There is no shortage, in the contemporary Western intellectual milieu, of laudatory homage to modern science and its achievements. Our scientific technocratic attainments, and the material benefits they have conferred, are celebrated in popular culture as crowning human accomplishments—and often as a vehicle for humanity’s greatest potentials. Steven Pinker’s best-selling works like Enlightenment Now, Sam Rosenberg’s Atheist Guide to Reality and more scholarly essay anthologies such as Science Unlimited? go further: not only extoling science’s paradigm-shaping virtues, but also exalting its purview as the only legitimate worldview—or at least the one upon which every other must inevitably supervene (a view commonly referred to as “scientism”). Pop-culture influencers from Sam Harris to Neal DeGrass Tyson –who many look to as authorities on the nature of reality– reflect the prevalence of this belief in our media and educational system.
Though less influential and generally popular only in academic circles, postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality and its quintessential intellectual achievement, modern science, have offered an important counterpoint not only to scientism’s philosophical status, and its psycho-social effects in Western society, but also to the celebration of science—and indeed scientism—that has flourished in Western culture since the scientific revolution. The triumphalist view of science, they claim, is not just an expression of false confidence in its status as a field of knowledge but, even worse, is an arrogant arbitrary claim to intellectual authority that has served as a propaganda slogan for the West’s cultural imperialism from the advent of colonialism to the present–18thth and early 19th century idealists, romantic-era, and transcendentalist thinkers (from Hegel and Coleridge to Emerson and Thoreau) lamented technological society’s stultification of the human spirit. Late 19th and early 20th century thinkers expressed concern over the “disenchantment of the world” (Max Weber) the “mathematization” of reality (Edmund Husserl) and the “homelessness” of human life (Martin Heidegger) resulting from the social dominance of scientism.
Current thinkers across academic and professional disciplines continue to point out the limitations of scientism in these areas. The imperialistic aspect of Enlightenment rationalism and science, they claim, is not just some aberrant use to use to which an otherwise neutral epistemic method has been put (although apologists for science’s intellectual hegemony argue that this is the case). On the contrary: intrinsic to the essence of science as a research project are values like control, manipulation, and the domination of nature. Indeed, the scientific revolution’s originators often envisioned the goal of science in implicitly imperialistic ways –such as Francis Bacon describing scientific inquiry as “putting nature on the rack” and “torturing” its secrets from it, or Rene Descartes lauding its role in making humans “master and possessors of nature”. Even the pre-eminent early modern founding father of modern political science, Nicolo Machiavelli, compared the nature (“fortune”) to an untamed river that must be channeled, or to that of a fickle woman, who must be beaten and coerced to perform her domestic responsibilities.
Given the imperialist spirt of Western science then, it would seem only natural that the civilization that both shaped and was shaped by this spirit would carry out its global dissemination in an imperialist way as well. One characteristic of this imperialism has been to demean the legitimacy of the scientific traditions and accomplishments found in the non-western cultures that the West encountered. South Asia, for instance, has a long and established tradition of scientific research and discovery –in many ways, surpassing that of the West– that was subsequently undervalued and dismissed by western commentators. Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh ideas in philosophy, literature, and psychology are well known, as are their influences on Western thought. Less well known are the many achievements by South Asian scholars in the physical sciences–many predating parallel discoveries in the West– that may have consequently also influenced the development of Western philosophy and science. In mathematics, Hindu numerals, transmitted via “Arabic” numbers, gave the world its first concept of zero, place-value, decimals, a version of what became the “Pythagorean theorem”, square root, cube root, algebra , trigonometry, and the volume of a sphere. In astronomy thinkers calculated the nature of the earth’s rotation, heliocentrism, the distance from the sun and moon to the earth, planetary ellipses, and the second law of thermodynamics/first law of motion/gravity well before Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. South Asian chemists developed iron beams and girders, as well as what came to the West as Damascus Steel in the European Middle Ages. In biology, ancient South Asian surgeons and physicians had a knowledge of human anatomy sufficient to perform complex surgeries and develop medicines via aryuvedic science that were possibly the most advanced in the world. And, of course, many of the technological innovations that the West benefitted and advanced as a result of –like paper and gunpowder– were invented in East Asia.
However, as recent scholars in comparative cross-cultural science have observed, the Dharmic worldview on which this south Asian scientific tradition was predicated, was much different than the one from which Western science was derived and, because of this, has been delegitimized by a culturally imperialistic Western intellectual paradigm since the advent of colonialism and the scientific revolution. According to Alok Kumar in A History of Science in World Cultures, the Hindu worldview underwriting south Asian science was predicated on three basic assumptions: the conception of reality as both physical and mental-spiritual, the unity of all existence in a primordial cosmic unity, and the fundamental reality of conscious or cosmic mind behind the world of physical appearance.
In contrast, Western science has, since its inception, traditionally assumed a stance of ‘methodological naturalism’ (a method of inquiry excluding any spiritual, non-material or teleological-purpose driven- explanations of reality), if not wholesale “ontological naturalism’ (basically, the belief that that reality actually IS fundamentally material, mechanistic and non-spiritual). Given its inherent imperialist ethos, the West also rejected south Asian science and its discoveries as mere superstitions because of this difference. It was in this imperialist spirit that Lord Thomas McCauley, a 19th century colonial administrator in India, made the famous claim that “a single shelf in a good British library is worth the whole native history of India and Arabia…false astronomy, false medicine, …in the company of a false religion”….and why renowned 20th century American philosopher John Searle said “When I lectured on the mind-body problem in India and was assured by several members of my audience said that…they had personally existed in earlier lives, I did not think that this was evidence for an alternate worldview, or even ‘who knows, they could be right’…given what I know about how the world works, I could not regard their views as serious candidates for truth.” ….and why prominent physicist Lawrence Krauss even more recently stated that the Dali Lama, who “tries to be in accord with science”, is nonetheless “absolutely ridiculous. If he really believes what he says…he would resign as Dali Lama because the Dali Lama’s beliefs are based on reincarnation which is just nonsense.”
In this way, ideas about the world that diverge from the Western scientific narrative have been either refuted or coopted by this narrative, but never acknowledged as legitimate truths that Western science must take into account. However, if Western intellectual culture wants to exemplify the virtues like objectivity, empirical rigor, and open-minded inquiry, that it considers the hallmark of scientific research, then Western science–despite its undeniable accomplishments—is in need of some remediation along these lines. The historical example provided by Asian and other non-Western scientific traditions may be one perspective from which to provide such correctives.
