Global Transformations and World Futures -vol. I -global Science - Global Science

Organizing scientific knowledge in a sustainable way is possible if the lessons of history are taken. China, Islam, and India have all had prodigious scientific capacities in the past. While those bodies of knowledge have withered for various reasons, it is unreasonable to suggest that it was because they had nothing important to offer (see The Grand Patterns of Change and the Future). It is equally unreasonable to suggest that even if that knowledge was beneficial that it was in all cases not as beneficial as the new science of the West. The reasons for the withering of that knowledge are not all of a technical nature. We will see that science is a cultural artifact, and that the growing hegemony of Western science has to a large degree grown as part of the growing cultural hegemony of the West. The choice of using Western scientific knowledge is, therefore, not just a choice made on the grounds of the efficacy of that knowledge. Science and imperialism (in the same vein as Christianity and imperialism) have clearly followed the trajectory of the post-Columbian European expansion. The argument put forward here is not one of decrying the value of Western science at the altar of a romanticized local science. Western science is not decried and local science is not romanticized. The simple point is that both are needed but that in the interests of good risk management the hegemonic science must not be allowed to swamp the local. This implies that we have something new rather than a repeat of the past where the two streams of science develop without being in dialogue with each other.