December 19, 2004

Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester in William Shakespeare’s profoundest tragedy King Lear, defies the common belief of Elizabethan England that mankind’s fortunes are compliant to heavenly bodies. He says, “When we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars.” Shakespeare had the guts to challenge the status quo of his time despite being a Roman Catholic, and so did the thinking people of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance times. The names of Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and many others can be cited in this context who insisted on rationality, which is popularly known as science.

Just like drama, science is also meaningless without the element of ‘conflict’. It is strange that in this so-called scientific and cyber age we don’t hear much about scientific discoveries and inventions, contrary to the norm of the past, particularly after the industrial revolution in Europe. People nowadays tend to confuse science with technological advancement. Science, as a tool to critically analyze, investigate, discover and more importantly to challenge the forces of nature, has lost its utility, or is not commonly used.

Science has come to the service of the ‘market’, or to justify religious uprightness. The flow of ‘biased’ and ‘selective’ knowledge from the developed countries to the underdeveloped ones has contributed significantly to the disparity among different nations, nationalities, and more significantly among the classes. The linkages of this notion can be traced in the historical development of science or the scientific development of history.

Leading thinkers of the past, notably of the 20th century, had foreseen this scenario in their various interpretations of society, history and economy. Bertrand Russell was the most prominent of these thinkers whose analyses of society did not separate natural sciences from social sciences. To Russell, science was a way of thinking and a fashion in which solutions to humankind’s problems could be sought. His dialectical way of interpreting history makes him very much a socialist, but he never conformed to the authoritarian ideology of the Soviet regime. His scientific demeanour didn’t allow him to.

Apart from his major writings, a corpus of Russell’s works is based on booklets on different issues of philosophy. In all these books he has tried to scientifically scrutinize the problems faced by humankind and looked for their possible remedies in history. The book under review is one such work of Russell which has been translated into Urdu for the benefit of Pakistani readers entitled Mua’sharay Par Science Ke Asraat. Russell has discussed the formation and evolution of science through different historical epochs and the effects of science on nature and man. By doing so, Russell confronts with obscurantism, different sorts of dogmatisms, and political and religious reaction to science.

Russell believes that scientific development, or the scientific way of thinking (the reason), has been the biggest achievement of humankind, which not only undid the myths and superstitious beliefs of a majority of people but also altered their entire way of life and concepts about the universe and the world. At the same time Russell maintains that science has its negative and destructive repercussions on people also. The crux of his argument in this book is that the profits of scientific development could not reach a large number of the world’s population. The reason he cites is the confinement of science to the ruling classes that exploit science to maximize their profits.

For example, it is a known fact that the massive growth of the European capitalist class led to the search for different markets overseas and to brutal imperialism. Though imperialism is an older phenomenon, its extraordinariness could be witnessed in the industrial age. Discussing the milieu of the early 19th century, Russell argues that in order to sell cotton to the Africans, the Christian missionaries had to preach their ideology of ‘shame’ to naked Africans, so that they buy and wear cloth.

Russell has devoted a full chapter to scientific progress and its connection to war. The discourse is as relevant to contemporary readers as it was during the Second World War. Russell is of the opinion that scientific progress gave the armament industry a big boost. With the invention of gunpowder and more sophisticated weaponry, wars became more horrific and unstoppable. Monarchs and rulers became more ruthless in curbing dissidents and used modern weapons to violate civil rights. An analogy can easily be made with today’s political scenario.

This marvellous book encompasses popular subjects such as morality, democracy, and war, as well as more academic disciplines such as physics, biology and psychology, but its importance lies in Russell’s humanistic and internationalist ideologies, and his desire to use ‘knowledge’ for the collective betterment of man. Russell saw the panacea to humankind’s sufferings in the establishment of a society based on rational foundations. It seems we are getting farther from the attainment of this dream.

Mua’sharay par Science Ke Asraat
By Bertrand Russell
Translated by Bashir Ahmed Chishti
Book Home, Book Street,
46 Mozang Road, Lahore
Tel: 042-7231518
Email: bookhome1@hotmail.com
128pp. Rs120

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