1 no no 2 January. Today will be a frivolous, albeit quiet, day, not only because it is a holiday but because everyone in my household is maintaining a draggy cold that is perversely holding steady day unto day after having pretended to be packing up and heading out. But it's a good day to give a rough warning of what I'm going to be boring you with in the year to come: aspects of what I've been chewing on for a while - the larger context of the Kennewick Man controversy. I'll be going round and round, examining attacks on the human universality of science, and mulling over how we decide the proper limits of the authority of science in a free society. In the spirit of which, I open the year with the following quotes:

As a consultant to Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s, Brody organized a historical workshop in which archaeologists explained that the Arctic was colonized across the Bering Straits by way of a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska[...]:

One of the workshop participants was a woman from a Cree community who was enrolled in a Ph.D. programme at a prestigious American university. She was not happy about the Bering Strait theory. She pointed out that her people, and most "Indian" people, do not believe that archaeologists know anything about the origins of human life in the Americas. The idea that people first came as immigrants from Asia was, she said, absurd. It went against all that her people knew...There had been no immigration, but an emergence...She would have nothing to do with so-called scholarship that discredited these central tenets of aboriginal oral culture.

This objection broke up the workshop. Brody recalls feeling confused. Could something be true at the University of Toronto but false in Kispiox?¹

Now consider the following argument, a response to a defense of the scientists in the Kennewick case. It is an argument rarely made explicitly but is after all logically consequent to a belief in the intrinsic "Westernness" of science: human struggles to come to terms with the conclusions of science are not just historically and culturally distinct, but epistemologically incommensurable. In fact the whole exercise is fundamentally meaningless for non-Westerners (emphasis in original):

It is much more reasonable...to surmise that diverse native peoples lived the way they thought best as often as possible and therefore did not use the secular versus religious dichotomy that still dominates modern epistemological fashion. Why then should the blood and emotion of Europeans' struggles with their religious history be allowed to politcally encircle much older native stories, stories told by generations of tellers who never feared the Grand Inquisitor or felt compelled to take a stand on Darwinian theory? Indian histories were not forged in the history of Europe, and Indian understandings of our dead must not be neatly subsumed and therfore dismissed by what generations of European Americans have now learned to quite rationally oppose as religious. Indian understandings may be many things, but they are not reducible to the ongoing heritage of European Christendom. Indian ways are Indian ways. They are not the European "religion" overcome by European science and the European Enlightenment.²

Certain of my regular readers will immediately recognize in the above an attempt to obfuscate the obvious legal and philosophical analogy to the claims of Christian fundamentalists. If you've ever wondered how certain academic types manage to justify sneering at Baptists while honoring any other (non-European) spiritual belief - well, they don't manage to justify it. But this is as fine an example of an attempt to justify it as I've come across.

But let us take it at face value. It is certainly correct to say that we will not find one-to-one correspondence in cultural development and institutions. It is also true that the engagement of non-Europeans with the troubling truths of science will be an experience distinct from that of Europeans - from whose culture, after all, contemporary science evolved, and who particpated in an intellectual tradition, extant for millenia, that truth is best approached by reasoned argumentation. But to state these truisms addresses nothing and settles nothing. Whatever the difficulties of that engagement (and they can be very harsh and painful indeed), science is not culture-specific, and all must eventually come to terms with what science has to say about the world - not only because that is a natural response of thinking, curious human beings ("how do I make all I know fit together coherently?"), but because no culture is static and sealed, and truth claims will inevitably contest. To ignore this the author has to pretend not to notice that the "our" in "our dead" is actually the very thing under debate.

What we are left with is a pernicious exclusionary view that posits the scientific impulse as just one parochial cultural practice among others, not as a universal human predilection that flourishes or falters across time and space according to the condition of the cultural soil. With influences from all over the map, by the way. Science is intrinsically, parochially European? ("That crazy Hindu mathematical jive? Naught to do with us, Baldrick!") But the cultural soil that allowed science to flourish in the last few centuries was parochially European. What happens when such exclusionary tenets are given a foothold in those institutions that had marked out the neutral social space necessary for free inquiry and hence science?

The televisions and airplanes which [the Ayatollah Khomeini] depended on, it was pointed out to him, were the products of the West. Yes, he said, "these are the good things from the West. And we are not afraid to use them, and we do. We are afraid of your ideas and your customs. Which means that we fear you politically and socially."

Liberal science is not, finally, a way of making things. It is a way of organizing society and a way of behaving. To defend it by pointing just to its technological success is to defend the laboratories while abandoning the social infrastructure that makes them work. In any case, most of what modern intellectuals do does not make technology; it makes knowledge. Sociology and economics do not cure cancer, nor are they much good at making predictions - but they, no less than physics and chemistry, deserve to be defended against people who want to tinker with their results or regulate them for political reasons.³

As the "televisions and airplanes" prove, there is no one who does not in at least some ways acknowledge, if only indirectly, the validity of what Rauch eloquently defends as the system of "liberal science", under which Group A cannot limit the inquiry of Group B because it finds Group B's inquiries disrespectful of its beliefs.

But what about the view from the other end of the issue? To what degree, if any, in a free society can Group B compel members of Group A to acknowledge the claims of liberal science in their personal lives? We do do this, as Rauch points out with the example of parents punished for withholding standard medical care from ill children. We are right to do this, protecting the lives and rights of children, but it's at such a point that I (and I suspect many others) begin to become uneasy. I sense that I am coming near to the proper limits of the sway of "expert opinion". I'm well aware that there are ostensibly liberal-minded people out there who go so far as to categorize any parental training of children in traditional religious belief as "child abuse", and I suspect they'd be more than happy to have the state "protecting" children from those dreadful unenlightened parents. That meddling fascist impulse is not a product of a scientific world view - and in fact it would shut down inquiry just as handily as a mullah might - but it does demonstrate that training in a scientific worldview won't necessarily rescue one from that meddling fascist impulse. I no more want "experts" ruling over our private lives, no matter how true their claims, than I want what are essentially anti-blasphemy rules limiting speech and free inquiry.

Well, that's enough incoherent rambling for New Years Day. It's actually 2 January as I push the "publish" button; I didn't trust that my brain was working well enough yesterday for this post to make any sense. But I feel just as crappy today as I did yesterday, and you're probably just as likely today to be wondering what the hell I'm going on about here. Hopefully all these themes will cohere in the days to come.

Hopefully.

Happy New Year.

(Related posts.)

1. In Adam Kuper, "The Return of the Native", Current Anthropology Volume 44, Number 3 (June 2003) 391-392.

2. Clayton W. Dumont, Jr. "The Politics of Scientific Objections to Repatriation", Wicaza Sa Review, Spring 2003, 123.

3. Jonathan Rauch, The Kindly Inquisitors.

Posted by Moira Breen at January 01, 2004 12:16 PM