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
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I agree with you, violently, but there are a few points that I want to make.
ReplyDeleteThe first is that I see this regression everywhere - 60% of the population in the US believe that Noah's ark was for real, when I go to Poland, I find people gushing about the fact that Pope John Paul II was such an icon among the people there and about his "miracles" but not a word about Madame Curie, Joseph Conrad, Stanislaw Lem - such great Poles.
My second is my (perhaps simplistic) attempt to explain why there has been such a degeneration in scientific, rational thinking. When we grew up, I remember that there were at least 3 science periodicals, Science Today (later renamed 2000 to anticipate the millenium), Science Reporter and another whose name escapes me which I used to read. I loved Science Today in particular and Mukul Sharma (btw, he is the ex-husband of Aparna Sen) used to write a great column called Mind Sport which I used to wait for every week because of the puzzles. There used to be a nice science quiz on television. I think that technology, in particular, consumer technology (yes, IPods) actually erode scientific temper than enhance it. So, to your comment about IT - unfortunately, it is technology and not science. So, people are better technologists, I think - I see the younger generation more gizmo-friendly, better able to tinker and make things work but less scientifically curious. There is a "gadget mentality" out there and I am not trying to demean this - it is just that the scientific curiosity has been morphed into that, IMO.
From a Marxist angle this may be the logical denouement of a long unwinding capitalist belief system of commodity fetishism - society giving value to commodities over labour which ultimately affects class relationships ( I own an IPod and you do not and therefore, I belong to a superior class and have more value...etc.)
There is another angle to look at this which is Jungian: scientific temper requires one to be creative and imaginative and to not accept and identify with an archetype that is presented to them. But modern society with the amount of advertising and subliminal and overt propaganda seems to do that very easily. The power of imagination and of myth, metaphor, poetry and if I may add to this list, scientific thinking, is constantly subjugated to the power of possessing new things. The archetype takes over the role and stature of what the "individuated" personality with his power of imagination and story telling and myth making and scientific discovery could have been. Instead there is a bankruptcy that you talk about.
You talk about folklore and belief and that is exactly what is missing. This was not so when we were growing up.