LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND SCIENCE
Jawaharlal Nehru in defining culture once said, all that includes is culture and all that excludes is non-culture. The historical patterns and the socially valued characteristic that shape the lives of the people and hold them together could then be considered as culture. These patterns and traditions are cumulative in nature, and they stimulate, intrude, interrupt and impede the socialisation process of human beings. Whether it is creativity in literature, arts and architecture or in speculative philosophy, whether it is the conceptualisation, formulation and solution of various scientific and technological issues and problems, culture provides the general framework for their development.
Science is dynamic. Its development is intimately connected with the development of the society. Unless scientists constantly renovate their consciousness in terms of the life styles of the population constituting a society, its development is bound to be irrelevant to the large majority of people.
Science and technology determine the nature of economy. They hold the key to the production of wealth. In fact, the history of technology is almost coterminous with the history of material wealth. Therefore, the access to, management, control, and product of science and technology all assume great importance. The attitude towards material wealth, human values and social organization embedded in the cultural milieu of a community may clash with the values generated by the new economy emerging with the expansion of scientific and technological base of the country, and, thus, act as a factor preventing its application for development.
The nature of economy also determines the nature of scientific and technological development. In Europe, for example, in the transformation of agriculture, there was a substantial reduction in the use of manpower for agricultural operations over a period of years. During the 18th - 19th centuries the required labour force which consumed 80 per cent of the product was reduced as a result of mechanisation to a level so as to consume a mere 5 per cent by the mid 20th century (Bernal 1963 : 100). Science and technology blindly so used are bound to create devastating effects in the more populou developing countries of Asia and Africa, where the problems is one of human resources planning rather than labour saving, capital intensive economic planning.
Accentuation of material wealth through the application of science and technology not commensurate with human resources engineering is bound to divide communities into privileged and underprevileged categories. The division of the world into developed and developing is one such manifestation. Today the per capita saving available for investment for the production of more wealth in the developed industrial countries is more than the per capita spending on everything in the pre-industrial developing countries. Even within a developing country, the relative gap between the highly developed sector, the beneficiary of science and technology, and the underdeveloped sector is as immense as between countries. Benefits of science and technology tend to acrue to the privileged. As this accentuates class difference, societies which were stratified on different principles or where no stratification existed become naturally antagonistic to the application of science and technology.
The planner and the scientist in any society is always confronted with choices regarding priorities (Blackett 1963 : 47-64 and Powell 1963 : 85-112). Whether to explore and use the natural resources or to use the human resources, whether to spend money for present development or divert it for investment for the future, whether to allocate funds for the youth programmes or provide social security for the old, whether to develop nuclear capability for development or the divert resources for combating infant mortality, whether to plan for scientific and technical manpower or to wipe out illiteracy and provide minimum education to the maximum number are questions which confront them. The priority of the consumer may be different from that of the planner. In a Mysore village where drinking water is not available and has to be fetched from a distance, the rural development agencies put first priority to the supply of tap water. But he village thought that the renovation of a gymnasium which was in dilapidated condition should receive first priority. Their argument was that if people are given minimum opportunity for exercising and keeping healthy and fit, then they can take care of the problem of fetching water from the nearby well. They will not only be sure of the quality of water this way, but will not have to depend on outside agencies for such a vital need as water.
In conditions of elitist control of the society there is invariably a communication gap between the rulers and the ruled. If such a society is multilingual, then, communication problems become more acute. If one of the language varieties receiving elite patronage becomes the medium of education, administration and mass communication, then, it not only creates handicap for groups speaking other varieties or other languages, it is bound to create communication barriers at different levels. Not only economic planning, science and technology also thus, get divorced from their cultural roots. Unless bi-directional communication is established between scientists and technologists on the one had, and the larger majority of common men on the other, application of science and technology for the greatest good of the greatest number can never be achieved.
The large bulk of human communication is verbal communication. Language is both an expression of culture as well as a vehicle of cultural transmission. It is both a cause and an index of social and cultural change. The inter-dependence of language with social and cultural structures has been acknowledged by all social scientists. By expanding or contracting the communication network, language plays a key role in defining the nature of culture itself. The constant restructuring of the society which takes place as a result of addition of new knowledge, if not properly comprehended, interpreted, and transmitted, may create and reinforce an elitist culture which is characterised by a limited class beneficiary of the resultant socio-economic and cultural development.
In the early phase of development, science dealt with laws. But, later, formulation of laws changed the concepts themselves. In fact, it is acknowledge by almost all scientists that formulation of concepts are as important, if not more, as formulation of laws. Concept formation is intimately connected with language competence. The development of science over the past hundreds of years has brought us to a situation where the scientist is no longer sure about the nature of the scientific investigations, the layman is not sure whether he is asking the right questions and getting the right answers and the person interested in the expression of scientific concepts is not sure whether he has reached the limits of language. This apparently contradictory situation arises out of the fact that scientists believe that they are investigation the structure of the universe whereas the universe does not have one single structure. Each person makes his own approximation of the universe and each successive approximation is as valid as the other. As many reputed scientists point out in their writings (Bridgman 1959 and Conant 1962 : 15-28), through the course of the achievements of science, a contradiction has developed between deductions from various hypotheses and experiments. As a result, two diametrically opposite views about the nature of a scientific phenomenon could be both rejected and confirmed at the same time. Conant has referred to the contradiction between the caloric theory of heat and the concept that heat was associated with the motion of particles. Similarly, the theory that light is a wave phenomenon superceded the earlier notion that light was corpuscular, a stream of bullets. Further, new experiments proved, which could be summarised by saying, that light is emitted and received as though it consisted of a stream of particles and that it is transmitted as though it were a set of waves. Contradictions in theories and experiments go to prove that this world is a world of ideas and that their internal relations are relations between abstract concepts. When we talk of advances in science, we are really concerned with a break in the continuity of a line of argumentation. Because of situations like these, both questions asked and answers given are unsatisfactory. As language aids concept formation as well as expresses concepts, it plays a crucial role in hypothesis formation, explanation and dissemination of scientific concepts. When this association ossifies so that language becomes a mere formula, either because the concept has changed or the language has changed, then, communication either breaks or becomes a ritual. Unalterable associations are signs of a fanatic. As the line of argumentation is broken because of discrepancy between hypothesis and experimentation, it becomes essential that both scientists and laymen develop a flexibility of mind to read just themselves to the new scientific situation.
As Susan Langer points out, "Question and answer, assertion and denial, denotation and description-these are the basic uses of language" (Langer 1964). If question like 'is light wave or particles' are no longer considered appropriate by the scientist, if it is difficult to either assert or deny a specific structure of universe, it is not because we have reached the limits of language, but because inflexibility of thought and language use has reached almost the dead end. As Herbert J. Muller rightly points out, in the conditions of "complexity, relativity, multiplicity, flux" that science has presented before us, it has become imperative that we develop a "lithe, sinuous, atheletic type of mind" (Muller 1962 : 29). The development of such a mind capable of constant readjustment is as much dependent on language and culture which set up their own constraints as the nature of scientific investigation, the nature of the tools, and the nature of things approximating the structure of universe.
Individuals and groups draw a sense of identity and rotedness from the language the use. Furthermore, the structure of social relationship in non-literate societies, transmitting their values orally, is quite different from that in literate societies which record events and thus distinguish between myth and history. With accelerated and technological related changes, the chances of acute social dislocation increase. Although differences and even conflicts in ideas among different cultures might result in the advancement of knowledge, of disintegration. Unless there is uniformity of communication providing for the results of scientific experiments being independently tested, the universal base necessary for scientific development is not likely to flourish.
An educational system is a creature of a particular historical setting and cultural background and, in turn, it creates and moulds the historical setting, thus creating new cultural tensions. Since education provides access to science and technology, the question often asked is : if the education system does not relate to the needs of the people of a country as a whole, how far its products, science and technology, will be relevant? In the populous developing countries of Asia and Africa, education has created a new class. This class of privileged elites enjoy the rank, status, wealth and other benefits conferred by education, and thy appropriate to themselves the power of decision-making in matters-relating to the state. Thus, science and technology and its products, identified with the interests of a minority, is concerned largely irrelevant by the community at large.
The structure of education in developing countries in general and India in particular, inhibits any balancing of primary, secondary, and higher education. For example, while India has the third largest scientific manpower in the world, it also houses 400 million illiterates, 50 per cent of the total world illiterate population. Not to speak of adult illiterates, it has not been possible to create opportunities for primary and secondary level learning for the eligible young. The scientific personnel trained in urban institutions, ignorant of , and indifferent to, the life style rooted in their own culture, become largely irrelevant to their own milieu and act as cheap labour for the developed countries. According to a study by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, every Indian engineer emigrating abroad means a loss of about Rs. 2.56 lakhs (US 32000 dollars), every emigrating arts, science or commerce graduate costs Rs. 1.36 lakhs (US 17000 dollars and each doctor Rs 3.52 lakhs (US 44000 dollars). Based on these calculations, the report estimates that contribution made by India to the US economy in 1970 through the supply of skilled man power was 697.6 crores (US 874.5 million dollars). The contribution of developing countries as a whole that year was 2929.6 crores (US 3662 million dollars). This reveals the irrelevance of present higher education to the developing countries and the subtle exploitation of these countries by the developed countries. If the application of science and technology bypasses the large majority of people, as it has done so far, then, it is bound to destroy itself along with the society id is designed to serve.
There are many wrong notions prevalent about the developing societies. It is taken for granted that an illiterate person is uneducated, and uneducated persons are unscientific, if not anti-scientific in their attitude. It is neither necessarily true nor need it be so. The Punjab farmers response to technology in agriculture, the diffusion of transistors in the remotest parts of India and to the lowest strata of Indian society, and the response of the people to the Satellite Television, in spite of its many limitations, would belie such notions.
It should now be clear that the application of science and technology in a specific social context is dependent largely on two factors, the cultural milieu in which it is placed and which it is called to serve, and the milieu it creates as a result of its application. Two aspects of the problem, the physical accessibility and conceptual accessibility of science and technology and their products to the common man, have to be taken into consideration in this context. If the smallest tractor in India costs Rs. 30,000/- or more, or the most efficient scooter costs Rs. 10,000/- or more, it is certainly not physically accessible to the common man. If the concepts change so fast that the practitioners cannot cope with them, or, if the language use in these domains does not keep the audience in view as a result that the communication becomes restricted to a small group, then, it is conceptually inaccessible. The society at large is thus excluded and science and technology remain non-culture. Expanding the scale of communication in a manner that scientific knowledge is evenly diffused in a multilingual country is a precondition for the removal of constraints on the path of wider application of science and technology.