July 13, 2024
Paul Robeson,
speaking of the scientific achievements of the West which have formed the
bedrock of its claim to supremacy, posed a question for the 20th century:
“having found the key, has Western man—Western bourgeois man—sufficient
strength left to turn it in the lock?”1
Today, as we
witness the spectacular and terrifying unraveling of the West, this question
takes on a new urgency. Western epistemology, rooted in white supremacy and
domination, has proved to be woefully inadequate at explaining the rapidly
changing world, or answering the great moral and ideological questions of our
time. Why is there unbridled poverty and homelessness in the richest nations?
Why are Western democracies suffering the biggest crises of legitimacy in their
history, with ordinary people utterly distrustful of experts in every field?
Why has liberal democracy not made freedom real? What is the way forward for
humanity, and for knowledge?
Barely three
decades have passed since Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation of the “End of
History.” He was articulating the thesis of the triumphant post-Cold War
Western ruling elite that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy
represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”2 Ironically,
the U.S. imperialist state and its allies could only sustain this end point by
waging endless wars and coups throughout Asia and Africa, in “defense” of
Western standards of “freedom” and “democracy.” It is clear that the logic and
assumptions of liberal democracy have failed miserably to explain the world,
and the aspirations of the masses. The vast majority of the world’s people,
weary of war and striving for a new path forward, will not respect or be
controlled by these false standards any longer. They do not see Vladimir Putin,
Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump as the enemy, nor Ukraine and Israel as bastions of
democracy.
However, the
political decline of the West has not yet translated into a commensurate
decline in the influence of Western science and academia, which shares and
serves to perpetuate the logic and assumptions of the Western ruling class. The
dominant view of science, which is the white view of science, is that science
is the concern of a select few “experts,” who must pursue it as a disinterested
activity, even as their careers secure their place among the ruling elite. The
scientist, in choosing what he works on, must be neutral and unconcerned with
moral questions, even as his research is funded by, and often aids, war. And
the purpose which science must serve is rarely discussed, even as “academic
freedom” is passionately defended as “the bedrock of the American university.”
The question of
how we know, or epistemology, is necessarily preceded and informed by the
question of why we know, or the purpose of knowledge. As such, scientific
inquiry has never been and can never be a purely rational and objective
endeavor. It is dishonest to pretend that science can remain neutral in the
face of war and the degradation of humanity. Whether it be the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the use today of Artificial
Intelligence in ensuring the maximum civilian casualties in Israel’s genocidal
war in Gaza, the practice and use of science has always collided with the moral
choice.
The question
facing us today is this: how can science, the vanguard of human knowledge and
the method to know the truth, be freed from the confines of the compromised
scientist? And in what way will humanity—on its path to a new stage in
history—bring forth the next revolution in science?
The question of
how science relates to society is at least as old as the modern world, although
it takes on qualitatively new forms in every epoch. A close look at the history
of the philosophical debates that have shaped science as we know it today delineates
two epistemological frameworks for science—one compatible with the striving for
the broadest measure of freedom for the people, and another which seeks to free
the individual scientist from their responsibility to society.
Lenin,
Materialism, and Positivism
Ten years before
the October Revolution, Lenin argued that materialism, which is the
philosophical framework rooted in the existence of an objective, material
reality outside the human mind, was the basis for advancing human knowledge.3
Central to this framework is the historical lesson that human knowledge has
always crossed hitherto unknown frontiers—frontiers never completely predicted
by existing knowledge, but nevertheless anticipated. Of course, Lenin was
defending not a mechanical understanding of a fixed external world, but a
dialectical relationship between an evolving external world and human action.
He saw knowledge as a prerequisite to human freedom, and his defense of
materialism was a revolutionary step to further freedom. In order to make freedom
real, epistemology had to be rooted in the historical lesson that human beings
are capable of knowing the world and hence acting to change it.
The materialist
framework was opposed and attacked by adherents of the positivist school of
philosophy. Positivism argues that Truth is subjective, and the totality of
human knowledge is determined by what human beings can observe or sense alone.
Positivism as a framework has developed over historical time. In the 18th
century, Bishop George Berkeley argued that the idea that the external world
exists independent of our perception, is a “manifest contradiction.” He argued,
“what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly
repugnant that any one of these [objects that we perceive], or any combination
of them, should exist unperceived?” He revealed that his philosophical line was
ultimately a defense of the Church as the sole arbiter of Truth, when he
identified materialism as “the main pillar and support of Skepticism… Atheism
and Irreligion.” More than 150 years later, Ernst Mach reinvented Berkelian
categories to posit the external world as a “complex of sensations.” Instead of
the material world, Mach argued that “sensations,” which lead to the external
world, should be the object of scientific study. This was of course a reaction
to the revolutionary science of his time, the dialectical materialism of Marx
and Engels, which sought to study and understand the concrete, changing world.
Thus, although
positivism had different manifestations in different epochs, its uniting
essence could be found in its adverse relationship to revolutionary thought of
the time. At every stage, positivism was revealed to be a reactionary
philosophy that denies the existence of an objective world independent of human
experience, thereby obviating the striving to understand the world in its
movement.
Lenin noted that
from the positivist framework, “It inevitably follows that the whole world is
but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the
existence of other people besides oneself: it is the purest solipsism.” Lenin’s
argument helps explain the worldview from which Europe has historically related
to the rest of the world. As long as the European idea of the world was the
only one that mattered, Europe did not need to care about the existence of the
rest of humanity, who could be enslaved, colonized, and written out of history.
Einstein,
Quantum Mechanics, and the Battle Over the Nature of Reality
Albert Einstein,
one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, believed that in
order to bring forth new scientific discoveries, the scientist cannot proceed
“without considering critically a much more difficult problem, the problem of
analyzing the nature of everyday thinking.”4 Science is then a specialized
articulation of humanity’s striving to know itself and the world, reflecting
and shaping everyday thinking.
It was
Einstein’s groundbreaking discovery of the wave-particle duality of light that
ushered in one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the modern world. The
quantum realm, having been discovered, necessitated new theoretical and
epistemological formulations, because the laws of classical physics could no
longer explain the physical world in its entirety.
Following
Einstein’s new theory of light, Niels Bohr had proposed a new model for
subatomic particles, which disobeyed classical laws but verified patterns of
light emitted by matter when heated. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg
independently advanced two statistical theories to substantiate Bohr’s model,
in which the electron existed at all times in a superposition of states. While
the transition between states explained the statistical phenomenon of light
emissions, these laws said nothing about direct measurement of the electron
itself. Eventually, it was Max Born who proposed a physical world-picture
emerging from these theories, in terms of probabilities of finding the electron
in a given state. The trouble was, measurement always found the electron in a
single state.
Born’s
interpretation of statistical laws as definitive ones, necessarily implied that
the electron, and by extension material reality itself, was fundamentally
indeterminate. This was the Copenhagen interpretation, which was eventually
championed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born, despite their different formulations
of the theory itself. Instead of investigating the inconclusive aspects of this
new theory, the partial success of quantum mechanics was used to canonize it as
the ultimate description of reality. It is only the act of measurement, or
observation, that determines reality. An objective Truth does not exist
independent of our observations. Thus once again, the debate over the nature of
reality was invoked, and positivism found its new heroes in the defenders of
this interpretation.
Einstein
categorically rejected this interpretation.5,6 He, like Lenin, believed in the
existence of an objective world independent of the human mind, that could be
known. Our understanding of the natural world surely depends on how we probe
it, but the “curve of knowledge” bends towards the most accurate description of
objective reality. He considered quantum mechanics to be an incomplete theory
because even though it found “external confirmation,” it lacked an “inner
perfection”—the harmony and beauty that he saw in the arc of natural science in
its movement toward Truth. He refused to accept the Copenhagen interpretation
because he saw in it “the end of physics as we know it.” For him, to accept
that objective reality didn’t exist was to stop striving to know it.
The Cold War
Capture of Science
The period after
the Second World War was ripe with the possibility of solidifying the
commitment of science to human freedom. The Soviet Union was admired by
scientists the world over for its heroic role in the defeat of fascism and the
call for planned scientific and technological development of society. The
rising anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa further created conditions
for a view of science that was concerned with the uplift of the masses from
poverty and the immiseration of war. Scientists embraced their moral
responsibility, flocking to the defense of Peace and global disarmament. At the
same time, Soviet science made remarkable strides in working out the
ramifications of the unresolved epistemological questions brought forth by
quantum mechanics.7
This was also
the period of the Cold War, and science did not escape the scourge of the
anti-communist witch-hunt in America. A carefully planned propaganda campaign
launched by the CIA breached all sections of intellectual activity, and a new
view of science, separated from questions of politics and ideology, began to
take shape in the Western academic establishment. The scientific framework of
the Soviet Union was demonized and portrayed as the enemy of “academic freedom”
of the individual scientist. With the fall of the Soviet Union, this view of
science as a narrow technical pursuit was declared victorious. Peace and hunger
were no longer worthy concerns of the scientist, who was encouraged to “shut up
and calculate.”
Theoretical
physics in particular was completely cut off from the philosophical and moral
questions that had thus far been instrumental in shaping its historic arc. With
the passing of Albert Einstein, the epistemological battle over the
interpretation of quantum mechanics was forgotten, its implications for the
nature of reality remaining unresolved. The failure to address this question
charted a trajectory for theoretical physics that sought to understand, not the
concrete material world, but only an abstraction of it.
This pathology
is perhaps most starkly reflected today in the fate of String Theory. Based on
the idea of replacing point-like elementary particles with one-dimensional
objects called “strings,” this theory held out hope to unify quantum mechanics
with the gravitational force, and thereby furnish a “theory of everything.”
After decades of research however, no evidence supporting the existence of
strings could be found, and string theorists concluded that four dimensional
space-time was too narrow for a description of reality. Peter Woit, in his book
Not Even Wrong, says that string theory “required postulating the existence of
many extra unobserved dimensions, and by different choices of the properties of
these extra dimensions, one could get just about anything one wanted.”8 Once
more, one is reminded of Lenin’s assessment of positivism, that “the whole
world is but my idea.” What was outstanding, however, was that the theory was
not discarded despite the absence of experimental proof. Woit goes on to say, “the
term ‘superstring theory’ really refers not to a well-defined theory, but to
unrealised hopes that one might exist. As a result, this is a ‘theory’ that
makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability
is what has allowed the whole subject to survive and flourish.”
What does this
view of science have to offer today, especially to the youth who must
understand the world in all its complexity, as well as their place and role in
it? It tells us that the world cannot be known in any useful way, and hence
gives us no way to imagine a new future. It denies the possibility of the yet
unknown, including the possibility of revolutionary change. Is science then to
be altogether rejected in our search for the way forward? What happens to
centuries of progress in human thought which Western science inherited, and yet
lost its way?
Science and the
Human Being
History is
meaningful to the living if it can be used. The history that has shaped science
makes one thing clear, that the current crisis in science is rooted in a crisis
of epistemology. As such, it cannot be resolved purely within the domain of
science. The deep philosophical and moral questions at its heart must be
engaged with and answered. Returning to where we began, the question of how we
know cannot be separate from the question of why we know, and for whom?
Science is not
separate from society, it assumes the values and contradictions of the society
that produces it. W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of modern sociology and the first
to scientifically study race in America, wrote, “Science is a great and worthy
mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves;
one thing there is greater than knowledge, and that [is] the Man who knows.”9
If it is the human being that science serves, then in order to address the
crisis in science we must first investigate the relationship of the society
that shapes science, to the human being.
How is the human
being regarded in American society? We are encouraged to keep him at a safe
distance, and only see him through layers of abstraction, e.g. through
categories of identity. The ordinary human being does not have the capacity to
understand what the expert knows, and hence the expert must speak for him.
However, in order to speak for him, it is enough for the scientist to “observe”
him and his life-world from the lofty heights of the ivory towers of academia.
He does not need to descend to the ground and get his “hands dirty.” Not
equipped or even required to know the human being, the scientist is then free
to cast doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself, and thereby abdicate his
responsibility to the human being.
This lies at the
heart of postmodernism, which asserts that Truth is multiple and subjective—it
belongs to and is shaped by an individual’s experience and identity, and thus
cannot be known by the “other.” Postmodern theories are packaged as radical and
progressive, claiming to serve the broadest measure of freedom to the
individual in society. However, the freedom they offer is the freedom of the
individual from society, and not of society itself. By separating people into
increasingly narrow and mutually exclusive categories of experience, this
worldview obliterates the possibility of unity, of people coming together to
form a consensus about the Truth and social change.
Postmodernism
employs language and jargon to obscure the truth, and this tendency has become
rather commonplace in science today. Woit, pointing out the similarity between
how string theory research in physics and postmodern theories in the humanities
are pursued, says, “In both cases, there are practitioners that revel in the
difficulty and obscurity of their research, often being overly impressed with
themselves because of this. The barriers to understanding that this kind of
work entails make it very hard for any outsiders to evaluate what, if anything,
has been achieved.” An illuminating example is the Sokal Affair. In 1996, the
academic journal Social Text published physicist Alan Sokal’s “hoax” article
attacking the legitimacy of science, which mimicked postmodern language and
positionalities, but made no scientific contribution or even common sense.
Sokal’s intent was ”to bury postmodernism,” and the fact that one of the most
prestigious postmodern journals in America could not tell his deception apart
from a serious work of scholarship, proved the absurdity and obscurantism that
pervades postmodern ideas and theories.
Perhaps even
worse than the conclusion that there is nothing more to know, is the assertion
that it is the human being who doesn’t have the capacity to know. This was the
premise of John Horgan’s The End of Science,10 a book which claims that all
discoverable knowledge has been discovered, and the limitations on human
cognitive ability preclude any further progress. He proposes the concept of an
“ironic science” going forward, which cannot produce new knowledge, but takes
inspiration from postmodernism “to invent new meanings, ones that challenge
received wisdom and provoke further dialogue.” This same worldview forms the
basis for the current craze about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), which seeks
to replace the human being with the machine, the former having served his
limited purpose. The “A.I. revolution” is rooted in the pathetic and sinister
hope that the machine can achieve what the human mind, inadequate and
stagnated, cannot—produce new knowledge, and hence the next revolution in
science.
Now, machines
may well be able to do a great many things that human beings cannot, but they
cannot think for you. A.I. can at best interpret and consolidate the existing
body of human knowledge, but it cannot produce anything new or revolutionary.
That task still falls squarely on the shoulders of Man, if he can yet find the
courage and tenacity to carry it. However, this requires serious philosophical
work. It requires an assessment of the anti-human assumptions on which today’s
intellectual activity is based, and the limitations they impose on the human
capacity to know and change the world. It also requires the rejection of these
assumptions in favor of a new epistemology rooted in the human being, that will
realign the purpose of knowledge with the strivings of ordinary people.
King and
Baldwin: Towards a New Revolutionary Epistemology
At this point,
we will make a bold proposition. Perhaps there is something yet in the
revolutionary history of this country that can show us the path forward.
America, which declared “the end of history” when it emerged as the principal
hegemon of the Western world at the turn of the 21st century, also produced a
philosophical and epistemological tradition that may yet take history forward,
and that is the Black Radical Tradition. It is in the legacy of Martin Luther
King Jr. and James Baldwin that the world of Man, and hence the world of
science, may find the key to the future.
What has King, a
preacher and a Civil Rights leader, got to do with science, one may ask?
Everything possibly, if the thesis that science and philosophy are tied at the
hip holds muster. King was a philosopher and a revolutionary. Deeply troubled
by the suffering and indignity of his people, he embarked on a scientific study
of philosophy, seeking the basis for a method of social change. While moved by
the best of the European tradition, it was in Gandhi’s philosophy of
nonviolence that King found intellectual and moral satisfaction saying, “I came
to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to
oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”11
King’s
touchstone for knowing the world, and the nature of reality, was the life-world
of the Black working poor, whom he loved. It was this worldview, rooted in the
condition of the human being, that led him to conclude that war was the biggest
enemy of the poor, and that the struggle for racial justice in America could
not be separated from the struggle for Peace in the world. He asserted that
“there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.”12
He saw clearly that scientific advance without concern for the moral progress
of man had led to “guided missiles and misguided men.” For him, non-violence
was a revolutionary framework that could forge a new kind of human being. This
new human being, by refusing to conform to the standards of an unjust society,
could compel society to transform in order to fit him.
James Baldwin,
similarly, must be regarded not just as a writer, but as a philosopher and a
revolutionary. He explains that the American sense of reality, or lack thereof,
is a pathology firmly rooted in the failure of white America to confront its
history of slavery—“one of the most obscene adventures in the history of
mankind.” Thus, what the white man does not know about the world and the human
being, is precisely what he does not know about the Black man—having trapped
himself into the necessity of denying the Black man’s humanity in order to
justify his enslavement.
Baldwin’s
primary concern is the Human—man’s knowledge of himself leading to knowledge of
the world, and how to act in it. His writings on the Civil Rights Movement can
be read as a sociological study of human capacity—what produced figures like
King, Rev. James Lawson, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Diane Nash? How is it
that from the life-world of the descendants of slaves, a great revolution could
emerge that threatened to fundamentally alter American society, and bring forth
a New American People?
Baldwin writes,
“The rock against which the European notion of the nation-state has crashed is
nothing more—and absolutely nothing less—than the question of identity: Who am
I? And what am I doing here?”13 He finds the response to this universal
question in the Blues, the only original music to ever be produced in America.
The Blues are an articulation of a people’s striving to reclaim their captive
humanity, to make of their despair and suffering a song, and to use their
history and experience to create a unique identity and a personal authority,
that rejects every standard of their captor. And this music “begins at the
auction block.”
Is it possible
then, that at the auction block, which was “the demolition, by Europe, of all
human standards,” was also forged a way to know the human being and the world
that might be our salvation? Consider nonviolence, which the great civil rights
leader Diane Nash called the greatest invention of the 20th century. Could
nonviolence have been invented if Man had not been compelled, at great personal
cost, to look white supremacy in the face, and see in its insistence on brute
force and domination, the spiritual and moral undoing of Man? Can this not
explain why Gandhi’s philosophy and method was forged in the crucible of
apartheid South Africa, and why he was able to see that the true meaning of
nonviolence would be revealed to the world by the Black Freedom Movement, a
prophecy that King brought to fruition?
If it can, then
from this wellspring of thought and ideas can emerge a new revolutionary
epistemology that articulates the strivings of today’s human being. Centered on
the human being, this way of knowing the world will once again create the
possibility of liberatory knowledge, and offer answers to the philosophical
questions that confront science. However, this is a unique moment. One thing is
certain, Asia and Africa will never again be colonized, enslaved and starved
for the benefit of Asia’s peninsula, nor will neo-colonization and war be
accepted by dark humanity as the birthright of the West for much longer. For
the first time in history, the majority of the world’s peoples, and not just
Europe, will have to work out the answer for all humanity.
References:
(1)↩
Paul Robeson, “Primitives,”
1936
(2)↩
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, 1989
(3)↩
V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908
(4)↩
Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,”
1936
(5)↩
Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, 1906-1955
(6)↩
B.G. Kuznetsov, Albert Einstein, 1965
(7)↩
Vladimir A. Fock, “On the interpretation of quantum
mechanics” in V.A. Fock—Selected
Works: Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory, ed. L. D. Faddeev, L. A.
Khalfin, and I. V. Komarov, 2004
(8)↩
Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, 2006
(9)↩
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Galileo Galilei,”
1908
(10)↩
John Horgan, The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight
Of The Scientific Age, 1996
(11)↩
Martin Luther King Jr., “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,”
1958
(12)↩
Martin Luther King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,”
1954
(13)↩
James Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of
Redemption”
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