MULTICULTURALISM – 2: The role of science in civilization

 Now there is an important difference between ancient and modern civilization: The material foundations of ancient civilization were craftsmanship and devices resulting from human ingenuity, based on trial and error. The intellectual foundations of ancient civilizations were religion and mythology. Their norms and values rested largely on traditions and  sacred texts.  On the other hand, the material basis of modern civilization is sophisticated technology, deriving from complex physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Its intellectual foundations are closely linked to  the modern scientific world view. Its values  and norms have evolved primarily from eighteenth century European Enlightenment.

      Any dispassionate inquiry will reveal that modern civilization is not better than ancient ones on any absolute standard, any more than that the ancient ones were intrinsically superior. But irrespective of that, it is a historical fact that the major insights and material elements of the modern world first arose in the Western cultural framework.

Reactions: This last fact has had a tremendous impact on non-Western peoples. And it manifests itself in different ways in the current multicultural discussions.

      In this context,  non-Western peoples face a serious predicament: To  accept modern science and  its off-shoots of technology and secular liberalism seems to to be equivalent to embracing the creations of Western culture. Yet, even virulently anti-Western cultural chauvinists have to rely on telephones and airplanes,  vaccines and  pipe-lines, international banking systems and  computers and much more of Western vintage to survive and compete in the modern world.

      In Western societies, on the other hand, there has been a gradual  awakening that Europeans had committed  outrageous  moral transgressions and grievous intellectual errors in recent  centuries: The moral transgressions lay in their ruthless appropriation of lands and minerals that  belonged to others  and the infliction of political domination over them. [Others before them had engaged in similar atrocities, but those are now in the distant past.] Their intellectual blunders related  to the arrogant conclusion to the effect that the conquered peoples were without culture or civilization of consequence. Thanks to a number of sensitive and enlightened scholars in the West, the cultural superiority assumed by  Europeans of earlier centuries has been revealed to be base and baseless.