Asian Appropriations of Science and Technology

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Asian Appropriationsof Science and Technology

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China Nationalist Hubris
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Japan Pragmatic Hybrids
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India Hubris and Hybrids
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Hubris and Hybrids

• hubris impious disregard of the limits
  governing human action in an orderly universe
• hybrids offspring of parents that differ in
  genetically determined traits

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Hubris in History

• The myths of Icarus and Prometheus
• The scientific revolution New Atlantis
• Industrialization Prometheus Unbound
• Atomic energy Science - The Endless Frontier
• The arms race and the Apollo Mission

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Hybrids in History

• Medieval monks artificial people
• The renaissance men artists-engineers
• Experimental philosophers scholar-craftsmen
• Professional engineers theoretical technicians
• Environmentalists activist academics

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A Brief History of Science

• Ancient, or Traditional science, up to about 1600
  
• spiritual knowledge, distinctive regional modes
• gap between theory (episteme) and practice
  (techne)
• Modern, or Western science, from about 1600 to
  1970
• instrumental, rational, universal knowledge
• functional interdependence of science and
  technology
• Global, or Technoscience, from about 1970
• multiple forms of knowledge, commercial networks
  of innovation
• combinations of science and technology

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Science and Technology in Traditional Asia

• On the discursive, or macro level
• ideas of order, authority and control -
  Confucianism
• an underlying philosophy of life Taoism,
  Buddhism
• On the institutional, or meso level
• systems of infrastructural maintenance and
  management
• hierarchical forms of education and knowledge
  making mandarins in China, brahmans in
  India, samurais in Japan
• On the practical, or micro level
• advanced forms of artisanal practical knowledge
  (techne)
• spriritual and naturalist theories (episteme)

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Encountering the West

• India the crown of the empire
• colonization, occupation, national liberation
• China the middle kingdom
• commercialization, resistance, revolution
• Japan keeping distance
• isolation, confrontation, competition

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The Indian Case

• A long struggle for independence
• British and Soviet influences
• Pluralist civilization, multiple cultures
• Scientism and spiritualism a dual society
• The invention of tradition

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The Chinese Case

• A sequence of revolutions
• American and Soviet influences
• hydraulic civilization, bureaucratic culture
• The four modernizations
• The destruction of tradition

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The Japanese Case

• A series of military confrontations
• Chinese and American influences
• island civilization, Samurai culture
• A national system of innovation
• The mobilization of tradition

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Indian Minds

• Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
• poet, philosopher, artist, Nobel Prize, 1913
• M.K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948)
• independence leader experiments with truth
• Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)
• Indias first prime minister scientific temper

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Tagore
What I object to is the artificial arrangement
by which the foreign education tends to occupy
all the space of our national mind and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the
creation of new thought by a new combination of
truths..




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Just as matter displaced becomes dirt, Reason
misplaced becomes lunacy. Mahatma
Gandhi
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I do not see any way out of our vicious circle
of poverty except by utilizing the new sources of
power which science has placed at our disposal
Jawaharlal Nehru
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Chinese Minds

• Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925)
• Founder of Chinas nationalist party
• Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)
• Chairman of communist party
• Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997)
• Party leader from 1978 to 1997

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I saw the outside world and I began to wonder how
it was that foreigners, that Englishmen could do
such things as they had done, for example, with
the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80
years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no places
like Hong Kong.
Sun Yat-sen
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The great Chinese revolutionary, our precursor Mr
Sun Yat-sen, said at the beginning of the century
that in China there would come a Great Leap
Forward. This prediction of his will certainly be
realized within a few decades. Mao Tse-tung
(1964)
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The key to achieving modenization is the
development of science and technology.
Deng Xiaoping
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Japanese Minds

• Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945)
• philosopher, cultural theorist
• Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972)
• novelist, Nobel Prize for literature, 1968
• Akio Morita (1921-1999)
• physicist, co-founder of Sony, writer

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To become global Oriental culture must not stop
at its own specificity but rather it must shed a
new light on Western culture amd a new world
culture must be created. Kitaro Nishida
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The Master was plagued... by modern rationalism,
to which fussy rules were everything, from which
all the grace and elegance of Go as art had
disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect
for elders and attached no importance to mutual
respect as human beings. From the way of Go the
Beauty of Japan and the Orient had
fled. Yasanuri Kawabata (The Master of Go)
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• Only with these three kinds of creativity -
  technology, product planning, and marketing - can
  the public receive the benefit of a new
  technology.
• Akio Morita