Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of history will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

What Golden Age?

This Golden Age is rightly held up as one of the glories of Arabic-Islamic civilization. However, it only makes more pointed the question of how Arabic-language science (defined broadly as natural philosophy) came to be so rapidly and totally surpassed by European science. As the historian of science Toby Huff points out with regard to astronomy in particular:

Arab astronomers from the eleventh to the fourteenth century established a broad-based research tradition aimed at reforming the Ptolemaic (geocentric) planetary model. These astronomers—in both Eastern and Western Islam—wanted a theoretical planetary model that conformed to what really is. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the combined efforts of the Marâgha School of astronomers, capped by the work of Ibn al-Shatir, finally arrived at a planetary model mathematically equivalent to the Copernican model of a century and a half later. But having arrived there, Ibn al-Shatir and his successors failed to make the leap to the heliocentric view—the leap that distinguished the Copernican achievement—and thereby failed to achieve the philosophical and metaphysical transformation that we call the scientific revolution . . . .¹

Despite all of these advantages—research funding, the resources of Greek philosophy and science, and great minds such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Razi, al-Baghdadi, al-Biruni, al-Haytham, and Ibn Rushd—Arab societies did not give rise to modern science.

The eclipse of Arabic science is often explained by pointing to external geopolitical factors, such as the re-conquest of Spain by Christian forces from 1085 onward or the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. However, in other intellectual capitals, such as Damascus and Cairo, developments proceeded largely undisturbed for centuries. Arab astronomy and medicine were reaching their zenith at the end of the thirteenth century—well after the purported disruption by external forces (and long before colonialist interference by European powers). The great observatory that was home to the Marâgha School was founded near Tabriz, Iran, in the year following the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Although it ceased to function barely forty-five years later, its end appears to have been hastened not by foreign hostilities but by some impulses from within.²

Another take on the decline of Arabic science is that it never declined because it never really existed. In this view, science and mathematics were carried out by a small number of extraordinary individuals whose activities and outlooks were never fully assimilated to the mainstream—that is, Islamic—culture. As these individuals disappeared or their patronage dried up, their work dissipated. Since there was no established tradition, we have no need for an explanation of its decline by appeal to general causes, endogenous or otherwise.

Arguing against this view, the so-called “marginality thesis,” A. I. Sabra has pointed out that many of those who taught secular philosophy and medicine were also Islamic legal scholars; that leaders in higher mathematics were often muwaqqits, official time keepers employed by mosques; and that scientific literature could be found in the libraries of the religiously affiliated madrasas.³ This evidence suggests that Greek learning had been “Islamized” or “naturalized” by integration with the intellectual, social, and institutional structures of Islam and Arab culture.

Whig History of Science

The most eyebrow-raising response to the question of what caused the decline of Arabic science is to deny that there really is such a question. Some have maintained that the question only arises if we assume that the historical trajectory of Europe is normative for other societies, such that divergence from that trajectory demands an explanation. To catch the drift of this criticism, have another listen to Huff’s language. He tells us that Arabic scientists “failed to make the leap . . . that distinguished the Copernican achievement” and “failed to achieve the . . . transformation that we call the scientific revolution.”

In his book, The Making of Islamic Science, Muzaffar Iqbal labels this kind of discourse Whig history, in which “judgments passed on the scientific developments of a previous civilization are invariably based on the developments in modern science. This creates historiographic problems and entails the danger of unconsciously slipping from the historical fact into a Whiggish view of history, as if the final purpose of the cultivation of science in the other civilization was merely to create modern science.”⁴ Iqbal seems to suggest that the question of decline will itself decline as more informed and culturally sophisticated historians prevail.

This position has a whiff of plausibility, and not just because it nods to the contingency of history. Apart from a belief in Providence or Giambattista Vico’s “principles of universal history,” would it have been true to say in early renaissance Florence that a scientific revolution was going to happen there? Furthermore, isn’t asking why there was no Arab Galileo like asking why there was no Chinese Puccini or Persian Dante? China produced Peking opera and Persia produced Rumi. It would be a bizarre form of tunnel vision to see these singular achievements merely as abortive attempts at the achievements of other culture.

In the case of science, however, there are actual continuities between the Middle Eastern and European traditions that Peking opera and Italian opera do not share. It is precisely these continuities—such as the survival of Ibn Sina’s Canon—that are cited admiringly by those who wish to highlight the legacy of Arabic science. More fundamentally, the historiographical critique conflates motivation and justification. Undoubtedly some historians who accept the “decline” question are in part motivated by a belief that scientific modernity is on balance not all that regrettable, or by an interest in addressing the contemporary plight of science in Muslim-majority countries. These motives and interests give the question salience. However, they do not by themselves impugn the objectivity, truth, or justification of any particular claim that a historian makes. If Iqbal finds scientific modernity regrettable, then when he reads in Huff that Arab scientists “failed to make” the leap and “failed to achieve” the transformation to Copernicanism, he can substitute “were saved from making” and “managed to avoid.”⁵ The flip in salience will not change the truth-value of Huff’s analysis one whit.

Iqbal floats the idea that the alternative to Whiggish comparative history of science is to “examine the nature of science in Islamic civilization from within its own framework and see where it could have gone.” However, on its face, this is perfectly consistent with the comparative approach he rejects, for the way of Europe is one way that Islamic science could have gone. Of course, a good history will attempt to gain an appreciation of a social practice from within, from the perspective of the practitioners. In this case, it will inquire—as Sabra, Huff, and others do—into the proximate causes that shaped the role of the muwaqqit, for example. In principle, enough accounts of this kind will add up to a historical explanation of why Arabic science did not follow the trajectory of European science—or, if you prefer, why European science did not follow the trajectory of Arabic science.

The next installment of “Circumnavigations” will edge closer to this “why.”

Notes

1. Toby E. Huff, The rise of early modern science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87.
2. —. 171-172.
3. —. 84.
4. The making of Islamic science, Muzzafar Iqbal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009), 151.
5. Iqbal, trained as a biochemist, is the founder-president of the Center for Islam and Science, based in Canada. He has also worked with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (on which, see my previous column). He told PBS in 2003 that he was “disenchanted” with practical science and that his biggest desire was to see “a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning.” See “Closer to Truth: Ask the Experts: Muzaffar Iqbal, Ph.D.”; accessed 12 January 2010.

The official results of the disputed Iranian presidential election in June 2009 aren’t the only unbelievable numbers to come out of Tehran lately. This fall, the publisher of the peer-reviewed journal Engineering and Computers withdrew a paper co-authored by Iran’s science minister, Kamran Daneshjou, after Nature magazine revealed that it had been plagiarized. The paper, “Analysis of Critical Ricochet Angle Using Two Space Discretization Methods,” contained significant portions of text, figures, and tables copied from a 2002 article by South Korean researchers in the Journal of Physics.¹

Critics have also questioned the legitimacy of the academic credentials of Daneshjou, a professor at Iran University of Science and Technology (his online vita currently states that he did doctoral studies at the Imperial Collage of London).² As it happens, Kaneshjou was running the Interior Ministry’s election headquarters in June, and his new appointment came courtesy of the man who claimed victory, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maybe it does all add up.

Perhaps this behavior is to be expected from a member of Iran’s mullahcractic regime, which has perfected the tradition of taqiyya, or religiously-sanctioned dissimulation. What is more shocking is that Iran is among the more scientifically productive nations in the Islamic world—for present purposes, defined as the fifty-seven members of the intergovernmental Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

A Revolution Deferred

Here are some astonishing figures from Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan:

A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7…. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The [U.S. National Science Foundation] records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.³

Another survey found that of the approximately 1,800 universities in OIC countries,

only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded).

Even Turkey, the most scientifically productive of OIC states, produced only 88,000 research papers between 1996 and 2005, less than the typical output of a single Ivy League university in the same period.⁴

Recent years have seen bold hikes in scientific research funding by governments such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar, but nothing yet seems to have made a dent in the fundamental reality: Science in the Muslim world is moribund.

Abstaining from Science

In 1979, the OIC established a new body to promote science: the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Headquartered in an ostentatious complex in Rabat, Morocco, and maintaining regional offices in Paris, Tehran, Chad, the Union of the Comoros, and the Emirate of Sharjah, ISESCO would, according to its charter, “support the efforts of Member States in developing programmes of education and technical and practical training; and encourage researchers and inventors from the Member States.” Last year, ISESCO claimed it would partner with UN bodies such as UNESCO and UNICEF to undertake close to two hundred projects costing around $6 million.

Yet according to Hoodbhoy, the achievements of this and sister initiatives (such as the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation) to date have amounted to little more than “sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.”

In 2006, ISESCO published a Guide for the Incorporation of Reproductive Health and Gender Concepts into Islamic Education Curricula, obviously a critically important subject area where some scientific facts are in order. The Guide, which can be found on ISESCO’s Web site, is addressed to curriculum developers, textbook writers, and those responsible for training instructors in formal Islamic education for students aged six to nineteen. Its introduction stresses the need “to supply, at the proper time, adolescents with appropriate health information on the biological aspects within the framework of Islamic rulings and values” and emphasizes “the fact that Sharia, whether in its original or interpretative sources, is the only source for establishing, interpreting, clarifying, and incorporating reproductive health issues, including adolescent health, in the programs of formal education.”⁵

What follows contains not a shred of science but instead a series of checklists and tips for imparting Sharia rulings on matters of health, hygiene, and sexual ethics. The ISESCO authors mention the Islamic basis for upholding “equality in human dignity” and “good treatment of the girl and kindness towards her” and opposing female circumcision and “indiscrimination between the sexes” (sic?). They also instruct teachers that Islam forbids, among other things, fornication, homosexuality, intercourse during menstruation, and khulwa (an unrelated man and woman being alone together). At the same time, they assert that Islamic law justifies polygamous marriage and, above all, abstinence.

The student should adhere to the lofty Islamic morals and ideals that call for modesty, lowering one’s gaze, avoiding mixing and being alone with a person with whom one can be intimate, abstinence, resisting shameful deeds, avoiding any provocative act or item of dress that may encourage sexual harassment and lapsing into harlotry . . . [and] observe abstinence before marriage.

And this from a publication that was “compiled in cooperation with United Nations Population Fund”!⁶

In this Guide, as in numerous other documents, ISESCO is only doing its job. Rather than seeking Muslim integration with the global research and academic communities, its stated mission is to advance science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.” In this case, ISESCO does not even do students the service of setting forth the relevant empirical evidence for the purpose of beating it senseless with religious precepts.

Elsewhere, ISESCO dispenses with pretexts at pedagogy altogether and joins in familiar Islamist propaganda against Jews. In Protection of Islamic and Christian Holy Sites in Palestine, the proceedings of a conference held in Amman in November 2004, Adnane Ibrahim Hassan Al Subah writes, “Jews are the enemies of Allah, the enemies of faith and of the worship of Allah”⁷—not a paragon of experimentally testable hypotheses. In a sickening touch, copies of this ISESCO publication were distributed at an OIC-sponsored “Inter-institutional Forum on Universal Shared Values: Challenges and New Paradigms,” attended by various UN dignitaries and held in the chambers of the UN Human Rights Council in December 2008 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN gadfly David Littman sent an open letter of complaint the following month; he has yet to receive a response from the Islamic Scientific, Educational, and Cultural Organization.

While ISESCO has the right to promote Islamic values, some of the practices it endorses are arguably contrary to international human rights standards found in treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Child, to which most OIC states are signatories. Certainly the UN has no business partnering with them in its efforts to support responsible family planning. This is all the more disappointing because ISESCO’s Sharia-based approach described above is only the most conservative way to promulgate reproductive health science within the framework of Islamic values. There are alternatives, such as a program pioneered by the UN Population Fund that trains Afghan clerics on issues of women’s health and rights.

The broader question remains: what explains the malaise of Muslim science and what can be done about it?

References

1. “Exclusive: Paper Co-Authored by Iran’s Science Minister Duplicates Earlier Paper – September 22, 2009,” The Great Beyond. Available at blogs.nature.com, accessed 28 November 2009.
2. Borzou Daragahi, “IRAN: Proposed Education Minister Accused of Making Up His Degrees,” Los Angeles Times (August 29, 2009). Available at latimesblogs.latimes.com accessed 28 November 2009.
3. Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Science and the Islamic World: The Quest for Rapprochment,” Physics Today (August 2007). Available at ptonline.aip.org accessed 25 November 2009. Hoodbhoy is also the author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991). See also the special issue of "Islam and Science," Nature 444, 19 (2006).
4. Ehsan Masood, “New Wave for Islamic Science,” BBC News (February 16, 2009).
5. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/Menu.php; accessed 25 November 2009.
6. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/P1.php.
7. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/Protection%20of%20islamic%20and%20chrestian%20holy%20sites%20in%20Palestine/p18.php; accessed 25 November 2009.

Two classical Confucian philosophers once had a famous disagreement over the morality of music. Mozi mounted a utilitarian case in his “Codemnation of Music”: “What benefits men, the man of humane principles will carry out; what does not benefit them, he will leave alone. . . . Sounding bells, striking drums, strumming zithers, blowing pipes, and waving shields and axes in the war dance do nothing to feed the people when they are hungry, clothe them when they are cold, or give them rest when they are weary.”

The great Xunzi responded that if Mozi’s policy were to be implemented, society “would be pressed to such extremity by his measures that all clothing would be coarse and gross and all food would be bad and detestable, with only hardship and grief when music and joy have been condemned.”¹ But Xunzi did not defend music by asserting its intrinsic value or extolling its aesthetic properties. Instead, he accepted Mozi’s utilitarian premises, insisting that music is valuable just because it is necessary to preserve civic order.

When music is centered and balanced, the people are harmonious and not [consumed by] dissipation. When music is sober and dignified, the people are uniform and not chaotic. When people are harmonious and unified, the army is stiff and the cities secure. . . . When music is ornate and seduces [people] to malice, then the people are dissipated, indolent, crude, and base. Dissipation and indolence lead to chaos, crudity and baseness to contention. When there is chaos and contention, the army is soft and the cities are pillaged.

Referring to the sage-rulers of antiquity, Xunzi concluded:

Thus the Former Kings were cautious about what they stirred [the people] with. They used ritual to make their wills [conform] to the Way, music to harmonize their sounds, government to unify their actions, and punishments to prevent licentiousness. Rituals, music, punishments, and government are ultimately, a means to make the people’s minds similar and bring about the ordered Way. ²

Music is a means for moral instruction, ritualized rehearsal of social roles, and ultimately discipline and control—hegemony in harmony. No less than sound, it seems that science in China has been political from its beginning.

China’s Scientific Revolution

The story of modern science in China begins with the introduction of mathematical astronomy by Jesuit missionaries during the late Ming period in the 1580s. In 1592, the Ministry of Rites discovered that the Astrocalendrical Bureau had miscalculated the date of the lunar eclipse by a full day. This was going to foul up the timing of all the auspicious and inauspicious events. Fortunately for them, the Jesuits were adept at dealing with calendar crises, having not long before resolved a European controversy over the date of Easter.

In the 1630s the government was persuaded to undertake a major calendar reform, and as Benjamin Elman explains in A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, this “opened the door for leaders of the mind and Qing dynasties to accept Jesuits as calendrical experts, just as earlier rulers had accepted Indian, Persian, and Muslim specialists.”³ So long as they continued to supply expert assistance in astronomical and geographical matters, the missionaries were tolerated by the emperor and eventually incorporated into the bureaucracy. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuits introduced a variety of European technologies. But they failed to keep apace with the latest scientific advances back home. Consequently, the Earth-centered cosmological system of Tycho Brahe was still being taught in China in the nineteenth century.⁴

With the help of the Protestant missions, modern science was born in China: “From 1850 to 1870, a core group of missionaries and Chinese co-workers in Guangzhou, Ningbo, Beijing, and Shanghai translated many works on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, as well as botany, geography, geology, mechanics, and navigation.” Scientific training was centered on the military arsenals, shipyards, and factories of the coastal cities where armaments and ships were being constructed. After 1895 and China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, elites increasingly agitated for political reform and modernization. As Elman observes,

Chinese radicals linked political, social, and economic revolution to their perception that a scientific revolution was also required. Those who were educated abroad at Western universities such as Cornell or sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation for medical study in the United States after 1914, as well as those trained locally at higher-level missionary schools in China, often regarded modern science as a revolutionary application of scientific methods and objective learning to solve all modern problems.⁵

Here began a political rhetoric fusing scientific advance, technological application, and Chinese national aspiration, the same rhetoric that later resounded in the May Fourth Movement after 1919, up through Maoist “mass science” to Hu Jintao’s Scientific Development Concept.

Humming Along

Today the country’s enormous investment in science is overwhelmingly pragmatic, driven by short-term technological applications. In 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Science magazine that only 5 percent of the nation’s total spending on science goes toward basic research (by comparison, basic research accounts for 17.5 percent of the U.S. government’s science funding).⁶ The ubiquity of the Chinese term keji—literally, science and technology—illustrates the importance of applied knowledge.

It would be mistake to think of China’s scientific revolution as a fast-motion replay of Europe’s. Science did not come to China as it had come to Europe, and most Chinese elites did not come to science for the reasons that their European counterparts had. Early modern European science depended heavily on private commercial interests and autonomous professional associations (like the Royal Society). Its propagandists pressed for knowledge to improve the human condition but also to read the mind of God or the book of Nature as an end in itself. An anti-authoritarian ideology arose in response to confrontations with the Church. Chinese science, by contrast, evolved in symbiosis with state power, and its propagandists championed it as a means to national development.

In this way, from its origins the Chinese scientific establishment was organized and mobilized to achieve the practical ends of those in power. But perhaps the best explanation for the dearth of political dissent among professional scientists is more pedestrian than philosophical. Since Tiananmen, the shocking brutality of the crack- down and the constriction of civil society have surely taught many would-be disharmonious scientists that silence is the only sensible option. More importantly, they have so much to lose. Today’s technoscience professionals are members of a comfortable middle class with enviable positions to look out for and reliable research funding to look forward to.

China’s vast economic engines churn ahead, and its scientists hum along.

Notes

1. John Knoblock, ed., Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 128.
2. Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 79–80.
3. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
4. —. A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
5. —. “New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China Global Science and Comparative History,” Isis, 98(3): 522.
6. See “Science: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Sees Science as a Key to Development,” (accessed 17 October 2009).

As its gangplank rose dramatically, the tanker’s public address system blared symphonic pomp. The music, rousing to the point of desperation, sounded at turns like a knockoff of the theme from Star Wars, then Superman, as if John Williams had been forced at gunpoint to produce an anthem in a single sitting. From beneath this rose the sound of vigorous clattering from a core of traditional Chinese drummers assembled on the dock. Clouds of confetti descended onto the expectant crowd, a few hundred journalists, local government officials, ordinary onlookers, and one curious American philosopher. As the massive ship pulled away from the Shanghai port, a fleet of sleek hostesses in red silk gowns and a pack of schoolchildren in imperial yellow tracksuits waved goodbye to the crew.

Those on board were not celebrities on a luxury cruise or military officers deploying for a foreign campaign. They were scientists. Their vessel was the Xue Long, Snow Dragon, and it was bound for the South Pole on the twenty-fifth Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition.

When the Xue Long set off in October 2008, I was in Shanghai visiting with leaders of the municipal branch of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology. After several weeks of working in cramped offices in gloomy Beijing, I enjoyed the time in Shanghai, where I found the air somewhat freer and the espresso easier to come by. I was there on behalf of the Center for Inquiry, seeking to interest a division of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST) in conducting the Worldviews of Scientists study.

Pioneered by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the Worldviews series is an international sociological survey of the religious, ethical, and social opinions of working scientists. Above all, I was curious about the extent to which the scientific community in China exemplified the critical rationalist spirit in their public lives. One might expect scientists to be occupationally committed to anti-authoritarianism and freedom of inquiry, intellectual honesty and pluralism. It was probably no accident that an astrophysicist, Fang Lizhi, had such an important part in inspiring the student unrest that led to Tiananmen Square. Scientists are a disharmonious bunch. How willing could they be to sing in tune to the Party’s official march?

Big Science

At the most recent national congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2007, President Hu Jintao trumpeted “scientific development” and the Harmonious Society, directing the government to

thoroughly apply the Scientific Outlook on Development, continue to emancipate the mind, persist in reform and opening up, pursue development in a scientific way, promote social harmony, and strive for new victories in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. . . . Emancipating the mind is a magic instrument for developing socialism with Chinese characteristics, reform and opening up provide a strong driving force for developing it, and scientific development and social harmony are basic requirements for developing it.¹

Soon after I arrived in Beijing, my colleagues made it clear to me that for official purposes, building the Harmonious Society would mean tapping into scientific methods, but it also would mean placing limits on the scope of scientific values. With the utmost congeniality and reasonableness, they explained that survey questions about religion would be deemed too divisive and sensitive, and questions about politics could be considered seditious. Further, the term “skepticism” was to be avoided because what remained of the Party’s ideologues might consider it a threat to Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

This should not have been surprising. After all, CAST is a part of the bureaucracy, not an independent, non-governmental professional association (genuinely independent civil society organizations are still almost unheard of in China). On Wednesday afternoons the entire office—spare two junior female researchers—emptied out to attend the meetings of the Party. For those who seek professional positions of privilege, it is of course the only thing going.

On December 10, 2008—the 60^th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—over three hundred Chinese dissidents released Charter 08, an open letter calling for human rights, civil liberties, private property, and a democratic, federated republic. The letter was organized by Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic, and the list of signatories included more lawyers and entrepreneurs than professional scientists. One prominent scientist signatory was Jian Qisheng, who was arrested following his involvement in Tiananmen and subsequently spent four years in prison after commemorating the massacre in 1999. Jian studied philosophy and worked as a physicist. But, perhaps significantly, he is now identified as a former physicist.²

Scientist-Reformers of the 1980s

There was a moment in recent Chinese politics when elite scientists were in the vanguard of dissent. Ironically, this was not the result of the CCP’s antipathy towards science but rather its embrace of science in the post-Mao era. Central to Deng Xiaoping’s reform efforts, begun in 1978, was a new policy on science and technology. Mao was faulted for his utopianism, for becoming unhinged from empirical reality. While carrying on the traditional Marxist rhetoric of the “science” of dialectical materialism, Mao had little but suspicion and hostility for the scientific establishment. The Cultural Revolution made scientists targets in the class struggle, branding the Chinese Academy of Sciences a “bourgeois headquarters.”

Once in power, Deng rallied for a return to scientific rationality. He recruited scientists and technologists as essential partners in effective policymaking and governance in a modern China. By the early 80s, leading specialists were being incorporated into the bureaucracy as the staff and directors of permanent consultative bodies. But in some cases, this close association ended up blowing back on the government. The period is described by Alice L. Miller, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, in her excellent study Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge:

Especially among those in the “basic” sciences—those pursuing scientific knowledge for its own sake—a conflict of professional mission and identity with the regime’s utilitarian goals for science emerged. Among some, the reforms were seen not as alleviating problems in the scientific community but as making things worse. By the late 1980s many scientists were deeply frustrated with the reforms, anxious over their jobs and futures, and alarmed at their declining standing in a rapidly changing society. A few, at least, felt a deepening alienation from a regime that they had previously supported, spurring them onto the path of political dissent.³

Miller argues that the public political dissent of leading figures in the scientific community—Fang Lizhi and others, such as Xu Liangying, Jin Guantao, and Li Xingmin—was inspired by the powerful anti-authoritarian norms and Enlightenment values of science itself:

For scientists such as Fang and Xu, the anti-authoritarian norms of science translated easily into a classically liberal politics. The message these scientists carried into the larger political arena defended above all the sanctity and worth of individual autonomy and conscience above the claims of state and society. . . . the emergence of a renewed liberal voice in China’s political arena in the 1980s was in significant part a natural extension of what some scientists believed to be the norms of healthy science into politics.⁴

What became of this scientific dissent in the intervening years? Was it suppressed by the force of the post-Tienanmen crackdown, or were there other dynamics at work?

A Musical Interlude

One afternoon my colleagues held a lunchtime party in honor of my visit. We all drove over to a local karaoke lounge for a buffet-style meal followed by what turned out to be several convivial hours of drink, chat, and of course, singing. Everyone took turns at his or her favorites, often with wild abandon.

Someone had brought along an acoustic guitar, so when my turn came around (after first agreeing to sing karaoke on John Denver's “Country Roads,” which somehow everyone knew by heart), I taught the group the chorus to “Free Falling,” the wonderful rock ’n’ roll anthem by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. As we belted out “Now I’m free . . . free falling!” it felt like the right song for the hour, putting us in the shoes of a skydiver who thrills to the rush of the leap even though he cannot control the direction in which he spirals. It was now late afternoon, the workday was ending, and we could linger no longer. We left the lounge and headed back into the drone of Beijing.

Notes

1. President Hu’s speech, presumably translated by the Chinese Embassy, can be found at http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zt/768675/t375502.htm.
2. See http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3343/prmID/172
3. H. Lyman Miller, Science and dissent in post-Mao China: The politics of knowledge (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1996), 69.
4. —. Science and dissent in post-Mao China: The politics of knowledge (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1996), 4.

I don’t get to use this joke very often, nor should I. But I have come upon the occasion recently by re-reading the Upanishads, and that in the course of exploring further the subject of my previous column; namely, whether there is a convergence of modern science and classical Indian or neo-Hindu thought.

Reading the Vedas

The Upanishads are recognized as the wellspring of Indian philosophy. They date from the so-called Vedic period, between approximately 2500 and 600 B.C.E. The texts of this period, the four Vedas, are in turn divided into four sections, the Upanishads being the most reflective and speculative of them.

By the time I got to Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest and most revered, I was reminded that while my enlightenment-by-mail joke is not much of a joke, it is not that much of a caricature either. A sampling:

“Bring hither a fig from there.”

“Here it is, sir.”

“Divide it.”

“It is divided, Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“These rather fine seeds, Sir.”

“Of these, please, divide one.”

“It is divided, Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“Nothing at all, Sir.”

Then he said to him: “Verily, my dear, that finest essence which you do not perceive—verily, my dear from that finest essence this great [fig tree] thus arises.

“Believe me, my dear,” said he, “that which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its self. That is Reality. That is Ātman. That art thou [Tat tvam asi].”¹

“Now, when one is sound asleep; composed, serene, and knows no dream—that is the Self (Ātman),” he said. “That is the immortal, the fearless. That is Brahman. . . .²

The past, the future, and what the Vedas declare—

This whole world the illusion-maker projects out of this.

And in it by illusion the other is confined.

Now, one should know that Nature is illusion [maya], and that the Mighty Lord is the illusion-maker.³

Just as I felt I was not going to get it, Kena Upanishad assured me I might be on to something:

It is not understood by those who [say they] understand It.

It is understood by those who [say they] understand It not.⁴

It was hard not to be reminded of Feynman’s remark that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don’t understand quantum mechanics. The Upanishads set forth a majestic metaphysics of Ātman and Brahman. The latter is the ultimate or Absolute, the universal principle as encountered objectively; the former is that same Absolute as encountered subjectively. Ātman, or Self, manifests in individual selves. Brahman manifests in the universe and in individual divinities.

Carl Sagan once credited Hinduism with being “the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the earth or the sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.” The Vedas: “Verily, in the beginning this world was Brahman, the limitless One. . . . Truly, for him east and the other directions exist not, nor across, nor below, nor above.”

In a series of celebrated addresses to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda sought to portray Hinduism as a universal faith on which the world’s religions and sciences are converging: “From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in Hindu religion” (emphasis added).⁵

Today the same strategy is still seen, stripped down to a crude ideology, in the discourse of the Hindu Right or Hindutva movement. A textbook published by the Hindutva organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad describes the Vedas as “not just old religious books, but as books which contain many true scientific facts,” saying that “these ancient scriptures of the Hindus can be treated as scientific texts.”⁶

A Saffron Science?

Is this a historical thesis about the causal role of Indian ideas in the actual development of science? If so, then it is flatly false. Indian philosophy had very little readership in Europe until the early 1800s, more than a century after the methodological revolution launched by Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Huygens, Hooke, Boyle, and Newton was more or less complete. Indian thought was most influential on post-Enlightenment and Romantic figures like Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that science fails to grasp the “inner nature” of things. Far from being an inspiration for modern science, the Upanishads were most useful to those European thinkers who felt that empiricism was missing something.

If “Vedic science” is not a statement about the intellectual genealogy of modern science, what is it? Perhaps it is the idea that ancient Indian thinkers independently discovered key insights of the sciences or at least something that resembles them. Maybe Vedic science is not so much a historical thesis as an analogical thesis. Consider the nature-is-illusion doctrine, or maya, here in a comment from the chapter on “Hinduism and Science” in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science:

Maya has often been castigated as a pessimistic concept describing the spatio-temporal world as worthless and illusory. The growing interest in the ideas of quantum entanglement and multiple possible worlds by quantum physicists might provide a welcome note for the dynamic and positive interpretations of maya, which hold that the world is “real while experiencing, but not independently.”⁷

In contemplating the doctrine of maya, the author is reminded of the weird world of quantum physics. But what is the probative value of this resemblance? How much of it depends upon an individual’s level of tolerance for resemblance? I’ve had students with very low tolerance. The more they read, the more everything started to sound more or less the same. A poet once pointed out that any word sounds more like any other word than either of them sounds like silence.⁸

Suppose there were some acceptable objective criteria for resemblance, and some nonbiased way to sort through the countless Vedic ideas and scientific ideas, so to find relevant analogues. Could we then vindicate Vivekananda’s conclusion that science is echoing the Vedas? Why not rather say that the Vedas are echoing science? Remember, we’ve set aside the interpretation according to which Indian thought had a causal role in the history of science. So, we have no more reason to say that science approximates Hindu wisdom than to say that Hindu wisdom approximates science. Given a mere resemblance between an Indian and a European idea, the self-appointed representatives of “the East” have no more warrant to claim the European idea as Indian than the representatives of “the West” would have to claim the Indian idea as European.

Besides, if resemblance is the order of the day, then countless other ancient traditions have equal claim to be “pre-echoes” of modern science. The writings of the pre-Socratic materialist philosopher Empedocles contain tantalizing suggestions (composed in verse) of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Should we say that modern biology rediscovered Greek wisdom? Greek and Indian wisdom? The whole thing begins to look like a joke. Empedocles was from the city of Acragas in southern Sicily. Do his remarks redound to the glory of Sicilians, Greeks, Mediterraneans, pagans?

There is at work here a deeper and potentially dangerous conceit: in identifying those entities that deserve praise for their science-reminiscent insights, this way of thinking arbitrarily subdivides a complex social reality in the interest of mobilizing solidarity around some community. Who precisely should get credit for the Vedas? Surely not, as the Hindu Right would have it, the Indian nation as a whole, the same nation that is a secular democracy and home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world.

The irony is that the echoes or analogues of contemporary science in world history could be seen as evidence of the universality of science. Instead they are brandished by neo-Hindus and their post-modernist allies as proof of the cultural specificity of science or the superiority of a particular tradition. Despite the undeniable fact that the sciences have their cultural and historical roots in particular societies—Europe in the middle of the last millenium—they are universal in at least three senses. The sciences are universal in scope. Their validity is not bounded by epoch, place, or people. They are universal in practice: open in principle to all individual practitioners, fruitfully adoptable by any willing peoples. Finally, they are as nonproprietary as any human striving. They belong to no one people.

One with Nothing

Vivekananda’s message is now found alongside a quite different one, to the effect that the materialistic worldview of Western science is impoverished and incomplete and must be supplemented by the more holistic, pluralistic, and spiritual outlook of the Indian tradition. And so one reads from the same chapter in the Oxford Handbook: “What distinguishes the Indian way of thinking from what we today call the Western way of thinking is the wholesome connection present in the Hindu world between theoretical, experiential, and transcendental issues.” This is contrasted with “the linearity and immediate convenience that is provided by rigid, reductionistic structures of knowledge.”

For those readers looking for a thorough draining of the cognitive swamp where pop physics and New Age mysticism are brewed together by neo-Hindu gurus, I recommend Victor Stenger’s Unconscious Quantum. For present purposes, it is enough to note that the neo-Hindu critique of science is in tension with, if not strictly incompatible with, the previous argument for the scientific validity of Vedanta. For if the greatness of science has brought it around to ancient Indian wisdom, as Vivekananda postulated, then to that extent science does not stand in need of ancient Indian wisdom to correct its shortcomings.

In the end, it must be said that in light of modern cosmology, Indian philosophy was dead wrong about the biggest thing of all. We cannot be one with everything. Our world—everything living and inorganic—is a fig seed in a desert. Physics tells us that the ordinary matter that makes up all the planets, stars, and gases—and everything we’ve ever known—accounts for only 5 percent of the mass of the universe. If there is a One, we are not in on it. Its “finest essence” is not ours. We can identify with the fig seed, with life, even with life’s lifeless chemistry. But everything else, the rest of the universe, is near completely, fundamentally Other. The unbiased observer would see we clearly do not belong here. Here then is our self-portrait from the sciences so far, and verily anti-Vedic at that: a fig tree clinging, with the not-fig infinite on all sides. When you do get your mail-order-enlightenment kit, it will come stamped, “Void where not prohibited.”

Notes

1. Chāndogya 12. 1-3, translation from Robert Ernest Hume, ed., The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 247-248.
2. Chāndogya 11. 1, ibid., p. 271.
3. Svetāsvatara 4. 9-10, ibid., p. 404.
4. Kena 2. 3, ibid, p. 337.
5. In Edwin S. Gaustad and Mark A. Noll, eds., A documentary history of religion in America: Since 1887 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), p. 72. The term Vedānta, literally, ‘Veda’s end,’ since the medieval period has come to refer to a dominant philosophical school of interpretation of Vedic teachings.
6. Meera Nanda, “Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and ‘Vedic science’” Frontline vol 20, no. 26 (December 20, 2003-January 2, 2004); http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2026/stories/20040102000607800.htm; accessed August 12, 2009.
7. Sangeetha Menon, “Hinduism and Science,” in Philip Clayton and Zachary R. Simpson eds., The Oxford handbook of religion and science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 19.
8. I attribute this thought to the American poet William Stafford: “I assume that all syllables rhyme, sort of. That is, any syllable sounds more like any other syllable than either of them sounds like silence.” Thanks to Philip Dacey for this.

Nair had reason for confidence. Since 1993 the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV, had been a success story of India’s space program. What’s more, earlier that morning Nair and more than a dozen other top space scientists had visited the Tirupati temple of Lord Venkateswara, where they laid a miniature prototype of the PSLV-C6 at the feet of the deity (a form of the sustainer-god Vishnu also known as Lord Balaji) and offered prayers for a successful mission.

Was this some kind of prank? Was it a symbolic gesture, intended in fact not for Balaji but instead for the more earthbound audience of the public, a Hindu equivalent of those prayer breakfasts that U.S. presidents cannot seem to go without? Or did the scientists actually believe in Balaji? Did they consider the temple ritual a proper part of their public scientific activities?

Indian scientists under study

This last question has been put to India’s scientific community as part of a national survey of professional scientists released last year by Trinity College’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society in cooperation with the Center for Inquiry-India, headquartered not far from Tirupathi in Hyderabad (full disclosure: I had a hand in coordinating the project while at Center for Inquiry). The first-of-its-kind study, entitled Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists: India 2007-2008, gathered responses to an email questionnaire from 1,100 participants at 130 universities and research institutes.¹ The results reveal a fascinating portrait of science and religion in the subcontinental context.

Most readers of Skeptical Inquirer have committed to memory the figures from the famous 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S.: only 7.5 percent of physicists and astronomers and 5.5 percent of biological scientists believe in a personal deity.² By contrast, Worldviews found that most Indian scientists are believers. Only one-fourth are non-theists, while 66 percent identified as Hindu. Half hold that homeopathy and prayer are efficacious; 90 percent approve of the offering of university degrees in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional practice that prescribes various herbs, oils, and spices to bring the diseased back into balance with the universe. The blessing of rocket launches turned out to be relatively contentious, with 41 percent approving the 2005 event and 46 disapproving (the remaining 13 percent were not sure what they thought about it).

The Worldviews survey sparked plenty of conversation, especially in the Indian press, about whether such attitudes are defensible or whether they are a dangerous betrayal of the civic duty—mentioned in the national constitution—to cultivate a “scientific temper.” However, the survey did not attempt to explain why it is that so many Indian scientists cleave to non-naturalistic worldviews, as compared to their American counterparts. After all, the rates of religiosity in the Indian and American general populations are not so dramatically different.

Was this simply a case of Pascal’s Wager: Ignore Venkateswara, thereby risking his displeasure and aeronautical disaster; or supplicate Venkateswara, thereby risking nothing and possibly gaining favor? One classic objection to Pascal—the so-called Many Gods objection—points out that the wagering party, who resorts to a gamble precisely because he lacks conclusive evidence about the divine, cannot know which of all the possible gods might exist, and therefore which he might be enraging by wagering on another (to say nothing of the possibility of a supreme being who smites all those and only those who believe just to escape a smiting).³ The unimaginable pluralism of India, with its 22 official languages and thousands of castes, extends to its supernatural precincts as well, with over 200,000 gods and goddesses crowding temples and rickshaw triptychs. Many Gods with a vengeance! In this case, one might worry about Indra, formerly the king of the gods who was demoted to running the weather and who is quite possibly disgruntled about it. As with India’s infamous bureaucracy, the trouble may lie in figuring out which official to propitiate.

Science and reactionary modernism

A more general (if not generalizing) explanation of Indian scientists’ worldviews would point to the syncretism of Indian thought on the whole. Not unlike its urban centers, where livestock jostle with stockbrokers and illiterate rural immigrants mix with techno-billionaires, India’s religious, scientific, and philosophical minds appear capable of housing a wild admixture of seemingly incongruent occupants. The expansiveness of Hindu cosmogony, already noted by me and numerous other commentators, always leaves room for another entity with its own compartmentalized jurisdiction. You can have your quarks and Vishnu too; they’re all Brahma in the end somehow.

During the colonial era, Indian intellectuals lived amid ambivalent attitudes to the European scientific tradition and the Enlightenment outlook associated with it. According to Meera Nanda, a philosopher of science and a consultant on the Worldviews study, although many of these thinkers and social reformers looked to “the West” for the tools they needed to bring their country into modernity, they at the same time sought to vindicate the value of the indigenous. Nanda explains,

keen to assert their national pride against the colonizers, these intellectuals tended to subsume the new ideas into the unreformed tradition. Rather than agitate against those elements of the inherited tradition that negated the content and the spirit of the modern worldview, neo-Hindu intellectuals began to find homologies between the new worldview of science, liberalism, and even Christian ideas of monotheism, and the high-Brahminical Vedic literature, especially the philosophy of non-dualism.⁴

In contemporary politics, one can find a similar pattern of “reactionary modernism” taken to the extreme in the discourse rightwing Hindu nationalism:

. . . Hindu nationalism asserts itself not by rejecting the modern ideas of democracy, secularism, and scientific reason, but by aggressively restating them in a Hindu civilizational idiom. The champions of Hindu nationalism pretend to set themselves apart from their Islamic and Christian counterparts by claiming to be enlightened champions of democracy, secularism, science, all of which they claim to find in the perennial wisdom of the Vedas, Vedānta, and in the original, uncorrupted Vedic institution of four varnas or castes.⁵

In practice, then, the discourse of science and modernity can be impressed into the service of a reactionary agenda that re-asserts a traditional Hindu social order and national identity. In her excellent book Prophets Facing Backwards, Nanda documents a convergence with postmodern critiques that would make science a culturally specific narrative. On this view, India has its own authentically saffron-colored science. Ayurveda is literally a “science of life”; the celebrated tolerance of Hinduism means remaining open to the utility of astrology.

It is just this kind of thinking that alarms Nanda and Innaiah Narisetti, the chairman of Center for Inquiry-India, who told the Sunday Hindustan Times in 2008, “It is disturbing to see scientists touching the feet of godmen and taking replicas of rockets before their launch to the Tirupati temple. If scientists do these things, what message will it send to the general public?”⁶

A widening debate

As it happened, that morning in May the PSLV-C6 blasted off on time and placed its two satellites into polar sun-synchronous orbits roughly 18 minutes later, thanks to the dedication of its team of technicians and engineers. Nair might just as well have offered his prayers to Robert Goddard. One of the satellites deployed was HAMSAT, which would relay the signals of ham radio operators. Its launch represented the government’s recognition of the critical role played by the amateur radio community in coordinating disaster management in the wake of supercyclones and tsunamis. PSLV-6 also put into orbit the solar-powered CARTOSAT-1, which was carrying two earth-imaging cameras capable of high-resolution applications in agriculture, water-management, and cartography.

A survey of the landscape of Indian thought and scientific opinion makes one thing clear. Rationalists cannot simply insist on the value of cultivating a scientific temper. The debate now turns on the very meaning of science. Until recently this debate has largely been internal to India, but that may be changing. We now have the Worldviews survey. Meanwhile, Amartya Sen has been pressing for more cosmopolitan models of Indian identity.⁷ And thanks to Narisetti, there is now a Telegu translation of the first chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Still, real philosophical work remains to be done at a smaller scale of analysis. Is it possible to harmonize the notion of argument by analogy, so important in classical Indian logic and epistemology since 7^th century B.C.E, with post-Galilean quantitative methods and contemporary accounts of induction and evidentiary confirmation? And what could it mean to say that any mode of inquiry belongs to one civilization or another in the first place?

Notes

1. See worldviewsofscientists.org.
2. Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, Leading Scientists Still Reject God. Nature 1998; 394, 313.
3. For a critical discussion of the Many Gods Objection, see Jeff Jordan, Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2006).
4. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 46-47.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. C. Sujit Chandra Kumar, Is HE for real? Sunday Hindustan Times, June 22, 2008.
7. See Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

Several months earlier in San Francisco the American poet and playwright had crafted the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, which declaims, “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” In November, MacLeish, who had volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I and gone on to serve as Librarian of Congress and assistant to the Secretary of State, was in London serving as the United States delegate to a conference of 44 nations that had gathered to create a new UN institution. It would later come to be known as the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.

They met in the Institute of Civil Engineers, one of the few buildings unscathed by German bombs, and on November 16, 1945 adopted a Constitution that opens with MacLeish’s line, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” It goes on to declare that

a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.¹

The parties to the Constitution, affirming their commitment to “full and equal opportunities for education for all,” “the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth,” and “the free exchange of ideas and knowledge,” created UNESCO

to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives;

with the ultimate purpose of

advancing, through the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world, the objectives of international peace and of the common welfare of mankind for which the United Nations Organization was established and which its Charter proclaims.

Viewed from the vantage point of today, the hope radiating from this document is almost blinding, the distance of the intervening years making it seem only more improbably bright. Somehow the delegates’ optimism burned more powerfully than Oppenheimer’s “thousand suns” that just months before had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki—they too begun in the minds of men.

Julian Huxley and the universal culture

Science almost didn’t make it, along with education and culture, into the organization’s name and mandate. The ‘S’ in UNESCO was thanks in large part to the urging of the British biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of T.H.). After MacLeish declined the post of Director-General in order to return to academic life, Huxley went to Paris to take up the task. In a 1946 essay entitled UNESCO, Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, he boldly maintained, with the smoldering globe in full view, that what the world needs is more, not less, science. The philosophy of UNESCO, in his vision, is in essence the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment:

Science . . . is by its nature opposed to dogmatic orthodoxies and to the claims of authority. . . . Science, however, on the basis of its fruitful experience, asserts with confidence that a priori reasoning is inadequate to arrive at truth, that truth is never complete and explanation never fully or eternally valid.²

The purpose of the organization, Huxley thought, is to encourage the spread of this philosophy everywhere:

Anything that [UNESCO] can do to satisfy these needs through promoting education, science and culture, will be a step towards a unified way of life and of looking at life, a contribution to a foundation for the unified philosophy we require.³

The scientific enterprise itself, Huxley observed, is “already the most international activity of man,” and so provides our best model of a new kind of polity for a new kind of world, a cosmopolitan community that transcends frontiers to collaborate for the betterment of humankind. In the first report of the Director-General of UNESCO he spoke of a “universal culture” that will grow from the global cultivation of free, critical inquiry.

One need not share Huxley’s enthusiasm for “evolutionary humanism” (to say nothing of eugenics) to resonate to his call for science as a cultural commons, a buffer against sectarianism and nationalism. Contemplate the Large Hadron Collider, its subterranean vaults glittering, deep enough to house the nave of Notre Dame. The design and construction of this marvel near Geneva brought together funds and specialists from 60 countries, including military rivals like India and Pakistan. If they find the God Particle, it will belong to all of them, all of us.

The politicization of “culture”

The one thing that Huxley did not anticipate was the rest of the 20^th century: the tectonic effects of the collapse of empire and the emergence of the Third World. Decolonization and the rise of non-western nationalisms radically altered the political realities at the UN and the discourse among the so-called international community. As developing countries asserted their equal dignity and autonomy on the world stage, they pressed in the international legal order for “cultural rights” and the right of peoples to “self-determination” even at the expense of universal values—now conceived as the values of one particular culture, “the West”. Meanwhile, post-colonial and multiculturalist academic theories elevated cultural membership to the preeminent source of personal identity.

With these political and intellectual shifts came a shift in the meaning of “culture” in international discourse. In 1945, it denoted cultural productions—the works of art and letters, architecture, cuisine. Throughout the 1950s, the Director-General reports classified cultural activities as “the preservation and protection of art, heritage, and artists . . . .”⁴ But in the post-colonial landscape, culture increasingly came to stand in for peoples, particularly those who hadn’t (lately) run an empire. Culture went from a What to a Who.

By 1982, UNESCO’s Mexico Declaration on Cultural Policies could define culture as “the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group,” and it paired each culture with a people:

1. Every culture represents a unique and irreplaceable body of values since each people's traditions and forms of expression are its most effective means of demonstrating its presence in the world.
2. The assertion of cultural identity therefore contributes to the liberation of peoples. Conversely, any form of domination constitutes a denial or an impairment of that identity.⁵

Culture-as-people recalls the German romantic notion of the Volk, a community bonded by blood and distinguished by its language, religion, and customs. And as Johann Gottfried Herder would have it, Volk comes first. States must recognize “the right of each people and cultural community to affirm and preserve its cultural identity and have it respected by others” and should “foster the assimilation of scientific and technological knowledge without detriment to each people’s capacities and values” [italics added].

In the context of this discourse, Huxley’s thesis of a universal, science-enriched culture must be either irrelevant or false. For if it means culture-as-production, then the thesis concerns something that no longer concerns most of the international community. If instead it means culture-as-people, then the thesis is ludicrous. Scientists are decidedly not a community bound by blood or soil. And no one—not even a fan of world government such as Huxley—supposes that a world culture would or should entail one world people.

Instead, science itself has been dismembered by culturist politics, exemplified by the Vedic science movement in India, with its ties to the Hindu Right. The Indian experience suggests that a society can adopt the modalities of science without fully absorbing the Enlightenment culture that in European history accompanied it. Making the irony complete, in 1982 a coalition of Islamic states launched its own brand of UNESCO that replaces the “United” with a particular “culture”: the Islamic Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It promotes science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.”⁶

An unclinical trial

Of the founding of UNESCO, one member of the British delegation said it was “the most underrated conference in all history.”⁷ And it was either that, or the most overreaching. We still do not know which. Before it could be truly tested, Huxley’s vision was abandoned by the United Nations. Quite independently, however, the world’s scientific institutions themselves embarked on a vast unintentional experiment, an unclinical trial of the idea that science will bring people and peoples closer together. Is there in fact a universal culture of science? If so, what is it? The experiment is now running, and it will be examined in subsequent installments of this series, “Circumnavigations.”

Notes

1. Available at unesco.org (PDF)
2. Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (Preparatory Commission of UNESCO, 1946), 34.
3. Ibid., 62.
4. Katérina Stenou, ed., UNESCO and the Issue of Cultural Diversity: Review and Strategy, 1946- 2004 (UNESCO, 2004); unesco.org (PDF); accessed on June 2, 2009.
5. Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies, World Conference on Cultural Policies, Mexico City, 26 July - 6 August 1982; unesco.org (PDF); accessed June 2, 2009.
6. ISESCO Charter, Article 4(a); unesco.org; accessed June 2, 2009.
7. Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 223.

Joshua Fineberg is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a composer whose works are widely performed in the United States and Europe. He collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists to help develop tools for computer-assisted composition, electronic sound manipulation, and in music perception research. In 2004 Fineberg became the U.S. editor of The Contemporary Music Review. In 2006 his book Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture through a Composer’s Ears was published by Routledge. Fineberg is associated with the movement known as “spectral music,” which draws on acoustics and computer technology to explore the fundamental nature of sound (a spectrum is a representation of a sound in terms of the amount of vibration at each of the individual frequencies that make it up). In spectral composition, timbre often eclipses melody as the primary musical element.

What is spectral music?

All such labels are kind of awkward, but the common thread is that rather than taking for granted certain sonic categories as the most musically relevant way to divide up the soundstream—notes, for example, that are played for particular durations at a particular volume—you start from the assumption that what you have is the soundstream itself. Though sound can be parsed in the traditional way, it can be parsed lots of other ways. By understanding the physical and psychophysical principles of sound, you can gain an understanding into the possibilities and methods best adapted to modifying sound over time.

In what ways has spectral composition been influenced by science and technology?

This is a kind of music that couldn’t have happened without the progress in acoustics and psychoacoustics in the late 1960s and 1970s when people started having access to the first analog sonograms and then electronic software sonograms that let you see the interior composition of sound. The personal computer enabled people to analyze sounds more easily with less demanding equipment.

Spectral music has been called a post-electronic approach to music. Sometimes it uses electronic synthesis; often it doesn’t. But the knowledge acquired in order to make (synthesize) sounds from scratch is essential to writing this kind of music. To really control sound as we want to, we must understand enough to be able to make it.

Is the movement French?

Initially it was centered around an ensemble called L’Itinérarie in early 1970s Paris, a very experimentally oriented group that was trying out these ideas. But once you had the basic concepts it became very clear that you needed computer tools. Because in France music in general is not at the universities, except for musicology or music history, the place where a lot of this happened was IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique). It’s a research institute started in the mid-1970s and built on the idea of providing tools to musicians at the interface between science and art. In the early 1980s, the computer-assisted composition techniques that IRCAM was developing prompted them to bring spectral composers into the fold.

Spectral music became one of the first real implementations of computer-assisted composition that went beyond what I would call algorithmically produced music. What spectral composers wanted was much more like what happens in computer-assisted design in architecture.

In music there has been a long tradition of laborious hand-calculation, but the reality is that if you spent four weeks calculating something, you’re going to use it whether it turned out to be what you wanted or not! Whereas if you spent twenty minutes on it with a computer, you might have the courage to go back and try it seven or eight times until you really find the thing you were looking for.

Some see spectral music as a reaction to the artificiality of serialism and 12-tone-row music. Is it somehow more natural?

We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are relatively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals is part of why for a long time they were interesting. But when you start thinking you can do anything that is mathematically possible with musical symbols, you get a kind of speculative music that at a certain time loses all contact with perceptual reality. Spectral music certainly strove to reground musical discourse in human perception and cognition.

Your book asks, Classical Music, Why Bother? What’s your answer?

In order for subsidized art to survive it must be seen as having importance and intrinsic value independent of how much entertainment value it has. You’re not just going out and buying it. You’re supporting it because you believe that the world is a richer place with this art in it. That is a much harder sell than it used to be. Now, most people believe that in most domains, there isn’t better or worse. You also see this in the debate over evolution, in the idea that we should teach all the alternatives.

I don’t mean that these abstract criteria are based on something divine. I think they are based on parameters of human perception and the way the human mind is built, certain things may have richer content than others. I tend to think we’d be better off pretending that it were so, even if it turns out not to be so. The belief that there can be great literature will make you wrestle with, say, James Joyce. You can develop a lot of capabilities in that effort that you probably couldn’t in reading more facile fiction.

Spectral composers are anti-establishment figures in their own way, aren’t they?

I still don’t understand how I got the job I have! In a composition seminar of mine, I’m just as likely to pull out an article from Perception & Psychophysics as a piece by Beethoven. Western classical musicians are quite conservative people. I mean, we’re trained in conservatories, for God’s sake!

You’re challenging their self-conception.

In a lot of the music, we are using the musicians as incredibly sophisticated tone generators. What matters much of the time is the sum of all of the sounds that the musicians are making. Each of their individual parts may not make much sense by itself. And that can be very frustrating for a performer. That is very different from a lot of the Western tradition, where each line should sing and have its own sense.

When will we see a Lincoln Center premiere of a composition written by no one?

The factual answer is that we have already had more than one. But I think the real question is more like a musical Turing test: Will we ever hear a piece written by a computer that feels as successful and original as one written by a gifted human being? And in that context, do not expect one anytime soon.

Music is so tied to the human perceptual system that until one has a complete map of that, I don’t know how you would get a computer to write really effective music. It would have to weigh every choice against the perceptual system. This is what composers are doing, even when they don’t think about it: playing things or thinking through things in their minds and applying them to their own perceptual systems.

What pieces do you recommend as an introduction to spectral music?

First, Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques (The acoustic spaces), which is to my mind the twentieth-century equivalent of the Ring Cycle. Another composer who is essential to the beginning of this music is Tristan Murail. Listen to Gondwana, and what I think is the first piece where electronics and acoustic writing really meet as equals, Désintégrations. More recently, there is Grisey’s last work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold), Murail’s L’Esprit des dunes (Spirit of the dunes), or my Recueil de pierre et de sable (Collections of rock and sand).

Niles Eldridge, curator

On the sunny autumn afternoon of Saturday, November 19, I was among the enthusiastic throng at the opening of a new exhibition entitled Darwin: His Life and Times, at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Waiting in line outside a sold-out opening panel featuring the show’s curator, Niles Eldredge, as well as Darwin’s great-great grandson Randal Keynes, I looked around at my fellow museum goers and wondered which of them represented the scant 26% of Americans who accept naturalistic evolution, and which represented the majority, anti-Darwinian, public. For the latter, the $3 million production—with its 6,000 square feet of displays bursting with evidence both of evolution by natural selection and the intellectual and moral integrity of its greatest expositor—must have smacked of Madame Tussaud’s or Ripley’s Believe it or Not. The American Museum of Natural History is an ironic spot for the sage of Down House, for Americans remain a people for whom history is fundamentally not natural. All the more reason for this remarkable initiative in science education, which after a tour of Boston, Chicago, and Toronto will land in London for Darwin’s bicentennial in 2009.

Beagle Ship Model, © AMNH / Denis Finnin

Although the exhibition was in the works well before intelligent design became front page news, it can be seen as a direct response to the movement, and it is being framed as such in much of the ample media coverage it has already received; for example, in the cover story of the February 28 issue of Newsweek, called “The Real Darwin: His Private Views and Science and God.” Throughout the displays on Darwin’s work, the emphasis is on the cumulative evidential case for the theory. The final third is devoted to “evolution today.” As a video clip points out, whether we like it or not, evolution is happening today to the avian flu virus. In the middle of the final room is a multimedia kiosk on “Social Reactions to Darwin” that places creationism alongside social Darwinism in the context of “reaction and controversy based on nonscientific perspectives.” Given the cultural environment of the U.S., it is entirely appropriate that the design of the show gives the evolution-creation controversy a place of prominence, if not priority (I’m curious how this will play in the U.K., where Darwin’s face is on the 10-pound note).

Many readers of Skeptical Inquirer will be most interested in the display on the meaning of “theory” in science, a copy of the Cobb County, Georgia textbook disclaimer, and a timeline depicting the history of the American creation-evolution controversy. I was surprised to see the Dover, Pennsylvania case at the end of the timeline. Particularly after the electoral reversal of the school board, it is much too soon to say whether Dover will turn out to be a landmark like Dayton.

Down House, © AMNH

The centerpiece of the “Social Reactions” piece is “Scientists on Faith,” a collection of thought-provoking video messages from (among others) Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, and Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project. Here Niles Eldredge speaks of the personal edification he finds in the naturalistic outlook: “it’s wonderful for me to feel connected to all the rest of the living things on the planet, present day and in the deep past and beyond that to the basic fundamental units and history of the universe in which we live.” Collins identifies himself as a believer in a personal deity, saying “I find the scientific worldview and the spiritual worldview to be entirely complementary” He describes ID as a “God-of-the-gaps” theology and observes that past attempts to put God in a box have done harm to people’s faith.

Orchids Exhibit, © AMNH / Denis Finnin

Curiously, this cozy compatibilism finds little confirmation in the biography we were gathered to celebrate. The exhibition does a fair job of addressing Darwin’s “skepticism about religion,” though its shies from using the A-word that he himself preferred (“Agnostic”) and couches science-religion tension in his emotional relationship to Emma rather than in argument and doubt, in his deep-time argument from evil (found in the autobiography): “for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?”

On the way out of the exhibit hall, a final case holds a hopeful sight, the moonglow white of a lovely Angraecum sesquipedale orchid of Madagascar, whose foot-long throat led Darwin to predict in 1862 that Madagascar must be home to a species of insect with an oversized feeding tube adapted to pollinate it: “Charles Darwin died in 1882, and more than 40 years later, his insight was confirmed. A naturalist in Madagascar discovered the giant hawk moth, which hovers like a hummingbird as its long, whip-like proboscis probes for the distant nectar. The moth’s scientific name, Xanthopan morganii praedicta, honors the prediction of the scientist who never saw it, but whose theory told him that it must exist.” Three cheers for the evidence of things unseen. Will we see full public understanding of evolution, at least by the time of Darwin’s tricentennial? This engaging and cutting-edge exhibition is cause for hope.

Darwin: His Life and Times is showing at the American Museum of Natural History until May 29, 2006. Extensive texts, videos, behind-the-scenes photos, and a downloadable teacher’s guide can be found on the Museum’s website at http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/.

Is science making us more ignorant? Surely, scientific knowledge is increasing. In a year, we will know more, and in richer detail, about the universe than we do now. In one sense, the scientific ignorance of laypeople increases with each increase in specialists’ knowledge, since most laypeople can’t keep abreast of advancing science. But even if everyone were scientifically informed, that would not keep us from being ignorant in the following sense. We still might be lost, in that we might not have a reasonable grasp of basic issues like these: What are we? Why are we here? How are we related to nature? Why is this world here rather than some other world or “nothing at all?” What can we know? What can we hope for? A person who could recite the periodic table and explain the difference between introns and exons but who had nothing to say on questions like these would be out to sea intellectually.

Throughout most of human history, people have gotten a handle on such questions by way of common sense, religion, philosophy, literature and art, educational and civil institutions, and assumptions embedded in natural language itself—in short, by way of their culture. Of course, a single culture might contain many, sometimes conflicting, answers. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a cultural understanding of our basic outlook on the world and our place in it.

Today, this understanding is being unsettled. Emerging science clearly speaks to central cultural questions, but precisely what it says is unclear. This is an opportunity for a new line of inquiry, rooted in a new multidisciplinary academic field with tremendous intellectual and social significance. It could help point the way to renewed support for publicly funded basic research and decide what sort of “science literacy” matters most.

The Loss of Cultural Understanding

Consider the question of what we are. One way to approach this question is through a complex of cultural beliefs about the self; for instance, that it is a coherent, unitary entity, mostly transparent to introspection, which authors behavior by the free directives of its will. Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else? I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone does at this point.

And that is how science is making us more ignorant. Before neuroscience, the received cultural understanding of the self was reasonable because it was favored by the balance of the total evidence available to us. That evidence included our own introspection, along with the cultural sources just mentioned. We had an idea of what was going on with the self. With the advent of neuroscience, the total evidence available to us came to include the results of the investigations of that field. Yet we don’t know what this expanded set of evidence should lead us to conclude with respect to our cultural beliefs about the self. Thus, we have become more ignorant about the self. The point is not that some people don’t yet understand the latest relevant science. Rather, the latest science makes it the case that we no longer understand what we once did about the self. A similar case can be made for each of the basic cultural questions mentioned above.

Someone skeptical about the reach of science might reply that neuroscience research is not a proper part of the total evidence relevant to understanding the self. However, such research clearly appears relevant. Maybe the appearance is misleading, but no one has established that it is. Until this is established, basic pieces of culture remain up for grabs. In a prescientific environment, we could discharge our epistemic duties with respect to our cultural beliefs without thinking about science. To do that now would be to ignore a part of the total evidence relevant to those beliefs. And that would be ignorant.

A New Field of Inquiry

The positive way to say that science is making us more ignorant is to say that it is opening up a new field of inquiry. There are different ways to frame this field. For reasons that will emerge below, I frame it as “science and the public.” I see it as having philosophical and empirical-sociological aspects. The philosophical aim is to articulate the relationships (logical, conceptual, epistemological, normative) that hold between emerging scientific knowledge and basic cultural beliefs and values. The empirical-sociological aim is to examine how these relationships play out in the interactions of actual participants in the culture, namely, institutions of science and technology and the public. We are familiar with the idea that science has technological and medical applications. But it also has cultural applications. The field of science and the public can also be thought of as the study of the cultural applications of science.

The general idea of bridging science and culture is nothing new. However, the present notion of science and the public is distinctive. Perhaps the two thinkers who loom the largest in this area are C.P. Snow and E.O. Wilson. In a now-famous, 1959 lecture, Snow decried the gulf between the “two cultures,” with literary intellectuals and artists on the one side and scientists and technologists on the other. [1] He was worried that academics were not talking to each other across these disciplinary fences. Snow was right to be concerned, and his concerns remain timely today. We can go further than Snow, however. Basic cultural understanding, common to literary and scientific types alike, is being upended by the growth of science. Reconstructing it will require the cross-disciplinary work of scholars in the sciences and the humanities.

The contemporary scientific outlook is widely presumed to be materialist or physicalist, in that all properties and relations in the universe (or universes) are thought to depend in some way on the fundamental wave-particles and forces postulated by physical theory. This presents a problem, for there are plenty of things in the world that we regard as real—intentions, promises, jealousy, friends, toll roads, federal constitutions, and so forth—yet they appear in no physical theory. What are we to make of them? That is, how are we to systematically relate our commonsense and cultural ontologies to physicalist ontologies? One solution is so-called intertheoretic reduction: “higher-order” entities are “nothing but” agglomerations of “lower-order” entities, and the laws governing the former can be deduced from the laws governing the latter. This was the bold agenda championed by E.O. Wilson under the banner of consilience, the idea that “all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.” [2]

Unfortunately for Wilson, this reductionist program has long since been abandoned because of insurmountable technical obstacles, even in the case of reducing biology to chemistry. [3] Reductionism is dead, whereas nonreductive integration is very much alive. [4] Throughout the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, even theology, researchers are attempting to systematically relate their subject matter to the ontologies emerging from the natural sciences. The field of science and the public would draw these disparate research projects together, offering a coherent overview (inasmuch as the overview turns out to be coherent).

The Role of Academia

To date, there are no major academic institutions devoted to studying the cultural applications of science. Traditional training in formal-science teaching tends to focus, quite appropriately, on science as a body of knowledge or set of methods. In the U.S. and in the United Kingdom especially, there are also thriving academic programs in the field known as “science communication” or “public understanding of science,” for instance, the programs at Cornell University and the London School of Economics. These programs typically consist of sociological examination of the public’s experience of science, especially as mediated by mass communication. Programs in the history of science and technology, such as the initiative at MIT, look at the social repercussions of science and technology over time. None are primarily concerned with the intellectual and normative connections linking the scientific outlook with cultural beliefs and values. Many analytic philosophers are taking naturalistic, scientifically informed approaches to semantics, the mind, morality, and other issues. The task of synthesizing these independent lines of inquiry has for the most part been left to others.

A new interdisciplinary academic field is needed. The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit research organization concerned with the scientific outlook, is collaborating with the University at Buffalo on a program in Science and the Public, which will initially include research and an interdisciplinary Master’s degree. [5] The program is being designed to attract scholars in the sciences and humanities, as well as educators, policy makers, and journalists who seek a new language and framework in which to discuss the intersections of science and culture.

The subject of science and the public is related to, but distinct from, the subject of public science literacy. Scholars and policy experts continue to disagree about what kind of science literacy is desirable and how to promote it. [6] Not even scientists and science educators, much less laypeople, have a comprehensive grasp of the fundamental principles and findings of all fields of contemporary science. [7] It may well be that the findings are just too numerous and complex, and the principles too nongeneralizable; there is simply more scientific knowledge than even a reasonably intelligent and well-educated person could become competent in (and there is good inductive evidence that this situation will continue into the foreseeable future). As a workable alternative to this ideal of science literacy, we might look toward the public’s appreciation of the scientific outlook’s import for basic cultural beliefs and values. Further, one of the things that most disturbs science educators, especially in the U.S., is the high level of public belief in pseudoscience, the paranormal, and the supernatural: ghosts, demons, reincarnation, creationism, psychic abilities, and so on. Yet no one has successfully demonstrated that traditional education in science tends to reduce such beliefs generally. [8] With its focus on cultural implications, the science and the public approach engages them directly.

Leading colleges and universities may be beginning to rethink the place of science education in their core undergraduate curricula. The 2004 Harvard College Curricular Review by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences noted: “. . . our undergraduates will live in a world of ongoing scientific and technological revolution. We are revising our understanding of the biological infrastructure of life, and challenging conceptions of human nature and of our physical universe. . . . We must prepare not only science concentrators but also those students more interested in the humanities and social sciences to grapple with the scientific and technological elements of the public policy issues and ethical questions that will arise in their lifetimes.” [9]

The Review concluded that students should grasp the foundational principles, methods, and institutional culture of the sciences; broad-based survey courses alone are insufficient. A reinvigoration of science’s role in a liberal-arts curriculum, of the kind being considered by Harvard, will benefit from serious reflection on the relationships between science and culture. It is precisely this reflection, I am arguing, that deserves a specially dedicated academic effort.

The Search for a New Public Science Policy

Aside from its intrinsic interest, the field of science and the public could play an important role in securing public support for science. The architects of twentieth-century American science policy saw that basic scientific research would require public—i.e., governmental—support. The received policy dates to the closing years of World War II, when leading scientists sought to continue the partnerships between academic, business, and military communities that had been forged during wartime. In 1945, President Roosevelt commissioned a report that would come to structure American science policy for the next fifty years. Science: The Endless Frontier, authored by Carnegie Institution president and electrical engineer Vannenar Bush, made the case for securing government funding for “basic research” (by which he meant research guided by theoretical rather than practical considerations) while relaxing wartime controls and security constraints. The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation five years later. [10]

The received science policy served the country’s national interests throughout the eras of Sputnik and the H-bomb. It also made the United States the world’s leading contributor to the global commons of scientific information, an enormous wealth of data that are copyright-free and open to all for further study and applications. Throughout most of the history of the U.S., a liberal regime of copyright law reinforced the scientific ethos of information sharing. Data as such were not eligible for copyright protection and immediately entered the public domain upon publication. Other researchers could protect specific scientific publications that used or compiled the data, while the data itself remained non-copyrightable, along with any “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery” found in a scientific work. [11]

This legal infrastructure has come under stress at several points. The commercialization of biochemistry by the pharmaceutical industry is the most pressing. Corporate-funded researchers bury the results of clinical trials when they are found to be unfavorable to their sponsors, depriving public science of crucial data. [12] Drug companies block cheap generics desperately needed in the developing world, insisting on an inflexible intellectual-property system in the face of a staggering humanitarian toll.

Less noticeably, the proportion of government-funded to private-funded research and development has fallen from a high of sixty-seven percent in the 1960s to twenty-six percent in 2000. The universities, traditional centers for the production of public basic science, are especially vulnerable to financial pressures. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 encouraged schools to commercialize the applications of research, even when it is federally funded. Some observers see funding “shifting from military-related physics and chemistry to commercially oriented molecular biology applications, chiefly for agricultural and drug corporations. In many leading universities, a new pharmaceutical-corporate complex is slowly displacing the older military-industrial complex. . . .” [13]

Meanwhile, with the rise in digital media for disseminating information, have come new opportunities to own and control it. Under the 1996 European Union Database Directive and similar proposals put forward in the U. S., the maker of a database is granted a new sui generis property right to all the information it contains. In general, when information is accessed via computer software, the creators of that software have the power to limit access even when such access would be permitted by the copyright. In this digital environment, copyright holders’ controls can easily outpace their permissions. [14]

Where Vannenar Bush feared the meddling fingers of short-sighted bureaucrats, today, it is the market’s invisible hands that are bending science into a narrowly utilitarian shape. Surely, any sensible knowledge economy must provide incentives to private interests to invest in innovative science and technology. But these incentives must be weighed against the great public interest in free and open basic science. Its flourishing will require a new commitment of public support, a new contract between science and society. [15]

As the Cold War did a generation ago, an open-ended “war on terrorism” might justify federal spending on certain fields, such as bioinformatics—but what of evolutionary ecology or neurobiology? [16] Practical arguments for noncommercial applications might support investment in some sciences, such as climatology—but what of cosmology or theoretical physics? Here the cultural applications of science may help point the way to a post-Cold War defense of publicly funded basic research. The cultural project of self-discovery, once carried out in the solitary introspections of a Descartes or Luther, now animates research programs enlisting dozens or hundreds of people and resources from around the globe. In an age of science, cultural knowledge isn’t cheap. And like knowledge in general, it is a public good. In the terms of economic theory, its use is non-rivalrous—once the good has been produced, the marginal cost of providing it to each additional user tends to be low to zero—and it is non-excludable—preventing anyone from using the good without preventing all is impracticable or impossible. [17] Like other public goods, knowledge invites “free riders,” making it unattractive to private investors seeking financial returns. Citizens who care about basic cultural knowledge should care about public investment in fundamental science.

Conclusion

Science doesn’t shed only light. It also casts shadows, splintering the “clear and distinct ideas” of Cartesian intuition and the “inner light” of conscience into a thousand variegated shades. If we look carefully into this dappled array, we can make out the beginnings of a new cultural understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. To make sense of it, we will need a field of inquiry that examines the intersection of the scientific outlook with fundamental cultural beliefs and values. Attention to science and the public could also help refocus the debate over science literacy and motivate public support for basic research in the post-Cold War era.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Camilla Dacey-Groth, Elizabeth Harman, Paul Kurtz, and Christopher Whittle for their comments.

Notes

• Snow, C.P. 1959. The Two Cultures: A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: David A. Knopf, Inc. 266 (see also 11 and 55).
• Bickle, John. 2002. Philosophy of mind and the neurosciences. In Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Ted Warfield, and Stephen Stich, eds. New York: Blackwell Publishing: 322—351; Kitcher, Philip. 1984. 1953 and all that: A tale of two sciences. Philosophical Review 1984: 335—373; Nickles, Thomas. 1973. Two concepts of intertheoretic reduction. Journal of Philosophy 70: 181—201; Rosenberg, Alexander. 1994. Instrumental Biology, or The Disunity of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• In the contemporary philosophical literature, this enterprise is proceeding via the concept of “supervenience.”
• Available at www.scienceandthepublic.org.
• Shamos, M.H. 1995. The Myth of Scientific Literacy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; Miller, J.D. 1998. The measurement of civic scientific literacy, Public Understanding of Science 7: 203—223.
• Showers, Dennis. 1993. An examination of the science literacy of scientists and science educators. ERIC document ED 362 393. From a paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Atlanta, Georgia.
• Some paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs are actually more common among better educated Americans. See Losh, Susan Carol, et al. 2003. What does education really do? Educational dimensions and pseudoscience support in the American general public, 1979—2001. Skeptical Inquirer 27(5), September/October: 30—35.
• See Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Science. 2004. A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. 8—9; and Rimer, Sara. 2004. Committee urges Harvard to expand the reach of its undergraduate curriculum. New York Times. April 27: A19.
• Bush, Vannevar. 1990 [1950]. Science: The Endless Frontier. Washington, D.C.: The National Science Foundation.
• Reichman, J.H., and Paul F. Uhlir. 2003. A contractually reconstructed research commons for scientific data in a highly protectionist intellectual property environment. Law & Contemporary Problems 66(1&2): 315—462. See also David, Paul A. A tragedy of the public knowledge “commons”? Global science, intellectual property and the digital technology boomerang. For historical insight on America’s handling of intellectual property, see Ben-Atar, Doron S. 2004. Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
• Meier, Barry. 2004. Medical journals weigh plan for full drug-trial disclosure. New York Times. June 15.
• Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
• Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press. 157.
• The late Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., was a vocal advocate of such a rethinking. See his 1998 public statement Unlocking the Future: Report of the House Science Committee Science Policy Study. Washington, D.C. September 24. The complete report is available at www.house.gov.
• With the increase in transnational scientific ventures and the rise of Europe and Asia as centers of innovation, Cold War motives of nationalistic competition are losing their relevance. See Broad, William J. 2004. U.S. is losing its dominance in the sciences. New York Times. May 3.
• For technical reasons, some economists classify knowledge as quasi-public.