is at a huge disadvantage, for it “artificially,” “ideologically,” “by fiat,” closes off the possibility of divine action. Those scientists who are also Christians, on the other hand, are more “open minded” and therefore more scientific as they don’t restrict themselves to purely naturalistic hypotheses and explanations. Christian scholars let their Christian faith shape their scholarship: it is good for them, and good for science, too.

Anyone familiar with the writings of feminist epistemologists, especially Helen Longino’s much acclaimed “contextual empiricism,” and Sandra Harding’s “stronger objectivity” cannot but be struck by the close parallels. That is not surprising, for the reformed epistemologists derive their logic from the same postmodernist sources, chief among them a radically relativist reading of Quine, Kuhn and Wittgenstein. Indeed, they have one distinct advantage over their secular colleagues: by bringing in God in scientific explanation, theistic science is not afraid of relativism, for God provides the ultimate assurance of the truth of their science. They literally claim to offer a God’s eye view of the world!

This brings me back to the argument I made at the beginning of this essay: theistic science is no different in its logic from feminist science, or ethno-mathematics or any of the multitude of alternative sciences that have flourished in the academy. If the academic left can condone feminist science, it has no choice but to accept theistic science as well. Yet, there is a great reluctance among social constructivist theorists to admit that theistic science is a variety of local knowledge. There is much concern among social constructivists to be even-handed and “symmetrical” with local knowledge systems of particular groups and cultures, especially if these groups belong to non-Western cultures. But what is not realized adequately is that many of the unorthodox and minority ways of knowing are part and parcel of the dominant ideologies and religious teachings of that culture. While it may look as if the academic critics are supporting the marginalized minority’s right to know, their even-handedness ends up, indirectly, supporting the dominant ideology and religious worldview of that culture. Many of the women’s ways of knowing that feminist critics of science support, for example, include elements of nature worship, goddess worship and even magic. Likewise, the constructivist thesis that science does – and should – reflect cultural preferences and interests of scientists, opens the door to religious preferences and values of the scientists.

The problem with doing science as a Christian believer or a Vedantist is not just that it is based upon a wrong understanding of the distinctive self-correcting social dynamic of modern science. The problem is that this whole idea of theistic science is wrong in a politically dangerous way. Postmodernist arguments for faith-based science are being used both by the Christian creationists and Hindu apologists to attack the assumption of naturalism in modern science. The alternative to naturalism is supernaturalism, which means the re-introduction of revelation, miracles and rituals as legitimate sources of empirical knowledge.

The sharpest attack on naturalism comes from the intelligent design (ID) movement, the postmodern incarnation of the creation science movement. Well known ID philosophers, Philip Johnson and Wlliam Dembski have argued that the acceptance of Darwinian evolution rests not on adequate evidence, but on scientists’ ideological preference for naturalism. In other word, because most modern biologists tend to be atheists or at least agnostics, and because in the secular culture in the West, scientists occupy positions of power, they deny the existence of the supernatural by fiat. Naturalism wins for the reasons of dogma, not for reasons of evidence. Darwinism, in other words, is a social construct of powerful scientists, who are suppressing the alternative view points of a marginalized, powerless group of Bible-believers.

Robert Pennock, one of the most astute critics of ID creationists, describes the features they share with postmodernist thought in the following words, cited here from his 2000 book, Tower of Babel:

The intelligent design creationists are in lockstep with postmodernism’s skeptical contention that human truths, including scientific truths, are merely subjective narratives. Both hold that what passes for objective knowledge depends simply on which narrative is in political power, and both think that science has been in power long enough and seek to overthrow its epistemic privilege. Both hold that human knowledge is relativistic…. But while postmodernist accept relativism and seem happy to dispense with notions of objective truth, embracing instead the rich plurality of subjective human viewpoints. Creationists, however, believe that though human reason itself is impotent, there remains one way to get a “God’s-eye view” of the world, namely, from God himself. God’s divine revelation saves us from relativism, by providing us with absolute truth in Scripture.

How do these postmodern arguments play in the construction of Hindu sciences? Both the elements of a distinctively sacred science discussed above – the “epistemic rights” of believers, and the rejection of naturalism- play a dominant role in Hindutva discourse as well.

First, the more sophisticated, Western educated ideologues among Hindu nationalists (notably, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, N.S. Raja Ram, K. Elst, Rajiv Malhotra and his circle of intellectuals associated with the Infinity Foundation), have begun to argue, using arguments very similar to those of the conservative Christian reformed epistemologists and the left-wing postcolonialists, that modern science, as we know it, is only one possible universal science, and that other sciences, based upon non-Western, non-materialist assumptions are not just possible, but are equally capable of being universalized. It is only the imperial, colonial power of the West that has made Western science look like it is the only and universally true knowledge. Hindutva ideologues see their role as creating alternative sciences, grounded in the Vedic assumptions, which is able to convince all people, in all cultures, universally, of the correctness of its findings.

This alternative science, Hindu apologists argue, must start from the Vedântic assumption of non-dualism of matter and spirit. While the Christian theists want scientists to consider the will of the creator God as a reasonable explanation of natural phenomena, Vedic scientists want scientists to consider the presence of the spark of divine consciousness in the entire universe as a reasonable explanation of phenomena that “Western” science cannot explain.

From within a Vedanti paradigm, all the phenomena which modern science discards as “paranormal” are fully explicable as normal, and amenable to “scientific” demonstration, explanation and control. Indians need not reject the paranormal. Instead, they need to “decolonize their minds” so that they can understand nature through “Hindu categories.”

This is the philosophical basis on which the Indian government recently introduced the study of astrology as an academic discipline at post-secondary level in state-funded colleges and universities. This is the philosophy that underlies the defense of countless miracles (idols “drinking” milk, for example) and supernatural powers of countless “god men” from levitation to the memories of previous births. This is the philosophy that is used to declare the very first, and the most ancient Veda, the Rig Veda to be a “book of physics” and Vedic fire rituals to be shorthand for cosmology.

On the matter of asserting their “epistemic right” to their own science, Hindu nationalists have a distinct advantage over the Christian fundamentalists in the West. They can count upon the anti-colonial and anti-Western biases of Indian people, including Indian intellectuals. Once they can establish that different cultures allow different facts to be accepted as true, using the standard Kuhn-Feyerabend-social constructivism arguments, it becomes easy to ascribe those aspects of science which contradict the orthodox Hindu worldview as “Western” and therefore, colonial. Hindu nationalists mix up their defense of Vedic sciences with invocations of national pride and the need to “decolonize the imagination.” While Christian fundamentalists have only their own evil secular-humanists to rail against, Hindu fundamentalists can in fact use the anti-Western writings of their supposedly progressive intellectuals to make a case for bringing religion into science.

On the second count of anti-naturalism, Hindutva stands with its Christian counterparts to decry naturalism and materialism of scientific knowledge. (Of course, Hindutva also decries the transcendent Creator God of the Christian and Islamic theists. But for all their deep disagreements, fundamentalists of all stripes agree that treating nature as just matter and energy without a directing hand of God is heretical.) On Hindutva’s account of the history of science, the age of naturalism is long dead. Depending on purely speculative, idealistic interpretations of the developments in quantum physics, and invoking fringe new-age and paranormal sciences popular in the West (e.g., the neo-vitalistic theories of Rupert Sheldrake), Hindutva intellectuals claim that the idea of consciousness-free, inanimate matter is a Western fallacy, a fallout of the mindset of the Semitic races to divide the world in dualistic categories in which mind and matter, subject and object are separate. On Hindutva’s account, Vedântic conception of monism or non-dualism of nature and divine consciousness contains the post-modern, post-materialistic philosophy of nature.

Right from its beginnings with Vivekananda’s boastful and deeply distorted picture of Hinduism, Hindu nationalists have always presented Vedic Hinduism as the religion and science of the future. With the growth of postmodernism, Hindutva has finally found an intellectual environment where its own views of what constitutes nature and knowledge are finding acceptance among the mainstream intellectuals who have taken the postmodern turn. The fact that postmodernism can shelter and nurture the worldview of Hindu and other fundamentalists is what makes it so dangerous.

Meera Nanda’s book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, has just been published.

The hostility to science goes back for millennia. We don’t like brute facts, we don’t like having to check our wishes and hopes against the reality of how the world is. We’ll submit to the necessity for survival purposes, we’ll learn what we need to know of leopards and rabbits, fire and ice, but beyond that we want the right to believe our fantasies. ‘May God us keep/From single vision, and Newton’s sleep!’ said Blake, and Wordsworth agreed: ‘Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;/Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–We murder to dissect.’

But there is a new kind of animus that has become conventional wisdom in many universities over the past three decades. It goes by the name of perspectivism or situatedness or social constructionism . This view purports to show that science is neither universal nor peculiarly well equipped to arrive at the truth; that on the contrary it is local, Western, socially and culturally embedded, and therefore, merely one form of knowledge among many. Its claims of objectivity and dispassion are an illusion, rationality is window dressing for power, evidence a matter of negotiation and agreement, and truth an outdated metaphysical word that should be confined to the dustbin of history. Indeed, in this view science is not only no better at discovering the truth about the world than any other method, it is worse. Some epistemologies are more unequal than others. Science is crippled by its blind infatuation with reason, its foolish insistence on evidence before believing something, its tiresomely pedantic insistence on replicability, peer review, statistics, falsifiability, distinguishing correlation from causation, and all such nit-picky hair-splitting rules that impede a good imaginative hypothesis. If Freud had gone about things that way, imagine what would have become of his daring theories. Furthermore science is Eurocentric, and male, and white, and a product of the Enlightenment. And in spite of all those obvious faults, science has an enormous amount of undeserved status and prestige and power and influence. Scientists sometimes use this power and prestige to say that other people are wrong about certain things, and that is a very undemocratic situation that shouldn’t be allowed.

Perspectivists like to mention Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend to back up their claims, although both these philosophers of science explicitly repudiated the more radically relativist conclusions some people drew from their work. Michel Foucault is another name to conjure with, and critics of ‘the scientific medical system of knowledge’ make great play with his comparison of hospitals to prisons. The ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of science claims to give a sociological explanation, not of the practices of scientists but of the actual content of scientific theories. The thorough success of this modest ambition is an article of faith among social constructionists: it is now received wisdom that scientists don’t discover facts about the world, but rather negotiate with each other until everyone agrees on a story, not unlike a gang of bank robbers in imminent danger of arrest. This putative insight is loyally re-cycled as constructivists admiringly quote each other. The anti-science branch of feminism also leans heavily on the idea. Evelyn Fox Keller puts it this way: ‘Recent developments in the history and philosophy of science have led to a re-evaluation that acknowledges that the goals, methods, theories, and even the actual data of science are not written in nature; all are subject to the play of social forces.’ [1] And Sandra Harding this: ‘An outpouring of recent studies in every area of the social studies of the sciences forces the recognition that all scientific knowledge is always, in every respect, socially situated.’ [2] They agree with each other, at any rate. The upshot of all this agreement is, it is universally acknowledged that science does not deserve its ‘privileged’ epistemological status. David Bloor writes: ‘It is those who oppose relativism, and who grant certain forms of knowledge a privileged status, who pose the real threat to a scientific understanding of knowledge and cognition.’ [3]

Witness the censorious tone of Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather. From the first page Ross takes it for granted that the ‘accredited authority’ of science, its place in the ‘knowledge hierarchy’, its ‘legitimacy’, the ‘deference’ to its ‘power and prestige’ are arbitrary. ‘In this respect, it is perhaps worth drawing an analogy between the demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical taste cultures–high, middlebrow, and popular–that cultural critics and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had the vocational function of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and exclusion.'[4] Science, with its ‘institutional scientific orthodoxies’, ‘orthodox rationalist view of the natural world’, ‘licensed rationalist center’, and ‘dominant paradigm’, is the equivalent of a monarchy or plutocracy, an exploitative boss or rent-gouging landlord, a robber baron or war lord. Paul Forman, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, deals this way with epistemological issues: ‘postmodernity ceases to regard Truth as a prime value. No longer is truthfulness expected anywhere in our culture, and its breach is regarded as excusable in any circumstance covered by a moral intent and guided by a sense of responsibility.’ [5] Steven Best and Douglas Kellner close the is-ought gap in a few words: ‘Rejecting the positivist dichotomy between fact and value, theory and politics, critical theory interrogates the “is” in terms of the “ought,” seeking to grasp the emancipatory possibilities of the current society as something that can and should be realized in the future.'[6]

The result is a kind of happy free for all, in which science and New Age and folk wisdom all mix it up together, with no ‘way of knowing’ privileged over any other, all crafting their paradigms as they like. This idea licenses a magic, instant egalitarianism, one free of struggle or conflict, that is just spoken into being. Simply announce that all ‘ways of knowing’ are epistemologically equal, rather than doing any of the hard work of examining evidence, and it shall be so. This makes possible the refusal to make any invidious distinctions whatever. It is never legitimate to say that science is more accurate than myth, or that astrology is not science, or that evidence to support a given belief is lacking. Thus there is never any occasion for colonial arrogance or Eurocentrism or hegemonizing the discourse of the Other, for being judgmental or elitist or for ‘policing the borders’ as Andrew Ross puts it.

Thus, perspectivism is an essential tool for the deconstructive work much of the left has turned its hand to over the past few decades, in the absence of much success in real-life political action. So every ounce of political energy is devoted to the endless task of adjusting attitudes. Eurocentrism must stop, ethnocentrism’s gotta go, scientism is out, postivism has had it. The shift is, as Meera Nanda points out, citing Ernest Gellner, from political equality to hermeneutic equality: the careful elimination of every possible social, cultural or intellectual pretext there might be for saying any idea is better than any other. Nanda calls it epistemic charity, and says thanks but no thanks. She acknowledges the good intentions, and the value of challenging colonial ideas of the inherent superiority of the colonizers, but she then presses the argument to its obvious conclusion: science and rationality are not the exclusive property of the West. They are available to all and useful to all, and should not be considered a Western monopoly even for the sake of empathy and tolerance. ‘What from the perspective of Western liberal givers looks like a tolerant, nonjudgmental, therapeutic “permission to be different” appears to some of us “others” as a condescending act of charity.'[7] And this charity comes at a high price. What the donors give with one hand they take away with the other. Self-esteem comes at the cost of remaining subservient to tradition and authority. It is just as possible to feel loyalty to shared ideas, to larger communities, to global ‘perspectives’, to new and rationally chosen traditions and ways of knowing, as it is to those one was born into. Nanda again: ‘The constructivists, then, confer on the “Others” the ability to think, but then take away the ability to choose, on occasion, the knowledge of aliens over the knowledge of ancestors.’ [8]

Nanda is eloquent and impassioned on the way postmodernist and constructivist ideas have been adopted and used by the fundamentalist Hindu Right in India for purposes that are anything but progressive. ‘I submit that the moment the Indian left began to talk the language of cultural constructionism, it lost the battle to the Hindu nationalists.'[9] The anthropologist Frederique Apffel Marglin, for example, in her essay ‘Smallpox in Two Cultures,’ writes about the campaign by colonial administrators in the 19th century and the Indian government in the 1970s to vaccinate the Indian people against smallpox. She does not stop at making a limited, reasonable point that colonial officials and the Indian government were tactless and counter-productive in telling those who resisted vaccination that they were superstitious and irrational. Her aim is larger: to show that science’s claims to get things right is an imposition. She says as much in the opening sentence of the essay. ‘The present essay is an attempt to challenge science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge which renders obsolete more traditional systems of thought.’ [10] Marglin makes this attempt by means of a sympathetic depiction of the Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, which she contrasts with the binary opposition Western medicine makes (very usefully, one might think) between disease and health, death and life. ‘In absolutely negativizing disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.'[11] There is something a little breathtaking in a level of science-phobia that can see ‘negativizing’ disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s retort to a character’s reproach, in ‘The Front’, that he really wanted success: ‘So what should I want, a disease?’ Does Marglin seriously think that disease, suffering and death (the death of other people, remember, as well as one’s own) would be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren’t for the ‘scientific medical system of knowledge’? Has the postmodern left become so tone deaf that it can hear no echo of the complacent droning of landowners and priests (and colonialists, surely) about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate?

Historically, the recognition of a sharp difference between justified assertion and mere assertion tout court has been a force for liberation and progress, and against arbitrary power and illegitimate institutions. As Gross and Levitt point out in Higher Superstition, the left has traditionally seen science as an ally, not an enemy. ‘The dissecting blade of scientific skepticism, with its insistence that theories are worthy of respect only to the extent that their assertions pass the twin tests of internal logical consistency and empirical verification, has been an invaluable weapon against intellectual authoritarianisms of all sorts, not least those that sustain social systems based on exploitation, domination, and absolutism.’ [12] But perhaps that idea has been around too long, has become too familiar and dull and unhip. It’s so much more knowing and edgy and transgressive to laugh at essentialism and meta-narratives and let it go at that.

We want the freedom to believe what we like, ignore facts, sugar-coat reality, but then we have to recognize that there is a price to pay. If we abdicate reason and clear thinking and reality checks, the result is not only that pesky scientists can’t gainsay our beliefs–neither can we gainsay those of fundamentalists, theocrats, obscurantists, Nazis, Holocaust deniers. We have to choose, we can’t have it both ways, we can’t embrace irrational ideas we just happen to like and reject the ones we don’t. If you insist on setting sail for the realm of hunch and intuition and thinking with your gut, you’re likely to meet some fellow voyagers who are not all peace and love and light.

References

1. E. F. Keller, ‘Long Live the Difference Between Men and Women Scientists’, The Scientist, 4 (October 15, 1990)

2. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking >From Women’s Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 11.

3. B. Barnes and D. Bloor, ‘Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge’, in Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) pp. 21-47.

4. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 25.

5. P. Forman, ‘In postmodernity the two cultures are one — and many’ http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/FormanThinkPiece.html.

6. S. Best and D. Kellner http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/best8.htm.

7. M. Nanda, ‘Epistemic Charity of Social Constructivist Critics’, in A House Built on Sand, ed. Noretta Koertge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 288.

8. Ibid., p. 295.

9. M. Nanda, ‘The Science Wars in India’, Dissent, vol. 44, no. 1, (Winter 1996).

10. F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

11. Ibid.

12. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1994) p. 24.

This article is to be published in the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal, Think. It has a web site here.

When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun
newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the
hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness.
It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people
could believe about Blair. He wasn’t a child, his leadership was anything but
childlike, and he lacked the requisite number of legs to be a baby deer. Not
discouraged, the Sun was at it again in 2001, this time when Iain Duncan
Smith became leader of the Conservative Party. In what was probably a desperate
attempt to establish his man of the people credentials, it started to call him
‘Smithy’. A quite absurd conceit, given his double-barrelled name and former
career as an army officer. Needless to say, this nickname didn’t catch on either,
and now, almost universally in the UK media, Duncan Smith is known as IDS.

None of this is surprising. If your aim is to coin, ex nihilo, a name
or epithet which quickly gains widespread public acceptance, the chances of
success are not great. Even the media, with its ability to talk daily to massive
audiences, fails as often as it succeeds. Thus, for every ‘Slick Willy’, you’ll
find that there is a ‘Bambi’, for every ‘loony left’ a ‘Doris Karloff’.

This is a comforting thought for a secularist at the present time. For a rather
unfortunate meme has lately infected the minds of some leading exponents of
a naturalistic worldview. It is a meme which says that it would be a good idea
if people without belief in things supernatural started to call themselves ‘brights’.

The meme started with two people from Sacramento, California. Though atheists,
Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell did not want to be referred to as being ‘godless’,
so they came up with the word ‘bright’ to better describe their naturalistic
worldview. Their hope is that other nonbelievers will also use the word, and
that it will become an umbrella term for the whole range of naturalistic philosophies
(i.e., atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc.). They have setup a website, The Brights
Net (www.the-brights.net), to this end, and have attracted a number of high
profile advocates, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both of whom
have written articles supporting the idea.

It is easy enough to understand the efficacy of this meme. The naturalistic
philosophies of the non-religious do not play the same kind of high profile
role in political and civic life as do the supernaturalist ideas of their religious
counterparts. This is the case particularly in the United States, but also in
the United Kingdom, where, for example, assorted bishops get to sit on various
ethics committees simply because they are bishops. Given this situation,
any intervention which promises to raise the profile of naturalistic thinking
is bound to be attractive at first sight. The trouble is that it doesn’t take
too many more sights of the brights idea to realise that it is badly flawed.

First, ‘bright’ is just the wrong word. How it was chosen in the first place
isn’t quite clear. It seems to have had something to do with the fact that it
is a ‘positive’ and ‘memorable’ word; and also that it is sufficiently puzzling
or enigmatic when used as a noun – ‘I am a bright’ –that it invites the
response, ‘What’s a bright?’, thereby allowing a person to talk about their
naturalistic worldview. But there are major problems with the word.

The first is that its enigmatic quality is indicative of a fundamental arbitrariness
in its relationship to the phenomenon that it names. It’s the let’s call Tony
Blair ‘Bambi’ problem. Dawkins imagines that a bright might have a conversation
which goes like this:

‘"What on earth is a bright"? And then you’re away. "A bright
is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements…."

"You mean a bright is an atheist?"

"Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights
call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some freethinkers.
But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism."’

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The future looks bright’, The Guardian, June
21^st 2003)

All very nice, except that the conversation is far more likely to go something
like this:

‘What on earth is a bright?’

‘A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical
elements.’

‘Right. So why the word "bright" then?’

‘Err. Well it’s a positive word. And memorable.’

‘So is the word "truffle", but you wouldn’t call yourself a truffle.
So why "bright"?’

‘Well, it’s what this couple from Sacramento came up with… and it is
a very cheerful word!’

The arbitrariness of the choice of the word ‘bright’, though undermining its
potential as a meme, would not matter so much were it not for the fact that
one of the established uses of the word is as an adjective meaning ‘clever’
or ‘intelligent’. The problem here is that in the absence of an obvious reason
to explain how it is that the word ‘bright’ designates a person who espouses
a naturalist worldview, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that what is being
suggested is that it is more intelligent to embrace naturalism than it is to
embrace supernaturalism.

It must be said that the supporters of the brights idea are quite clear that
the word should not be taken to be an adjective in this way. However,
this does not make the problem go away. It should be obvious why it does not.
For starters, there is the trivial point that you cannot strip a word of its
associations simply by denying that you intend them. [1] Nor can you do so by
using the word in a slightly strange way (i.e., as a noun). If someone announces
that they’re a bright, then likely it will occur to their audience that what
they actually mean is that they are bright. The fact that they will also
be unable to explain why the word ‘bright’ is appropriate as a label for someone
with a naturalistic worldview will do nothing to allay this suspicion.

There is also a slightly more complex point to be made here. To be an atheist
in the United States – and also in some ways in the United Kingdom – is to set
oneself against the dominant culture. There is, therefore, a tendency to associate
atheism with a certain kind of intellectual independence. This is reflected
in the names of the groups with which many atheists associate themselves (e.g.,
freethinkers; skeptics; etc). And it also underpins the anti-intellectual sentiment
of much of the religious sermonising characteristic of Christian fundamentalism.
The problem with the word ‘bright’ is that it is too easily seen as confirming
this link between atheism and intellectuality. Or to put this more precisely,
if people with no belief in god begin to self-identify as brights, they run
the risk of apparently confirming what many religious people already suspect
about them, that they consider themselves to be better or more intelligent than
people who believe in a god.

Does this matter? Yes it does, if one is interested in convincing people of
the merits of a naturalistic worldview. To start with, there is the obvious
point that people are more likely to be receptive to new ideas if they feel
that they are being treated with respect. But perhaps more worryingly, a movement
which self-identifies as a movement of brights makes itself a hostage to rhetorical
fortune. It is extremely easy – and, it must be said, very tempting – to parody
the whole idea of a brights movement. And, of course, this is exactly what the
enemies of a naturalistic worldview will do should the idea take off. The brights
movement will find itself transmogrified into a ‘We’re smarter than you’ movement.
And, at that point, protesting that the word was chosen simply because it is
‘warm’ and ‘cheerful’ will just result in more parody and more laughter.

‘Bright’, then, is the wrong choice of word to designate a person with a naturalistic
worldview and as an umbrella term for a movement. But substituting a different
word won’t make the brights idea a good one because it is muddle-headed for
other reasons. Perhaps the most interesting of these has to do with what appears
to be an unspoken assumption about people with a naturalistic worldview.

The assumption seems to be that the rejection of supernaturalism is enough
to qualify someone as a person without religion. This claim is only unproblematic
if one defines religion as involving supernatural beliefs. However, there is
at least an argument that the sphere of the religious can be extended to include
aspects of the secular world. It is an argument inspired by the French sociologist
Emile Durkheim. He claimed that the realm of the sacred is distinguished by
the separateness of its objects from those of the world of the profane, and
by the system of interdictions which prevents them from being denied. [2] If
one accepts this conception, then there are secular phenomena which qualify
as sacred. So Durkheim talks of ‘common beliefs of every sort connected to objects
that are secular in appearance, such as the flag, one’s country, some forms
of political organisation, certain heroes or historical events’, which are ‘indistinguishable
from beliefs that are properly religious’; and he notes that ‘Public opinion
does not willingly allow one to contest the moral superiority of democracy,
the reality of progress, [or] the idea of equality, just as the Christian does
not allow his fundamental dogmas to be questioned.’

It is easy to understand what Durkheim is getting at. It is only necessary
to attend a meeting organised by a group like the Revolutionary Communist
Party of Britain to become very quickly aware that people can hold secular
beliefs to be every bit as inviolable as religious beliefs often are for the
religious. Of course, this point is already well understood. For example, in
a review of Steven Rose et al’s Not in Our Genes, Richard Dawkins, commenting
on their arguments against ‘genetic determinism’, has this to say: ‘The myth
of the “inevitability” of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology,
and has everything to do with Rose et al’s paranoiac and demonological theology
of science. [my italics]’ (Richard Dawkins, New Scientist 24 January
1985).

What this means for the brights idea is that the criterion of a naturalistic
worldview is no guarantee that people will be free of the kind of thinking which
is quite reasonably described as ‘religious’. Or to put this another way, it
is no guarantee that people will not be committed to beliefs, or sets of beliefs,
which are beyond rational scrutiny in the same way as are many of the beliefs
which are associated with theism. Possibly the supporters of the brights movement
will not deny this, but rather claim that it does not matter too much, that
their expectation has never been that they will create a movement of absolutely
rigorous thinkers, each one holding up their beliefs to the light of reason.
Fair enough. Except for two further points.

First, there is just a suggestion in some of the writings of the supporters
of the brights idea that they see themselves as the true inheritors of the Enlightenment
tradition. Well, it just isn’t this clear-cut. First off, the belief in a deity,
in and of itself, does not rule out an attitude towards this world which
is entirely consistent with the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and the progress
of human knowledge. But perhaps more significantly, many people who qualify
as brights would have a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the products of
the Enlightenment. Just consider, for example, that many Marxists would agree
with Rose et al that ‘science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.’
(Not in Our Genes). And that from amongst the whole caboodle of postmodern
thinkers, at least some will be prepared to commit to agnosticism, and will
no doubt claim something like ‘that progress in social thought is not possible
without a thorough critique of the Enlightenment, whether for its justification
of the domination of nature, or its authoritative support for belief systems
like scientific racism or sexism, or for the monocultural legacy of its assumptions
about rationality.’ (Andrew Ross, The Sokal Hoax).

Which thoughts lead on to the second point about the kind of movement the brights
idea is likely to foster. It is certainly going to contain some odd bedfellows.
Scientific atheists and Marxist atheists will be united in thinking that there
is definitely no god, but they’ll fight like cats and dogs over the fate
of the bourgeoisie. The agnostics will irritate both groups by sitting on the
fence, whilst freethinkers drive themselves crazy trying to find a viewpoint
unique to themselves. The skeptics will watch the whole thing from afar with
slightly cynical smiles, and the postmodernists will talk past themselves, as
per usual. As for the rest of the world? They won’t see past the name. And laughter
and parody will be the result. Therefore, one can only hope that the ‘bright’
meme fails on its evolutionary journey.

Footnotes

[1] The observant reader will notice that there is an echo here of the criticism
that some people have made of the language of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.
For the record, I think the criticism is misplaced in the case of The Selfish
Gene.

[2] There’s obviously a lot more to Durkheim’s argument than this mere bald
assertion. See his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; and also,
for a summary of the argument I’m making here, J. C. Alexander’s The Antinomies
of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Routledge, 1982), pp. 242 -250.

The rise of the precautionary principle in public policy and international
relations has called into question the role technological innovation should
be allowed to play in society. [1] According to the precautionary principle, no
novel technology, regardless of its benefits, should be deployed if it poses
risks to human health or the environment. [2] Under some interpretations
of the principle, these risks need not even be testable hypotheses, but may
merely be posited. [3] In the latter case, the principle merely
says that technological innovation is too dangerous to be allowed.

Critics of technological advance have also invented a doctrine which is antithetical
to the precautionary principle, and dubbed it the ‘technological imperative.’
In its first formulation, this doctrine only existed as a ‘straw man’ argument,
something put forth so that it may be attacked at convenience by its creators.
The doctrine has no canonical statement, its existence is at best claimed to
be "implicit," it has no discernible champions, yet its critics abound.
[4]

In spite of its dubious origins and lack of formulation, the technological
imperative actually exists in Western philosophy and jurisprudence. In ethics
technological invention is a virtue and in law it is protected and encouraged;
and in both, a duty exists to allow the dissemination and use of novel technology.

The technological imperative in philosophy and ethics.

Perhaps the earliest, but certainly the most durable, contextual explanation
of technology was offered by Aristotle. His explanation relies on making distinctions
between three types of knowledge: episteme, techne [5]
and phronesis. Episteme is pure knowledge, such as of mathematics, geometry
or logic. Techne, from which our word ‘technology’ is derived, is concrete knowledge
of how to rearrange lumps of matter in a purposeful way. Phronesis has no counterpart
in English, but is often rendered as ‘prudence.’ As Aristotle explains it,

We may grasp the nature of prudence [phronesis] if we consider what sort
of people we call prudent. Well, it is thought to be the mark of a prudent
man to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and advantageous…
[P]rudence cannot be science or art; not science [episteme] because what
can be done is a variable (it may be done in different ways, or not done
at all), and not an art [techne] because action and production are generically
different. … What remains, then is that it is a true state, reasoned,
and capable of action with regard to things that are good or bad for man.
We consider that this quality belongs to those who understand the management
of households or states. [6]

This explanation of three forms of knowledge establishes a framework for understanding
the nature of technology. On Aristotle’s account, techne is value-neutral and
capable of serving any number of ends, good and bad alike. This accords well
with intuitions about the nature of technology, but this value-neutral status
cannot establish the existence of a technological imperative. However, Aristotle
links technology to phronesis, to knowing "things that are good or bad
for man." If there is a technological imperative, it must go two steps
beyond this framework and address the question of whether a change in
knowledge (be it episteme or techne) when put to use serves a good purpose.
Aristotle stops short of addressing that, saying instead that with phronesis,
episteme and techne are "capable of action."

Elsewhere in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle reasons that actions have goals,
that those are human goals, and that human goals in general are directed at
eudaimonia— a term often translated as ‘happiness,’ but defined by Aristotle
as the general direction of human activities intended to make human life complete
and satisfying. [7]

Aristotle did not leave us with much more than this on what is good to do,
because his emphasis in ethics was on what was good to know and to be.
Like many he was a virtue theorist and to him, good meant being virtuous.

Later philosophers re-examined human virtues and claimed they were human duties
instead.

Duties to oneself include preserving one’s life, pursuing happiness, and
developing one’s talents. Duties to others fall into three groups. First,
there are family duties which involve honoring our parents, and caring for
spouses and children. Second, there are social duties which involve not
harming others, keeping promises, and benevolence. Third, there are political
duties that involve obedience to the laws, and public spirit. [8]

Other philosophers preferred to judge between good and bad activities by determining
their outcomes, which is known as consequentialism.

Consequentialist normative principles require that we first tally both
the good and bad consequences of an action. Second, we then determine whether
the total good consequences outweigh the total bad consequences. If the
good consequences are greater, then the action is morally proper. If the
bad consequences are greater, then the action is morally improper. Consequentialist
theories are also called teleological theories, from the Greek word telos,
or end, since the end result of the action is the sole determining factor
of its morality. [9], [10]

This begs the question of how good is actually distinguished from bad, but
the most famous consequentalist would have good and bad be defined socially
or democratically, as "the greatest good for the greatest number."
[11]

The pragmatist John Dewey blended notions of virtue and consequentialism in
his account of the nature and value of innovation.

The logic of the moral idea is like the logic of an invention, say a telephone.
Certain positive elements or qualities are present; but there are also certain
ends which, not being adequately served by the qualities existent, are felt
as needs. Facts as given and needs as demands are viewed in relation to
each other because of their common relationship to some process of experience.
Tentative reactions are tried. The old ‘fact’ or quality is viewed in a
new light— the light of a need— hence is treated in a new way and thereby
transformed. [12]

It is unnecessary to delve much deeper into notions of technology and how philosophers
define ‘good’ to see that there is an underlying consensus that technology should
be deployed for good purposes. If one discovers something new and sees that
it can be used for a good purpose, then it follows that the new should be used
for a good purpose. This is easily justified on all the theories mentioned above,
whether in terms of improving the quality of life, having good consequences
for many people, fulfilling a duty or serving a need. So philosophically and
ethically speaking, there is a technological imperative.

The technological imperative in jurisprudence.

If the technological imperative has its basis in ethics, it should not be surprising
to find this reflected in law, especially in product liability law, which addresses
innovations which offer novel benefits, or in injury, which occasions a legal
dispute.

Product liability law places a punitive burden on producers of defective products
which cause injury. In contrast, the law refuses to impose a duty to retrofit
non-defective products when an innovation would, i.e., improve their safety,
and the reason is found in the technological imperative. "Imposing a post-sale
duty to recall or retrofit a product ‘would discourage manufacturers from developing
new designs if this could form the basis for suits or result in costly repair
and recall campaigns.’" [13] However, nothing prevents
a manufacturer from voluntarily retrofitting its products already in use— which
is another way to introduce an innovation— and this has also been held to absolve
a manufacturer of liability. [14]

So in product liability law, the value of innovation eclipses other interests.
Even though a duty to retrofit would benefit some consumers, the cost of such
a rule would intolerably burden the general social benefits of technological
progress.

The internet is an innovation which may well prove to have the broadest impact
on society since the invention of the printing press. Here, too, the technological
imperative has come into play. Even though legislators know the internet might
be misused, the law is willing to countenance the prospect of misuse to protect
innovation.

This explosive democratization of the capability to publish [on the internet]
has raised fundamental questions about who bears responsibility for content
that is harmful. In February 1996, Congress enacted 47 U.S.C. § 230 to eliminate
some of the uncertainties surrounding that question. Section 230 establishes
that providers of interactive computer services are generally immune from
liability for harms resulting from the dissemination of defamatory or otherwise
harmful information that other persons or entities create and make available
through such services. [15]

Indeed, the law in general may be said to be structured to encourage technological
progress by making it a protected activity. The system of patents established
by the United States Constitution, which gives inventors temporary monopolies
on the use of their inventions, is probably the most obvious example of this.
Thus, we may also conclude that the technological imperative is an important
part of Western jurisprudence.

The status of the technological imperative.

Having established the existence of the technological imperative, it is necessary
to determine its status. In both philosophy and law, some things rise to the
level of a duty, while other things are considered virtues, and praised or rewarded
when they are exhibited. For instance, it is deemed virtuous to be a hero, but
there is no duty to be a hero. Indeed, one cannot become a hero by fulfilling
a duty and this is intuitively recognized by firefighters, who often deny fighting
a fire is heroic. In fighting a fire, they are doing their job.

Acts above and beyond the call of duty, which are by definition voluntary,
produce heroes. These are known as supererogatory acts.

Although agents are not obliged by the dictates of ordinary morality to
perform supererogatory acts— extraordinary feats of heroism or extreme deeds
of self-sacrifice, for example— they may be commended for doing so. Normative
theories that demand the performance of the best possible action in every
circumstance render supererogation impossible by identifying the permissible
with the obligatory. [16],[17]

Both in law and in ethics, there is a duty to avoid causing harm to others.
In ethics, a breach of this duty deserves punishment and in law, the punishment
is delivered. In ethics, complying with this duty is not praiseworthy, and in
law is irrelevant except as a defense. Doing good to others goes beyond this,
and is supererogatory. ^[18] In ethics, this is
virtuous and in law, is protected and encouraged by various rights.

When it comes to employing technology, the analysis is similar, but not the
same. Employing the current state of any art is nothing more than using available
means to achieve expected ends, which is just as ordinary as not harming others
and just as morally neutral. However, failing to employ the state of the art
breaches no duty per se, and can at most be condemned as irrational or
foolish. [19] This indicates, but does not yet demonstrate,
that improving on the current state of the art is virtuous.

As stated above, technology, by itself, is value-neutral. However, that applies
only to the current state of the art. A technological improvement over the status
quo is distinct because it by definition makes a new contribution to the availability
of moral goods. [20] Otherwise, it would be no improvement
and would not be adopted. Once adopted, it becomes the state of the art and
reverts to value neutrality.

This is consistent with the notion of technology as instrumentality, where
technology serves as a means to an end, rather than being an end in itself.
The conclusion is inescapable, however, that the value of a technology is measured
with reference to the moral goods it may be used to produce or deliver. Similarly,
every technological improvement is justly measured according to the moral goods
it can be used to produce or deliver over and above the previous state of the
art. In this way, the value of an invention derives from the ends it more ably
serves. But it cannot accomplish that on its own.

The improvements in technology called for by the technological imperative are
supererogatory and laudable because of their novelty and usefulness [21]
for improving the quality of human life, for conferring increased net benefits
on society, or more readily fulfilling a moral duty. In this way, techne
is again revealed as morally neutral while phronesis, the ability to
"deliberate rightly about what is good and advantageous," becomes
central to the virtue established by the technological imperative.

Since phronesis is at work in discerning and choosing the mean at which
ethical virtue aims, ethical virtue cannot achieve its own end without phronesis.
On the other hand, discernment of the good and perfection of deliberation
is dependent on having a good character; hence, without ethical virtue,
one might have cleverness in figuring out the means to any end, but one
would not have phronesis, the virtue of choosing the appropriate means to
the right end. Excellence of character, then, and practical wisdom together
form a whole which alone counts as genuine virtue. [22]

On this analysis, phronesis justifies techne, and even more strongly justifies
technological invention.

The technological imperative establishes duties.

Just as the moral considerations behind the technological imperative require
[23] praise for those who exemplify the virtue of invention
by making new technology available for use, patent law requires that inventors
be compensated for a time for the use of their inventions, on condition that
the substance of the inventions be disclosed and made freely available thereafter.
In law, the condition is a duty. In ethics, it is a duty as well, and this is
where the technological imperative becomes worthy of being called an ‘imperative.’

The value of an invention derives strictly from its ability to be used to improve
the availability of moral goods but in ethics, as in law, there is no duty act
for the benefit of someone else absent a special relationship such as that between
parent and child. Thus it would violate law and ethics to require that an inventor
make an invention available to others, because that would amount to imposing
a duty to act in the interest of others; [24] and the act
of inventing creates no special relationship which could impose such a duty.
Indeed, an inventor may legally and ethically make use of an invention in secret.

The duty arises instead when the inventor offers the invention to be used.
It is not a duty to use the invention; for as we have seen before, failure to
employ the current state of the art may be unintelligent, but is neither reprehensible
nor illegal. [25] Nor is it a duty adhering to the inventor,
who will already have disclosed the substance of the invention. The duty is,
instead, reciprocal among all who might benefit directly or indirectly from
its use, and that is to allow its use. There are utilitarian aspects which justify
this conclusion.

The sciences, like the arts, may expand in two directions—in superficies
and in height. The superficial expansion of those sciences which are most
immediately useful, is most to be desired. There is no method more calculated
to accelerate their advancement, than their general diffusion: the greater
the number of those by whom they are cultivated, the greater the probability
that they will be enriched by new discoveries. [26]

This helps explain why in ethics, preventing or interfering with the dissemination
of innovative technology is a breach of duty, and that duty is the technological
imperative.

Footnotes

1 The author of this article is Andrew Apel, B.A. (Phil), M.A. (Phil.), J.D., editor
of AgBiotech Reporter, http://www.bioreporter.com

2 An early formulation of the precautionary principle is found
in the "Wingspread Statement." See http://www.sehn.org/wing.html
Versions of the principle appear in over 20 international treaties, laws, protocols
and declarations. See, e.g., Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, "Current
status of genetic modification in New Zealand," http://www.gmcommission.govt.nz/RCGM/pdfs/appendix1/2-2.pdf

3 Such posited risks are often called "unknown risks."
See, e.g., National Center for Policy Analysis, "Amid Famine, Africans
Reject GM Corn," http://www.ncpa.org/iss/env/2002/pd082302b.html
Danish Environmental Protection Agency, "The precautionary principle,"
http://www.mst.dk/udgiv/Publications/1999/87-7909-203-9/html/bil01_eng.htm
Friends of the Earth, "Tomorrow’s World," http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/sustainable_development/publications/tworld/land.html

4 See, e.g., Daniel Chandler, "Technological or Media
Determinism," http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tdet07.html

5 Aristotle limits episteme to self-evident, axiomatic principles
and to what can be logically derived from them. See Muryat Aydede, "Aristotle
On Episteme And Nous: The Posterior Analytics," http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/maydede/Aristotle.html

6 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a24-1140b12. See Theodore
Goertzel, "Three Approaches to Knowledge," http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/threeapproaches.htm

7 Eugenio Benitez, "Eudaimonia," http://www.usyd.edu.au/philosophy/benitez/eudaimonia.html

8 The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/ethics.htm#Normative
Ethics

9 Ibid.

10 Critics of consequentialist theory say that since all future
outcomes of an act cannot be known in advance, its relative goodness or badness
cannot be determined in the present. Critics of the precautionary principle
say that the principle exploits this weakness in consequentialist theory by
making it a pretext to ban all novelty.

11 J.S. Mill. For an outline of the many approaches to defining
good, see "What Matters in Life?" http://home.att.net/~talk2perry/what_matters.htm
Though the claims made there are not entirely accurate, the outline serves well
to show the variety of theories available, and the general compatibility of
those theories with the conclusions of this paper.

12 John Dewey, "The Evolutionary Method As Applied To
Morality: II Its Significance for Conduct,"http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/dewey/Dewey_1902b.html

13 Stephanie Scharf and Thomas Monroe, "Post-Sale Duty
to Warn," http://www.jenner.com/files/tbl_s20Publications%5CRelatedDocumentsPDFs2254%5C324%5CMichigan.pdf
citing Estate of Raap v. Clark Equip. Co., No. G88-614-CA7, 1989 WL 382091 (W.D.
Mich. June 20, 1989) Note that this only applies to non-defective products.
Another way to view the doctrine is that the improvement of a product does not
render more primitive products automatically defective.

14 Ibid.

15 Patrick Carome, Samir Jain and Elizabeth deGrazia Blumenfeld,
"Federal Immunity For Online Services: How It Works and Why It Is Good
Policy," http://www.ldrc.com/Cyberspace/cyber1.html

16 Free Online Dictionary of Philosophy (FOLDOP), http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?supererogatory

17 On sociological evidence, there is justification for accepting
both standard and normative theories as descriptive and explanatory. Those who
rescue children from burning buildings, firefighters and civilian passersby
alike, often reject being described as heroes; members of both groups often
report feeling that their duty was either pre-existing or had been thrust upon
them and in either case merely did what they should have done under the circumstances.

18 There is of course a vast spectrum of supererogatory acts,
ranging from what some call "random acts of kindness" to developing
superior crops which save millions from starvation.

19 But see footnotes 24, 25.

20 In this monograph ‘moral goods’ are defined as things a
human may desire and attain without violating moral principles. These would
include the necessities of life, as well as its enjoyments.

21 In law, these are the two fundamental requirements for
the issuance of a patent.

22 Robert Berman, "Nicomachean Ethics: Commentary on
Book III," http://webusers.xula.edu/rberman/CommentBk3.htm

23 The requirement may be rationally necessary, per Aristotle
or Kant; or practically necessary, per the consequentialists; or dutifully necessary,
per those who rest their arguments on duty (which would again include Kant).

24 There are significant exceptions to this which nonetheless
underscore the technological imperative. When public interest in the value of
a patented invention is sufficiently great, the US government may force the
inventor to license the patent. See James Love and Michael Palmedo, "Examples
of Compulsory Licensing of Intellectual Property in the United States,"
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/cl/us-misc.html
A similar power is found in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). See "Health
Care and Intellectual Property: Compulsory Licensing,"
http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/cl/cl-ilaw.html

25 There are significant exceptions to this, such as in food
safety regulations, which are constantly upgraded to require the use of novel
technologies – but this, too, underscores the technological imperative.

26 Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward: Reward Applied
to Art and Science, http://www.la.utexas.edu/labyrinth/rr/rr.b03.c03.html

Are all religions identical? Many people seem to think so, especially if they’ve taken a world religion course in college or read a Joseph Campbell book. They will tell you that all religions teach us to value life, to refrain from harming others, and to renounce selfishness. Therefore, so the thinking goes, all religions are identical in both content and purpose. The corollary assumption is that there can never be legitimate conflicts between religious beliefs, therefore all disagreements between followers of different religions must be fundamentally illegitimate. These conflicts allegedly stem from simple misunderstandings or unwillingness to admit common ground.

Such a view is certainly comforting, since it suggests that religious factions need only to listen to each other to find out they’re not so different after at all. Then, as trendy therapists might say, the healing can begin. The only problem with this tidy, conciliatory view is that it is utterly incorrect. A little knowledge of world religious traditions might convince us that they are identical, but a lot of knowledge tends to convince us that they are very different.

Many people who believe all religions are identical pay special attention to the similarities between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or between ancient myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical flood story included in Genesis. All of these describe the actions of a powerful deity who created the world by conquering the forces of chaos. But why is this similarity so surprising? All of these religions arose in the same tiny sliver of the world known as the Fertile Crescent, and their development often overlapped. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi almost certainly inspired the Jewish Ten Commandments, which later found their way into both Christianity and Islam as those religions absorbed and reinterpreted Judaic religious concepts. Thus, it’s hardly newsworthy that Near Eastern religions tend to resemble each other to some degree.

Still, resemblance does not imply equality, and the common religious concepts of the three major monotheistic faiths have not prevented them from making violently contradictory claims. To a Christian, Jesus represents the incarnation of God on earth, and his sayings carry a corresponding moral authority. Muslims hold Jesus to be a great prophet, but believe Muhammad to have provided a more accurate record of God’s intentions. Jews, of course, believe Christians have given the Judaic concept of the messiah a meaning it never should have possessed, and reject any suggestions that Jesus was anything more than a man. These differences, among others, have led to very real disputes between adherents of these three religions. Someone seeking to reconcile these differences might explain them as simple misunderstandings, but he would also be explaining away the very convictions that make each of these religions so meaningful to its followers.

In addition to the conflicts among these three faiths, there have also been conflicts within them. There have been standoffs between Catholics and Protestant Christians, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and Orthodox and modern Jews. These frequently bloody confrontations did not arise from simple misunderstandings, but from contradictory convictions about the nature of the divine. After all, Jesus was either a being of pure spirit lacking a human body (as some Gnostic Christians claimed), or he possessed a physical body of flesh and blood. Both of these claims cannot be correct.

Things only look worse for “all religions are the same” hypothesis when we examine world religions originating outside the Fertile Crescent. Religions uninfluenced by Islam, Christianity or Judaism lack concepts of a future apocalypse or a messiah, and posit very different models of ultimate reality. Religions such as Hinduism see the lifespan of the universe as essentially eternal and cyclical, a view at odds with the time-bound and directionally evolving world of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In some Eskimo traditions, grafting the souls of artic sea birds onto their own can cure a person with a troubled soul. And anyone who has seen Soulymane Cissé’s great film Yeelen knows about the exotic world of African religion it shows – a world in which blacksmiths occupy high strata of social life and possess magical powers. What analogies for these beliefs exist in the three major monotheistic traditions?

Sometimes, those who posit the identity of all religions seek common ground in the nature of the mystical experience itself. They argue that the psychological experience of the transcendent shows uniformity across cultures and historical periods, and this similarity shows that religions spring from a common source. But what can we really make of this claim? If all mystical experiences were very similar, we still would not have grounds for thinking they resulted from contact with a higher spiritual reality. The feeling of hunger also seems constant across all cultures, but this constancy doesn’t prove it is anything more than a physiological phenomenon, or demonstrate the equality of hungry people everywhere. Cognitive research shows that many details of mystical experiences result from stimulation of particular areas of the brain. Researchers can reproduce these sensory experiences in controlled settings, and are learning more about the complex physiological responses associated with feelings of religious awe.

Like all sensory perceptions, mystical experiences can also vary significantly from one cultural setting to the next, whatever general similarities they may have. There are no sensory experiences completely separate from cultural and personal expectations. For instance, the physiological phenomena known as sleep paralysis or “night terrors” have many general similarities, such as feelings of immobility and awareness of a strange, ineffable presence in the room. Yet, a Satan-obsessed sixteenth century woman might interpret the hallucination as a demonic visitation, and a modern American might interpret the same kind of hallucination as an alien abduction experience. Mystical experiences follow a similar pattern. A Christian mystic may see hordes of angels and saints, while an Eastern mystic may find confirmation that the universe is either infinite or non-existent, depending on her particular beliefs.

Even if we accepted the proposition that mystical experiences were very similar, we still could not justifiably conclude that religions themselves were similar. Explaining religions in terms of common building blocks, or core experiences, does not reduce their differences any more than explaining objects in terms of atoms. All physical reality may be composed of atoms with similar properties, but the collection of atoms known as Adolf Hitler was very different from the collection of atoms known as Bertrand Russell. The moral is that superficial similarities among mystical experiences should not distract us from the fact that they lead to very different insights about the ultimate nature of reality.

We should also remember that all religions must be more than a feeling of awe to be meaningful. Religions use symbols and sacred stories to convey ideas and insights about human relationships, and the ties between mortal and divine realities. These insights are the very things the religious faithful cherish, and use as guidance in living a virtuous life. And the fact that most religions address questions of how people should live does not change the reality that the answers offered differ. An analogy with politics may clarify this point. In a general sense, all political thought explores strategies for governing society. But different political thinkers favor very different strategies. A Marxist believes in the redistribution of wealth, while a free-market capitalist wants to foster an open market with no restrictions on individual prosperity. Most people would agree that these strategies are not compatible. Why then do some of the same people believe that there are no genuine conflicts between the different moral principles of religions?

Many religions may command us to live a virtuous life, but their ideas of virtue tend to differ. A radical Muslim believes in the virtues of “protecting” the modesty of women by limiting their social and personal freedoms, and a liberal Muslim believes in the virtue of declaring the sanctity and equality of all human life. Each bases her view on a plausible reading of the Quran, but the views are irreconcilable. Looking across the religious spectrum, we see many further conflicts. A Manichean who believes the world is essentially evil will draw radically different moral lessons than a pantheist who finds God present everywhere in his creation. An extreme Zionist will reach different conclusions about the covenant between God and man than a follower of Reform Judaism or a Christian liberal. And few citizens of modern democracies would find much virtue in the Bible’s commandment to burn witches.

People who assume a common ethical code across all religions tend to think that only good things follow from real religious beliefs, and overlook any aspects of religions that don’t conform with modern moral standards. They define religion as equivalent to goodness and virtue, so it’s hardly surprising that all religions reflect these qualities back at them. This tautological view of matters prevents many people from asking if some religious beliefs might have inherent negative consequences as well as positive consequences. Christians, for example, do not often consider the possibility that monotheism may fuel intolerance of rival religious factions, and allow people to exterminate their neighbors in the name of piety. Christians often express sincere concern about events such as the Crusades and the Inquisition, but tend to see these events as aberrations of true Christianity rather than tendencies inherent within monotheism itself. Monotheism can also motivate good ethical conduct, of course, but that doesn’t negate the existence of the bad conduct. Both are real parts of the legacy of world religions, and responsible scholarship should not ignore one at the expense of the other.

What does all of this mean? Should we conclude that religions have nothing important to say to each other? No, we should not. Instead, we should remember that the goal of legitimate education should be to expose ourselves to views and ideas different from our own, rather than seeking false comfort in the belief that all ideas are equal. The notion that all religions are identical may sound admirably open-minded, but it really is dismayingly parochial. If we think all religions are the same, how likely are we to actually learn something about unfamiliar religious traditions? We are far more likely to see other religions as simply quaint variations of the beliefs we already know about, and will stop probing any further. In the name of openness, we close our minds to ideas that may challenge us to think just a little bit harder. Having decided in advance that religions are the same, we simply seek out the ideas that sound similar to our own and reject the rest. This hardly does justice to either the diversity of religious beliefs or the importance of religions to their followers.

Of course, most people in the “all religions are equal” camp do not intend anything harmful. On the contrary – they have the best of intentions. They are genuinely concerned about the effects of religious divisiveness in the modern world, and have arrived at a solution appealing to their sense of fairness. This solution seems to give all believers a firmer foundation for their beliefs in the wake of spreading secularism, while also lessening the tensions between different religious traditions. However, a false belief in the equality of religions will only lead to frustration when believers themselves continue to see their traditions as unique, and encourage failure to understand the ideas involved when religious conflicts occur.

All of us, secularists and theists alike, have a moral obligation to understand the role of religion in the world today. There is no possible understanding of humanity that does not include an understanding of religion, and no possible understanding of religion that does not include honest evaluation of different religious traditions. This is especially true today, when religion inspires not only terrorist hijackers but also those who help their victims. To understand how this is possible, we need to reject both the facile explanation that only good actions result from true religious belief, and the corresponding idea that all religions preach the same code of basic moral goodness. To cling to these simplistic ideas in the modern world is to fail to understand the problems facing us, and to abandon our highest moral responsibility to understand our fellow human beings in all their bewildering complexity.

Phil Mole frequently contributes to Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer. He can
be reached at PhilipMole72@aol.com

It is an article of the most unshakable faith that the personal, familiar, Montaignian–call it what you will–essay is minor stuff, a second-rate employment undertaken by bankrupt novelists and other failures. In literary rankings its place lay well below the novella and scarcely above the book review. “Essays, reviews, imitations, caricatures are all minor stuff,” wrote the New York Times critic in a recent review of a Max Beerbohm biography. In this conviction he has more support than a sports bra. Indeed, the personal essay’s most esteemed and acclaimed practitioners have to a man voiced misgivings about their trade. E.B. White called the essay a second-rate form. Cynthia Ozick, certainly one of the best contemporary essayists, may not specifically refer to the essay as second rate, but she certainly prefers to write fiction. “I don’t think I ever undertake to write non-fiction without some external prodding,” she told the Atlantic. Joseph Epstein will allow only that an excellent essay counts for more than a less-than-excellent higher form of literature, thereby damning the essay with faint praise. In his collection Plausible Prejudices the former American Scholar editor writes that “because essays do not have the prestige of other genres, no one sets out to be an essayist.”

A less odious, but no less frequent adjective applied to the personal essay is the term “undervalued.” Robert Atwan, editor of the Best American Essay series, is no doubt correct when he says the essay is an undervalued genre that has resulted in a “sharply skewed canon, [and] the neglect of many important works.” In particular, master works such as T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays, H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions, and A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science come readily to mind. I suspect all but a handful of professors of literature dismiss these texts as lacking the creativity required of a first-rate genre.

In his introduction to the Norton Anthology of the Personal Essay, Mr. Epstein makes reference to the rise and fall of genres, which occur no less frequently than the rise and fall of empires. Time was when drama was tops, only to be outdone by the poem. Now the novel is king. Unless one counts film. Or, God help us, television. This much seems certain: if the essay has been exiled to the kitchen table of literature, this has not always been the case. No sensible person writes off the essays of Montaigne, Lamb, DeQuincey, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, and William James as second-rate stuff. Dull, perhaps. Tiresome. But tiresome in the first-rate manner. “There are no second-rate genres,” said Joyce Carol Oates, “only second-rate practitioners.” If that is indeed the case, it is either today’s writers who are second-rate or something unfortunate has happened to the essay to precipitate its decline. Or both.

As late as mid-twentieth century one senses the essay donned respectable clothing, all done up in the fine silk prose of Orwell, Santayana, Russell, Chesterton, Belloc, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, the latter few writing nearly as much in the essay form as in verse. Indeed their corpses had scarcely cooled when the professors began to bemoan the essay’s deterioration, as noted in David Daiches’ 1951 book A Century of the Essay, in which he blamed the decline on magazine specialization, noting that essays that appeal to intelligent persons of large general curiosity–notably the essays of Arnold and Thoreau–became increasingly rare as human knowledge was fragmented by “highly-focused serious prose discussions.” Similarly, Cynthia Ozick blamed the ubiquitous short article for displacing the personal essay. No doubt, the New Journalism, as popularized by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer, played its part too.
Arguably our best contemporary essayists–Ozick, William H. Gass, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, and, to a large extent, Joseph Epstein—have shunned the personal essay in favor of the essay of literary criticism.

The present lack of respect for the personal essay is not entirely undeserved; too many modern essays are thin, watery things written by self-absorbed sentimentalists, who inflict upon the reader a subgenre that Carl H. Klaus has termed “the malady essay.” Literary journals are infested with such rot, to the extent that they have replaced not only the Montaignian essay (a philosophical mediation upon a particular subject or theme), but the charming Beerbohmian or Orwellian essay in which the author begins with a small observation and ultimately reaches a larger understanding. Editors seem to favor essays that depict illness, sickness, disease, infection, and death over all other kinds. Not surprisingly the malady essay mirrors our whiny, I-feel-your-pain, tell-all, victimization culture. They may be therapeutic for the author-victim, but they are painful for the reader and certain death for the essay as a form. Editors who print malady essays assume we want to know the essayist in an intimate, overly personal way, genital warts and all, a role that has heretofore been assigned to the biography or confessional, not the personal essay. When Montaigne wrote “Of Drunkeness” he did not recount the many times he woke up in the Parisian gutter beside some fat whore. Au contraire. The Montaigne essay is an act of discovery, a meditation, containing not only what the essayist thinks, but what the greatest minds throughout history have thought on a particular subject.

Similarly, we pick up Mark Twain’s essays not because we hope to read about the many tragic deaths in his unfortunate family–since we can all relate to death. Rather we read Mark because he is an expert at exposing sham, pretension, and hypocrisy, and because he was the greatest American humorist of the 19th century. (The one exception, his essay “Death of Jean”–the doleful reminiscence and grieving of a mournful father– was meant as the last chapter of his autobiography, and not as a stand-alone essay. Such pieces as these are written more as a form of release for the author than as a pleasant diversion for the reader. Why editors print them, except out of sympathy, is a mystery on the order of the extinction of the dinosaurs.)

Unlike today’s malady essayists, the great personal essayist Max Beerbohm was an intensely private man working in a supposedly narcissistic trade, who knew how to write in the first-person without drawing constant attention to himself and his various difficulties, which may or may not have included two unconsummated marriages. According to his admirer Joseph Epstein: “His tact was consummate; and one has never grown less tired of a man who wrote so much in the first person, for he knew the difference, as he once told his wife, between ‘offering himself humbly for the inspection of others’ and pushing himself forward through egotism.” Advice too many malady essayists have failed to heed.

A few years ago in the online magazine Slate, the eminent literary critics A.O. Scott and Sarah Kerr undertook to diagnose the current health of the essay. Kerr found the personal essay “operating well beneath his full capacity. He’s not as robust or playful as he used to be…lately he’s been clinging to known routines…[but] nothing that some exercise and a change of scenery couldn’t cure.” Drs. Kerr and Scott accused essayists Epstein, Anne Fadiman and Wendy Lesser of an unhealthy fixation on the past, an “idolatrous valuation of the past,” and “a reluctance to break new ground.” Both Scott and Kerr seemed to be holding to the curious belief that–as with fiction–the personal essay must constantly reinvent itself through experimentation with form and punctuation. This hasn’t worked for fiction, and it doubtlessly won’t work with the essay. The essayist, in fact, profits immeasurably from looking over her shoulder at what the past masters have written and thought and applying it to today. That’s what Mr. Epstein does so successfully, and that is why he is often called the heir to Montaigne. Scott and Kerr seem to suggest this is a bad thing.

Elsewhere Mr. Scott admits that Epstein, Fadiman and Lesser’s essays “annoyed the hell out of [him].” Presumably then Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Emerson would annoy the hell out of him too, were they writing today. That is, unless they changed their style, dropped all those references to dead white males and the occasional punctuation mark. The cause of Mr. Scott’s annoyance seems to stem from his belief that the essay should be “a democratic form, requiring no particular learning or credentials to practice.” In other words, a second-rate genre practiced by second-rate writers. Epstein, Fadiman and Lesser, he goes on to say, are “big snobs…They’re not like you and me at all–they’re better: better read, more sensitive, more discerning…Reading Fadiman and Lesser back to back was rather like watching a PBS fundraiser drive…all they can talk about is how much better their programming is than anything else, how threatened is our vulgar culture, how only viewers like you can keep it alive. And I find myself thanking God for the Fox network.”

So it is that literary critics–doubtless the snootiest pretenders inhabiting this crust–make themselves feel less snobbish when they accuse personal essayists of being the real snobs. I find this game of “Who’s the snob?” silly, to say the least.

For his final trick, Mr. Scott has at Epstein and Fadiman for assuming “the love of books, and of certain types of books, is a sign of cultural, and therefore moral, superiority.” I wonder which is the greater crime for Mr. Scott, being culturally superior or believing oneself culturally superior. For such critics the only acceptable essay seems to be the dreary death and dying essay. No chance of feeling superior there–at least until the essayist begins to claim that her hemorrhoids are larger and more painful than yours.

Christopher Orlet is a columnist for Vocabula Review.

Inferiority as a Luxury Item

Before the Industrial Revolution, artists and artisans would strive to make a work as perfect as possible. They used the technologies of their time to make as fine a product as their skill and limited technology allowed. Given the long painstaking efforts involved in creation, such items were few in number and available to only a minuscule number of elites. They were the crowning achievement of their time and brought great prestige to those fortunate few who owned them. Renaissance painters used the mathematics of perspective to create their trompe l’oeil (a French term meaning “trick the eye.”) David Hockney’s recent claim that some of the Renaissance artists achieved realism by using a camera obscura to design their paintings is controversial and shocking to many today but one wonders whether it would have mattered to anyone prior to the Industrial Revolution (Hockney 2001).

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, one of the qualities that allegedly makes a craft item superior became its demonstrable inferiority. Before that time, increasing precision was one aspect of the way in which artisans sought to refine and improve their craft. Nineteenth and twentieth century tech­nology not only carried this refinement beyond the point that our hands or eyes can detect, it did so with mass production. Today some people will point with pride to the imperfections that indicate handcrafting. Thorstein Veblen makes reference to the “claims to excellence put forward” for some products that “rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities” of earlier inferior technologies (Veblen 1934, 121). Veblen was referring specifically to the very expensive books produced by William Morris and the Kelmscott Press. Veblen went into great detail on the means and methods used for book production by the Kelmscott Press and scathingly referred to their “pains­taking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude” (Veblen 1934, 122). William Morris, an ardent socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, earned his livelihood by selling his non-industrial arts and crafts to those made rich by industrialization.

In Veblen’s example of book production, limiting an edition is the ultimate reversion to a criterion of earlier technology to enhance a product’s pecuniary value (Veblen 1934, 122). It is an artificially-contrived scarcity, whether it be in a “hand-produced” item of William Morris or the mass-produced results of technologies. The crudeness must be contrived to be different because modern industry has taught us how to turn out great quantities of high quality items (Kouwenhoven 1967, 35).

No previous transformation was as beneficial to human enterprise and crea­tivity as the Industrial Revolution. Yet it was damned for being dehumanizing, and its technology was considered antithetical to artistic endeavors. The dual­ism between thought and practical action that characterized earlier civilizations such as that of classical Greece was revived with a vengeance. It is more than appropriate that among the anti-technology artists and artisans, there was a revival of Greek forms in neoclassicism. William Blake, who is famous for his reference to “dark Satanic Mills,” was himself “dependent upon prosperous patrons for his livelihood” (Boime 1985, 111). The “fiery chariots,” the furnaces, and other technologies were important images in Blake’s poetry and drawings, reflecting more of an ambivalence to industrialization than is recognized by many who quote him. The neoclassicism in fine arts that followed Blake and the revival of Greek ideals were facilitated by “one of the first and most refined products of modern manufacture … the steel pen, which everyday recorded the images, means, and ideas of the new era” (Howard 1985, 790-2). Steel pens were better and they were cheaper (Howard 1985, 794).

By the late 19th century, the elitist mania for handcrafted items led to an interest in “primitive” art which pre-Industrial European elites would have considered too crude to be art. A strange contradiction emerged as the art was praised while those who created it were degraded. Leah Dilworth uses Veblen’s analysis when writing about the demand for crafts produced by Indians of the American Southwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mass-produced objects had a “sameness” to them, and because they were mass-produced they were by definition “perceived as being common and it is this commonness that the leisure class objected to.” To Veblen the leisure class “preference for the singular marks of imperfection, or marks of the hand, became ‘honorific’.” For collectors of Indian crafts, “singularity and the mark of the maker’s hand were highly valued” (Dilworth 1996, 154-155 and Veblen 1934). The belief in the eventual “dying out” of the Indian, undoubtedly further enhanced the value of the craft. It was “natural” and “authentic.”

One can appreciate “primitive” art and the great works of earlier times apart from any crudeness or extraordinary effort to achieve perfection. The elite’s preference for that which is inferior was carried over to other areas of life. Occasionally manufacturers found it profitable to advertise the inferiority of their technologies such as “fire-brewed” beer when any brew master will testify to the superiority of electric kettles for more precise heat control.

As societies become more affluent and wages rise, hand made products become more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Even reaching out for overseas production in low wage countries is not always effective as these areas are seeking to improve their lot with low cost industrial production serving a mass global market. Affluence also creates an ever-growing class of well-off consumers, many of whom seek to emulate the crudities of consumption of the elites. The crude items of every day use that were the few meager processions of the poor have become the prestige consumption of the affluent. To acquire the “authentic” or “natural” or “real,” be it in construction with expensive stone or wood or in foods, eating only the rare or organically grown – these natural lifestyles are expensive because the means for providing them are extremely limited, making it a way of life possible only for a privileged portion of the world’s population. Time magazine had a cover story on “The Simple Life.” A perceptive correspondent for The New Yorker made an “unofficial tally of Time’s ‘expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ stuff, as against the new simplicity’s ‘recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ stuff.” The results were:

‘Recyclable, cheap, plain and nostalgic’ goods … : $459.40.
‘Expensive, high tech and sophisticated’ equivalents: $145.83.
He concluded that he didn’t think that he could “afford the simple life (The New Yorker 1991, 30, and Time 1991, see also Carlson 2000).

It seems that the poor can no longer afford the crudities that were once their lot in life and have to make do with the products of industry when they can afford any consumption at all. Even the poverty of Gandhi was costly, as his trademark goats had to be boarded when he was in urban areas, prompting the often-paraphrased comment of Edgar Snow that Ghandi never realized how much it cost the Indian rich to keep him in his poverty.

Consumption of inferior products has become a growth industry in affluent societies particularly in the area of food and health where the fetish of ‘inferior is better, safer and healthier’ has deep ideological roots. Terms like “organic,” “biodynamic,” “all natural,” “alternative therapies,” “herbal” and “holistic” have lost any meaning that they may once have had and are to be understood as endowing a commodity with immeasurable, not fully definable vital properties. The quintessential inferior vitalist product is the homeopathic remedy whose mystic vitalist potency is derived from having virtually every last molecule of the “medication” diluted away.

The Vitalist Revolt

The ongoing vitalist revolt against the emergence of modern chemistry and agricultural science since the work of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Friedrich Wöhler and Justus Baron von Liebig is most evident in food production and consumption. First it was claimed that it was impossible to synthesize an organic compound, and then it was argued that minerals could not be used to help plants grow. When these claims were disproved, the argument was made that the food grown using minerals as fertilizer lacked some vital or living force. To Lady Balfour, a proponent of “organic agriculture” and a founder of the Soil Association in England, Liebig’s “naive theory” that inorganic material could be used in plant production, did result in increased food production but the food was nutritionally inferior (Balfour 1948, 50-51 and Balfour 1976, 56). It lacked a “vital quality,” as the modern world, “largely ruled by chemistry,” had neglected the “continuity of the living principle in nature” (Balfour 1976, 25).

The emergence of synthetic urea brought an even stronger response -it was man-made, alien to the environment and dead, in the words of Rudolf Steiner. We must remember that the movement for “organic” or “biodynamic” agriculture was first a response to the use of synthetic fertilizer and not to pesticides. Synthetic fertilizers have proved their worth and there is no question that we would not be able to feed 6.3 billion people today without them, nor could we do so for the expected 9 billion people in 2050 when population growth is expected to level off or even decline (Smil 2000 and 2001, 159). Though many believe in the mystic vitalist properties that manure provides to the crop, plant physiology tells us that manure has to be broken down in the soil and that the plant takes in cations and anions that are no different from those provided by synthetic fertilizer. The difference is that with modern agronomy, the farmer can more accurately provide the needed nutrient in proper proportions with synthetic fertilizer than with manure whose nutrient content may vary considerably.

However post-modernists and others may attack modern science, it has permeated our society sufficiently that there is often a felt need to find scientific evidence to justify a belief, even essentially vitalist ideas like the belief that “natural” is better. Having failed to prove that “organic” produce was superior in any other way, its proponents have now turned to the argument that its superiority results from its being less well protected from competitors, which means that it is being produced in an agronomically inferior way. After all, from the earliest agriculture, farmers have sought to protect their crops from competitors such as other plants, rodents, birds and microorganisms. In the attempt to find nutritional benefit in “organic” food crops on the basis of their being less well protected, the advocates are venturing into a mine field where there is a vast array of unexploded ordinance.

Trace Amounts

The “organic” enthusiasts never seem to tire of trying to find evidence of the superiority of their product. In March 2002, yet another study was announced which purported to show that “organic” vegetables were more nutritious than those that were conventionally grown (Baxter et al. 2002). Canned soups made with “organic” vegetables were found to have a higher level of salicylic acid than vegetable soups that were not labeled “organic.” These higher levels were the result of the fact that the organic plants were less well protected against various forms of infestations, and they expressed salicytes to protect against the invaders. Since farmers from time immemorial have sought to protect their crop, being less successful at it could be defined as being inferior, but an Orwellian inferiority where inferior is really superior.

Salicylic acid is the active ingredient in aspirin for which there is a claim that it has beneficial health effects for those who take one or two a day. This was taken as tantalizing evidence of nutritional superiority that warranted further research even though salicylic acid is not known as a nutrient. No matter how heroic the efforts to hold other factors constant, it is difficult to take seriously a study comparing commercially canned vegetable soups where one could either have compared the vegetables directly or made the soups themselves to make sure that everything else was the same except the vegetables.

Even if we accept the study’s validity, its conclusions are still in doubt. The tiny amount of salicylic acid that they found was 117 nanograms/gram. This is “1/10,000,000 of a gram or 0.00001% or (1/100,000 of 1%). For a typical 400 gram serving of soup at 117 nanograms/gram = 50,000 nanograms of SA, which is 0.005% of a gram, or 0.05 milligrams of salicylic acid, or 1/20th of one milligram” (Avery 2002). A bowl of organic soup provides “roughly 1/6,000 of a standard aspirin compared to conventional soup” which provides “only 1/36,000 of an aspirin” (Avery 2002).

A more recent paper found that foodstuffs produced by “organic” or “sustainable” methods produced more phenolics because they were less protected (Asami et al. 2003). Once again, phenolics are not thought to be a nutrient but they are believed to be anti-oxidants and therefore possibly helpful in preventing cancer. If being less well protected is the source of the alleged benefit, then conventional farmers could reduce the protection that they provide plants and thereby improve their “nutritional” value. Of course this would reduce the farmers’ output and raise the price of the product.

Consider all Factors

In my view as an economist, the authors missed the point that consumption of fruits and vegetables is price sensitive, so that even if the authors are correct one would still have to balance the alleged nutritional benefits of the foodstuffs with the reduction in the consumption of them, particularly by those in lower income groups who need them most. Phenolics and salicytes are called secondary metabolites because they are not essential for the plant’s metabolism. They are expressed in response to some attack against the plant. Some secondary metabolites have been found to be rodent carcinogens. Simply stated, if a plant is less well protected than it will be producing a variety of chemical defenses and it is likely to be carrying some residue from whatever attacked it. It is not valid or good science to cherry-pick what one wants to measure and ignore the rest. One has to look at the total potential benefits and harm to be able to say anything meaningful about the difference between various forms of plant production, and then one has to consider the cost factor for any judgment about nutrition to have any validity. The authors of the articles, finding “organic” foods have more nutrients, fail to test for higher levels of other secondary metabolites that may be carcinogenic, nor do they test for higher levels of a microbial infestation that may have caused the plant to express the chemical toxins.

In my judgment, it would be helpful if authors spoke about the increased production of “chemical toxins” to ward off infestation in less well-protected plants. After all, in spite of the use of the term “chemicals” as a pejorative, chemicals are what the plant is producing. And if they are being produced to protect against an invader then they are likely to be in some way toxic to it. Once we have the generic category of “chemical toxins” than we can proceed to enumerate them and identify which are (or may be) beneficial to humans, which are (or may be) harmful to humans and which are likely to be neither. Unfortunately, just as we have words like “organic” that are endowed with vitalist virtues, we also have terms like “chemicals” and “toxins” that have been so demonized that sensible discourse using them has become almost impossible.

Much of the opposition to transgenic food crops is that they are allowing and will increasingly allow farmers to produce food crops with reduced pesticides or even no pesticides and use agronomic methods such as sustainable conservation tillage which prevent soil erosion, conserve water and preserve biodiversity in ways that “organic” agriculture cannot. When honestly and properly understood, pesticide-free transgenic food crops (crops using lower amounts of less environmentally toxic pesticides than the “all natural” pesticides of “organic” farmers) undercut the benefits of “organic” food consumption. This means that conventional farmers could mass-produce food that more than matches the alleged health and environmental benefits of “organic” food at a lower cost and price. Why then, would anyone buy “organic” food let alone pay a premium for it? Further, the transgenic food crops have vastly lower levels of fungal or other infestation, and as recent pro-organic studies show, they produce far fewer toxins. Even the most optimistic supporters of pest resistant Bt corn and cotton fully expected that in time some insects would develop resistance to their bioengineered insecticide (the Bt gene expresses a protein fully digestible by humans but lethal to target insects), yet six years have passed and “target insect pests have developed little or no resistance to Bt crops thus far, according to US Department of Agriculture-funded scientists.” Ironically, the diamondback moth “evolved resistance to Bt sprays used by organic growers, but no pest has evolved resistance to transgenic Bt crops in the field” (Fox 2003, see also DeGregori 2003). The irony is of course that it is the organic growers who have vociferously complained that the transgenic Bt varieties would lead to the emergence of super bugs resistant to their Bt spray.

More than 500 species of insect have evolved resistance to one or more
conventional insecticides. So far, the track record for Bt is better.
In the field, only one pest, the diamondback moth, has evolved resistance
to Bt sprays, and none has evolved resistance to Bt crops. Despite this
success, the incredible adaptive ability of insects means that resistance
remains a threat (Fox 2003).

Transgenic food crops using rDNA are the most predictable and therefore the safest form of plant breeding humans have ever devised. And almost everywhere in the world they are regulated, as they are the only food crops where we know what to test for. The potential for enhanced nutrition or even using the plant to express a protein that has pharmaceutical capabilities at an incredibly low price is enormous. But in the perverse logic of inferior-is-better, because “organic” foods are inferior to those resulting from transgenic food crop production, they are really superior.

Never has human food production been safer or more abundant than it is now. But we must always remember that in any human endeavor, there is never 100% certainty. The food crops in the field today, conventional and “organic” alike, are the products of 20th century plant breeding. In addition to the traditional crossing of closely related types, throughout the last century there emerged mutation-breeding using either highly toxic mutagenic chemicals or gamma radiation from a nuclear source that immediately produces random, massive change throughout the plant’s genome. There is nothing predictable in the outcome here. What could be more frightening to the consumer should critics wish to use it than for our food to be the product of carcinogenic chemicals or radioactivity (which of course it is not)? But of course this would leave nothing on the shelves or in the fields for people to eat. In addition, plant breeding has added techniques such as somaclonal variation, protoplastic cell fusion, embryo rescue, self-pollination and tissue culture to put crops in the field and food on our table. Again, there is nothing predictable here but of course that is the intention, namely to produce quickly as much variation as possible so that the plant breeder has more possibilities to choose from.

The use of tissue culture in plant breeding has also often resulted in somaclonal variation of plant lines and irregular phenotypes or field performance. Somaclonal variations are mutational and chromosomal instabilities of embryonic plants regenerated from tissue cultures (Haslberger 2003).

Unfortunately, these “chromosomal instabilities” persist for some time not only in the original crop but in future crops in which it is part of the breeding stock.

These instabilities may result from activation of dormant transposons in the chromosome. The consequent genetic variability is known to persist for many generations and is difficult to eliminate by backcrossing (Haslberger 2003).

Yet our food supply remains safer than it ever has been. And we must never forget that these mutation crops are very much a part of the crops of the “organic” farmers whose opposition to synthetic pesticides requires them to use varieties that are more resistant to disease infestation.

Natural Toxins

It is interesting to note that in searching for the possible “unintended consequences” of rDNA. the most serious unintended outcome was found in crops from “traditional breeding.”

a traditionally bred squash caused food poisoning, a pest-resistant celery variety produced rashes in agricultural workers (which was subsequently found to contain sevenfold more carcinogenic psoralens than control celery) and a potato variety Lenape contained very high levels of toxic solanine (Haslberger 2003).

These crops are no longer cultivated (Kirschmann and Suber 1998, Ames and Gold 1990a and Prakash 2001). The most recent episode was an outbreak of “killer zucchini” which produced the “only food scare in recent history in New Zealand” and interestingly it “stemmed from the farming methods of organic farmers and others who use unconventional farming practices” (LSN 2003). In February 2003, Zucchini with “high levels of natural toxins” was sold on the vegetable market and resulted in “several recorded cases of people suffering food poisoning” (LSN 2003). We often worry about the toxicity resulting from spraying crops but rarely are we as concerned about those from not spraying them.

An examination of common factors shows the levels of toxin apparently increased among zucchini growers who did not spray their crops. Unusual climatic conditions meant there were huge numbers of aphids about in January and insect predation is sometimes associated with increased levels of toxins in plants (LSN 2003).

In this case, there was a “clear link between increased toxin levels and older open-pollinating varieties of seeds” (LSN 2003). It is another of the “inferior is superior” views that there is something inherently virtuous in farmers planting their own saved seeds but it is “likely zucchini grown from saved seed will therefore be more vulnerable to toxin build-up” (LSN 2003).

The scientists who reviewed the “killer zucchini” case were very clear that the “most likely cause of the build-up of toxins is a genetic weakness in older varieties.” However worthy the farmer’s intentions may have been, “the growers’ decision to use older varieties and to save seeds is likely to have resulted in a health risk for consumers – something which has never happened with crops derived from genetic modification” (LSN 2003).

The work of Bruce Ames and two different National Academy of Science studies have shown that over 99.9% of the toxins that we ingest are the natural products of plants, and as we have noted, most of them are rodent carcinogens (Ames et al. 1990a&b, NAS 1973 and NRC 1996). Worst of all from the inferior-is-superior perspective, with rDNA, conventional farmers will mass-produce better protected food with fewer toxins in the plant and on it. Mass production means that those who consume these safer foods are not partaking of some special virtue, apart from better health.

Some Ideas are Dangerous

The inferior-is-superior food fetish is harmless as long as it is the exercise of personal consumption practices of those who can afford it. But it has taken a nasty turn, as these ideas are now lined up in opposition to the use of the latest and best in modern science and technology to contribute to meeting the needs of a growing world population for improved nutrition provided in an environmentally sustainable way. When these ideas galvanize street protests, the burning of crops in the field and buildings, the destruction of research in improved crop production, and other actions that make advances in agriculture more difficult, then these ideas have become dangerous and must be countered vigorously and continuously with better ideas. Freedom of speech and freedom for research must protect the minority but also the majority that may wish to carry forward the enterprise of science/technology and promote the benefits that they allow. This means that the laws protecting crops in the field, research, and researchers must be enforced. Modern agricultural science has given us much and our task is both to defend it and to find ways to allow access to those who have not fully realized these benefits.

Scarcity and Snob-value

In addition to higher levels of nutrition and cleaner, safer food, modern consumers now have an incredible array of foodstuffs from around the world as well as an opportunity to savor, with some frequency, cuisines from cultures whose culinary delights were unknown to their parents or grandparents. In an article appropriately titled, “Mean Cuisine,” Greg Critser asks the question, “Why, in a time of unprecedented abundance for everyone–vine-ripened Mexican tomatoes for $1 a pound! World-class reds and whites from Montepulciano d’Abruzzo for $5 a bottle! An international glut of inexpensive extra virgin olive oils and cheeses and nuts and fruits at Trader Joe’s and Price Club! – why oh why are the chefs of America so dour, so chary – so very very very bummed out?” (Critser 2001). “Why the big change” Critser asks? “Ten years ago, a pint of cold-pressed, extra-virgin Italian olive oil would set you back about $20. It was scarce, and so it was the chef’s preference. Today one can buy a gallon for the same price. Today, of course, imported oil is not the chef’s choice” (Critser 2001). The answer is abundance, and abundance is a threat to the values of snobbery of the critics of modernity.

Critser adds that the “culprit is globalization.” The foods, particularly, those that were once imported at a price beyond the reach of ordinary citizens, have now become common and relatively cheap in supermarkets across the land. Globalization has been the mechanism by which the increasing global food production leads to greater diversity of available foodstuffs and therefore greater choice, but it also deprives the snobs of that sense of exclusivity in the items they consume. In a world of increasing free trade and technological advancement, the food snobs seek to pursue an anti-trade (“buy locally”), anti-technology agenda in order to preserve their status and self-esteem, even if it is at the expense of continuing the increase in food production to meet a growing world population and make the technologies of accessibility and abundance available to those who have not had the opportunity to benefit as fully as others from them. Rules that make items of consumption more expensive, restrict access to them to those who can afford them, thus making them more prestigious. Whatever the rhetoric used to defend them may be, the fact remains that those actively opposing the advance of science and technology are also working against the well-being of the less fortunate citizens of this planet. Humanism and science are today, as in the past, intricately interrelated in the endeavor not only to understand the world but also to make it a better place for all who call it home.

Thomas R. DeGregori (http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg/)is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and the author of the forthcoming book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Publishing Company –
http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813805139.html – which formed the basis of much of the material in this paper along with material from his other recent books.

 

References

Ames, Bruce and Lois Swirsky Gold. 1990a. Chemical Carcinogenesis: Too Many Rodent Carcinogens, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA

Ames, Bruce and Margie Profet and Lois Swirsky Gold. 1990b. Dietary Pesticides (99.9% all natural). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87:7777-7781.

Asami, Danny K,; Yun-Jeong Hong, Diane M. Barrett and Alyson E. Mitchell. 2003. A Comparison of the Total Phenolic and Ascorbic Acid Contents of Freeze-dried and Air-dried Marionberry, Strawberry and Corn Grown Using Conventional, Organic and Agricultural Practices, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 51(5):1237-1241, May.

Avery, Alex. 2002. Warning–Organic Foods Contain Higher Levels Of Chemical Dangerous To Infants AgBioView online, 16 March.

Balfour, Eve (Lady Evelyn Barbara). 1948. The Living Soil: Evidence of the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, with Special Reference to National Planning. New York: Devin-Adair Co.

Balfour, Eve (Lady Evelyn Barbara). 1976. The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment. New York: Universe Books.

Baxter, Gwen J.; Allan B. Graham; James R. Lawrence; David Wiles; and John R. Paterson. 2001. Salicylic Acid in Soups Prepared from Organically and Non-organically Grown Vegetables, European Journal of Nutrition 40(6):289-292.

Boime, Albert. 1985. William Blake’s Graphic Imagery and the Industrial Revolution. Arts Magazine 59(10):107-119 June/Summer.

Boime, Albert. 1987. Art in an Age of Revolution 1750-1800. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Carlson, Peter. 2000. Conspicuous Simplicity for Beautiful People: Real Simple Only Faintly a Throwback to Thoreau, The Washington Post, 11 April.

Critser, Greg. 2001. Mean Cuisine: Gone Is The Joy of Cooking. Today’s Celebrity Chefs Are Serving Up a Menu of Global Doom and Politically Twisted Snobbery. Washington Monthly, July/August.

DeGregori, Thomas R. (2003). The Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Publisher.

Dilworth, Leah. 1996. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Ferguson, Eugene S. 1978. Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology. Technology and Culture 19(3):450-60, July.

Ferguson, Eugene S. 1979. The American-ness of American Technology. Technology and Culture 20(1):3-24, January.

Fox, Jeffrey L. (2003). Resistance to Bt Toxin Surprisingly Absent From Pests, Nature Biotechnology 211(9):958-959, September.

Haslberger, Alexander G. 2003. Codex Guidelines for GM Foods Include the Analysis of Unintended Effects, Nature Biotechnology 21(7):739-741, July.

Hockney, David: 2001. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Viking Studio.

Howard, Seymour. 1985. The Steel Pen and the Modern Line of Beauty. Technology and Culture 26(4):785-798, October.

Kirschman J.C. and R. L. Suber. 1989. Recent Food Poisonings from Cucurbitacins in Traditionally Bred Squash, Food and Chemical Toxicology. 27(8), 555-556.

Kouwenhoven, John A. 1967. The Arts in Modern American Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton.

LSN. 2003. Killer Zucchini. Life Sciences Network, http://www.lifesciencesnetwork.com/news-detail.asp?newsID=1122.

NAS. 1973. Toxicants Occurring Naturally in Foods. Washington: National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Food protection, Food and Nutrition Board, National Research Council.

The New Yorker. 1991. Notes and Comment: The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, 29-30, 20 May.

NRC. (National Research Council). 1996. Committee on Comparative Toxicity of Naturally Occurring Carcinogens, Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, and the Commission on Life Sciences, National Research Council. Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet: A Comparison of Naturally Occurring and Synthetic Substances. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Prakash, C.S. 2001. The Genetically Modified Crop Debate in the Context of Agricultural Evolution, Plant Physiology 126(1):8-15, May.

Smil, Vaclav. 2000. Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Smil, Vaclav. 2001. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1934. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The Modern Library.

 

The case for astrology

An expanded abstract of the article in Journal of Consciousness Studies Volume 10 (6-7), June-July 2003, pages 175-198 with four tables and 85 references. This particular issue of JCS is devoted to parapsychology and related matters, and is also available in book form. Details, abstracts, and the full article in pdf format are available at www.imprint.co.uk/books/psi.html. See also the user-friendly www.astrology-and-science.com/ for critical articles on astrology by the same authors and others.

 

Why astrology?

Astrology has one sure thing in common with parapsychology – a highly visible outpouring of market-driven nonsense that threatens to bury the work of serious researchers. Just as parapsychology to the ordinary person means ghost busting and psychic phonelines, so astrology means sun signs and newspaper columns. Here we ignore the latter view in favour of serious astrology, the study of purported relationships between the heavens and earthly affairs.

Astrology can be applied to anything that is born or begins independent existence such as a person, company, ship, nation, animal, or idea, and the astrologer begins by calculating the birth chart or horoscope, a stylised map of the heavens at the moment of birth as seen from the place of birth (think of a wheel covered in strange symbols). Then comes the difficult part, namely the interpretation or birth chart reading, where the strange symbols and their positions are translated into a discourse that the client can understand. It is here that the possible relevance of astrology to psi becomes apparent.

Many astrologers attribute a successful birth chart reading to what they variously call intuition or psychic ability, where the birth chart acts like a crystal ball. As in shamanism, they relate consciousness to a transcendent metaphysical reality that, if true, might require a re-assessment of present biological theories of consciousness.

Cynics might argue that the prospects are not good. Even after centuries of practice, astrologers still cannot agree on what a birth chart should contain, how it should be interpreted, or what it should reveal. Nor do they agree on how astrology should be tested, or even on whether it can be tested in the first place. They are also generally unaware of the many hidden persuaders such as the Barnum effect (reading specifics into generalities) and nonfalsifiability (nothing can count against your idea) that can make astrologers see hits where none exist. Technically these hidden persuaders can be described as “statistical artifacts and inferential biases”.

Indeed, it is not uncommon for astrologers to make a seemingly accurate reading only to discover it was based on the wrong birth chart, which they then attribute to some mysterious property of astrology. It seems that critical thinking, and being informed about relevant research, is not for them.

Nevertheless let us accept that astrologers may use some sort of intuition or psychic ability when reading a birth chart. Because the incidence of astrologers and serious students of astrology is roughly 1 in 10,000 of the general population, their total number is substantial and our chance of detecting psi and anomalous states of consciousness is correspondingly increased, which is an opportunity not to be lightly passed by. On the other hand, their 0.01% incidence is very much less than the 4% incidence of fantasy-prone personality (one that fantasises vividly during much of waking life), so who knows?

 

Empirical studies of astrology

Although very few empirical studies of astrology existed before 1950, their number now exceeds five hundred. Their results have revolutionised our understanding of astrology, and coherent reviews are now possible. In what follows we look first at the performance of astrology, for which the definitive test is time twins, and then at the performance of astrologers. If astrologers can do better than astrology would seem to allow then we might be on to something.

Suppose that at one moment the heavens signify that people born at that moment will have characteristic A, the next moment it is characteristic B, and so on. Time twins (people born close together in time) should therefore be more alike than expected by chance, and more alike than people born further apart in time. Time twins are thus the definitive test of astrology because errors or uncertainties of birth chart interpretation are avoided.

The first systematic study of time twins was reported by British astrologers Peter Roberts and Helen Greengrass in 1994. Their sample of 128 people showed some evidence of similarities in interests and occupation, for example two born 15 minutes apart were respectively a bassoon player and a clarinet player, but there were no clear similarities in appearance, handwriting, names, or life events. The strong similarities predicted by astrology were simply not there.

We conducted a more powerful test involving 2101 persons born in London during 3-9 March 1958 averaging 4.8 minutes apart. For each person 110 variables were available, including ability test scores, interests, and ratings of behaviour, all of which are supposed to be shown in the birth chart. The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success but the results were uniformly negative. The effect size due to astrology, expressed as a correlation on a scale of 0 to 1, was 0.00 ± 0.03.

The above result is consistent with other empirical studies, which when free of artifacts have consistently failed to find effects commensurate with astrological claims. Here, however, such a result is actually good news, because if artifact-free tests of astrologers are found to give positive results it might suggest the existence of human abilities of interest to parapsychologists.

 

Studies of Astrologer Accuracy

Tests of astrologer accuracy generally involve astrologers matching birth charts with information such as personality profiles or case histories, where a hit rate significantly better than chance would be evidence that they are on to something. Meta-analysis of more than forty controlled studies suggests that astrologers are unable to perform significantly better than chance even on the more basic tasks such as predicting extraversion. The mean effect size is 0.05 ± 0.12, p = 0.66, equivalent to getting 52.5% hits when 50% is expected by chance. Visual plots indicate the existence of a publication bias against negative results, which probably accounts for the weak positive direction.

More specifically, astrologers who claim to use psychic ability perform no better than those who do not. The results are no better when the astrologers are given all the case history material they ask for including photographs. Nor can people pick their own chart reading when given several to choose from, a result based on ten studies in which give-away cues were known to be absent.

There is clearly nothing here to suggest that astrologers can perform usefully better than chance, or that your own chart reading fits you better than someone else’s, regardless of how the reading is made or how well the conditions are stacked in the astrologer’s favour.

 

Studies of Astrologer Agreement

Astrologers tend to dismiss the above findings as the result of asking the wrong questions, albeit without ever telling us what the right questions should be. But such ploys are irrelevant when testing agreement among astrologers, simply because the truth of their answers and the usual philosophical arguments about truth are now of no consequence. Our only concern is agreement, the extent to which astrologers agree on what a given chart indicates.

Meta-analysis of 25 controlled studies suggests that astrologers show negligible agreement on their chartt readings, and equally poor agreement on their confidence in those readings. The point is, we might conceivably explain away poor effect sizes for hits, but not poor agreement or the inconsequence of confidence. If astrologers cannot agree on what a given birth chart indicates, or on their confidence in that indication, then what price astrology and the supposed intuitions of astrologers?

 

Conclusion

Our concern in this article has been to measure the performance of astrology and astrologers. A large-scale test of time twins involving more than 100 cognitive, behavioural, physical and other variables found no hint of support for the claims of astrology. Consequently, if astrologers could perform better than chance, this might support their claim that reading specifics from birth charts depends on psychic ability and a transcendent reality related to consciousness. But tests incomparably more powerful than those available to the ancients have failed to find effect sizes beyond those due to non-astrological factors such as statistical artifacts and inferential biases. The possibility that astrology might be relevant to consciousness and psi is not denied, but if psychic influences exist in astrology, they would seem to be very weak or very rare. Support for psychic claims seems unlikely.

 

Further reading

For critical articles on astrology see www.astrology-and-science.com/

 

Postscript for Butterflies and Wheels

The JCS article was featured in a half-page article in the UK Sunday Telegraph 17 August 2003 that raised a storm of protest from astrologers who generally showed no awareness of relevant research or even of the original JCS article. An example is the article by astrologer Neil Spencer in The Guardian 19 August 2003, which featured briefly on the B&W website under the heading “Oh That Old Ploy.” The objections he raised were already fully answered by either the JCS article or previous publications, and thus made no sense. (Spencer’s article is at www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1021328,00.html)

More subtly, the protesting astrologers saw the JCS article as the case against astrology when it was merely an examination of astrology’s relevance to consciousness and psi. Our other articles on astrology have included the case for astrology, which is summarised in the following excerpt from www.astrology-and-science.com, starting with the case against:

 

The case against astrology

The case against astrology is that it is untrue. It does not deliver benefits beyond those produced by non-astrological factors, it has not contributed to human knowledge, it has no acceptable mechanism, its principles are invalid, and it has failed hundreds of tests. But no hint of these problems will be found in astrology books, which in effect are exercises in deception. But it doesn’t end there.

Astrologers disagree on almost everything, even on basics such as which zodiac to use. They rarely test control data, which is why scientists see astrologers as crazy or even crooks. In fact astrologers are mostly nice people who genuinely wish to help others. But the claim they repeatedly make (astrology is true because based on experience) is simply mistaken – what they see as its strength (experience) is actually its weakness (no controls).

 

The case for astrology

The case for astrology is that a warm and sympathetic astrologer provides low-cost non-threatening therapy that is otherwise hard to come by. You get emotional comfort, spiritual support, and interesting ideas to stimulate self-examination. In a dehumanised society astrology provides ego support at a very low price. Where else can you get this sort of thing these days?

In short, there is more to astrology than being true or false. But note the dilemma – to get the benefits you have to believe in something that is untrue. The same dilemma can apply elsewhere as in psychotherapy and even religion, so it is not unique to astrology. Nevertheless it presents an ethical problem that astrologers have generally failed to recognise let alone resolve.

Is there a conflict between science and humanism? Jeremy Stangroom thinks so. Science, he argues, is necessarily reductive, and reductive science undermines humanist ideas about phenomena such as consciousness or free will. Humanists, therefore, are forced to reject perfectly good scientific theories that don’t fit with their particular worldview. A good example, he suggests, is my own critique of what I call ‘mechanistic’ science. I am, apparently, a closet Lysenkoist (though I had always thought that such guilt-by-association argument itself smacks of Stalinist rhetoric).

To understand what is wrong with Stangroom’s argument, let us accept for the moment his claim that science will eventually show ‘the stuff of the inner life of human beings – consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc’ to be just physical, so that ‘in one way or another, they will disappear completely’. In other words, imagine that science has destroyed the argument that humans are subjects – that is, rational beings with agency and will and the capacity consciously to transform both themselves and the world around them – and shown instead that we are simply physical objects like any other physical object.

If this were true, though, how would we know it to be true? After all, truth has no meaning in a world composed simply of objects. That is why John Gray, a far more consistent anti-humanist than Jeremy Stangroom, argues in his book Straw Dogs that the whole of the Western rationalist tradition is doomed because it rests on the faith that ‘through science humankind can know truth – and so be free’. But, Gray suggests, ‘if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible’. Drawinian processes are driven, not by the need to ascertain the truth, but to survive and reproduce. Accordingly, ‘the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.’ Indeed, ‘in the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury’, even a ‘disability’.

In other words, if we are the kind of creatures that Stangroom believes us to be, then not just consciousness and agency, but truth and reason too, ‘will disappear completely’. Science, Gray suggests, reveals that ‘humans cannot be other than irrational’. But science itself is a product of our poor, irrational, mechanistic minds. If we cannot trust such minds to discover truths about the world, how can we accept the verities of science? The logic of Gray’s – and indeed Stangroom’s – argument undermines our confidence in its own veracity. For if we are simply biological objects, then we cannot place any trust in the claim that we are biological objects. Far from science revealing humans to be beings without consciousness and agency, we are only able to do science because of our ability to transcend our evolutionary heritage, to act as subjects, rather than as objects. Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can, to some extent at least, shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social beings, who can design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws.

The very development of the scientific method has exacerbated this paradox of being human. To study nature scientifically requires us to make a distinction between a humanity that is a thinking subject and a nature that presents itself to thought but is itself incapable of thought. When studying ‘external’ nature the distinction between the thinking subject and the object of study is easy to make. But with the study of humans, such a neat division becomes impossible: human beings are simultaneously the subject that thinks and the object of that thought.

This is, in Kate Soper’s words, ‘the paradox of humanity’s simultaneous immanence and transcendence’. Nature ‘is that which humanity finds itself within, and to which in some sense its belongs, and also that from which it seems excluded in the very moment it reflects upon either its otherness or its belongingness.’ Our very capacity to reflect upon nature, then, takes us in a certain fashion outside of nature, for if we could not view nature in some sense from the outside we could not reflect upon it objectively.

For Stangroom, the view of humans as both immanent in, and transcendent to, nature is ‘slightly odd’ because it seems to suggest that ‘things like consciousness, agency and free will are real’ but ‘beyond scientific… explanation’. Yet it is Stangroom himself who suggests that if consciousness, agency and free will can be explained mechanistically they will be exposed as illusions: in other words, that the belief in the reality of consciousness and agency and in a mechanistic science are mutually exclusive. My own view is neither that consciousness, agency and free will are illusions, nor that they are beyond scientific explanation, but rather that they cannot be fully explained by the precepts of natural science. This is the key point of difference.

According to Stangroom, because I value humanist explanations of the world, so I ‘deny that reductive, scientific explanations are admissible in the case of the inner life of human beings’. This is an unhelpful way of presenting the problem. For a start, I’m not sure what Stangroom means by ‘the inner life’. Is agency, for instance, an aspect of our inner life? My criticism of a mechanistic viewpoint is precisely that it views it as such, ignoring the importance to agency of our existence as social beings.

I’m unsure too what Stangroom means, in this context, by the word ‘admissable’. I have always argued that no areas are out of bounds to scientific inquiry and that there should be no artificial limits to the kinds of questions science should attempt to answer. At the same time, many mechanistic philosophers do hold that the ‘inner life’, in a certain sense, is out of bounds for scientific inquiry. Daniel Dennett, for instance, argues that ‘any such facts as there are about mental events are not among the data of science’. (Consciousness Explained, p. 71). And not just that they are not among the data of science, but that the subjective qualities of metal events do not exist. Dennett writes of ‘phenomenal qualities’ that ‘I am denying that there are any such properties’. (Consciousness Explained, p. 372)

And this brings us to the real problem with a mechanistic viewpoint. It’s not a question of whether science is admissible in the explanations of inner life. It is, rather, the assumption that a physical description of the brain is a sufficient explanation for the phenomena of consciousness and agency. It is an assumption that Jeremy Stangroom certainly seems to make: without it, the claim that a mechanistic science will make consciousness and agency ‘disappear’ makes no sense. But on what basis does one make such an assumption? Certainly, there is nothing in the data of science that compels one to do so. If anyone is introducing ‘non-scientific criteria’ into the discussion, it appears to be Jeremy Stangroom himself.

We certainly don’t make such an assumption in other cases. For example, nobody would suggest (I hope) that ‘democracy’ can be explained simply by the physical descriptions of ballot boxes, the physical act of voting, or the physical state of the brains of those who call themselves democrats. ‘Democracy’ refers not to a physical state of the world but to a set of social relations, political institutions and historical developments. Yet democracy is no more ‘illusory’ than the chair upon which I am sitting or the keyboard upon which I am typing.

When it comes to human behaviour or consciousness, though, there is an insistence that what cannot be understood purely in terms of the physical state of the brain is not ‘real’. Why? Partly because of the belief that not to understand human behaviour in this fashion is to give in to the mysterians. For example, in The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker suggests that the ‘self’ is just a description of a brain process. To say someone is responsible for their actions is to say that they possess a ‘functioning brain system that can respond to public contingencies of punishment’. Moral responsibility resides in certain ‘parts of the brain (primarily in the prefrontal cortex)’ that are able to inhibit violent or criminal behaviour ‘by anticipating how the community would respond to it.’ To invoke the self in any other sense, Pinker suggests, is to reintroduce the ghost into the machine.

Insofar as this is true, it is saying something trivial. Insofar as it is saying anything profound, it is untrue. Since brain processes underlie all thoughts and actions, so the ‘self’ in some sense must be a brain process. But to suggest that the self is simply a brain process is a bit like Margaret Thatcher’s infamous argument that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families’. Individuals and families constitute society. But society has an existence beyond those individuals and families.

Similarly, with selves. We cannot point to a ‘self’ in the way that we can point to a neurone. But that does not mean that neurones have a reality, and selves don’t. As the neurobiologist Joseph le Doux put it in a recent essay in Prospect magazine, ‘My assertion that synapses are the basis of personality does not mean that your personality is determined by synapses; it’s the other way round. Synapses are simply the brain’s way receiving, storing and retrieving our personalities, as determined by all the psychological, cultural and genetic factors.’

Part of the problem here is in the way that we have come to understand ‘naturalism’. Originally, as the concept developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘naturalism’ meant the ability to explain all events and phenomena without recourse to the supernatural and the divine. It came to be understood as a liberation from the dogmas of religion and the conservative social order for which they served as an ideology, as well as a declaration of independence for scientific inquiry into the nature of the world and also into human nature. In this sense I am a fully-fledged card-carrying naturalist – as I assume are all humanists.

In recent decades, though, there has been redefinition of naturalism which is now widely taken to mean, not simply the rejection of supernatural explanations, but the acceptance of the idea that the explanations of natural science suffice to explain all phenomena, not just the phenomena of nature. Naturalism has been reformulated as an all-embracing physicalism. For a naturalist such as Jeremy Stangroom it seems that the only conceptual system in terms of which the world and its processes can be reliably characterised is that of the physical sciences of nature. This is a view that appears to confuse the physical world with the real world. The social world, as I have suggested, is as real as the physical world, but cannot be understood simply in physical terms.

To suggest this is not, as Jeremy Stangroom seems to believe, to give into mysticism. The alternative to mechanism is not mysticism. The distinction I am drawing is between a mechanistic, a mysterian and a materialist view of the world. A mechanistic view sees human beings largely as objects through which nature acts. A mysterian view suggests that there are aspects of human existence not knowable to mere mortals. A materialist view, on the other hand, understands human beings without resort to mystical explanations. But it also sees humans as exceptional because humans, unlike any other beings, possess consciousness and agency. And understanding human consciousness and agency requires us to understand humans as not just as natural, but also as historical and social, beings.

But it’s just this view of humans as social and historical beings – as creatures who can transform themselves and the world around them – that today is in such bad odour. As John Gray puts in Straw Dogs, ‘Those who struggle to change the world’ are merely seeking ‘consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear’. Their ‘faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality’. Like all animals, we’re all going to die, seems to be the argument, so why bother with grand schemes of social change?

We live in a time that is deeply pessimistic about the human condition. For many people, human activity and human reason are themselves the sources of most of the ills of the world. Half a millennium ago, Descartes viewed reason as ‘the noblest thing we can have because it makes us in a certain way equal to God and exempts us from being his subject.’ Today, many view human reason as a tool for destruction rather than betterment. As the biologist David Ehrenfield put it in his emblematically titled book The Arrogance of Humanism, what he objects to is ‘a supreme faith in human reason – its ability to confront and solve the many problems that humans face, its ability to rearrange both the world of Nature and the affairs of men and women so that human life will prosper.’

There is a widespread feeling that every impression that humans make upon the world is for the worse. For many, the attempt to master nature has led to global warming and species depletion. The attempt to master society, many argue, led to Auschwitz and the gulags. The result of all this has been a growth of anti-humanism, of despair about human capacities, a view of human reason and agency as forces for destruction rather than for betterment.

A prime expression of such pessimism is the denigration of the human subject and of human agency. Historically, humanism – a desire to place human beings at the centre of philosophical debate; a view of human reason as a tool through which to understand both the natural and the social world; a conviction that humankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of other humans, through the agency of its own efforts – was the philosophy at the heart of both the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Today, though, such a view is often dismissed as arrogant, naÔve, even irrational.

The irony in this denigration of the human subject is that it is common to both postmodern and mechanistic views. Most advocates of the mechanist viewpoint are clearly, and rightly, hostile to postmodernism, and its deconstruction of reason. Yet mechanism and postmodernism are linked by a common distrust of human subjectivity. Whereas mechanists view the human subject as a physical illusion, postmodernists regard it as a historical construction, a myth foisted by European rationalist culture as part of its attempt to colonise the rest of the world, not just physically but also intellectually.

Daniel Dennett conceives of the self as a ‘Centre of Narrative Gravity’, a web spun out of the words and ideas in our minds. ‘Our tales are spun’, Dennett writes, ‘but for most part we don’t spin them, they spin us.’ Similarly, the postmodern historian Jeffrey Weekes argues that, ‘The individual is constituted in the world of language and symbols which come to dwell in, and constitute, the individual.’

In his comic novel, Nice Work, David Lodge satirises postmodernism in the person of Dr Robyn Penrose (Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge), for whom ‘there is no such thing as the “self”… there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses – the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc.’ And for whom ‘there is no such thing as an author’, because ‘Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts’.

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett cites this passage from Nice Work and suggests that ‘Robyn and I think alike’. ‘We are both’, he writes, ‘fictional characters of a sort, though of a slightly different sort.’ This bizarre love-in between the mechanists and postmodernists is a bit like discovering that the Ayatollah Khomeini had really agreed with Salman Rushdie that magical realism was an appropriate literary form through which to debate the merits of Islam. Both mechanists and postmodernists begin with reasonable premises – on the one hand that the world consists only of physical stuff, on the other that what we know of the world we know through language and culture. Both push their reasonable premise to an unreasonable conclusion – for one that consciousness is illusory, for the other that we can never know reality. Both sides end up in this virtual world because both have abandoned the one thing that attaches all of us to reality – our conscious selves.

Mechanism and postmodernism are like the two heads of a pushme-pullyou, constantly tugging at each other, determined to travel in different directions, never realising that they are stitched together at the waist. And the twine that makes the stitching is the common distrust of human subjectivity, a view of human beings not as subjects capable of acting autonomously but as objects who are simply acted upon, whether by nature or by culture.

Far from there being a conflict between science and humanism, a humanist viewpoint is necessary for us to take science seriously – and science is a supreme expression of humanism. There certainly appears to be a tension between a mechanistic philosophy and a humanistic outlook. By making humans into conscious agents we seem to separate them off from the rest of nature, and hence suggest that the language of natural science cannot fully encompass our humanness. Historically, however, this tension has been a highly creative one, helping develop both a more rational humanism and a science of humanity compelled to address the exceptional character of human nature. The tension only becomes a problem when we attempt to resolve it by assuming either that we cannot understand human beings using reason, or that we can only understand humans mechanistically.

There is an old joke (first told, I think, by Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore) about two men sitting on a park bench. One has a paper bag over his head. ‘Why are you sitting with a paper bag on your head?’, the other asks him. ‘To keep the elephants away’, comes the reply. ‘What elephants?’, asks the first man, looking about him greatly puzzled. ‘I can’t see any elephants.’ ‘Exactly’, says the paper bag man. ‘It’s working brilliantly’.

If you invent a non-existent problem, you can always manufacture an unnecessary solution. So it is with mechanists. There is nothing mystical or unscientific about viewing humans as exceptional, as social and historical beings, not just as biological ones. Nor is it ‘political’ to insist that a physical description of the brain is an insufficient explanation of consciousness and agency. Jeremy can remove the paper bag from his head. There are no elephants (Lysenkoist or otherwise) in the park.

Kenan Malik has a web site here.

In Yichang, in central China, the site of the infamous and globally reviled Three Gorges Project, something strange is happening. After five days travelling along the Yangtze River, your correspondent is beginning to think that in itself, the Three Gorges might not have been such a bad thing after all.

The project – designed primarily to control flooding, improve navigation, and generate power – consists of the world’s largest dam in the middle reaches of the world’s third longest river, and has become something of a cause célèbre, uprooting over a million residents on the banks of the Yangtze and causing untold environmental damage.

Just before our party reached the mountain that is supposed to resemble a prone Chairman Mao Zedong, our attention is drawn to a temple constructed to appease the elements responsible for so much carnage in the waters below. We are forced to admit that nature, and natural conditions, are – for the most part – utterly brutal, and that even as humanity seeks to tame it, as it now has done in the form of a 185 m dam, nature then somehow seeks to wreak revenge in the form of earthquakes and landslides.

This is, of course, philosophically flawed, for we remain a part of nature, the part that has contrived to create a species now capable of controlling and redirecting the brute force of the Yangtze, and potentially putting thousands of years of destruction and devastation to an end.

In 1954, the floods along the Yangtze River killed 30,000 people and left a million homeless. Chairman Mao decided to step up the efforts to build the dam. The fact that his likeness, on the mountain peak, is horizontal, is supposed to indicate that he is at rest, satisfied that his wishes have now been fulfilled. These are not the only superstitions that surround the Three Gorges Project.

Our tour organizers sought to put our minds at rest about the displaced migrants, the endangered artefacts, and the environmental damage caused by the project, but the overwhelming empirical presence of the Dam leads to other concerns, concerns that seem to bring into play all those superstitious notions about breaking the equilibrium of nature, and being forced – by building more dams, more power stations, more embankments – to consider thousands of new ways of restoring it. Throughout the visit, we were shown some of the temples that will either be relocated brick by brick or shored up and protected against the rising tide. Many of them were Taoist in origin, and Taoism teaches us, at least in its purest form, that the more you seek to interfere in nature, the more necessary it becomes to interfere. The more you do, the more you need to do, and the more laws you draft, the more laws you must continue to draft in order to support the first lot. There is something in this theory, but it sometimes rests on rather an archaic notion of what nature is, a notion that might be best described as pre-Nietzschean.

Nietzsche, excoriating the desire of the Stoics to live according to nature, wrote:

O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to this indifference? Is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living – estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited – wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life” how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

Thousands have lived according to nature in the Three Gorges region. Over the past century, 300,000 people were swept to their deaths by floods, and millions have been made destitute. “Indifferent beyond measure,” the Yangtze’s last great binge of terror took place in 1998. The death toll reached 4,000.

The success or failure of the dam will be judged on its ability to control the floods. I wasn’t as concerned about the old relics – the pagodas, the statues, the mausoleums – as some might have been. The human life scattered across the riverbanks seemed more significant. That life is one of pain and hard labour, in a different universe from the one I am used to. I could say that it is humbling, but such comments are always patronizing. Anger is probably a more worthy reaction, as you note the way their lives, and the aspirations therein, are summarily dismissed. This is not itself directly related to the dam, as such, and more to do with the way economic growth strategies in China have been skewed towards the eastern coast, or the way corruption and raw capital have allowed millions to fall by the wayside.

Nevertheless, there were pangs. Sailing towards the first of the Three Gorges you can see how many of the old inscriptions in the now-submerged rock have been gouged out and glued into position higher up along the bank. The difference in coloration is immediately apparent. The effort at preservation seems almost hapless.

Imagine, if you will, the remnants of a old and beautiful church lodged in the brick above a Starbucks logo. Imagine an ancient Roman ruin desecrated by the Golden Arches.

I recall, too, the spectacular vision of the Lesser Three Gorges, with the river’s spray hovering in the near distance, and the waters green with the imprint of the surrounding forest. “Ah, but you should have seen it before the water level rose from 2 m to 30 m,” said some of my travelling companions.

But imagine, if you can, the unspoilt scenery that might have existed in the city you are now living in. Imagine any other victim of economic progress in the West – the razed forests, the swarthy herdsmen, maybe the odd flock of dodos – and try to calculate the damage we have done to earn our way of life. “Natural beauty” is an awesome quality, especially for those of us who have been brought up in cities. Something instinctive tells us that, despite our mod-cons, our tap water and our TVs, our pavements and our power stations, something has gone wrong somewhere, that we took the wrong turning out of the jungle and are somehow paying the price. Somehow, we are all Prometheus waiting for the wrath of the Gods.

Those having to live in the vast majority of the world’s farming communities seem to have a different impression, however. Below one of the temples that have been constructed on the high hills along the Yangtze, a gang of withered little men with ropes of muscle on their arms and legs offer to carry my bloated Western body up to the top for just over a dollar, prompting a minor ethical dilemma: do we accept, and reinforce all the negative imagery of foreign imperialists exploiting the Chinese peasantry, or do we reject, and deprive him of a living?

Whatever. For them, it is difficult to get sentimental about the back-breaking labour and the pitiful annual income. And nor is it all that easy to get nostalgic in a puerile Lawrencian way about the violence of nature when a bloody great flood has just demolished your house and soiled your crops.

The fact that conservationists seek to preserve ways of life that need to be swept away – slums, whether they date from the Qing Dynasty or the Great Leap Forward, are still slums – seems to miss the point entirely. The fact that people are being driven out of subsistence farming and forced to participate in the urban spread is painful, but does not mean that their previous ways of life are worth keeping.

The Three Gorges Dam can be criticized, but not because it is devastating the natural balance in the region: the Yangtze itself has already done far too much of that.

For a free PDF copy of the the author’s five part Interfax-China special report on the Three Gorges, e-mail him at davidstanway@interfax.cn.

It’s not easy to write critically about humanism from a secular perspective.
The problem has to do with the fluid nature of the concept "humanism".
It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement about its constituent
elements. As a result, to criticise humanism is to run the risk of being accused
of a "straw-man" fallacy; that is, the fallacy of misrepresenting
a position or argument in order to make it easier to criticise. It is easy to
see how this might happen. Humanism isn’t any one particular thing. If
a good argument can be made against any one of the things, amongst others,
that it might be, then likely you’ll find that everyone disavows that
particular thing. And then you’ve got a straw-man. It doesn’t take too many
repetitions of this pattern of criticism and disavowal before you end up with
humanism weakly specified as a kind of rationally inclined, human centred, atheism
(or agnosticism).

The problem here for the secular critic of humanism is that there doesn’t seem
to be much left in this conception to be construed as objectionable. It is possible
to imagine a secularist being upset by such things as humanist funerals, but
surely not by the thought that humanism is rationally inclined, atheistic and
human centred? The humanist church, notwithstanding its godlessness, seems broad,
inclusive and inoffensive.

However, things are not quite this straightforward. To understand why, it will
help to consider briefly, for reasons that will become clear later, the rise
of "Lysenkoism" in the Soviet Union in the middle part of the twentieth
century. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, came to prominence as the proponent
of a theory of heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism. The
details of this theory need not concern us, except to note that it was "Larmarckist"
in its contention that it is possible for organisms to inherit acquired characteristics.
Lysenkoism dominated Soviet genetics in the 1940s. This was despite its being
wrong and the fact that the principles of Mendelianism – the correct theory
of heredity – were well understood by then. It came to dominate because it fitted
so nicely with Soviet ideology. Particularly, the idea that acquired characteristics
could be inherited held out the promise of the perfectibility of mankind. So
science followed ideology, and in the Soviet Union, the consequences, certainly
for many of the scientists involved and arguably also for its agriculture, were
disastrous.

What’s this got to do with humanism? At first sight, nothing at all. After
all, a tenet of humanism that probably everybody agrees on is that truth claims
must be subject to rational scrutiny and investigation. However, then the thought
occurs, what happens if science suggests hypotheses that are unpalatable from
a humanist perspective? Part of the reason that Lysenkoism gained official support
in the Soviet Union was because the Mendelian approach to genetics was not thought
to be consistent with Engels’s ideas about dialectical materialism. So are humanists
immune to this kind of tendency to select between scientific theories on the
basis of ideology rather than the balance of evidence?

A way into thinking about this question is to consider some of the objections
that might be levelled against it. Two in particular spring to mind. First of
all, it might be objected that it isn’t possible to draw conclusions about humanism
as a set of ideas solely on the basis of the actions or beliefs of individual
humanists. So what if some humanists lack impartiality? Nobody is naïve
enough to claim that all humanists are perfectly consistent. However, this objection
is weak. If nothing else, the actions of individual humanists tell us something
about the practice of humanism. But more than this, it just isn’t obvious that
one cannot learn anything about a set of ideas by looking at how well its adherents
live up to them. If it does turn out that there is a tendency for humanists
to judge the merits of scientific theories in terms of non-scientific criteria
then this might well be indicative of some tension within humanism.

The second objection is related to this thought. If humanists do indeed bring
non-scientific criteria to bear when judging scientific theories, it might be
objected that they do not do so in the name of humanism. If humanism is nothing
more than a rational secularism, then there isn’t any extra humanist ingredient
against which scientific theories can be judged. However, the difficulty
with this objection is precisely that it only works by setting up an equivalence
between humanism and rational secularism. It is true that some people see humanism
this way, but many people do not.

What then is this possible extra ingredient, properly humanist, against which
the merits of scientific theories might be judged? The answer is that it is
the constellation of ideas which constitutes the human-centred aspect of humanism.
These ideas include: that human beings are free, rational agents; that they
are, in various ways, the source of morality; that human dignity and flourishing
are important; and that there are significant common bonds between people, which
unite them across biological, social and geographical boundaries. These ideas
– and variations on them – are espoused in numerous humanist writings (just
type ‘humanism’ into Google – and read at your leisure). However, the claim
is not that all humanists accept all these ideas. It is rather
that they are representative of a discernible and significant thread in humanist
thought. Or, more strongly, it is at least arguable that if a person has no
sympathy at all with these kinds of ideas, then they are not a humanist. As
Kurtz and Wilson put it, in their Humanist Manifesto II: "Views
that merely reject theism are not equivalent to humanism. They lack commitment
to the positive belief in the possibilities of human progress and to the values
central to it."

What evidence is there then that these kinds of ideas might be involved in
the judgements that humanists make about scientific theories? Let’s take, as
an example, the article by Kenan Malik, "Materialism, Mechanism and the
Human Mind", which appeared in the Autumn 2001 edition of New Humanist
magazine. In this article, Malik argues that human beings are "exceptional"
in that they "cannot be understood solely as natural beings". In pursuing
his argument, Malik attacks "mechanistic" explanations, which reduce
human beings, and the human mind, to the equivalent of sophisticated machines.
He argues that this view is flawed in that it fails to recognise that humans
are conscious, capable of purpose and agency. According to Malik, human beings
are, in a sense, outside nature, able to work out how to overcome the constraints
of biological and physical laws. In his words: "Our evolutionary heritage
certainly shapes the way that humans approach the world. But it does not limit
it, as it does for all other animals."

It is quite hard to make sense of this argument. For starters, the idea that
the evolutionary heritage of human beings does not limit the way we approach
the world is highly questionable. For example, it’s hard to see how we can rule
out the possibility that had our brains evolved differently, then puzzles that
presently seem intractable (for example, the fact that there seems to be something that
it is like to be a human being) would have long ago been solved.

But, more significantly, the whole idea that human beings are somehow outside
nature is slightly odd. It seems here to amount to the claim that things like
consciousness, agency and free will are real – though non-physical – and that
they are, in principle, beyond scientific, or at least mechanistic, explanation.
But the trouble is that Malik, in this article at least, does not argue for
this position. He merely repeats what everybody already knows – that it certainly
seems that we all have inner lives (and everything that entails), and it’s a
bit of a puzzle.

So what’s at stake here? Why not draw less hard and fast conclusions about
the proper domain of scientific explanation? Perhaps part of the story has to
do with the spectre of anti-humanism, which seems to be in the background of
all scientific attempts to get to grips with the stuff of human existence. How
this might be so can be illustrated by briefly considering Benjamin Libet’s
experiments, from the 1960s, on readiness potential. An RP is an electrical
change in the brain that precedes a conscious human act – such as waggling a
finger. Libet’s discovery was that if volunteers are asked to waggle their finger
within a 30 second time-frame, the RP that accompanies the waggling begins some
300 to 400 milliseconds before the human subject reports that they have
become aware of their intention to waggle the finger. This is disturbing, because,
as Libet puts it, the "initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to
begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he
wants to act!"

The anti-humanist threat is obvious. If our conscious acts are unconsciously
initiated, then what of free-will and agency? Perhaps we are just sophisticated
machines after all. And if we are, what does this mean, for example, for the
idea that human beings are the source of morality? It must be said that Libet’s
work is not uncontroversial, and he himself does not draw particularly radical
conclusions. However, in an important sense, this is not the point. Rather,
the point is that science is in the business of providing reductive, causal
explanations of the phenomena that it investigates. Consequently, when it turns
its gaze to the stuff of the inner life of human beings – consciousness, agency,
will, sensation, etc. – there is the possibility that these things will turn
out just to be physical, or indeed that, in one way or another, they will disappear
completely.

Malik seems to recognise this threat when he argues that the attempt to understand
human beings in mechanistic terms is motivated by an anti-humanism. But his
solution, to deny that reductive, scientific explanations are admissible in
the case of the inner life of human beings, is not yet at least rationally justified.
It is too early to rule out on a priori or empirical grounds the possibility
that science will be as successful in this domain as it is in others. The brain
is rapidly giving up its secrets to neuroscientists and there are philosophical
theories available – for example, eliminative materialism and epiphenomenalism
– which offer a way of dealing with issues of consciousness without denying
the explanatory power of a reductive, physicalist approach. To preclude the
possibility that science might be successful in this area, on the grounds that
it results in theories that are counter-intuitive, is bad science and bad philosophy.

The important point is that Malik is grappling with a tension that lies right
at the heart of humanism. If a person is serious about science then they cannot,
without fear of contradiction, embrace a doctrine which requires, as humanism
might, that human beings have free will or that the stuff of consciousness is
non-physical and causally efficacious. To escape the possibility of contradiction
by asserting the truth of the kind of science or philosophy which is, in principle,
anti-reductionist in its approach to humans is to allow ideology to govern scientific
and philosophical commitments.

In an endnote in his book, The Selfish Gene (2nd Edition), Richard Dawkins
writes: "If…you are not religious, then face up to the following question.
What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated
one?" It may be that complicated robots have consciousness, free will and
agency; that is, that they have the things which are important to many humanists.
Unfortunately, it may also be that they do not, and to deny this possibility
requires a leap of faith. What this means is that it is not rationally justified
to assert the truth of the constellation of beliefs which constitutes the human-centred
aspect of humanism. Rather, one is forced to concur with Kurtz and Wilson’s
more general verdict on humanist affirmations, that they are "but an expression
of a living and growing faith."

Jeremy Stangroom is New Media editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine.

The critics of modern life never cease to amaze us. Everyday there is a new
crisis of modernity that threatens our continued existence. Nowhere is this
more evident than in agriculture. We’re told that the use of pesticides is generating
soaring cancer rates, yet there is nothing in the statistics which confirms
this alarmist rhetoric. It is claimed that the Green Revolution led to a decline
in vegetable production. Never mind that in most areas where there were significant
advances in the production of modern grain varieties, there were also the largest
increases in non-grain consumption; and that the world’s population is eating
a more diverse diet than ever before. And also, never mind that without the
yield increases in Green Revolution grains, there simply would not be any land
left for other crops (or for wildlife and habitat conservation), as farmers
would plant every bit of land available with the crops that produced the highest
yield of calories per unit of land.

Critics resort to unbounded imagination when the facts of the Green Revolution
don’t support their case: they now claim that increased production is achieved
at the expense of the nutritional value of the crop we consumed in the past.
One activist, Alex Wijeratna of ActionAid, generalizes the nutritional
attack against the Green Revolution by claiming that: “Two billion people now
have diets less diverse than 30 years ago. The Green Revolution stripped out
the micro nutrients and encouraged monocropping” (Wrong 2000). Where he gets
his evidence for this assertion is not mentioned, which is appropriate since
there isn’t any. The number of people deemed to be in hunger (i.e. as having
less than adequate nutrition) as measured by every reputable international agency
has been falling steadily over the last decades, even as the world population
is increasing. Despite this, somehow there has been an otherwise undetected
two billion increase in the number suffering from malnutrition – that is to
say, not detected by those who lack an anti-technology agenda that they wish
to promote. How then do we explain the fact that in the areas in which the Green
Revolution technologies have most effectively taken hold, there have been spectacular
decreases in infant mortality, and increases in life expectancies and disability
adjusted lifeyears (DALYs), resulting from a variety of factors including improved
nutrition.

Anyone who has traveled in Asia over the last decades cannot have failed to
notice the increases in height not only across generations but often within
them. When one observes as I have, a consistent pattern where younger children
are taller than their older siblings, it indicates that there was a significant
improvement in the family diet between the birth of the two children which led
to the increased height of the younger child. (A note of clarification: taller
does not necessarily mean healthier within a group, particularly when conditions
of nutrition and illness are comparable. Taller is very definitely an indicator
of nutrition and overall health when it is a measure of the change in the average
height of a group through time.) Nowhere has this been more evident than in
China. The particularly dramatic increase in height in the population of China
over the decade and a half following the Deng Xiaoping-led reforms is documented
in an article titled – “Richer and Taller: Stature and Living Standards in China,
1979-1995” (Morgan 2000). The introduction of the “responsibility” system in
agriculture in China in the late 1970s led to China’s becoming the world’s leading
wheat producer by the early 1980s. It quickly yielded this position as farmers
found it more profitable to turn to vegetable and other production to satisfy
the increased demands of an economically better-off population and of international
trade. China could do this because it could meet its wheat needs by importing
from areas of monoculture production.

The dangers of monoculture?

The “dangers” of monoculture prompted a Newsweek cover story (June 9,
2003). Once again we are told that there is a crisis in agriculture because
crop monocultures are failing to prevent pests and disease. The irony of this
claim is that just when much of the world has seen the elimination of the devastating
famines from crop losses that were once the scourge of humankind, the shrill
cry against the agricultural system that has made this possible grows ever louder.
That only Africa, which was tragically passed over by the Green Revolution,
has experienced near total crop losses is truly the exception that proves the
rule of the benefits that modern agronomy brings to crop stability. Polycultures
in African agriculture have not prevented the periodic outbreak of famine. Needless
to say, the products of monocultures are what provide the famine relief.

Apparently the lead reporter on the Newsweek story, Matt Margolis, does
not find it strange that critics continually hark back to the southern corn-leaf
blight in the U.S. in 1970, since they cannot come up with any comparable loss
in the last half century in corn or wheat or rice, the staples which provide
about two-thirds of the world’s food production. The $1 billion in losses, amounting
to about 15 to 25% of the crop, was substantial, but these loses should be considered
against the fact that corn yields had more than doubled over the previous two
decades, and that the crop year following the blight was one of record yields.
When not citing the corn blight, the critics go back more than 150 years to
the Irish potato famine.

Monoculture and “nature”

There remain those who consider monoculture to be unnatural, as if anything
involving agriculture could be totally unnatural or anything involving humans
could be totally natural (whatever that may mean). Ironically, it can be argued
that humans developed agriculture in what could well be considered an era of
“monocultures.” In the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, “climatic
changes in seasonal regimes decreased diversity, increased zonation of plant
communities, and caused a shift in net antiherbivory defense strategies” (Guthrie
1984, 260). The ecological richness of late Pleistocene in many of the areas
where humans were first to develop agriculture, gave way to “relative ecological
homogeneity during the succeeding Holocene” (Guilday 1984, 251).

The warming climate meant that areas in many latitudes began once again to
experience spring thaws and run-off, which frequently caused erosion. These
areas were often colonized by single strands of hardy weeds with nutrient rich
seeds whose botanical weediness required aerated soils which the erosion created.
The fact that there were monodominant stands of these grasses meant that humans
could form small clusters of relatively permanent habitation as they regularly
harvested nature’s monoculture seed crop. In many respects, this close association
with the plant precursors to wheat meant that humans were domesticating the
crop even before agriculture, as the periodic harvesting of the seeds gave an
evolutionary advantage to those seeds that adhered most closely to the stalk.
It allowed for the development of a variety of technologies for harvesting and
utilizing the crop. And it gave so many points of observation of the plant cycle
that by the time agriculture became necessary, humans already possessed its
basic instruments and knowledge.

Nobody is going to start the laborious process of cropping a plant if it is
freely available in the environment, so it is likely that humans had the ability
to engage in agriculture before they took the trouble to engage in it. The intensive
harvesting of the monodominant crop led to population increase, and eventually
some of the population had to move into other areas. They took their “domesticated”
seeds, their technology and their knowledge with them. The early agricultural
staples originated as monodominant strands in harsh or marginal conditions.
Storing energy underground in tubers or producing energy rich seeds for wide
dispersal are competitive survival mechanisms for plants in marginal growing
conditions, and became a source of food for humans. One would hesitate to go
so far as to argue that agriculture would not have occurred had it not been
for nature’s monoculture, but it would seem that it was clearly a major contributing
factor.

Moving “domesticated crops” out of their harsh original environments into ones
with richer, wetter soils allowed them to thrive. In time, civilization emerged,
but agriculture needed considerable investment in labor, and it required the
crops to be protected because they had been moved into environments replete
with competitors. The necessity for crop protection emerged with agriculture
not because of any practice of monoculture but because crops were now being
grown in areas outside where they originated. And contrary to “organic” agriculture
mythology, crops have had to be protected ever since agriculture got started,
frequently with very highly toxic “all-natural” compounds such as various forms
of arsenic.

Ecological stability and lack of diversity

Plant breeding, synthetic fertilizers and irrigation are a part of the complex
of agronomy that has allowed humans to bring agriculture back into harsh agroclimatic
spheres which were dominated by a very narrow array of vegetation. The agriculture
of the high plains of western North America typifies the monoculture that critics
deem to be in “crisis.” But rather than replacing diverse agricultural or diverse
natural systems, modern agriculture on the High or Great Plains has probably
added to the diversity.

It would be hard to imagine an area less diverse than the Great Plains during
the Holocene. If one had taken a journey of several thousand miles, from the
Great Plains in the heart of what is now West Texas north into modern Canada,
for half that distance one could have walked every step of the way (except to
cross rivers and creeks), on just two different species of Great Plains short
grass, and then the rest of the way into the Prairie Province of Canada on two
other varieties of short grass (Bailey 1976 and Küchler 1966). Even today,
“productive grasslands are usually lower in plant diversity than less fertile
ones” (Moore 2003, see also Grime 2001). This was a condition that lasted for
more than ten thousand years, until the arrival of the settlers with European
agriculture. It replaced a very rich and diverse ecosystem that crashed with
the climatic change of the late Pleistocene. Diverse ecosystems are no more
or less a protection against population crashes brought about by major climatic
changes than are mono or duodominant systems.

As the ecological mosaic shifted “from plaids to stripes,” creating zones of
greatly reduced plant species diversity, the animal life that the habitat supported
was similarly transformed. “As the plant communities became more zoned, there
were fewer optimal ‘plaid’ mixtures of plants for the species requiring nutritional
diversity in their diet” (Guthrie 1984, 282). This opened a niche for the dominance
of “large ruminants such as bison” which can “flourish on a monotonous summer
range of just a few plant species” because of the ability of their “rumen to
synthesize a balanced diet of amino acids, fatty acids and vitamins” (Guthrie
1984, 277). In addition, the bison ranged from the Eastern Woodlands, where
they could be found in small numbers in clearings, to more mountainous areas
west of the Great Plains. As a consequence, they would have come in contact
with a vast array of other animals at the periphery of their habitat, which
conceivably could have transferred a disease contagion to the great herds of
the plains. That this ecosystem lasted ten thousand years would indicate that
diversity is but one of many factors of sustainability in natural and in human
created ecosystems.

While the short grass of the Great Plains was creating an ecological niche
for a ruminant like the Bison, the taller grasses of Eurasia allowed for more
diverse animal life including horses and humans. “Grass seeds which tend to
be destroyed in the rumen composting process are usually isolated high on the
undigestible coarse stems of mature plants. This coarse stem is avoided by most
ruminants because it clogs the rumen with relatively undigestible fiber.” Horses
feed on the grass seeds while the coarse stem passes “quickly through the gastrointestinal
tract in essentially undigested form. At the same time, horses can ingest, masticate,
and digest the seeds which are high in nutrient quality and easily assimilated”
(Guthrie 1984, 285).

In contrast to the gorilla with a large hind gut which can hold and extract
what little nutrient fibrous vegetable matter has, humans, like horses, pass
the fiber quickly, utilizing very little of its nutrient. Thus today a diet
high in fiber (relative to our current diets) facilitates moving food more quickly
through the intestines with a variety of benefits including absorption of fewer
plant toxins. However, such a digestive system, combined with an energy demanding
brain, requires a nutritionally energetically-dense diet of which grass seeds
were to become a major component (DeGregori 2001, 77-81). The poor in the world
today may get the benefits of a high fiber diet, but unfortunately this is more
than offset by being nutritionally deficient. “Hunger” is not necessarily a
function of a quantitative lack of food but of its qualitative deficiencies.
In fact, the poor may well be eating more and passing larger quantities of it
as waste than those on richer diets. According to Feachem, the daily per capita
production of human waste is about 100 to 200 grams of solid waste in developed
countries compared 130 to 520 grams in developing countries (Feachem 1983, 4).

Monoculture: the cause of crop losses?

It is interesting to note that the 1970s corn blight resulted from an attempt
to introduce an element of diversity to the corn plant. In the corn blight case,
“susceptibility to blight is conditioned by the mitochondrial genome” (Parrott).

Maize with one genotype of mitochondria, called T cytoplasm (Texas male sterile),
turned out to be susceptible to the blight fungus. Prior to the introduction
of the T cytoplasm, all the maize had N (normal) cytoplasm. In this case,
switching from one cytoplasm genotype grown throughout the country to two
cytoplasm genotypes is what allowed the disease to develop: increased cytoplasmic
diversity allowed disease to develop (Parrot 2003).

Wayne Parrott adds: “Needless to say, we are back to the one cytoplasm which
has been stable for centuries.” From the first work on wheat in Mexico, it was
clear that the yield increases of the Green Revolution depended both on increases
in plant production and on decreases in crop losses. Since then, some of the
most important and widely planted high-yielding varieties (HYVs) were bred from
a multiplicity of varieties from different countries, creating varieties that
were multiple-disease resistant, and that were also better able to withstand
other forms of stress.

While attempting to build more resistance into maize actually made it more
susceptible to corn blight, many of the wheat and rice varieties of the Green
Revolution have successfully built in multiple resistances for a variety of
forms of stress including disease (Rosegrant and Hazell 2000, 311-312). For
both wheat and rice “components of genetic diversity other than spatial diversity
have improved over time.” This includes:

“temporal diversity (average age and rate of replacement of cultivars); polygenic
diversity (the pyramiding of multiple genes for resistance to provide longer
lasting protection from pathogens); and pedigree complexity (the number landraces,
pureline selections, and mutants that are ancestors of a released variety)”
(Rosegrant and Hazell 2000, 311-312).

The argument that the Green Revolution crops have led to a diminution of genetic
diversity, with a potential for a disease or pest infestation engendering a
global crop loss catastrophe, is taken as axiomatic in many circles as one more
threat that modern science imposes upon us. In fact, there is a sizeable and
growing body of solidly based, scientific, peer-reviewed research that finds
the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom (CIMMYT 1996, Evenson and Gollin
1994 & 1997, Gollin and Smale 1998, Rice et al. 1998, Smale 1997 & 1998,
Smale et al. 1996 & 2002 and Wood and Lenné, 1999). Findings for
wheat for example, “suggest that yield stability, resistance to rusts, pedigree
complexity, and the number of modern cultivars in farmers’ fields have all increased
since the early years of the Green Revolution” (Smale and McBride 1996).

The conclusion that the “trends in genetic diversity of cereal crops are mainly
positive” is warranted by the evidence. Moreover, this diversity does more than
“just protect against large downside risk for yields.” It was “generated primarily
as a byproduct to breeding for yield and quality improvement and provides a
pool of genetic resources for future yield growth.” Consequently, the “threat
of unforeseen, widespread, and catastrophic yield declines striking as the result
of a narrow genetic base must be gauged against this reality” (Rosegrant and
Hazell 2000, 312).

Most critics do not seem to realize that the Green Revolution was not a one-shot
endeavor for wheat and rice, but an ongoing process of research for new varieties
and improved agricultural practices. There is an international network of growers,
extension agents, local, regional, national and international research stations,
often linked by satellite, that has successfully responded to disease outbreaks
which in earlier times could well have resulted in a global crisis. Historically,
the farmer had access to only a limited number of local varieties of seeds.
Today, should there be a disease or other cropping problem, the farmer can be
the beneficiary of a new variety drawn from seed bank accessions that number
into the hundreds of thousands for major crops like rice. With transgenic technology,
the options for the cultivators are becoming vastly greater. Monoculture today
is in fact not only consistent with an incredible diversity of means for crop
protection, it is the sine qua non for them, because it is not possible
to have such resources for all the less widely planted crops.

In a world of 6 billion people, with over 2 billion of them in agriculture,
it is not difficult to cherry-pick instances of major crop disease outbreaks,
but the issue is how representative are these examples, and what should our
response to them be? Too often, narratives such as that in Newsweek are
used to condemn the Green Revolution, which has increased food production by
2.7 times on about the same land under cultivation, accommodating a doubling
of the population over the last 40 years, while creating more stable food production
in areas that have been historically most prone to crop failures and famine.

Monoculture and crop protection

Even protected plants produce some chemical defenses, though fewer than the
same plant unprotected. Those plants that have survived in nature have done
so because of the successful chemical and other defenses they have evolved.
Domesticated plants that have long been removed from the habitat of their origin
and the predators therein, often lose the ability to produce specific chemical
and other defenses, since the defenses would not have any survival value and
would likely be wasteful of energy. This explains why farmers and plant breeders
seek plants from the original habitat for crossbreeding for resistance, when
a new disease or predator invades their domain. Given this process of developing
resistance, followed by new forms of attack, followed by new resistance and
new means of attack, in a seemingly never-ending process, it is understandable
that with human intervention in the form of domestication, there is the same
process of chemical or biological defense against insects and micro-organisms,
followed by the evolution of means of overcoming these defenses in an ongoing
process. Critics of modern agronomy, in recognizing this process, offer a perverse
form of Luddite logic in concluding that no defense should ever have been tried
since the insects or micro-organisms would eventually evolve means of overcoming
them. How we would be better off by never having tried to protect the crop is
never fully explained.

Contrary to the doomsayers, some of the modern commercial plant varieties which
have had resistance genes bred into them have maintained this resistance for
long periods of time – up to 50 years in some cases – and are still functioning
well.

“In the United States, the T gene in barley has held up against stem rust
for over 50 years; similarly, in wheat the Hope gene has kept stem rust in
check for over 40 years and the LR34 gene has limited leaf rust for more than
20 years” (Sanders 2001).

To Sanders, “multiple-gene resistance and other techniques are preferable when
they are available” but we “use what we have if it works, and we anticipate
breakdowns” (Sanders 2001). Not only is this pragmatic process of breeding-in
plant protection vital for agriculture; there is no alternative to using a variety
of modern crop protection strategies.

Biotechnology, monoculture and crop protection

Modern biotechnology has given us new means of crop protection. As would be
expected, some of the earliest work has been done on the most widely grown crops
such as corn or soybeans which are often grown as monocultures. The most famous
and controversial is the splicing of a gene from the bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt) into corn to produce a plant resistant to the corn borer. When two research
reports and a News of the Week article on the development of resistance
to the Bt toxin were posted online in Science (August 2001), anti-biotechnology
groups almost instantly picked on the recognition of Bt resistance and were
online with it in their campaign against genetically modified food before most
subscribers even had the hard copy in hand. The online postings were quickly
followed by news stories strikingly similar to the anti-GM postings. A close
examination of the articles (or even a cursory one) would have indicated that
an understanding of them would not advance the cause of those against the use
of biotechnology in agriculture.

First, the Bt “resistant strains of at least 11 insect species have been documented
in the laboratory” while only “Bt resistant variants of the diamondback moth
have been identified in the field” (Griffitts et al. 2001). Checking the article
footnotes for resistant strains found in the field indicates that they occurred
before 1994, the date of the cited article, which was also before the first
Bt modified varieties were released (Griffitts et al. 2001). In fact, resistance
to live Bt spray by the Diamondback moths emerged in the field as early as 1989
(Palumbi 2001). “Some populations of diamondback moths, a devastating pest of
cabbage and related crops, are no longer bothered by sprays of Bt bacteria used
by organic farmers” (Stokstad 2001). In other words, the use of the live Bacillus
has the same potential of creating resistant strains as does the use of the
toxin engineered into the plant, though obviously more extensive use of the
Bt toxin in any form will likely accelerate the development of this resistance.
But note again, the only resistant strains that were actually found in fields,
were found in those involving “organic” agriculture.

Those in the environmental movement who oppose the patenting of life forms
somehow believe that “organic” farmers have an exclusive absolute property right
to use and prevent others from using not only the live Bacillus but also the
protein toxin that it produces. The three articles in Science reveal
a critical difference between the use of science in agriculture and those who
would favor some other method. Modern agronomy, monoculture or otherwise, provides
a variety of strategies for agriculturalists to employ, in addition to Bt, such
as chemical pesticides and refuges to maintain a population of insects that
do not develop a resistance to the Bt toxin. The articles demonstrate that modern
biotechnology provides the ability to identify and monitor “resistance allele
frequencies in field populations,” so that farmers will have a “direct test
of whether the highdose/refuge strategy is succeeding.” This “may allow enough
time for the strategy to be adjusted to reverse the increase” if the existing
strategy “starts to fail” (Gahan et al. 2001, see also Ferre and Van Rie, 2002).
The articles indicated that insects were evolving defensive mechanisms which
presented a challenge to create new strategies to combat them.

Those who read the online environmentalist postings would never have surmised
that the authors of one of the articles were defining ways of facilitating the
long-term use and expected benefits of Bt engineered crops. This is clear in
the following concluding reference to “the opportunity to make informed modifications
to a strategy that could sustain the use of Bt transgenics and prolong their
environmental benefits of reducing dependency on conventional insecticides”
(Gahan et al. 2001). Once again note that thus far, the greatest success in
bioengineered crops has been in those identified as monoculture, though other
crops have also been engineered and in time many other crops will be improved
by this technology.

Those who oppose all uses of biotechnology in agriculture, deeming it to be
inherently evil, lack any realistic options to counter the growth of resistance
to live Bt spray. Biotechnology and agronomy, like all scientific inquiry, are
processes of inquiry (the scientific method) and problem solving. They are in
search of best solutions to problems, not ultimate solutions. In some cases,
such as that of live Bt spray and the T gene in Barley, the solution works for
a long time. In others, the time frame is much shorter. The critical difference
between science and the presumed alternatives is that science has a way of moving
forward to find solutions and even to anticipate a need for them (Mokyr 2002,
38). From the way that the opponents of Bt corn have been characterizing its
threat to “organic” farmers, one might surmise that the “organic” farmers could
continue using live Bt spray in perpetuity were it not for the intrusion of
the bioengineered Bt serpent into their Edenic preserve.

Specialization in nature, like other forms of specialization, limits the options
of the organism but gives it an advantage in exploiting the environment to which
it has adapted. A plant or insect subject to attack by a specific insect or
parasite will tend to develop resistance to it. In the “struggle for survival”
in nature, the emergence of a trait that improves the ability to resist predation
or to prey on others, will spread through the species, becoming dominant.

Biotechnology and monoculture: future possibilities

Plant biotechnology is not simply a luxury but increasingly a necessity. Once
again, the crops that are rightly drawing the most attention are those like
rice which are widely cultivated, often in a regimen defined as monoculture.
Though rice yields have tripled over the last 30 years, we are now “fast approaching
a theoretical limit set by the crop’s efficiency in harvesting sunlight and
using its energy to make carbohydrates” (Surridge 2002, 576). According to John
Sheehy, plant ecologist at IRRI, “the only way to increase yields and reduce
the use of nitrogen fertilizers is to increase photosynthetic efficiency” (quoted
in Surridge 2002, 577). Plant evolution has shown us an improved pathway for
photosynthesis.

On at least 30 separate occasions, different plant lineages have evolved
to use the Sun’s energy more efficiently, making sugars in a two stage process
known as C4 photosynthesis (Surridge 2002, 578).

Surridge adds:

About 10 million years ago, falling concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere gave plants using C4 photosynthesis an important selective advantage.
The ancestors of maize were among these plants (Surridge 2002, 578).

Conventional C3 photosynthesis is used by rice, wheat and most other cereals.
Simply stated, the work to transform stable C3 crops to C4 is going ahead with
a major monoculture crop, as this is a crop which feeds billions of people and
whose improvement will feed hundreds of millions more. The need in agricultural
plant breeding is for a variety of different types of research technologies,
including biotechnology as well as the technologies of longer standing which
have brought us to where we are today (Powell 2002 and Terada et al. 2002).
The sequencing of the genome of two varieties of rice will be an important new
tool in creating rice varieties with genes that express the C4 enzyme (Ronald
and Leung 2002, Goff et al. 2002 and Yu et al. 2002). It is also likely to provide
valuable insights for work on wheat, maize and other grains which, along with
rice, provide two-thirds of the world’s calories (Cantrel and Reeves 2002, and
Serageldin 2002). Biotechnology engineering in iron-rich rice is likely to be
an important factor in fighting iron deficiency anemia which affects about 30%
of the world’s population, mostly women, and is the most important nutritional
deficiency (Lucca et al. 2002).

Improving the photosynthetic efficiency of rice has the potential both of increasing
its nutritional value and enhancing its ability to withstand environmental stress.
The harnessing of solar

energy by photosynthesis depends on a safety valve that effectively eliminates
hazardous excess energy and prevents oxidative damage to the plant cells.
Many of the compounds that protect plant cells also protect human cells. Improving
plant resistance to stress may thus have the beneficial side effect of also
improving the nutritional quality of plants in the human diet. The pathways
that synthesize these compounds are becoming amenable to genetic manipulation,
which may yield benefits as widespread as improved plant stress tolerance
and improved human physical and mental health (Demmig-Adams and Adams 2002).

Demmig-Adams and Adams add that things like vitamins,

antioxidants, and phytochemicals are not mutually exclusive. Major groups
of phytochemicals (produced by photosynthetic organisms) include isoprenoids,
phenolic compounds, sulfur compounds, and essential fatty acids. … Enhancing
the photosynthesizers’ own protective systems may also improve the nutritional
quality of foods, because fundamental cellular signaling processes and protective
mechanisms are highly conserved (Demmig-Adams and Adams 2002).

Photosynthesis involves “collection of solar energy and its efficient conversion
into chemical energy,” a process susceptible “to damage by any excess solar
energy.” Because of the “parallel functions of antioxidants in plants and humans,
new mechanistic hypotheses should incorporate information from both plant physiology
and human physiology” (Demmig-Adams and Adams 2002).

Protecting photosynthesis in the face of environmental stress as well as
protecting human health against environmental or pathological stress requires
improved understanding of molecular functions and the intersection between
stress, disease, and physiology for both plants and humans (Demmig-Adams and
Adams 2002).

Informed, intelligent criticism is essential to keep agricultural research
operating to the benefit all of humankind. Opposition based on clever slogans
and misinformation can drown out the voices of those with legitimate concerns,
who might be hesitant to speak out, for fear of being identified with those
whose knowledge and agenda is suspect. Critics of modern agronomy – biotechnology
and monoculture – would gain greater credibility if they were better informed
and could demonstrate substantial experience in helping to feed people.

To critique or not to critique

One would not wish to stifle criticism by demanding that every critic provide
a responsible alternative before voicing concerns. This is particularly true
when the criticism is intended to be constructive, seeking to bring improvement
to an ongoing process. But when the criticism reaches the level of that against
modern agriculture and the critics are actively seeking radical if not complete
transformation of it, then we have the right if not the duty to demand that
they state how they propose that we feed the world’s population. If they speak
about diversifying the crop production, we have a right to ask what crops they
going to take out of production to free up the land for greater diversity of
production, and who will supply the added labor for a more complex system.

This last question is vitally important for those opposed to Vitamin A enhanced
rice who blandly state the need for greater crop diversity. Fine! Very fine
in fact! Who is opposed to the families of poor subsistence rice farmers eating
more mangoes and fruits and vegetables of various kinds, and even some meat
or fish? Do the critics really believe that the poor families need their activist
saviors to tell them that such dietary diversity would be nutritionally beneficial
as well as desirable in every other way? If the critics have ways of bringing
about this changed pattern of cropping, why don’t they simply do it, and stop
wasting their time attacking a system that by their reckoning is a failure?
If there are ways of doing agriculture that require fewer inputs but provide
the same if not greater yields per unit of land, then why are they not out there
showing the farmers how to do it? Farmers the world over may be on the conservative
side, but in the modern era they have been one of the most world’s responsive
groups when it comes to producing a better crop.

It is one thing for critics to state a utopian alternative without ever having
to show how it works. It is another thing to be out in the field where new problems
regularly arise and new solutions have to be found. What counts is raising crops
and feeding people and trying through time to do a better job of both. From
the earliest agricultural systems to the present, protecting the crop has always
been a central issue of agriculture, and never have farmers been more successful
at it than at the present time.

For the defense of modern agricultural ecosystems, Wayne Parrot has the right
“take-home message.”

[B]uilt-in disease resistance is the most reliable and economical method
to achieve stable crop yields, be it under monoculture or polyculture conditions.
These resistances can be bred in from wild relatives or obtained via recombinant
DNA technology (Parrott 2003).

Parrot wisely adds:

Ultimately though, evolution is a dynamic process, so the job of resistance
is never done. We may achieve disease protection which will last anywhere
from a few years to several centuries, but ultimately, I would not consider
anything as permanent (Parrott 2003).

 

Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston
and the author of the forthcoming book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture
Debate Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Publishing Company -http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813805139.html
– which formed the basis of much of the material in this paper.

*I am indebted to my colleague in Anthropology, Randolph Widmer for his
valuable assistance for the sections on domestications and the conditions that
preceded it.

References

Bailey, R. G. 1976. ‘EcoRegions of the United States’. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service RARE II MAP B.

Cantrell, Ronald P. and Timothy G. Reeves. 2002. ‘The Rice Genome: The Cereal
of the World’s Poor Takes Center Stage’, Science 296(5565):53, 5 April.

CIMMYT. 1996. CIMMYT 1995/96 World Wheat Facts and Trends: Understanding
Global Trends in the Use of Wheat Diversity and International Flows of Wheat
Genetic Resources. Mexico, D.F.: CIMMYT.

DeGregori, Thomas R. 1985. A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change
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In these dark times holding out against the constant barrage of pop culture
has become more challenging than surviving a succession of carpet bombings.
Pop music seeps and swells from the ceilings and nooks of shops, offices, and
coffeehouses. Television sets are now permanent fixtures in airports, post offices,
saloons, and doctor’s offices – in fact, one dangled precariously above me as
I suffered a recent root canal, tuned to Oprah no less, which was far
more painful than the surgery itself. I commenced to pray the set would dislodge
from the ceiling and put me out of my misery, but Yahweh spared me – evidently
to continue His good work.

So much of popular culture is so indescribably bereft of good taste that
a thinking man will attempt to isolate himself from it whenever and however
possible. This, unhappily, is getting increasingly difficult to manage. It is
naturally assumed not only that we poor saps queuing in line need constant diversion,
but that we need infantile diversion of the worst kind. The relatively harmless
elevator music that once unassumingly infected public spaces has been supplanted
by commercial radio with its jackass disc jockeys and morning "zoos,"
while classical music is now wielded primarily as a weapon to drive loitering
and horror-stricken teens from parking lots. On the boulevards and byways one
finds insipid advertisements plastered to every imaginable surface, moving and
sedentary, human and inanimate. These days one moves in and out of pop culture
the way one dodges raindrops in a downpour. Against such overwhelming odds,
one has no choice but to hoist the white flag and lay downs one’s arms. Vulgarity
and boorishness have won the day.

It is unfortunate that in order to avoid the indecencies of pop culture one
must isolate oneself like a medieval monk in a Carpathian monastery; a monk
with a remote hopelessly surfing through hundreds of television channels, reeling
up and down the radio dial in a vain attempt to find some offering that only
mildly offends. Happily there are still enough decent books published, enough
tolerable music being recorded, a few passable newspapers and journals printed
so that one can stop his ears to the siren song of pop culture’s pimps.

I find noteworthy new music not by listening to KY-98, but rather by reading
reviews, and through the old reliable word of mouth, the same way I hear about
good films and good books. In this way, criticism is essential to my well-being,
and one first-rate critic is to me worth a hundred artists, if only for the
time and money the former saves me by sifting out the chaff.

But pop culture is far more insidious than mere TV and radio. It is films and
fashion, it is magazine fare and performance art, it is dance and design. These
too are impossible to avoid completely, particularly fashion – or its absence
– which has morphed into a perfidious form of advertising one might call fadshion,
for lack of a better word. Avoiding dance is as simple as avoiding dance clubs,
which is easy enough for a middle-aged homebody like myself. And as for magazines
and films, one learns to be selective, which is the one essential criterion
in a society where overabundance and choice are supreme.

Indeed the very term pop culture may just win the award for the most absurd
oxymoron. There has never been anything sophisticated, cultured or cultivated
about popular taste. Take rap musician Snoop Doggy Dogg. Granted, Snoop is the
coolest human being alive. Far cooler than me. Far wealthier than me. Am I jealous
of Snoop? Damn right. And yet what Snoop does in the recording studio has nothing
to do with culture; and yet what Snoop does is somewhat legitimized by the term
pop "culture." Sorry, but Snoop doesn’t deserve it. Culture, said
a very cultured fellow, Matthew Arnold, is "to know the best that has been
said and thought in the world." Elsewhere, in the same vein, he said, "Culture
has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light." Knowing the
best that has been said in the world is rarely associated with the masses, who
seldom know what even they are saying (let alone thinking). And as for
sweetness and light, the only light Snoop gives off is the one from his crack
pipe.

What we are really describing then is a form of popular entertainment,
not culture, and if we need a word to describe this I suggest Dwight Macdonald’s
term masscult, which has a slightly malicious sound to it that appeals
to me. It may seem silly to make distinctions between good and bad masscult,
and yet that’s exactly what we do all the time. The Clash are good, P. Diddy
is bad. Old Paul McCartney is good. New Paul McCartney is bad. How much easier
to say all masscult is bad and be done with it. But we can’t. I love the Clash,
despite their undeniable lack of culture, class and teeth.

Macdonald also described a third level of culture he called "midcult,"
or the culture of the new state-college-educated middle-class suburbanites,
who occupy the no-man’s land midway between the masses and the highbrows. I
suspect Macdonald gives the middle class too much credit for brains. My own
feeling is that Macdonald’s midcult is nothing more than the best of bad popular
culture, and what has happened is that contemporary pop culture has gotten far
worse than anyone ever believed possible. Take television. In the 1950s, NBC
had its own orchestra led by the greatest director of the day, Toscanini. Nowadays,
NBC has Fear Factor on which we are invited to watch bikinied bimbos
eat bugs.

I’m inclined to think there are rather two levels of mass culture that we might
profitably call low mass and high mass. If these terms do nothing
else they at least succeed in disassociating the words popular and mass from
the term culture. As you might expect, it is low mass that I find so annoying,
so troubling, so irritating, and it is low mass that I try desperately to avoid.
Then again, it is high mass that I am most comfortable with, that speaks to
me, not in the lofty, intellectual manner of high culture, but in the warm,
friendly tones of a sympathetic companion. I may occasionally dip a toe into
high culture, take in a production of Lear, reread Beckett’s Watt,
put on Gould’s Bach Goldberg Variations, but I find the water a bit warm
for my liking and can only take it in short spurts.

This is unfortunate because it is precisely high culture that allows us to
"become all we are capable of being; expanding, if possible, to our full
growth, which is the law of culture," to bring in Thomas Carlyle. High
mass does nothing but briefly entertain us. Low mass corrupts.

If the U.S. seems backward culturally, it is small wonder. Its democratic leaders
give very little weight to high culture; even in its colleges and universities
there is little encouragement "to know the best that has been said and
thought in the world," as schools have generally moved from educating young
men and women to job training. What pittance the government doles out to support
the arts often goes to low mass institutions and other forms of popular entertainment,
since that is what the majority of voters long for.

There is, I suspect, an undeniable pleasure, a rank smugness in being in the
high mass minority, just as I suppose those in the high brow minority are doubly
smug. Smugness, to my mind, is a greatly under-rated amusement. If one must
be continually annoyed by pop culture – and I see no alternative to this in
the near future – one may as well get some pleasure out it.