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.