Is science moving too fast? Does it require tighter controls? Such questions send waves of panic through many scientists, but have become a rallying call for a large and diverse group from anti-capitalist activists to Prince Charles. They have an ideological guru in Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk, editor of Resurgence magazine and founder of Schumacher College in Dartington, Devon. Kumar believes that certain areas of study should be off-limits, but he is not 鈥渁nti-science鈥�. The problem, he told Michael Bond, is that scientists have ceded too much control over what happens to their work to business and industry.
What do you make of Prince Charles鈥檚 recent BBC lecture when he said that scientists should not 鈥渃hange what nature is鈥� but rather observe it?
I agree with him. There is a difference between adapting nature, which is what we have done in agriculture for centuries, and fundamentally changing it, which is what Prince Charles was talking about. Genetic engineering is a much more fundamental change than normal agriculture. It鈥檚 a matter of degree. For example, when you make weapons, developing a bow and arrow or a handgun is very different from developing nuclear weapons.
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But some eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins were very critical of Prince Charles . . .
快猫短视频s like Richard Dawkins are doing a great disservice to science. They should be more humble. In some ways they are replacing religious fundamentalism with scientific fundamentalism.
There are 6 billion people in the world. Perhaps 2 million of them would claim to be scientists. You cannot imply that the rest of them are idiots. There are other ways of knowing about the world-philosophical, religious, poetic, artistic, cultural, and you can鈥檛 write them all off. Science is very important, but it is only one way of knowing.
Science may be one route to knowledge. But it鈥檚 a pretty successful one. We鈥檙e living longer and there鈥檚 unprecedented prosperity. We鈥檝e even been to the Moon. What鈥檚 there to complain about?
We have to ask: 鈥淲hat is the cost of this progress and prosperity?鈥� Sure, we have made progress and prosperity through scientific means, but to the detriment of the Earth and of humanity. A small, elite group of countries, 10 at the most, are living very comfortably, but at the cost of billions of people living at starvation level.
You鈥檙e a proponent of what鈥檚 called holistic science. How is this different from the science being practised in most labs worldwide?
In holistic science we recognise that we cannot look at nature without seeing the context in which we are doing our research. The text has no meaning without the context. We are looking at science in the context of society, of cultures, of environment, even of spirit. We recognise that we exist in a web of relationships rather than in isolation.
What do you mean by spirit?
Spirit is almost a dirty word in science. A lot of scientists have misunderstood, misinterpreted and misconceived the meaning of spirituality. Even E. O. Wilson, who is a very respected and ecologically minded scientist, says that there is no other knowledge but scientific knowledge. That is extremely exclusionist and extremely fundamentalist. People think that spirituality means that you have to be a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist or have blind faith in God. That is not spirituality. Spirituality is a deep feeling of compassion and unity and relatedness and connection with all of existence. The tigers and the snakes and the worms and the butterflies are all our family members. If you knew that any activity you were doing would hurt your mother or your father or your sister or your brother, would you do it? No, because they are your family members. Spirituality brings you the unity of the Universe.
So how could a laboratory scientist working, say, in plant genetics, use a holistic approach?
To start with, that person has to think. She or he has to consider what will be the effect of their science on the environment, on the community, on the culture, on the spirituality and on the psyche of humans. Soil, soul, society: this is the new trinity of holistic thinking.
Can you give an example where a scientist studying holistically has discovered something they would not have discovered if they had studied in the usual way?
An obvious one is the study of complexity in biology. Brian Goodwin and others have found that when you look at a complex system such as an insect colony, certain properties become apparent that you could not have predicted simply by looking at the interactions of the individual insects. Patterns of organisation, for example. Individual termites look chaotic when they build their dwellings, yet the colony turns out to be beautifully structured and ordered.
How has holistic science gone down with mainstream scientists?
Not very well.
Where has the criticism come from?
The criticism has come from the Establishment. There are still very few scientists who follow a more holistic path: James Lovelock, Fritjof Capra, Lynn Margulis, Amory Lovins. Most science is at the service of technology, business and governments and is no longer a free agent. Most scientists therefore have vested interests and these interests are challenged when we criticise the Baconian way, in which you reveal the secrets of nature so that you can control it.
But could science ever be devolved from business? Your ideal world consists of independent scientists working mostly for themselves. Is that realistic?
Independent scientists working for themselves but also working for society-within organisations and universities. For this to work, universities would have to be truly independent. Universities have become the handmaidens of business and industry and economic growth, and economic growth is driving science. We have to decouple the ideas of economic growth from Western civilisation. Someone has to have the courage of their convictions to expose this myth that science is independent and objective and neutral and searching for the truth and not having any vested interest.
If you chaired a research council and could dictate how government money was spent on science, what would you do?
I would use Ernst Schumacher鈥檚 idea of small is beautiful. It鈥檚 very valid in the field of scientific research and funding. We should not think in terms of big foundations with billions of pounds to spend. At the moment big foundations such as the Wellcome Trust control the direction and field of research. 快猫短视频s have to tailor their projects so they fit in with the purpose of the trust, or of business. My message is that we should give power back to the scientists and put scientists in charge, put them back in the driving seat so that they have the last word on what is researched. Then they can have responsibility for what they do.
Does holistic science mean that scientists should drop some areas of research?
Yes. I would say genetics, nuclear research and some research into mood-altering drugs that would allow healthy people to alter their emotions by popping a pill.
Wouldn鈥檛 putting the brakes on any area of research run contrary to the philosophy of Western science? Science succeeds because there are no limits . . .
I think it is wrong to say there should be no limits, no constraints, particularly when science is wedded to big business and other vested interests. We should always work within the limits of nature, and within the social limits of values, morals and ethics.
It鈥檚 been argued that the scientific revolution didn鈥檛 happen in India and China precisely because of a reluctance to go down certain areas. Do you agree?
Yes. For example, the Chinese in the Middle Ages when they discovered gunpowder declared that they would not use it as a weapon but only for fireworks.
Do you think developing countries have lost out because of this?
No, not really. I think their poverty is a result of exploitation by technologically advanced countries, and of social injustice. Economic growth is only one kind of progress. There are other kinds. You wouldn鈥檛 say that Shakespeare didn鈥檛 make progress. You wouldn鈥檛 say that people who built the pyramids didn鈥檛 make any progress. You wouldn鈥檛 say that great painters didn鈥檛 make progress. Music is progress, architecture is progress.
But might not restricting what scientists do mean we miss out on research that is beneficial, like the Green Revolution?
No. Beneficial research grows gradually. At the moment scientific research and development is happening at such a great speed that we don鈥檛 know where we are. Science should slow down. The Green Revolution has brought more poverty and problems than it has solutions. When you introduce capitally and chemically intensive agriculture to Third World countries, you deny employers access to labour that is available in abundance, and make them reliant on capital and chemicals which are in short supply. It isn鈥檛 wise.
So you鈥檇 have developing countries change direction.
I would want them to change direction because many of their government leaders and bureaucrats are trained in the West. They have been brainwashed, they have been conditioned to think that progress means having motorways and airports and Internets and everything dot.com. People like Mahatma Gandhi did not measure progress by Western standards. The whole idea of 鈥渄eveloping鈥� countries is very patronising. Just because in India we don鈥檛 have certain kinds of airports and motorways and car manufacturing and so on, does that mean we are not developed? This industrial model of thinking is something that we have to somehow raise a voice against.
Have you ever wanted to be a scientist?
Not exactly. My mother was a farmer. She used to say that you can learn spirituality from nature and so I became very interested in spirituality. She was not a literate woman, but she had a tremendous love of nature and she would observe the honeybee, for example, and she would say, 鈥淟ook at the honeybee, it goes from flower to flower to flower collecting only a little bit of honey from each flower. Never has a flower complained that a bee took too much nectar away.鈥� I believe that science should be a broad school and not narrowed down to the laboratory experiment. So from that point of view my mother was a scientist and I grew with her.
Tell me about Schumacher College . . .
Students come to Schumacher not only to listen to intellectual theories but also to live an ecological lifestyle. They start their day with meditation, participate in the cooking, cleaning, washing up and gardening. Going out into nature is important. In universities, they keep students in the classroom day after day after day. So at Schumacher we say: 鈥淲e are not learning about nature, we are also learning from nature.鈥�
This is a very radical approach to learning. Do any students who come to you feel alienated by that approach?
The majority of people find it very refreshing. We have had students from 75 nations, so you are not only getting a Western view of science and technology. We are getting a world view. We say: 鈥淟earning is a participatory process and we all learn together. There is no fixed dogma.鈥�