SCIY.Org Archives

This is an archived material originally posted on sciy.org which is no longer active. The title, content, author, date of posting shown below, all are as per the sciy.org records
Progress and Violence, by Shiv Visvanathan

Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Fri 29 May 2009 05:47 PM PDT  


Progress and Violence


by Shiv Visvanathan, 


The technocratic and progress-oriented Nehruvian visions dominated independent India during its first two decades. The great celebrations of science were followed by a period of doubt in the years following the Emergency, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the philosophy of science in India was reinvented, by a grass roots movement. The overall critique can be mapped across the civics of technological transfer.

The Marxist inspired Kerala Sahitya Shastra Parishad, a leftist science movement in Kerala sought to take the scientific imagination and method to the villages through mass quizzes and plays. It probably enacted more versions of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo in Kerala than have been performed anywhere else in the world.   Intermediate technologists such as Amulya Reddy at Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science worked on the recovery of local knowledge and material. Experiments centered around the rights of biomass societies and included experiments on biogas and cooking stoves. The Narmada struggle against large dams can also be located in this domain.

A smaller set of groups centering around the Murugappa Chettiar Research Institute argued for opening up the black box called innovation, contending that science could not be democratized through public participation and knowledge diffusion; a review of epistemologies was needed. They felt that agriculture itself was an epistemology of soils, water, and seed, not just productivity, and they challenged the monoculture of the dominant scientific model. As someone said: “a society with 40,000 varieties of rice has 40,000 dreams of cooking”.

     What the new grassroots groups in India did was to argue for these principles:
 

1)      The citizen is a scientist and an inventor and is a trustee of technology. 

2)      As a citizen, the Indian is responsible for the country’s 10,000 varieties of mango, because citizenship is trusteeship.

3)      The democratic imagination needs to be reinvented, and the notion of rights is sadly inadequate when confronting diversity or obsolescence either as civilizational questions or as a problems of governance. Prevailing notions of rights cannot prevent assaults on diversity or disruptions of obsolescence; in fact, these notions cannot even provide a language for discussing such conflicts, let alone principles for governing them.  The notion of governance needs new life affirming concepts to understand disasters, vulnerability, disappearance, and the new forms of enclosure created by globalization.

4)      Liberal democracy is an impoverished model for confronting science and technology. The groups did borrow from it of choice, however,. For instance the Indian debates on bio-technology are less hysterical than those in the West and more confident about confronting bio-technology. But they take the issue of choice from the individual consumer level into the collective arena. Choice and diversity become creatively and critically related, bringing to mind a recent debate on genetically modified seeds between Vandana Shiva and leftist activist Gail Omveldt, who argued that farmers should be allowed the right to choose any
technology they thought fit.  Shiva replied that choice is not only an individual act but; collective choices determine the availability of diversity and thus create availability of greater variety and choice. Succumbing to multi-national agribusiness only creates monocultures, which eliminate choice.

The recent impacts of globalization have caught these movements a bit flatfooted, but the debates in India continue – a fascinating attempt by a society to seriously confront governance of its own scientific and technological transformation.

The views of India’s grassroots movements were echoed in the west by agricultural scientist Wes Jackson, who criticized sociologist Manuel Castells for his glorification of the information society. According to Jackson, high performance information societies feel they no longer have to remember; the twentieth century tried desperately to devalue the power of the witness. Memory has to be embodied, he argued: “computer chips only store information but witnesses remember.

 One must confront the strange hubris of a high information society. America claims to be one, yet its very creation myth is an act of genocide; its elimination of the indigenous continuity, a program for museumizing or assimilating the other; and its official future, one grand project of homogenization called globalization. Wes Jackson put it succinctly when he observed that “America lost more information by depopulating its country side than it gained by all the science and technology in the same period. A country that reduces 160 varieties of apple to 5 is a low-information society. A global industrial process that is erasing one species per hour is a low information society.

 

References:

 

 Visvanathan, Shiv Progress and Violence, from Living with the Genie ed. Alan Lightman, Island Press Washington DC 2003    

 

Attachment: