Walter
Democratising science and technology – Is there a chance that it will happen? Is it even possible to think about it? And my answer is no - it is not possible. Currently what we are engaged with is fiddling at the edges, at the periphery of things scientific, things technological.
I think I would like to put something else forward before I get down to looking at how we can democraticise science and technology.
Fro
m what ever I have heard
from the last ten or fifteen days, we are fast approaching an apocalypse. It may
not be the end of the world, but it is probably the end of the world, as we know
it and we are not prepared for it. Let me give you a couple of examples. Just in the last week we have been seeing an advertisement on TV for low cost airlines. A traveler looks askance at a fellow passenger – very casual, all disheveled and with no baggage. Blithely he is told “It’s just that the barbers’ shops are closed in Coimbatore, so I am going to Madurai for a haircut!” For me this is an example of technology gone haywire.
Right now we are participating in the process where technology and finances have gone haywire. We are reaching the end of a phase of civilisational pathology. If I am sounding terrified it is because I am. And I have been terrified for quite some time. It is so easy for the system to say that you and I are paranoid. But, what system are we talking about?
There’s something else that I want to posit over here. You and I are part the system that we normally talk about. We are part of the system and we are pushed into desiring things that we have no control over. This brings me to the next example - if I want to build a house, I cannot build a house of the type that I propagate needs to be built. I have to build the type of house that we see coming up everywhere around us – here in Hyderabad, in Bangalore, Anantapur, and Bhadrachalam. A ‘normal’ (not ‘conventional’- conventional houses are still built with mud walls and thatched roof) house today will cost between Rs10-30 lakhs depending on where I am. And what happens to the environmentally friendly house? The same house if it is to be environmentally friendly will cost Rs 20 - 40 lakhs! So an environmentally friendly house is costlier!
So what are we doing here? Why is an environmentally friendly house so costly? It is because our understanding of science and technology and environment is so flawed and we are not re-examining the basics. This is why we are just carrying on like lemmings going into the sea. There is inexorability to this ‘logic’. And, therefore I say that we cannot make science and technology people friendly.
The other point which I would like to make is - can we really talk about making science and technology people friendly without being paternalistic? Most people - and here I am talking about India – are illiterate; and the key segment of the population that can contribute to science and technology – namely women are more illiterate than the rest of us. So what are we talking about? Unless we are able to engage with the large majority, especially women, whatever we are engaged with is fiddling at the edges.
This is not to denigrate what we are doing. It is just to add another dimension to our thinking which is: We are playing in a paradigm, which is playing into people’s hands. This is not the people in the sense that Shiv spoke about, but people who have a great vested interest in keeping the system going. It is a buddy system; and we are willy-nilly sucked into it. We talk nicely, we may be politically correct; we talk radical things but are actually doing the same thing as the system. So this is all a part of a pattern. I do not know if this is a ploy or a plot but there is a pattern in this. It keeps all the so called people illiterate and therefore whatever we do in terms of getting people’s science and technology people friendly is a kind of feudalism, at best a kind of benign paternalism.
So what do we have to do?
I would like to posit a kind of a framework in which we may look at this.
In the early part of our work, those of us engaged in social, economic and political development since the ‘60s and ‘70s, worked in a paradigm that we used to call Structural Change. So we wanted to change the structures of power. And we thought that if we just throw out those people in power and replaced them with another lot of people in power like the proletariat, peasants or whatever, then things would change. But they did not. Mainly because the discourse on how deal with science and technology was the same. And therefore today the Left wants Polavarams or big dams or whatever, as much as the capitalist societies - the domination of centralised, controlled, lab researched, intensive technologies, needing vast economies of scale, thrust with large capital.
Having seen that paradigm fail, or rather having been disillusioned with the possibility of revolution, we then got into the next paradigm, Structural Adjustment. And I think we are operating most of the time in that paradigm of structural adjustment. This is not to denigrate what we are doing because it is a compulsion - because we are part of the system. So in this paradigm we get to deal with the small victories that we talk about. It came out very clearly in the various discussions that we have had in the last couple of days – namely policy victories, policy failures, dealing with bureaucrats, politicians, etc. These are all in the politics of structural adjustment. The structure will adjust with small victories, small failures, and large hopes. But whatever happens, the structures will by and large remain the same.
So is there something else that we also need to engage with? Some other paradigms that we need to develop? I would like to posit the paradigm of structural transformation. Probably we can explore this in this forum. And that is why I am bringing it up at this point.
What is the paradigm of structural transformation? Revolutions don’t happen in an instant. Those that happen don’t last long. Such revolutions are not sustainable. They successfully happen when there is a new set of practices and theories that gain momentum, pass a threshold, and gain currency. Policy follows practice, follows a tipping point. There are a range of intermediary institutions and practices that develop, such that the dispersed experiments and enterprises coalesce are integrated into a sustainable web. So if the scale of organic farming or NPM agriculture is to posit an alternative, if it has to gain currency, we need to develop intermediary democratized institutions that do not follow the same dominant path of centralized, large scale capital intensive models.
We are at a juncture where a civilisational shift is possible. Only time will tell. The multiple crises of Global Warming, Peak Oil, Identities under Siege, et al are upon us. There is a possibility for us to shift away from the current paradigm be it capitalism, technology, the West or western civilization, this that or the other. There is not only a possibility there is an urgent need. In fact, it is not just a need -- it is going to happen whether we like it or not.
We have the opportunity to perceive the crises. We also have another opportunity, which is that we are in India. One small, elite section of India wants to go down that path of multiple crises. But we are not yet there, we have not yet gone all the way down that path – we have not yet arrived. We are merely the macho-superpower-in-waiting. Most of our people are living sustainable lifestyles, by default - what we call the bio-mass paradigm. And this is where the direction probably lies - and there is something for us to learn and develop over here. Is that possible? How can it be done? There are no ready-made answers for us. It is something that we have to create. We don’t know what will happen which is why time and again we say that we do not have an alternative. We can only presume and hypothesise. Because the alternative is not in the here and now, it is something in the future and something we need to work towards in the here and now. The interlocking, intermediary institutions need to develop and gain currency. It is a long and winding road.
Thus, in a forum like KICS, we will be engaged with mundane and exhilarating issues in the paradigm of structural adjustment with the existing structures, making them more user friendly, more transparent, regulated, and socially responsible.
We also need to be involved in mundane and exhilarating issues in the paradigm of structural transformation of diverse, dispersed, decentralized sustainable options.
Thus KICS will deal with energy in the paradigm of adjustment, as well as in the paradigm of transformation. And this goes for health, agriculture, education …
In this effort, we have to keep in mind a couple of things.
One of them is the notion of sacrifice. I think sacrifice has become a bad word in the past few decades. Every religion has a notion of sacrifice, and sacrifice is not merely giving up something. Sacrifice also has a connotation of holding something to be sacred. Whether you look at it as a scapegoat, and it takes away your sins, or whatever it is, it is something that you know is sacred and which one holds in esteem above all; in such esteem that one is willing to ‘sacrifice’ other things.
Even if we go beyond organised religion or beyond the practice of rituals, there is something that we need to look at: things held sacred, not so much because a high priest or a shaman or somebody else tells us. Today there is a reverence with which society looks at technology and science, oil, FDI (foreign direct investment), markets, capital, consumerism.
What we need to engage with is - what is it that we need to make sacred, which will be recognisable as the sacred in this civilizational shift, something for which we can make sacrifices.
Therefore I am all with Harish saying let us take off our clothes, figuratively and literally, and be naked – shed/get rid of some of the assumptions we hold dear - sacred.
We are then not just part of the problem - fiddling at the edges, at the periphery of things scientific, things technological.
We can also be engaged as part of the solution.
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