The Revenge of Athena
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The Revenge of Athena Science, Exploitation and the Third World i ii The Revenge of Athena Science, Exploitation and the Third World Edited by Ziauddin Sardar Mansell Publishing Limited London and New York iii First published 1988 by Mansell Publishing Limited, A Cassell Imprint Artillery House, Artillery Row, London SWIP IRT, England 125 East 23rd Street, Suite 300, New York 10010, U.S.A. @ Ziauddin Sardar, Third World Network, Consumers' Association of Penang and contributors 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers or their appointed agents. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Revenge of Athena: science, exploitation and the Third World. 1. Developing countries. Society. Effects of technological development. I. Sardar, Ziauddin 303.4'83 ISBN 0-7201-1891-3 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Revenge of Athena: science, exploitation, and the Third World/edited by Ziauddin Sardar. p . cm. Partly based on a Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) seminar, held 21-26 Nov. 1986 in Penang, Malaysia. Includes bibliographies and index. ISBN 0-7201-1891-3: $60.00 (U.S. : est.) 1. Science- Developing countries. 2. Science-Developing countries- International cooperation. 3. Science-Philosophy. 4. Science- Social aspects. 1. Sardar, Ziauddin. Q127.2.R48 1988 303.4'83'091724-dcl9 88-19216 CIP This book has been printed and bound in Great Britain. Typeset in English Times by Colset (Private) Ltd., Singapore, and printed and bound by the Camelot Press, Southampton, on Solent Wove paper. iv for Uncle Idris v vi Contents Contributors ix Introduction The Revenge of Athena, Ziauddin Sardar 1 Part One What's Wrong with Science? 21 1. Science and Ideology The Marxist Perspective, Glyn Ford 23 2. Science, Ignorance and Fantasies, Jerome R. Ravetz 33 3. Radical Sociology of Science From Critique to Reconstruction, Alejandro Gustavo Piscitelli 41 Part Two Science and Third World Domination 53 4. Science and Control Natural Resources and theirExploitation, J. Bandyopadhyay and V. Shiva 55 5. Science and Control How Indian Atomic Energy Policy Thwarted Indigenous Scientific Development, Dhirendra Sharma 73 6. Science and Control Sex, Race and the New Biology, Munawar Ahmad Anees 81 7. Science and Efficiency Exploding a Myth, Rakesh Kumar Sinha 97 8. Science and Health Medicine and Metaphysics, Z iauddin Sardar 106 9. Science and Health The Redundancy of Drugs, Claude Alvares 121 10. Science and Hunger A Historical Perspective on the Green Revolution, J.K. Bajaj 131 11. Science and Hunger Plant Genetic Resources and the Impact of New Seed Technologies, Lawrence Surendra 157 vii 12. Science and Development Trends and outcomes of the Transfer of Technology in the 1980s, David Burch 178 13. Science and Development Underdeveloping the Third World, Khor Kok Peng 207 Part Three Third World Possibilities Critique and Direction 217 14. New Paradigm Thinking We Have Been Here Before, Claude Alvares 219 15. A Project for Our Times, Susantha Goonatilake 226 16. Islamic Science, Western Science CommonHeritage, Diverse Destinies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr 239 17. IslamicScience Current Thinking and Future Directions, Munawar Ahmad Anees and Merryl Wyn Davies 249 18. Logical and Methodological Foundations of Indian Science, M.D. Srinivas 261 19. Appropriate Technology A Reassessment, Amulya Kumar N. Reddy 290 20. Traditional is Appropriate Ecologically Balanced in Sri Lanka, G.K. Upawansa 309 21. Traditional is Appropriate Lessons from Traditional Irrigation and Eco-systems, D.L.O. Mendis 316 Appendix The Penang Declaration on Science and Technology 323 Index 356 viii Contributors Claude Altars, an independent journalist and radical philosopher, is a frequent contributor to Indian Express and the Illustrated Weekly of India and is the author of the highly acclaimed Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West, 1500 to the Present Day, 1979. Manawa Ahmad Andes is a biologist and Director of Research and Development at East-West University, Chicago. He is the author of Guide to Sera and Habit Literature in Western Languages, 1986, and the forthcoming Islam and Biological Futures. J.K. Baja is Assistant Editor of Indian Express, New Delhi. J. Bandyopadhyay is attached to the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and National Resource Policy, India. David Burch is Lecturer at the School of Science, Griffith University, Australia. Melvyn Wynn Davies, anthropologist and journalist is the author of Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic Anthropology, 1988. Glyn Ford, formerly with the Department of Liberal Studies on Science, University of Manchester, now represents Greater Manchester in the European Parliament. Susantha Goonatilake is President of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science. His books include Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World, 1984, and Crippled Minds: An Exploration into Colonial Culture, 1982. D.L.O. Mendis is President of the Institution of Engineers, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Seyyed Hussein Nasr is Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and is the author of Science and Civilization ix in Islam, 1986, Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study, 1976, and many other books. Khor Kok Peng is Research Director of the Consumers' Association of Penang, Malaysia. Alejandro Gustavo Piscitelli is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jerome R. Ravetz, formerly Reader in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, is the author of the classic study, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, 1972. He now works as an independent consultant on risks. Amulya Kumar N. Reddy is Director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He edited Rural Technology, 1980, and authored many papers on alternative technology. Ziauddin Sardar is Director of the Center for Policy and Future Studies, East West University, Chicago, and is the author of Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World, 1977, Science and Technology in the Middle East, 1982, and several other books. Dhirendra Sharma, India's foremost expert on nuclear risks teaches at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Author of numerous books on the Indian nuclear industry, he edits the quarterly journal, Philosophy and Social Action. V. Shiva is attached to the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and National Resource Policy, India. Rakesh Kumar Sinha is at the Institute of Technology, Benares Hindu University, India. M.D. Srinivas is Director of PPST Foundation, Madras, India. Lawrence Surendra is Co-ordinator of the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives in Manila, Philippines. G.K. Upawansa is a consultant at the National Engineering Research and Development Centre of Sri Lanka. x Introduction The Revenge of Athena Ziauddin Sardar When the ancient Greek philosophers were laying the foundations of 'civilization' as we know it, the people of Athens turned to a particular goddess for intellectual and social guidance. She was Athena, the daughter of Zeus - master of gods and men throughout the whole of the Greek world - from whose head she sprang fully armed. Athena personified the Hellenic ideal, being the goddess of both war and reason. At a very early date Greek artists endowed her with attributes which made her easily recognizable at first sight: a helmet, lance, and, in particular, a shield of goat-skin on which the petrifying head of the Gorgon was attached. So revered was Athena that in the fifth century BC the Parthenon was built in her honour. Inside the temple, people worshipped a forty-foot ivory statue of the goddess dressed in gold. Her right hand held a statue of Nike, goddess of victory, her left hand rested on a twenty-foot shield. As much of contemporary western civilization draws its inspiration from the Greeks, so Athena continues to represent the intellectual and social ideal of our time. She is best personified by modern science where reason and war fuse to produce a violent enterprise. Modern science - by which I mean science as it is practised today with its origins in the seventeenth-century European Enlightenment - is based on the extreme use of reason directed towards the extreme use of violence. Modern, western science incorporates a fundamentalist attitude to reason: it is a tool of reduction with an essentially exclusionist methodology and its use is limited strictly within an ontological and epistemological framework. Reason is exclusive in the sense that there is no place in science for issues of morality or values for it is pure, clinical and neutral; only those aspects of a phenomenon which are amenable to pure reason are really worthy of investigation. It is exclusive as only those who have been specially trained in the use of 1 scientific reasoning have the right of access to knowledge and are the true judges of what constitutes scientific knowledge. And finally, it is exclusive in that reason constitutes the only legitimate way of knowing and is the only arbitrator of truth. As a tool of reduction, the use of reason in modern science is based on the theological belief that all phenomena can be reduced ad infinitum, that all systems can be broken into smaller and smaller components, and components of a system consist of discrete and atomized parts, that all systems operate on the same mechanical processes, and that it is possible to know the whole system by studying the components. Material objects are reducible to sense-data; mental events and processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events and processes in the brain; social structures and social processes are reducible to relationships between actions of individuals; biological systems are reducible to physical systems; philosophy is reducible to analysis; mathematics is reducible to logic; and what is not reducible is irrelevant.