Paradise and Dominatia: Science and the Developing World
Article Summary and Author Biography
With European industrial civilization comes European science. It is a package deal. The question whether a culture thus superseded or repressed had its own form of science has become purely academic: the process of economic growth and social development is entirely predicated on the "rational materialism" of post-Renaissance Europe and its North American colonies. This fact may well be deplored, but can scarcely be denied. The very word technology, denoting a practical technique that has been studied and transformed in the light of scientific rationality, betrays our values and intentions as it displaces the crafts from town and village, from workshop and field, throughout the world.
With European industrial civilization comes European science. It is a package deal. The question whether a culture thus superseded or repressed had its own form of science has become purely academic: the process of economic growth and social development is entirely predicated on the "rational materialism" of post-Renaissance Europe and its North American colonies. This fact may well be deplored, but can scarcely be denied. The very word technology, denoting a practical technique that has been studied and transformed in the light of scientific rationality, betrays our values and intentions as it displaces the crafts from town and village, from workshop and field, throughout the world.
Nevertheless, European science, both intellectually and practically, diffuses very slowly and unevenly into the culture of a developing country. This is not because it is firmly resisted by alternative metaphysical systems to which it seems antagonistic, but because the actual agents of diffusion are weak and uncoordinated. In Western Europe and the United States, scientific knowledge is a natural product as well as a fuel of the advanced industrialized society; in a country such as Paradisia-the pseudonym conceals no particular country, but refers perhaps to a whole class of medium-sized states such as Ghana or Iran, Korea or Peru-it is a foreign import, an exotic plant that has not yet established and seeded itself in new soil...
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