[Ms. of an article published in

Social Epistomology , Vol. 12, No. 4,1998: 321-334.

and in

Economic and Political Weekly XXXIII, 42 & 43,

Oct. 17-24, 1998 :2715-1723.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER ABOUT THE SCIENTIFIC EMPEROR'S CLOTHES

A Review Essay

of Naked Science. Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge edited by Laura Nader. New York & London: Routledge 1996, xvi,318 pp. $ ??

by

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

Political radicalism means speaking truth to power

- Barbara Epstein

The great enemy of truth is very often not	the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest
- but the myth - persistent, persuasive and
unrealistic

- John F. Kennedy

Complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal.

Such is the personal participation of the knower in all

acts of understanding [that] comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a	responsible act claiming universal validity. Such	knowing is indeed objective in the sense of
establishing contact with hidden reality. It seems
reasonable to describe this fusion of the

personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.

- Michael Polanyi

Chemist & Philosopher, brother of Karl, and

father of chemistry Nobel Laureate John

INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY

This book has its origin in its editor Laura Nader's participation in studies by the U.S. National Academy of Science's Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, one of which she oversaw and edited (Nader et al 1980), and on which she reports in the Conclusion here. Therefore, its alarming or perhaps disarming Naked Science title notwithstanding, this book is also still sympathetic to the goals and contributions of science to human betterment, even if that early experience, explains Nader, "stimulated me to scrutinize and question some basic assumptions of scientists and engineers working on energy questions" [p.261]. Since then she and her collaborators have expanded their purview to other sciences and technical endeavours as well.

The editor explains: "The point is to open up people's minds to other ways of looking and questioning to change attitudes about knowledge, to reframe the organization of science - to formulate ways of thinking globally about science traditions .... There are different kinds of knowledge that provide valid truths of use to human kind. If a dominant [Western] science silences that knowledge, we all lose.... The myth of a single science can be seen as a myth; the false separation between science and nonscience may be considered a barrier to new thinking; and a whole range of vital and experimental thinking is possible" [23-
24].

The central theses and the abundant evidence in this book are that "science is not free of culture; rather, it is full of it. Militarization has certainly had an effect on American science... [and] has also fired the pervasive commercialization of the scientific effort.... Politicization of science is unavoidable,

[because] behaviour is affected by those who control funding and who often determine the research questions [and] virtually all science has social and political implications.... Denial of a contexutalized science, or the assertion that science is autonomous, strikes at the scientific endeavour, defined as a process of free inquiry" [xiii,9].

At superficial first glance, this argument may mistakenly appear to be yet another instance of the currently fashionable

post-modernist and post-colonialist post-structuralism that claims to 'deconstruct' all science and knowledge to the point of the denial of the existence of reality itself. In that case of course, there is nothing to be known and/or no way of knowing or even inquiring into anything beyond the completely subjective and arbitrary ones that include this post modern thesis itself. This

'discourse analysis' of science not to mention literature, has gained much popularity among anthropologists, historians and social 'scientists' and is mentioned by Pamela Asquith [240]. Fortunately for us, the authors of this book do not adopt this 'know-nothingism' approach; and it is important to distinguish theirs from those of all too many others in the West and South

who have been bitten by the bug that carries this 'post' modern plague, which has become a cause celebre from New York and Boston to New Delhi and Bombay/Mumbai. In the former, a storm was created by the publication by a post-modernist houseorgan Social Text of an article that its politically progressive physicist author Alan Sokal then unmasked as a hoax. In Boston the problem for progressives has been examined in the magazine Z, among others. New Delhi for its part became a Third World center of 'subaltern' 'post-colonialist' writing intended to help liberate us from the oppressions of colonialism, patriarchy, class, ecological degradation, and yes ideology and science, which have all been scrambled up in the same bag to be discarded. The Mumbai journal EPW, among others, has launched a healthy re-examination of many of the scientific and political issues involved.

These argue, as Nader her collaborators and I also insist that, far from being a powerful instrument for the sub-altern as alleged by some to liberate themselves from domination, even from the use of science against them, what we must confront is in reality only a 'post' modern version of the most widely used elite ideological force to promote subaltern ignorance and submissiveness. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky rightly insists the 'post-modern' claim "that we must abandon the illusions of science and rationality [are] a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to use these instruments for their own use" (quoted by Nanda 1998:915). Or more explicitly citing Meera Nanda herself,

a scenario where truth and reality are made internal to the
social [and cultural] context will leave both science and
society impoverished, and the worst victims will be
precisely those who constructivists want to stand up for:
the dominated groups, people on the margins, especially
those of the Third World, who need the findings of modern
science to question some of inegalitarian ideas of their own cultures.... Truth ... requires the most strenuous defense by	all those interested in justice (Nanda 1997:316)

Sokal himself has written that

Unfortunately, some people, starting from the undoubted fact	that it's difficult to determine truth - especially in the
social sciences - have lept to the conclusion that there is
no objective truth at all. The result is extreme	epistomological scepticism.... It's crucial to distinguish between the concept of 'truth' and the concept of 'claim to truth'; if we don't do that, we give away the game before it starts.... It seems to me that truth, reason and objectivity are values worth defending no matter what one's political views; but for those of us on the Left, they are crucial - without them, our critique loses all its force.... As Barbara Epstein pointed out, political radicalism means speaking truth to power (Sokal 1998: 913,914).

So that is exactly what the editor and authors of this book are trying to do: "A plague on both your houses" may be an extreme and unjust caricature of their positions, but they do reject the Hobson's choice between two evils. For while they share some post-modernist reservations about the pretensions of science and add quite a few of their own, they also try to retain or achieve far more real world realism than most post-modernists who deny all scientific truth. Instead, Naked Science seeks and proposes a third option which is to subject science itself it to the empirical and analytical rigors of objective scientific method, as least as far as it can take them. And that is quite a ways.

In short, they are so politically radical as to speak truth to power even about science itself.

The editor and the contributors [twelve other anthropologists, three medicinal plant pharmacologists, two students of bio-
medicine and bio-technology, two historians of science, one physicist and one sociologist] also understand that their thesis is not new. But the pervasive neglect or even denial in both the scientific and popular communities of the prostitution and mis-
use of 'science' requires yet another "picture [that] departs radically from ideologies of science, and allows us to re-view science afresh, plain, and undecorated.... The significance of a naked science - an open science stripped of its ideological vestments - is worth serious thought."

So, what is there in common among South Sea navigation and Atlantic fisheries management; and Maya herbal medicine and immunology, DNA sequencing in molecular biology, the 'human gnome project,' and primatology in the West and Japan; as well as nuclear physics in Japan and testing American nuclear weapons and surveillance of Russian testing; with other scientific research and its selection, finance and administration including Inuit and Western knowledge [some also for military purposes] of the Arctic; let alone mathematics for every wo/man, the sociology of knowledge and a discussion of 'when is science scientific' in Physics Today ? They are all case studies in a book written "to examine science through a distant mirror as well as through a magnifying glass ... that should be read as if it were written by one author, although it is unlikely to have been" [p. 23].

There are several ways to organize such serious thought about the matter, and this book reflects some more than others. However, all of them demonstrate that we need and must not make the alleged Hobson's choice between accepting "science" as is and rejecting it altogether "post-modern" fashion. We also have other political choices - and indeed scientific obligations - to examine both of them more objectively in the pursuit of better knowledge to help us become more free. The editors and contributors propose the following approaches and arguments: 1. "Science is supposedly culture-free, but studies of science practice suggest it is not" [11]. Abundant evidence is supplied in several chapters particularly about nuclear physics and by extensive quotations in the conclusion from practicing scientists today. 2. "In several quarters, a reexamination of what we call science is underway ... [that has] revealed that ideals about the scientific enterprise show a less than perfect isomorphism with actual practice" [239]. That is the case for the reexamination of western science in about half the chapters of this book, it and also marks much epistomology of science and the 'science' sciences themselves, into which this book inquires less. 3. "The dominant Western tradition of science is one among many traditions" [8] and "other rationalities may count as science" [239]. Some of these are exemplified in the other half of the chapters on 'traditional' science among various other peoples including Japan. 4. "Historians of science who describe science as a tradition originating from Europe are incorrect and ignorant of the remarkably diverse scientific traditions" [8]. The editor goes on to refer to different traditions in Europe itself. But except for Asquith's [239-240] chapter 14 on primatology in Japan and her passing reference [239-24] to other science, this book does not but I do inquire also into the history of science and technology elsewhere in the world.

I. WESTERN SCIENCE IS NOT SO AUTONOMOUSLY VALUE FREE

"Public discourse about science is still saturated with notions of science as autonomous, value free, and omincompetent in spite of 25 years of science studies that have documented the links between science and society, and described science as foremost a human enterprise" [23]. Nader hammers this theme home again and again in her preface, Introduction to "Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge" and in her conclusion on "Magic, Science and Religion" to quote Bronislaw Malinovski. So do her contributors' case studies and additional analyses. So we may ask, is the glass half full or half empty? And which glass? If 25 years, and indeed far more, of documentation have been insufficient to disabuse much public discourse of its illusions and some science of its pretensions, why pour still another such collection, this one mostly by anthropologists, into the glass or hope that it will leave make a noticeable difference? Perhaps it is enough to ask the question to intimate an answer.

Speaking of anthropologists, Nader points out that Malinovski also held a doctorate in physics and mathematics and in his above quoted book published in 1925 already showed how magic, religion, and science interact not only in the Trobriand islands that he studied, but as Nader claims well nigh universally. Alas as Nader also notes, his followers have focused on the first two and largely neglected and forgotten their connection to science as well. Yet her conclusion [261- quotes one contemporary scientists after another to the effect that "they find difficulty in distinguishing science from pseudoscience," are "full of observations on unexamined assumptions...often made on the basis of faith ... [and] the predominance of group-think: people who thought differently than the group were told they were off the track ... [and] are bullied into silence by those who prevail in the upper echelons of planning - whether it be think tank, government or academy based ... [so that] communication becomes top-down ...[and] the educational process does little to enhance original thinking and a great deal to stop it." Steve Fuller's recent survey entitled Science confirms "given that scientists so rarely break rank with disciplinary norms -- and quickly close ranks against those who do -- how can one tell whether convergence is being pushed or pulled?" (Fuller 1997:18). Moreover, he cites an 'experiment': already published articles were rejected for publication when they were resubmitted by their authors now claiming to be from low status universities (ibid.24). An editor of the house-organ of a major American professional association admitted to his colleagues that one of his major criteria for publication/rejection of articles was the name of the university from which the papers were submitted.

Nader's collaborators offer case studies of how "much scientific research is encouraged or constrained by the ways in which their fields relate to public issues. At the least, the funding for research comes from governments, foundations, and private corporations that have agendas determining which research is viewed favorably and receives financial support and which is not" [Estellie Smith:202]. Chapter and verse documentation of the same and how it is politically and ethically rationalized appears in particular in chapter 8 on "Political Structuring of the Institutions of Science" in the United States by Charles Schwartz and in Chapter 10 on "Japanese Physicists' Strategies for Moving into the International Political Economy of Science" by Sharon Traweek. The role of political economy in science is further exemplified in chapter 7 on "Nuclear Weapons Testing" in the United States and Russia subtitled "Scientific Experiment as Political Ritual" by Hugh Gusterson and in chapter 13 by David Jacobson and Charles Ziegler who show how 'popular delusions' outsmarted 'scientific beliefs' regarding the progress of Soviet nuclear bomb program. Analogous socio-political influences on DNA sequencing in molecular biology are found in Chapter by Joan Fujimura and Michael Fortun and in chapter 5 by five authors on

immunology. Beyond these excursions into the social and cultural anthropology of science, in chapter 6 Troy Duster also inquires into the "Sociology of Knowledge" and how it is popularly diffused as a function of race and class.

Nor are scientists otherwise or those who benefit from their work altogether disinterested. The by now already notorious commercialization and indeed corporate sponsorship of research in allegedly 'academically free' universities is increasingly buttering their bread on one side. A study published in Science and Engineering Ethics documented that one third of the articles published in leading biology journals were written by one or more authors who had a private financial interest in the published research -- none of whom however disclosed this detail in the publication.	On the other hand as Fuller (1997:60) also concludes, "appealing to scientific authority has proved to be the most palatable means of democratic governments to coerce the people of the earth." Of course, that practice is not limited to government, as television advertisements of everything from soap to pills amply testify.

The pervasiveness of magic and religion, let alone political economic power, in science is also illustrated in Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Almost every issue and especially their editorials carry reports and critiques of governmental finance, its reductions or its privatization and their implications for and constraints on scientific theory and praxis. Occasionally, there are also reports of overt or covert censorship. Almost an entire recent issue [ xx] was devoted to debates on how compatible or not science - and not only or even primarily Darwinian evolutionism but also cosmology and physics - are with religion, not to mention magic.

So Malinovski and Nader cannot be very far off the mark still today as they also are not for the past that often goes unmentioned: Newton (1642-1727), the father of modern physics if not of all western science, "maintained a prolonged, intense involvement with alchemy. So, too, did John Locke (1532-1704)and Robert Boyle (1627-1691) (Adams 1996:54 citing Richard Westfall on "Newton and Alchemy." Another one example of the use of scientific interest and engagement was the Venetian Giovan Maria Bonardo who found in his 1589 study of The Size, and Distance of All Spheres Reduced to Our Miles that "hell is 3,758 and 1/4 miles from us and has a width of 2,505 and 1/2 miles [while] Heaven is 1,799,995,500 miles away from us" (cited in Cipolla 1976:226).

II. IS WESTERN SCIENCE SCIENTIFIC?

This question has many ramifications and ambiguities that may be of interest to and can be considered elsewhere in Social Epistomology. I confine myself to setting the largely anthropological discussion of Naked Science into an only selectively broader epistemological and scientific context. We may begin with the much vaunted 'seventeenth century scientific revolution' that allegedly took place in Europe. To begin with, authoritative observers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn conclude that, however "revolutionary" or not, these scientific advances appear to have had NO immediate impact on technology whatsoever and certainly none on the industrial "revolution," which did not even begin until a century later. The contemporary Bacon already observed "the overmuch credit that hath been given unto authors in sciences [for alleged contributions to] arts mechanical [and their] first deviser" [cited in Adams 1996:56). Three centuries later, Kuhn looked back over The Structure of Scientific Revolution and observed [in a later publication] that "I think nothing but mythology prevents our realizing quite how little the development of the intellect need have had to do with that of technology during all but the most recent stage of human history" (cited in Adams 1996:56-57). Robert Adams (1996) himself reviews any and all relations between technology and science, also cites numerous other observers and concludes on at least a dozen occasions (ibid: 56, 60, 62, 65, 67, 72, 98, 101, 103, 131, 137, 256) that scientists and their science made NO significant visible contribution to new technology before the late nineteenth century. So whatever the contribution of western science to technology and life in general may be, it is barely a century old.

Indeed, the opening sentence of Steven Shapin's (1996) recent study of the subject is that "there was no seventeenth century scientific revolution, and this book is about it." Moreover, Shapin devotes a chapter to the question of "What was the [scientific] Knowledge for?" whose subtitles refer to natural philosophy, state power, religion's handmaid, nature and God, wisdom and will, but not to technology (Shapin 1996:140). So the overwhelming evidence is that the alleged contribution of seventeenth, eighteenth, or even early nineteenth century science to technology or to the industrial revolution is no more than 'mythology' as Kuhn aptly termed it. Therefore, it is just as well and most welcome that Cohen (1994:500) ends by asking "Is the [fifty year old concept of] 'Scientific Revolution' going the way of all historical concepts?" "Perhaps" he answers, for "the concept has by now fulfilled its once useful services; the time has come to discard it. After all, historical concepts are nothing but metaphors, which one should beware to reify."

These evaluations of the alleged origins of science may be thought to be no more than the latest manifestations of an epistemological train of thought whose important mileposts include Karl Popper (1985) and his critique of positivism, Thomas Kuhn (1967) and the paradigms of his The Structure of Scientific Revolution and Paul Feyerabend with his Against Method (1975) and Farewell to Reason (1987). Their influence has been widespread, but it cannot be solely or even primarily attributed to or dismissed as the recent popularity of post modernism.

For the certainties of science have also increasingly been put into question by scientists themselves, including Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry. Forerunners and best known are Werner Heisenberg and his 'principle of indeterminacy' according to which even physical observations of physical phenomena are subject to errors of measurement that are a function of the observer's observation itself and Goedel's 'uncertainty theorem' according to which no system can be exhaustively defined within its own terms. The latter was popularized by xx in his bestseller Goedel, Escher, Bach.

James Glieck (1987) wrote another best-seller, Chaos: Making a New Science that offers biographical sketches of mathematicians, computer scientists, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, meteorologists, economists, statisticians and others. Repeated bifurcations in the possible directions of path travelled exclude some consequences while making others more probable, but can also cause the 'butterfly effect' through which a flap of its wings in the Amazon can change the weather in New York. Another illustrative finding and principle are Mandelbrot's 'fractals' in which real and imaginary things, like the coastline of an island, are identifiable as having ever smaller and more numerous outer edges [and indeed inner constituents] - but infinitely so. The same seems to apply to the production and dissemination of the theory of chaos or complexity itself [or chaoplexity as John Horgan (1997) has re-babtized it], which has already generated another dozen books to popularize it.

These scientists not only accept Heisenberg's and Goedel's indeterminacy and uncertainty in science. They use the same to construct their own scientific theories and their experimental tests based on 'Order Out of Chaos.' That was the title of the opening gun by the laureate in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine (and I. Stengers 1984) who now offers the culmination of his and their co-workers' endeavors as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (1997). That extends the same from the physical sciences also to the social ones, as in Opening the Social Sciences by Immanuel Wallerstein (1997) written with the collaboration among others of Prigogine. The feared or alleged distinction and gap between the 'hard' physical and the 'soft' social sciences are being closed by both sides.

Prigogine himself writes "I believe we are at an important turning point in the history of science ... paved by Galileo and Newton, which presented us with an image of a time-reversible, deterministic universe. We now see the erosion of determinism and the emergence of a new formulation of the laws of physics" that are no more than probabilistic but may apply universally, although "many questions still await answers [in] an adventure of science in the making" Prigogene 1997: x,ix). Indeed to further the same, the Santa Fe Institute has been established as a well financed innovative research center devoted to the application of chaos theory to more and more concerns, which according to some must yield increasingly diminishing returns. That leads, according to the title of Scientific American editor John Hogan (1996) and his also best-selling book to The End of Science. Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.

III. OTHER PEOPLES, OTHER SCIENCE

Of course, "science, after all, can be defined so that nothing outside a Western tradition will be admissible.

Yet, if science is considered an epistomology in the sense of a coherent, internally logical, and systematic way of ordering knowledge about the world, and which has predictive and testable capabilities, other rationalities may count as science" argues Pamela Asquith speaking for all her co-authors [239]. So

their answer to the question "Science for the West, Myth for the Rest?," as Colin Scott entitles chapter 3, is a resounding NO: "The achievements of indigenous ecological knowledge, as illustrated in the case of Cree hunters [in northern Canada] result from intellectual processes not qualitatively different from those of Western science" [84].

The prima facie case for this proposition, which is so obvious that it is hardly ever made, is that 'indigenous' peoples manage quite well and often better in the world, thank you, without and before being blessed by the power of western science [or the science of western power]. As Malinovski put it, they manage to combine 'secular' science with 'sacred' magic and religion. So did and still do any number of western scientists as we observed from Newton to Prigogene.

Therefore, the western notion of 'the West vs. the Rest' that Samuel Huntington now uses in his the Clash of Civilizations or indeed the 'civilization and barbarism' of the nineteenth century Argentinean Sarmiento and the 'primitivism' of some anthropologists are themselves no more than western mythology used as a magic wand to confound others and delude ourselves. The very invention of 'West' and 'East' was already denounced by Herodotus and that of 'Occidentalism' and 'Orientalism' was 'deconstructed' by Edward Said (1978) and Bernal (1987), not to mention the 'post-colonial' 'subaltern studies' school of post-
modernists.

The identification and critique of this Eurocentric mythology also precedes and can go well beyond post modernism. This book also documents the real practice of science, not to mention technology, in the real world beyond the West. But it begins with Nader's approving citation of Oscar Kwagley's critique of the following derivative and/or constituent disjunctures:

primitive	civilized

traditional	modern

science	knowledge

science	religion

rational	magical

particular/ist	universal/ist

practical	theoretical

underdeveloped	developed

Yet, all these Eurocentric Weberian 'ideal type' disjunctures already had nineteenth century sociological great-grandfathers in the "father of sociology" Auguste Compte and in Sir Henry Maine who distinguished between supposedly new forms of thinking and of social organization based on "science" and"contract," which allegedly replaced age old "traditional" ones. One grandfather was Emile Durkheim who idealized "organic" vs. "mechanical" forms of social organization and another was Ferdinand Toennis, who alleged a transition from traditional "Gemeinschaft" to modern "Gesellschaft." In a later generation, Talcott Parsons idealized "universalist" vs. "particularist" social forms, and Robert Redfield claimed to have found a contrast and transition or at least a continuum" between traditional "folk" and modern "urban" society and a certain symbiosis between "low" and "high civilization." The Marxist and contemporary neo-Marxist version is the alleged fundamental difference between "Asiatic," "feudal" or other forms of "tributary" and the "capitalist" mode of production (Wolf 1982, Amin 1991,1993, 1996). The archetype of this allegedly scientific mythology of European 'exceptionalism' is aptly entitled The European Miracle (Jones 1981). However, it also underlies books similarly revealing titles like [but alas not analyses of] How It All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy (Rostow 1975), The Rise of the Western World by Nobel prize winner Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas (1973), How the West Grew Rich by Rosenberg and Bridzell (1986), and still in 1998 in the much heralded The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes.

This Eurocentrism will be critiqued directly below after briefly reviewing some of the case study illustrations of 'indigenous science' in this book, which attack the same more indirectly. The first one is by Ward Goodenough who reports on "Navigation in the Western Carolines. A Traditional Science" in chapter 1. Melanesian sea-faring peoples have to know their way around the South Pacific. To that end, they study and map the stars, identify naval passages, keep track of distance, predict the weather. All "this massive amount of discrete information ... has to be committed to memory ... [and] is organized in a systematic way" [39] using empirical observation and verification as well as abstract thinking, all of which in turn are transmitted from one generation to another. "It represents ingenuities of much the same kind that are exemplified in the products of Western thought" [41].

The same can be said about 'traditional' science and technology elsewhere. The use of herbal medicine is illustrated in chapter 2 from among the highland Maya in Mexico. It involves diagnosis of different gastro-intestinal and other diseases, experimental treatment with herbal remedies, and their controlled and systematic classification, preparation, storage, and administration. The latter is highly successful, and chemical analysis of the remedies used shows that many of them have antibiotic properties. Of course, the same observations apply to Chinese, Indian and other medicine. Not for nothing did the practice and science of immunology originate in India, and environmental science and ecological praxis are highly developed for instance among the James Bay Indians in Canada [chapter 3] and the Arctic Inuits [chapter 12], let alone Atlantic fishermen [chapter 11].

Primatology was developed in Japan, first studying indigenous primates, at the same time as in the West -- but independently and with significantly different epistomologies and methods. Pamela Asquith shows in chapter 14 how "these theoretical, cultural, and methodological differences gave rise" to different hypotheses and findings, which for the same reason were long ignored by Western primatologists even after their publication in English. Indeed, Western primatologists did not draw on research and findings from Japan until some of them sought ammunition for their own innovative critiques of received primatology. Yet at a recent international primatolgy research conference, Western researchers reported admitted that their belated adoption of some Japanese research techniques obliged them finally to abandon some long-held dogmas of their own primatology.

In the also innovative chapter 4, Jean Love observes the use of grass-roots mathematics and scientific reasoning and experimentation also among "people engaged in daily activities in supermarkets and kitchens -- as they shopped for groceries, cooked meals, deal with quantitative relations while learning the Weight Watchers dieting program, and managed their household finances" [87]. She argues that the 'every day problem solving' of 'just plain folks' is not qualitatively different from or inferior to 'scientific' laboratory practice, however much folks may have been otherwise persuaded and scientists deluded by the 'culture' of science. This corroborates the theme of the book, already examined from above in parts I and II, also from elow at a worms-eye grass-roots level.

IV. SCIENCE IN HISTORY AND ALL THAT

If science is not so uniquely exceptional in its alleged autonomy and rationality nor so exceptionally unique in the West even today, then maybe it never was. For the millennial long period before 1500, the main locus of science and technology was in Asia. The multi-volume History of Technology edited by Charles Singer et al (1957) recognizes and even stresses in its Volume II that from 500 to 1500 AD "technologically, the west had little to bring to the east. The technological movement was in the other direction" (ibid. 756). It reproduces a table from Needham (1954) that traces time-lags 25 centuries for the iron plough mold board, 15 to 10 centuries for some and 6 to 3 centuries for others of several dozen inventions and discoveries in China and their first adoption in Europe. Nonetheless, even these accounts are excessively European-focused. For during these centuries technological diffusion was primarily back and forth among East, Southeast, South, and West Asia, and especially between China and Persia. Before any of this technology reached Europe at all, most of it had to pass via the Muslim lands, including especially Muslim Spain and also use the Byzantines and later the Mongols as transmission belts.

Yet the received Eurocentric wisdom about science and technology and their institutional forms has it that the European ones have been superior to those of Asia since 1500. What could have produced such a sudden change? - if it happened at all! An oft cited student of the subject, Bernal (1969:II,312) writes that "this early technical advance in China, and to a lesser extent in India and the Islamic countries, after a promising start came to a dead stop before the fifteenth century, and ... resulted in ... a high but static technical level." Accordingly also, Asia disappears from Bernal's account in Vol.II. We will observe below that the real world evidence is otherwise. Nonetheless, Bernal attributes the subsequent rise of science and technology to the indigenous rise of capitalism in the West, for which in turn he accounts in the same terms as Marx and Weber. Robert Merton's now classic 1938 discourse on "Science, Technology, and Society" is entirely Weberian and even linked to the latter's thesis about the "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

Singer's Volume III for the period 1500-1750 is explicitly devoted to The West. Without any further comparisons, it nonetheless asserts that "it is certain, however" that the balance shifted already in 1500, so that "granted the immense European naval and military superiority, European control of the Far East was an almost inevitable consequence" (ibid. III,709,710). Moreover, Singer et al (1957, II, 711) claim a "generally higher level of technical proficiency in Europe in the seventeenth century compared with the rest of the globe" and they attribute the same to a European and especially British more "liberal social system," being "united in religion" and other such differences in "civilization" (ibid. 716).

For other authors from Marx to Weber and all their many disciples also the rise of Europe was also a "miracle" was due to the allegedly unique qualities that Europeans had and all others lacked. Only later, it is claimed, were science and technology then diffused outward over the rest of the world as the "civilizing mission" of "the white man's burden."

This myth has been well examined by J. M. Blaut (1993a) under the apt title The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Blaut microscopically examines, exposes and demolishes the myth of "The European Miracle" in its myriad forms of biology [racial superiority and demographic continence]; environment [nasty-tropical Africa; arid, despotic Asia; temperate Europe]; exceptional rationality and freedom [as against "Oriental despotism", the centerpiece of the Weberian doctrine, and part of the Marxian one]; alleged European historical superiority in technology, despite its borrowings from and dependence on earlier Chinese, Indian and Islamic advances; and society [development of the state, significance of the Church and "the Protestant ethic," the role of the bourgeoisie in class formation, the nuclear family, etc]. The same and especially the Weberian allegations of 'specific and peculiar achievements of Western rationalism' have more recently been disputed also by the anthropologist Jack Goody (1996), who surveys analogous ones in West, South, and East Asia. Their examination of all these Eurocentric assumptions against the canons of scientific evidence and elementary logic literally demolishes each and every one of them.

Indeed, the Islamicist and world historian Marshall Hodgson wrote before his untimely death in 1968 that

all attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-Modern seminal traits in the Occident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis, once other societies begin to be known as intimately as the Occident. This also applies to the great master, Max Weber, who tried to show that the Occident inherited a unique combination of rationality and activism (Hodgson 1993:86).

Three decades later another critic, Frank Perlin, observes and then asks:

The creation of the 'scientific fact' frequently, and even systematically, turns out to have been its opposite, the establishment of myth, marking 'our' general complicity in the very facts beyond science that 'we' 'scientists' 'intellectuals' alike (justly) abhor.... How can it be that the sciences of society have permitted so little of contrary substance to be said to the peddlers of myth? (Perlin 1994:xi,15).

The more we look at science and technology as economic and social activities not only in Europe but world-wide, the less historical support is there for the Eurocentric argument about the alleged role of the "[European!] scientific revolution" in the seventeenth or any other century in the development of technology in the West prior to 1870. As already observed in Part II above, it had NONE.

And did science and technology continue to develop, be that independently or together, after 1500 elsewhere as well? On the evidence, the answer is a resounding YES! For China, Joseph Needham's (1954--) monumental multi-volume Science and Civilization in China is well known, although perhaps insufficiently examined. because of its large bulk and detail. A four volume extract has been prepared by Ronan (1986), and Needham (1964) himself summarizes "Science and China's Influence on the World."

Needham insists that scientific investigation was well accepted and supported in China and that technological innovation and its application continued through the early modern period, also in fields like astronomy and cosmology, and in medical fields like anatomy, immunology, and pharmacology. Needham explicitly denies the European notion that the Chinese only invented things but did not wish to or know how to apply them in practice. Although he examines some apparently parallel developments in East and West, he also speculates on the possible channels and extent of their mutual influence and interchange.

There are also similar studies and findings for India, albeit on a lesser scale than Needham's monumental work. For instance, Kuppuram and Kumudamani (1990) have published a History of Science and Technology in India in 12 volumes, and Rhaman has edited another collection on the same in "Historical Perspective." They testify to their continued development not only before 1500 but also still since then. Dharampal (1971) collected a compendium of contemporary eighteenth century accounts by Europeans, who also testify to their interest in and profit from Indian science and technology still then. Indian mathematics and astronomy were sufficiently advanced for Europeans still to import astronomical tables and related works from India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In medicine, the theory and practice of inoculation against smallpox came from there.

Similarly, Nasr (1976) and al-Hassan and Hill (1986) have written and edited compendia testifying to the development and diffusion of Islamic science and technology ranging from earliest to recent times. George Saliba (1996) provides multiple examples of important scientific "Arab Influences on the Renaissance," not only before and during this period but still in the seventeenth century. Only one example is that Saliba offers evidence of several kinds that Arab theories were known to, and that documentary knowledge about the same were transmitted to, Copernicus, which made crucial inputs into his "revolution" while he was still working on it.

So it is not enough to just go on touting Western science or its alleged seventeenth century revolution in Europe. We better examine the evidence of Asian capacities with a bit more care, as Goody (1996) and Blaut (1997) begin to do. Upon any inspection, not only will we find that technology was far "advanced" in many parts of Asia, but it continued to develop in the centuries after 1500. Needham explicitly challenges others's dismissal of the same, also for the early modern period. "In technological influence before and during the Renaissance China occupies a quite dominating position.... The world owes far more to the resilient craftsmen of ancient and medieval China than to Alexandrian mechanics, articulate theoreticians though they were" (Needham 1964:238). Needham lists not only the well known gunpowder, paper and printing, and compass. He also examines co-
fusion and oxygenation iron and steel technology, mechanical clocks, and engineering devices such as drive-belts and chain-
drive methods of converting rotary to rectilinear motion, segmental arch and iron-chain suspension bridges, deep-drilling equipment, and paddle-wheel boats, fore-and aft sails, watertight compartments and stern-post rudders in navigation, and many others.

Continued scientific and technological development also characterized especially the globally most competitive military naval, and textile technologies and industries elsewhere, particularly in India, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. The alleged "Ottoman decline" is contradicted already by the comparative examination of technologies in precisely the first two areas (Grant 1996). However is was also the case in more "local" hydraulic and other public works, iron working and other metallurgy including armaments and especially steel making, paper and printing, and of course in other export industries like ceramics, textiles, etc.

In short, it is far from established, as is so often supposed, that European "technological superiority" was established from 1500 onwards. My own comparative examination of the development and use of science and technology in the world before 1800 focuses primarily on each of the gun, ship, textile, printing, metallurgic, and transport industries. In each of these, various parts of Asia held their own and often prevailed over the Europeans until at least 1750. Even after that the British and Dutch still continued to buy and even commission better, longer lasting, and cheaper Asian built ships. India dominated the world cotton textile market with its technology and exports until 1816. British laboratories found Indian steel to be better and cheaper than their own and even than that of Sweden. China was and remained the world's most productive and competitive economy and thereby was able to absorb half of the world's production of silver, which it used to finance its own development of science, technology, industry, agriculture, transport and commerce until at least 1800, when the Chinese standard of living and per capita national income still exceeded that of the West (Frank 1998).

CONCLUSION

Indeed, there was no European technology or scientific rationality. Their invention and diffusion was world wide from the word GO, which also was not uttered in Europe or the West. In the world-wide division of labor in a competitive world economy, long-standing national, regional, or sectoral technological superiority could not be maintained as long as at least some other real or potential competitors had sufficient interest and capacity to acquire such technology as well. That is, technological, like and as part of all economic, development was a world economic, social, and cultural process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy/system itself. It is true that this world economy/system was and still is structurally unequal and temporally uneven. However, it is not true that scientific and technological or any other "development" was essentially locally, regionally, nationally, or culturally determined; nor that any one place or people had any essential "monopoly" or even "superiority" within this world economy and system. Still less was or is it the case, as we shall observe below, that any such alleged "superiority" was based on "exceptional" institutions, culture, "civilization" or "race!" I conclude as Nader [274] does: "The scientific attitude, which both pursues and criticizes the production of knowledge, is not confined to scientists; it may even be an attitude shared with non scientists." And perhaps also the other way around, if Fuller is right: "Indeed, what scientists often see as the public's 'confusion' about the nature of science may simply be the public's recognition that there is no 'nature' to science" (Fuller 1997:62). In that case, perhaps there is still room for hope, if not faith.

So Kipling's famous phrase that 'the East is East, and the West is West, and never the twain shall meet' was fully as much Western colonialist mythology then as the still widespread mythology about Western science still is now. Naked Science does indeed speak truth to power, also about the political use of science to maintain power; and as such its political radicalism and objectivity are a welcome and alas still needed contribution to the demonstration of this fact of life in our one world. What we need to preserve and advance both in scientific theory and popular practice is not any warmed over re-cycling of the 'clash of civilizations' by that old cold warrior Huntington, but instead theory and praxis that most contributed to ending that war, Gorbachev's 'unity in diversity.'

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