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Light Talk
Why Technology is a Western Phenomenon?
The other day, reading an article on how the US had withheld key technology at different strategic times in independent India’s history (cryogenic engines, supercomputers) did it strike me for the nth time on how India always seems to be playing catch-up with the West in the field of technology and science. Notwithstanding the successes of our rocket program and the software boom, by and large India is not known for the quality of scientific research or the brilliance of its scientists. If you really consider it, the fact is not surprising. The future of an average scientist in the country is dismal, with no funding, poorly-equipped laboratories, and no patronage worth the name. Why do we not have a long-term vision for the promotion of science and technology, to make the country a super-power in this respect?
The answer starts from after the Middle Ages. The Age of Reason in the West (the Renaissance and after) was amazing for the sheer quantity of work in the arts and sciences, architecture, literature, philosophy, painting, poetry and invention. To this age are owed many of the splendors of Europe – the Renaissance and Neo-classical buildings, the great libraries, theses on perspective and astronomy, the machines of Leonardo, and the mathematics of Kepler. Great cities flourished – Florence, Venice, London, Madrid, Lisbon – and to the patronage of their prince-rulers flocked men from all over Europe. From these states were sent out feelers of trade that would expand to become mighty empires.
Along with all this febrile activity, a subtler change was taking place – the simple yet revolutionary concept of Humanism that would restrict the Church’s role in life to provide succor for the afterlife. The time as a mortal, however, belonged to Man. And Man, being the most intelligent being on Earth (and perhaps the only one in the cosmos) had a natural power over the land and all that it contained and had to offer. Man is not a helpless being, forever doomed to be in awe of the elements and fate. Man is instead master of his fate, and has the power to change it, if he so wills, and bend the elements to his pleasure.
This, I believe, was one of the key factors behind the philosophy of science – a process to understand how the world functions, the better to reduce uncertainty and determine one’s own fate. This key concept – that Nature was an object to be studied, its secrets to be unlocked by the process of science, the way to discovery and invention was opened. Nearly all the key technologies on which global civilization is today founded – electricity, radioactivity, magnetism, nuclear forces, industrial manufacture – are derived from discoveries made in the West. So it was a cultural phenomenon that science began to be studied systematically in the west, not as an end in itself, but always as a tool to understand the forces of nature.
Without getting into a debate over the philosophical merits and demerits of Occidental and Oriental civilizations, it can be generally accepted that Eastern civilization with its major religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism) had running through it a common thread – of life being pre-ordained and the Almighty (as we me call Him) being the final arbiter, leaving almost nothing in the hands of a human on Earth. Hinduism went to one extreme – life was but a manifestation of the supreme truth, and everything we could perceive with our senses was but an illusion. This could be put another way, you could almost rephrase this as – if everything is already said and done, why make the effort? A frequent criticism of Hinduism is precisely this: the defeatism and stolid acceptance of fate.
The British, during their rule, may have bled the country but they put in place a number of institutions, not the least of which were a western system of education with the sciences figuring prominently in the curriculum – a mirror of Great Britain. After independence, we kept to the letter of the British plan, but ignored the spirit. We have imposed ‘Science’ as a subject in all of India. After the student is 14, he finds that ‘Science’ has given birth, it now has children appropriately and mysteriously called ‘Biology’, ‘Physics’ and ‘Chemistry’, all of which have their own families. It keeps on getting worse after that – the premier institutes of engineering and medicine in the country expect you to be full of useless facts, figures, equations and tables, to know them by heart, to be able to reproduce them all in a time limit of 3 hours. With a diet of cramming, is it any wonder that originality is at a premium? India abroad does much better. Under a system which puts much value on ideas and research, Indian professionals and scientists excel, rid of the stultifying atmosphere back home.
With its best intellectuals and scientists out of the country, India’s real poverty lies not so much in its population, but the lack of a vision and political will to make the most of that population. Producing little that is state-of-the-art, India lives on borrowed technology to maintain its façade as a nation which wants – no, ‘deserves’ so much to enter the UN Security Council. Never mind that we have not managed to produce a fighter aircraft which does more than test-fly. Our computer parts are from the Asian tigers while the chips are from America. Our military hardware is mostly Russian and our nail-cutters mostly Chinese. The technology that we have is ill-suited for the country, because it didn’t originate here, and worse, because little attempt is made to adapt it to our conditions.
Technology is not a mantra to be recited in schools and then to be blindly reproduced at will. It took centuries for the spirit of innovation and can-do so inherent in, for example, America, to be imbibed in the people. We have many disadvantages but none of them need be an excuse to take long term steps to correct this imbalance – a hard look at our school syllabi, generously funded R&D as a bedrock of state policy, luring the cream of our educated class back to the country, and above all the belief that superpower status does not come from arms, a bomb or sheer size – this is the globalized economic age when the only true power is your independence in the face of sanctions – or indeed, your ability to impose sanctions unilaterally.
– Ashish Nangia
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