The Chandrayaan-I launch has been the big news story of this week. While there are those who believe that for a a country with millions living in poverty an unmanned lunar mission is an expensive distraction, nobody can deny that it is an achievement and even the most ardent critics would congratulate the scientists and engineers behind the mission. The business case projects a 3x payoff for India's budding space launch industry and it is hard to argue that there is any extravagance involved here.
Such missions serve another very important objective - promoting Scientific Temper in our society.
Amartya Sen in "The Argumentative Indian" highlights how traditional Indian discourse and thought has been seeped in logic, rationality and openness. Nehru held Scientific Temper as dearly as Secularism and Socialism. He placed tremendous emphasis on combating superstitions and religious bigotry via spread of scientific thinking and a development model based on research in science and agriculture.
Over the past few years, I do believe we are losing this scientific temper or maybe it never percolated deep enough. One has to look through popular media to find numerous strains. India's most watched news channel is Aaj Tak and anybody tuning into it will find loads of coverage on religious miracles, godmen of all kinds and the occasional TRP toppers of milk drinking Ganesha statues and Shivalingams. Recently hundreds of educated Mumbaikars ran to the sea side to drink "sweet" water from the Arabian Sea. Astrology is big business and astrologers are celebrities. Godmen and their establishments are booming. Vaastu was not fashionable two decades ago but now India's newly rich make their buying decisions based on it. The Ram Sethu controversy, saffron brigade vandalism, religious fatwas - all evidence of a resurgence of irrationality and the polar opposite of scientific temper.
Oddly, the above regression has taken place in the backdrop of an IT driven economic boom, the nation's top scientist as President and foremost economist as Prime Minister. Almost every Indian middle class family has a son, daughter, nephew or niece working in the IT industry. We still aspire for our children to become doctors or engineers. Yet it is inexplicable that large sections of the educated class remain rooted in orthodoxy and distanced from rationality.
Initiatives like the Lunar mission provides the kind of folklore that is needed to shore up belief in science and engineering. People will start holding scientists and researchers with more awe and respect than they presently command. I am hoping that Dr Madhavan Nair and some of his scientists will become celebrities in their own right and spur a few people to switch off from the next Bejan Daruwala show. I am also hoping that many more schoolkids would dream of a career in scientific research.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Anti-Intellectualism in America
All these years, I have been unable to comprehend the strain of anti-intellectualism and aversion to nuance which is central to the conservative and Republican rhetoric in America. The origins have been unclear to me.
Till I came across Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal - "Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'" Frank quotes Ronald Reagan's poll strategist Robert Wirthlin from his election strategy in 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."
He adds "The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down."
With Reagan, the strategy worked beautifully and has then been embraced whole heartedly by electoral strategists like Karl Rove with remarkable effectiveness. More than two decades of feeding on this mantra has shaped an entire generation's view that anti-liberalism equals anti-intellectualism and it is not going to be easy to shake off
David Brooks in his New York Time piece "The Class War Before Palin" says "Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. ..... What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect."
Brooks goes on "Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch"
Time will tell if an Obama presidency (assuming he does become president) will reverse this thinking in middle America. If the economic situation doesn't improve during the term (which is a probable scenario) sadly there may be yet another republican revolution and a re-establishment of red neck hegemony.
Till I came across Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal - "Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'" Frank quotes Ronald Reagan's poll strategist Robert Wirthlin from his election strategy in 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."
He adds "The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down."
With Reagan, the strategy worked beautifully and has then been embraced whole heartedly by electoral strategists like Karl Rove with remarkable effectiveness. More than two decades of feeding on this mantra has shaped an entire generation's view that anti-liberalism equals anti-intellectualism and it is not going to be easy to shake off
David Brooks in his New York Time piece "The Class War Before Palin" says "Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. ..... What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect."
Brooks goes on "Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch"
Time will tell if an Obama presidency (assuming he does become president) will reverse this thinking in middle America. If the economic situation doesn't improve during the term (which is a probable scenario) sadly there may be yet another republican revolution and a re-establishment of red neck hegemony.
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