Chapter XXXXX
Cynical Science: Science and Truth as Cultural Imperialism
Bernd Hamm
1. Introduction
This chapter argues that our western concepts of science and truth are used to legitimate interests
aimed at the suppression and exploitation of nature and humans. They are used to mask the
destructive character of western political-economic interests. In doing this, science and truth have
become ideologies. As such, they tend to benefit the “Power Elites” (C.W. Mills 1965)1 of society
and, of course, the scientific community, at the cost of the population at large. The forced global
imposition of this understanding of science and truth is part of cultural imperialism.
This thesis is formulated in negative terms: It criticizes western science but will not
propose alternatives. Theodor W. Adorno, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School of
sociology, has coined the term “negative dialectics” and argued that a critical analysis of existing
reality implicitely contains its antithesis. This is not the place to go deeper into the issue of other
knowledge systems (for a discussion of this see, e.g., Goonatilake 1998).
My intention is not to follow-up on Johan Galtung’s (1971) understanding of scientific
imperialism (as a sub-type of cutltural imperialism) which still holds the assumption that science
is a serious attempt to find out “the truth” (the imperialism in it being rather that valid objective
science exists but is misused in the interest of power), but rather to challenge this assumption.
Science has become in the course of history, or ever was, so closely associated with, and
subservient to the interests of the cadres that the idealistic idea of science appears as a major
instrument to safeguard access to and influence on these cadres, i.e. a professional ideology.
The chapter will explore this thesis, first, by recapitulating the western definition of
science and truth as objective and value free. It then moves on to some observations which do not
comply with this self-image: The relation between science, money, and power; the rise of neoliberalism; science and the problem of sustainable development; the Americanization of science;
and university reform as experienced in Germany as part of the Bologna Process.
These observations contrasted with the ideology will lead to a diagnosis of cynical
science. Finally, the globalization of such cynicism will be discussed.
2. The Ideology of Science and Truth
“Knowledge” may be defined as the way in which humans categorize, encode, process and
impute meaning to their experiences. This is as true of scientific as of non-scientific forms of
knowledge (Studley 1998: 1). There are many different ways to acquire knowledge: through
logical reasoning; sensual perception; intuition; authority and conformism; or through devotion
and love. An experience made according to certain rules commonly accepted in the community of
scientists is called “scientific”. Irrelevant as this code might be for the majority of ordinary
people, it has still succeeded in gaining strategic influence among cadres.
as “élite” carries with it a connotation of moral superiority, I prefer the less common term of
“cadres” for the powerful groups in society
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Knowledge is acquired and processed in the context of world views, of systems of
knowledge and of cultures which people share and regularly confirm to each other. It is built into
existing frames of reference, evaluated and selected, and meaning is attached to it, and tied into
the historical experience of a given society. It is neither autonomous nor objective but rather
bound into those social conditions under which people live, and influenced by the social position
of an individual in his or her society and the respective material living conditions. The sociology
of knowledge (beginning with Karl Mannheim, 1893-1947) has provided ample evidence for this
(see, however, the critical review of Mannheim’s approach by Adorno 1955), and many empirical
studies have explored the images of society held by different social strata and professional
groups. Such paradigms which are relatively resistant against change do also exist in science, as
Thomas Kuhn (1962) has argued.
In everday life, we accept a statement as “true” if it is confirmed by the rules of everyday
experience, if it seems reasonable, if it is held true by people we love and respect, or if it is
confirmed by secondary information. A statement is taken to be “scientifically true” if it has been
published in a highly reputable volume and is taken for granted by respected scientists, or if it has
been tested according to the rules of scientific methodology. Karl Popper’s insistance that the
truth of a statement can never be objectively confirmed in scientific rigour and that the scientific
method demands to falsify well-established hypotheses, and thus gradually narrows the field of
potential truth, is of only theoretical value (Popper 1960). It does not count very much in real
practical research because new hypotheses are being continuously generated and tested in the
hope of verification, while sets of well established hypotheses being falsified is the exeption.
In extra-scientific everyday life, sensual experience, the opinion of a reference group, but
mostly the mass media are relevant proofs of truth. In most of the sciences the empirical proof of
truth is made by statistical tests based on probability theory, while quoting from the bible, or from
a classical author has lost in persuasiveness. Mathematics is seen as an objective basis for rational
arguing. Empirical phenomena are supposed to be translated into the language of numbers to
become scientifically accessible by mathematical transformation. Truth can be calculated,
according to common belief in the scientific community.
The methods of scientific discovery are conventional; they rest on culturally specific
consensus. However, we also have to assume that there are different ways towards achieving
knowledge, which might well lead to different results. Scientific education and training transfer
such conventions. Therefore, is is important to understand who is entitled to determine the
existence of such conventions, and on which criteria. Despite the obvious need for such careful
reflection, the current common practice is that European (and other) social scientists tend to
accept those statistical and methodological procudures which are the fashion of the day in the US
as the standard for the relevance of our own work. The way into “refereed journals” seems to be
more often paved with sophisticated statistics than with theoretically relevant arguments. How
often do we find heavy statistical artillery used to shoot at theoretical mice!
According to its self-image, science has to be independent and value free, leaving the
scientist devoid of all external restrictions. There is only one goal, i.e. pure, purposeless
knowledge. No political, economic or other non-scientific interest should intrude into and divert
the scientific process. Only then is it guaranteed that science will come continuously closer to the
truth. Curiosity is not only part of the inner nature of humans but also serves the benefit of
humankind at large. The scientist has one and only one task: to engage in pure research and make
his or her knowledge available to others. He or she bears no responsibility beyond this. This is
why the nation-state maintains universities and guarantees the freedom of research and teaching
(sometimes, like in Germany, even in the constitution). National governments are well advised to
invest in science because, at least in the long run, science will lead to wisdom and betterment, but
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also to competitive advantages, and thus to innovation, to growth, to employment and income.
Globalization increases the validity and the relevance of this argument.
It is true, there are problems. Education, science, innovation and growth are believed to be
the means to solve them. According to this logic, many problems have their cause in the fact that
people are not scientifically educated, that they act in their traditional, “irrational” ways.
Scientific progress is seen as the solution for all our problems: diseases will be eradicated or
healed, environmental damages prevented or repaired, poverty and hunger overcome, nonrenewable resources substituted, crime and drug abuse prevented, life-time extended and eternal
youth achieved, development enforced and material welfare secured for all. Scientific progress is
the panacea for all deficits.
The idea of a reality which opens itself to scientifically objective insight, that problems
are the simple consequence of insufficient knowledge, is very tempting. First, it provides a
welcome excuse because nobody is responsible for the deficits in scientific knowledge. Secondly,
it allows us to delegate the solution of our problems to others. If science has not yet sufficiently
proceeded, we’ll invest in it and wait. Our believe in the principal perceptibility of the truth
would provide a firm point of reference from which meaning could be derived and valid
judgments be made and justified - and we would know what to do. For centuries it was religion
which provided this fixed point: a quote from the bible was the key to wisdom. With Renaissance
and Enlightenment the church has lost much (though by far not all, as some tend to forget) of its
authority. The competence to establish the objective truth has been attributed to science. The
reputation of science depends largely on its ability to render this service to society.
Of course, this image of science has always been put to doubt. Remember, among many,
the case of Robert Oppenheimer, the American nuclear physicist who developed with others the
atomic bomb and who, after observing the disastrous consequences of this development in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, became an outspoken critic of armament research and was politically
prosecuted. But this has been portrayed as an isolated case and has not done serious damage to
the public image of science. Scientific inside critics like those in, e.g., the Pugwash movement are
marginalized.
There have always been, in all disciplines, individual voices calling for an ethical
foundation of science. Often these ethical scientists have been criticized by the mainstream, who
argue that they oppose intellectual freedom and the freedom of research, and hence, that they are
against democratic thinking and might even advocate state directed science. This would, of
course, ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class - ironically making scientists with a
strong ethical foundation alleged proponents of political totalitarianism.
Value freedom, purposelessness and non-responsibility are seen as primary virtues in
those very institutions which serve the self-administration of science and receive gigantic sums of
money for research funding. They still provide the yardsticks for academic education and are
being used to justify the privileges which scientists enjoy in our societies, especially in the rank
of professors.
In an article on “Western Domination in Knowledge”2, the Sri Lankain writer Nalin de
Silva (2002) addressed this problem very directly, arguing that: “Western science is supposed to
be making attempts to understand the objective reality, and the truths or whatever that is taught
by the westerners is said to be objectively valid. The entire European modernism that began in the
fifteenth century with Renaissance, is based on objectivity, reality, and absolute truth.” Science,
then, is the process of the gradual and methodologically standardized approximation of objective
reality. However, to be in a position to assess the degree of approximation, we should already
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made available to me by Sheldon Gunaratne
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know the objective truth. In other words: a classical circular argument. Even if we assume,
continues de Silva, that there is an objective reality which we can apprehend and which we can
appropriate (“know”) - even then the process of appropriation is subjective, or relative. There is
no way to appropriate an objective reality objectively, i.e. equally valid for all at the same time.
Even the concept of objective reality is formulated subjectively (a very similar argument has been
advanced by Feyerabend 1979).
To avoid overgeneralization, it needs to be noted that “western” or “modern” science are
by no means homogeneous bodies. There are “intellectual styles” (Galtung 1988: 27) in different
societies, and there have always been dissenting voices among the disciplinary mainstreams,
marginal epistemological positions with greater or smaller numbers of proponents. The
characteristics described above refer to the mainstream.
2. Observations
The following observations provide some accidental empirical information, although not
systematical research, on the ideology of science described above. They are used here as
arguments to put the validity of the assumptions presented into question and thus open the door to
better insights into the real, i.e. supposedly cynical, nature of science.
3.1 Science, Money, and Power
Those who are interested in science as a social institution are using a line of arguments
different from the above, and they arrive at very different conclusions. First of all they will stress
that science is a way to secure one’s living. Scientists need money not only for their research but
first of all for their and their families’ physical survival and comfort. Thus, scientists will be
inclined to conduct the very research they are being payed for; who the commissioner is might be
of secondary interest. The theory of cognitive dissonance may help us understand why and how
people payed for doing a certain job will tend to find positive justifications that exactly this job
has to be done and is useful for society (Festinger 1957). Those concerned with science as an
institution will perceive a complicated network of universities, institutes, research departments at
public administration and private corporations, and cannot ignore the permanent struggle for
competitive advantages, for reputation, money, power and influence among them. While the
allotment of such privileges in industry depends on the scientist’s ability to deliver marketable
results, the system is more complicated in universities: Academic criteria of quality are generally
based on disciplinary achievements like the number, volume and place of professional
publications, fund-raising, conferences organized, quality of teaching - but not necessarily would
they include the capability of the scientific efforts to contribute to practical problem solving. In
sociology, e.g., it is possible to have tenured professors teaching the sociology of work and
industry who have never seen an industrial workplace from close; teaching political science does
not presuppose to have ever attended a legislative meeting on whatever level, or seen a
department of public administration from inside. In the academic sphere, careers can be made by
writing books on issues deduced from books written by people who know reality from books.
Career promotion and popularity are primary goals for scientists at least until granted
tenure. How does one attract the attention of others in a scientific community? Who is in control
of the resources one needs to secure a relatively comfortable and privileged life-style of an
academic? To what extent does this depend on the intellectual quality and originality of one’s
work? For one thing it is important to be active in professional organizations and their research
committees. This binds him or her firmly into disciplinary ties. For young academics, this is the
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prime job market. Secondly, it is very important to invent or discover something new, give it an
easily memorable title and call it “paradigm change”. In sight of the many paradigm changes I
have seen declared in my own narrow field of specialization Thomas Kuhn would have serious
doubts that his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has really been read and understood.
The overwhelming proportion of scientific work done is, however, in applied research.
Scientists and their work are expensive investments which only very few can afford. One of those
is private business expecting a high yield of monetary return; the other is the state spending tax
money mostly for armament research which, again, is highly profitable with little risk. Science is
no longer there to help us understand who we are, where we come from, how we relate to our
natural environment, or where we want to go. It does no longer (if it ever has) work out potential
futures and submit them to democratic debate and decision-making. There are few scientists who
do that - but they are enclosed in small circles. By far the overwhelming part of science is there to
yield profit - in terms of money or in terms of votes. Responsibility for the one world,
intercultural understanding, priorities common to all humanity - they are almost non-existent on
the agenda of scientific endevaour. “Technology ... has cannibalized science” (Nandy 1987: 45).
Science is dominated by the perceptions, interests and worldviews of those who can afford to pay
for it.
Scientists have been more successful than others in asserting their self-image almost
undisputedly in the public. The media support this image by interviewing scientists for every
minor issue, to declare the truth. Courts of law and public administration need armies of scientists
as experts; and in the political arena scientists play their role as consultants, in expert committees
and fact-finding commissions. Throughout, the nimbus of independence, objectivity and
incorruptibility is carefully maintained. It is only in the backroom that cynical attitudes may be
expressed: You can buy any desired expertise if you only select the suitable expert, and pay him
or her accordingly. But it is also in the interest of the people in those backrooms to openly declare
their deep believe in the objectivity of the scientific endeavour. It is this coincidence of interests
which binds the two spheres, the power cadres and the scientists, so intrinsically together.
Ninety-five per cent of all global funds invested in research (which is almost exclusively
dominated by the west) go into applied research. Of this, some 65 per cent is tax money used by
governments for armament research (Nandy 1993: 383). Space research, astronomy, nuclear
fusion, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence or microbiology and genetic engineering are of no
short-time recognizable value for normal people in our societies which would certainly have
serious doubts against investing much money in these areas - but they are connected with new
business fields and gigantic profit expectations, and sometimes with presidential elections. Huge
sums are being invested in such areas, while - according to official documents signed by heads of
state (e.g. at world conferences over the last decade) - other areas of research affecting the real
needs and misery of millions of human beings are severely lacking behind.
There is neither value free purposeless science nor scientists dedicated exclusively to “the
truth” or the “common good”. The self-image of science serves as an ideology to camouflage the
real use of science in our societies. I make this argument not on the individual level, but on the
structural level where those conditions are formed and maintained which channel science and
scientists in the direction of servants of economic and political power cadres.
3.2 The Rise of Neo-Liberalism
Neo-liberalism, i.e. the ideology that every sphere of society would best be organized by market
rule where the state has no say (also called market fundamentalism), made its way in a
combination of four elements: High-funded right-wing think tanks engaged in framing all
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problems of society in this context; this included especially the so-called Nobel Prize in
Economics; the Washington Consensus as the dogma of structural adjustment policy; and
epistemological cleansing after the collapse of the socialist regimes (see, for an extended analysis,
Hamm 2004).
Starting in the 1960s, conservative intellectuals worked to fashion a political ideology that
would allow the different conservative groups to coalesce under a single umbrella. The trick that
intellectuals used to reconcile the conflicting viewpoints of religious conservatives and economic
conservatives was to treat „the market“ as something like a divine force that always calls for
moral behavior. The consequence has been a collapse of business morality: Infectious greed has
been institutionalized in the corporate suits. „The excessive compensation, the manipulation of
balance sheets, and the avoidance of taxes are by now all too familiar“. At the same time,
regulatory institutions are in a state of disrepair because the free-market mantra insists that
regulation is illegitimate and unnecessary (Powell 2003).
Conservative think tanks have framed virtually every issue in their perspective. They have
put billions of dollars into changing ideas and language. Wealthy conservatives set up
professorships and institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a
conservative business perspective. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the
Manhattan Institute after that. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to
their think tanks. They build infrastructure and TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to
buy a lot of books to get them on the bestseller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals
so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. Susan George (1997) and George
Lakoff (1996) provided more details on how neo-liberal ideology was deliberately manufactured,
and how it was spread across the US and Europe.
The „Nobel Prize in Economics“ can be seen as part of this venture. Few people are aware
of the fact that no such thing exists in reality. Rather what became known as the Nobel Prize for
Economics is the „Prize of the Bank of Sweden for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel“
neither funded out of Nobel’s fortune (but by the Bank of Sweden) nor given according to the
same rules and procedures as the real Nobel Prizes. This is important because of the outstanding
prestige Nobel Prizes garner as the most authoritative recognition worldwide in the respective
field. Despite the thousands of university chairs in economic sciences all around the world, 40 out
of 51 Laureates since the inception of the prize in 1969 were US citizens or working in the US,
nine of them at the University of Chicago alone. Ten prizes were awarded to economists in
Western Europe, one single to a Third World economist, and none to the East. The man most
influential in selecting Laureates was Assar Lindbeck. In 1994 he published a book entitled
“Turning Sweden Around”, which called for a profound change of Sweden's welfare state.
The Washington Consensus and with it structural adjustment policy began long before
John Williamson published his Ten Commandments (1990) as the „lowest common denominator
of policy advice being addressed by the Washington-based institutions to Latin American
countries as of 1989“ (Williamson 2000). He admitted that while he invented the term of
Washington Consensus, he did not invent its content but rather „reported (emphasis added)
accurately on opinions in the international financial institutions and the central economic
agencies of the US government“ (ibid.). It never was what the name suggests: a consensus
reached, after sound scientific research, in negotiations between rich and poor countries to
alleviate poverty and the foreign debt burden. It was not even an explicit agreement among the
rich majority of the International Financial Institutions but rather tacitly supported by the majority
of votes of their member states.
„The ‚Consensus‘ was drawn up by a group of economists, officials of the US
Government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It was not even formally
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ratified by the countries it was imposed on. It has been, and still is, an authoritarian exercise,
greedy and unsupportive, whose champions try to justify it on the grounds of the supposedly
unquestionable economic-scientific character of its guidelines.“ (Tamayo 2003).
Former World Bank senior vice president and chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, criticized the
way in which a uniform neo-liberal version of the Washington Consensus is being imposed on
indebted countries. Stiglitz acknowledged that in most countries subjected to structural
adjustment, and especially in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union, the more or less uniformly applied medicine did not reduce poverty nor did it reduce the
debts burden, nor lead to economic or environmental stabilization (Stiglitz 2002). Going one step
further, Michel Chossudovsky (1997, 2004) accused the IMF and the WTO of having caused
terrible poverty, exploitation, and war.
Finally, the collapse of the socialist regimes. This is not the place to recapitulate how and
under which inner and outer circumstances this collapse happened. However it is evident that this
event was followed, in all Western and Eastern European countries, by a process of
epistemological cleansing. Socialist regimes, so the argument goes, failed because, among others,
they had been based on theoretical foundations which, by the collapse, became empirically
falsified. Therefore, Marxist thinking had proven false and had to be eradicated, and with it all
leftist and dialectical approaches. Intellectually miserable as the argument might be, it was swept
through all schools, universities and across the media, and served to extinct or at least totally
marginalize irksome thinking. Thus, the epistemological spectrum in economics today is in fact
characterized by an overwhelming majority of neo-liberals, plus some Keynesian economists
which might go under the rubric of „repressive tolerance“, to borrow an expression of Herbert
Marcuse. In the perception of the political sphere as well as of the public, economics became
homogenized to serve the ideological interests of the rich and applaud the deprivation of the poor.
Paradoxically enough, the victory of Western style democracy and open competition of
ideas and opinions over alleged streamlined socialist ideology has led to the extinction of most
critical voices, and the streamlining of thought along crypto-capitalist lines. The intellectual
brainwashing was most succesful in the Eastern European transition countries. Although people
there should be more informed and skeptical about the blessings of capitalism, their naiveté and
their innocent beliefs are surprising and easy to exploit.
3.3 The Science of Sustainable Development
Two groupings of cynisists can be observed around the concept of sustainable development:
Those who understand the problem and pretend more research is needed before steps can be taken
to solve it on the one side, and the Greenwash scientists on the other.
Structurally, scientists must be interested in leaving problems unsolved, or in inventing or
appropriating new ones, because this guarantees their further funding. Sustainable development is
a perfect example: Considerable sums of money are being invested in researching the conditions
in favor of sustainable development. Most of this is in vain because those conditions can easily be
enumerated and are well known, the simple baseline being that rich countries have to cut their
consumption of natural resources by something like ninety per cent to become globally
sustainable. But action is not taken because of powerful adverse interests. In this case, research is
used as a pretext not to act.
Our systems of power distribution are not at all sensitive to, and our decision-making
mechanisms resist, the idea of sharply reducing natural resources throughput. The best empirical
proof is the position of the US ghovernment in the entire follow-up process of the 1992 United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development. We don’t need research on this, we need
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practical action in the rich countries. Still, in Germany alone we may invest something like ten
million Euros annually in sustainable development research, and do little. The German
government’s strategy for sustainable development presented to the World Summit in
Johannesburg in September 2002 is a telling example: On some 300 of the 360 pages the
governments explains that its entire political program has been based on the sustainable
development requirements, followed by a meager description of some very few projects it
envisages for the years to come: no clear goals, no time-frame, no actor, no control mechanism,
no sanctions in case of failure (Perspektiven fuer Deutschland, 2002). The opposite, by the way,
is true of the European Union. At the Goteburg European Council (2001), a sustainable
development strategy for the EU has been adopted which belongs to the best concepts one can
imagine in this field – but actions lags heavily behind.
The important point here is that while it was (few) scientists pointing to the threats of
biological survival on Planet Earth, it is also (many) scientists who don’t care at all for practical
solutions of the problem but rather are interested in exploiting it for getting money, reputation,
and public attention. It is not only their egoistic self-interest they serve in doing so but also the
egoistic interests of the power cadres who clearly perceive the challenge formulated by
sustainable development as a systemic, an antagonistic conflict.
It is a good recipe for prominence in the sciences to contest an established paradigm, and
if the paradigm goes against the interests of the powerful, contesting bears all chances of a high
yield in terms of money and publicity. This is what Greenwash strives at. Bjorn Lomborg,
professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, became the most prominent recent
example of this breed in the ecological field. His basic recipe is simple: Challenge all evidence on
the global environmental catastrophe, set against it an idea of environmental improvements, and
underly all this with an impressing number of statistics. You don’t need to understand even a
small part of the complexities in ecology to do this. What you need is a prominent publisher
(Lomborg 2001).
The potentially subversive field of sustainability science (Kates et al. 2000) would reside
somewhere in the broad fiel of social sciences. We do know what he need to act according to the
precautionary principle, but we don’t act. Sustainable development is not so much lacking more
natural science knowledge or engineering skills (though both can be improved) but rather the
possibilities of understanding, and change in social organization, distribution of power, decisionmaking. Reality is full of hypocrisy: The German National Science Foundation, e.g., in its public
declarations, is in full support of transdisciplinary action-oriented research on sustainable
development, with a strong social science component – the reality is, however, that in all such
efforts funding has been declined, or discontinued after a first phase, leaving behind fields of
rubble of discouraged approaches and deep frustration. No wonder, the social sciences care little
about sustainable development.
3.4 The Americanization of Science
In Western science, the peak of the pyramid is usually assumed to be science in the US. Western
scientists are supposed to follow rather closely what happens in their field in the US, have close
connections with their US collegues and derive many of their hypotheses from the US literature
(which would give them at least a tiny little chance to get their own writings published in the
US). A US scientist, at least in the social sciences, may publish relatively trivial things which are
far from being new to Europeans with average education; yet he or she can still be sure to attract
a lot of attention and citations in other parts of the West (“Communitarianism” would be one of
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many candidates). Those who do not follow the US literature closely enough are seen as
parochial. The reverse way of thinking does not exist. To find a paper by a non-American author
published in one of the US refereed journals gives proof of highest disciplinary esteem. Just as
the US mass media seldom follows non-American news, so also the US scientific community
seldom pays attention to developments in other parts of the World. American ethnocentrism has,
once again, recently been demonstrated in the OECD comparative study of pupils’ knowledge in
geography. Non-American social scientists are supposed to publish in English, and see their
papers refused for inadequately mastering the English language. On the other hand, it is much
harder to find American social scientists who have gained their academic reputations because of
their familiarity with French, Spanish, or German developments in their respective disciplines.
What is pushed to prominence in US social science is defining the mainstream. As in all
other spheres, the ability to delineate mainstream and margin is an expression of a power
structure where few rule and many obey. Indeed, cultural domination of the US is part of a
political program (Brzezinski 1997).
3.5 University Reform
Traditionally, the German system of higher education was exclusively state-funded, noncompetitive, non-hierarchical, and combined teaching and research. For students it was free from
tuition. Under the German federal system, universities were part of the second tier, the Land
administration; the federal government had very few competences in framework legislation and
infrastructure funding. Although there was a certain differentiation in status and income,
professors were tenured civil servants from the beginning. They enjoyed a high degree of
autonomy secured by the constitutional principle of freedom of research and teaching (art. 5.3 of
the Constitution). There was no evaluation of academic performance, neither by students nor by
peers, heads of department, deans or rectors/presidents. It was not before 1990 that the first
university ranking was published (Der Spiegel 1990). It was very much debated and mostly
denied.
Statistically, Germany produced less university graduates per age cohort than other
countries, and it took them longer to graduate. Of course, such information should control the
quality of education to be of any validity. Moreover, Land governments were heavily indebted
and looked for ways to cut university budgets. Both elements pressed for university reform. They
switched to block grant funding using as pretext the alleged increase in university autonomy. First
elements of evaluation were introduced, and rankings became more common. In May 1998,
ministers responsible for education of some bigger European countries met in Paris to adopt a
declaration demanding for a common European system of education. Only one year later the
Bologna Declaration was signed by 29 European governments aiming at a unified European
system of higher education to be implemented until 2010. Bachelor and Master programs should
replace the traditional ways of graduation, transferable credit points, accreditation of programs
and quality control were introduced. This is seen as a step towards world-wide standardization.
We should not forget at this point that the EU, negotiating for its member states,
commited itself to liberalize education in the context of the General Agreement on Trade in
Services of the World Trade Organization as early as 1994. Lobbying for a multilateral services
agreement began in the USA in the early 1980s when the companies who had joined forces in the
Coalition of Service Industries were able to put the subject on the agenda of the Uruguay Round.
This might help to explain the widely executive character of the standardization process.
(Scherrer, in this volume). It is easy to imagine how tempting a standardized European Learning
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Space must be for the predominantly US-based education service industries, from all forms of
eLearning via direct university subsidiaries to the accreditation, evaluation and testing servives.
The new system is a more or less exact copy of the US university system without any
serious foregoing research on which system is more productive, more creative, and more in
favour of autonomous critical thinking. In fact, although the traditional German system must
appear somewhat chaotic to an outsider, ist productivity was relatively high and German students
going to, e.g., US universities found themselves often among the best in their classes. The new
system will mostly benefit industry – corporations want low-brow graduates, obedient and easy to
train on the job. Industrialists will directly influence university decisions in the new Boards of
Governeurs. As the bulk of students is supposed to be confined to bachelor degrees, these
programs will mostly consist of lecture courses the content of which is to be obediently
reproduced in tight exams. More autonomous forms of self-directed learning like seminars and
projects will almost disappear. More students, more lectures, more assignments, more grading
means the disolution of the nexus between teaching and research. As universities are seen similar
to corporations, the dependence on fund-raising together with ranking and evaluation will enforce
a hierarchical system of university management. The new system is being politically imposed
from top to bottom. With the forced opening of universities for private enterprise as foreseen in
WTO-GATS, the commodification of education will prevail over the principle of public
responsibility. Private corporations will tend to subdue any idea of critical intellectual autonomy
and replace it by fully commodified education in the interest of pure market demands.
Ironically, it was reserved to a federal minister for education and science from the social
democratic party to announce, in early 2004, the government’s plan to select, in a competitive
process, five to six “élite universities”. These shall then receive additional funding from the
federal budget of some 300 mio €. It is not difficult to foresee the consequences: Public and even
more private funding will go to the inner circle of “élite” schools while the rest will not only lose
resources but also intellectual standing and attraction. The non-élite university will be
transformed into a professional college. Education statistics will reveal higher proportions of
university graduates but they will not show the lowering of intellectual standards.
4. Diagnosis: Cynical Science
These few and unsystematical observations have something in common. What comes out
of this diagnosis? The criticism of western science can be summarized in six arguments:
(1) Science has become more or less identical with technology; there is little
Orientierungswissen (knowledge for orientation) but overwhelmingly Verwertungswissen
(knowledge for profit making).
All scientific endeavor has its beginning and its end in society. Every theme which is
considered worthy of scientific reflection becomes such only in a process of social perception and
negotiation. Every problem must go through social definition before it becomes accessible to
science. Science, therefore, must not be allowed to ignore its social responsibility. Society needs
science, though not any science serving whatever particular interest but rather one accepting
responsibility for the whole of society which, to be sure, is the global society. Science must not
be allowed to ignore responsibility for the common good. The claim of many mainstream
scientists to separate logic from morals is ideological. Ethics and science ought not to go apart.
(2) Most technology is in the long run destructive and blind against risks
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It starts with the heavy weight, and gigantic “success”, of armament research: Every human being
on planet Earth can be killed thirty times within only hours, and we have some four tons of
explosives per capita in our (mostly western) arsenals. The basic reason for the global ecological
crisis is the increasing natural resource throughput of material and energy in the Western
countries induced by science and technology since the industrial revolution (Fischer-Kowalski et
al. 1997). In fossil fuels alone we consume a quantity per year which is roughly equivalent to
what nature has produced in one million years. At present nature needs something like 1.3 years
to produce what humanity consumes in natural resources in every single year (WWF 2000).
Nuclear power does not only lay uncalculable risks on the shoulders of hundreds of future
generations, it is the most expensive and most inefficient form of transforming primary energies
into electricity. There is no serious risk assessment of genetically manipulated organisms on the
side of the big corporations nor on the side of the state; the few who engage in this research are
being hindered and discriminated against. The plundering of raw materials, the risks and wastes
signify that we are about to purchase short-term use for present generations for long-term
destruction for all future generations (which is the exact opposite of sustainable development).
The biochemical analysis of love is being put forward in order to develop and sell new
pharmaceuticals - the tablet at the right moment will destroy the essence of what we find so
wonderful and so essentially human about falling in love.
(3) Science produces knowledge only for those in power
At least with industrialization, the essential purpose of science has become the mastery of
nature by means of technology. There is no a priori decision on what from the wide range of
scientific research will finally result in technology, but this decision is made according to the
profit interests of those who have technologies developed and used for their own purposes.
Research is passed through a series of filters selecting what is profitable and sorting out what is
not. Science and technology are both at the same time, instruments for mastering nature and
instruments for mastering humans. They transform humans, but their character as instruments of
power is veiled by the impression that technology determines objectively the conditions of social
organization in a way that the personal power behind it is no longer detectable.
In consequence of the destruction of subsistence economies - resulting from
industrialization, the separation of humans from the means of production, increasing
commodification, the separation of home and work - humans have arrived in dependency and the
permanent need to sell their labor power. The fundamental principle of social organization
changed from solidarity to competition with all other human beings. Scientists are eager to
provide the necessary ideology by maintaining that the evolution of all natural systems be
governed by competition and the survival of the fittest. Not only is this not so much an insight
gained by rigorous research but rather a guiding principle, a preformulated frame of reference
imposed on empirical findings while ignoring opposing interpretations: Why not re-interpret
evolution in terms of solidarity and cooperation? It also sweeps aside the basic essence of what is
human. Humans have knowingly and willingly escaped from the chains of natural determination
and substituted for them civilization and culture.
Decisions on scientific research are made in very few economic and political institutions
following criteria of their respective usefulness for themselves. It must be profitable, either in
terms of money or in terms of votes. Certainly, there are also universities, or the self-governance
of science. However, universities are forced, under rigid austerity measures, to raise additional
funds from private sources. Fund-raising has even come to be considered proof of quality - which
in the end means the subjugation of science under the interests of private industry. The last
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seeming refuge of value free research, the foundations, by far privilege research leading to
technological use. Most of these technologies either create new needs or they help to “rationalize”
production, i.e. they destroy employment.
(4) Science does not empower but deprives humans of the possibility to decide on their own
future
Increasingly, science impels society and deprives it of democracy and human rights. There is,
e.g., no democratic dialogue on how much genetic research we want for our society, if at all.
Decades ago there still was a slight possibility, as can be demonstrated by, e.g., the (negative)
public vote on nuclear energy in Austria. A public vote on genetically manipulated organisms
(GMOs) would immediately be suppressed today by pointing to global competition in research to
which Europe has to keep up. Globalization is blamed to make it more and more difficult to
organize democratic processes. Proponents of GMOs primarily make the points that more and
better food could be produced and diseases healed. However, the Director General of the World
Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland (2001), cannot see anything useful in GMOs. If
hunger on earth is rather a problem of distribution instead of production which easily can be
demonstrated, then the problem will not be solved by higher-yield crops.
(5) Science often veils more of reality than it elucidates
In the social sciences, and especially in their positivist mainstream, science tends to veil more of
reality than it elucidates. This is relatively easy to demonstrate in neo-liberal economic theory.
But this did not prevent the political enforcement of this approach against all alternatives and the
enormous damage it has caused for humans and for nature. It might be not equally easy to make
this point with respect to the empirical social sciences. A few randomly chosen examples may
suffice to illustrate the point:
 A key variable for the understanding of every society, crucial for informed democratic
participation, is the distribution of power. Although we do not lack in definitions or methods to
measure power and power differences, the issue is close to non-existent in research.
 An important variable for understanding social inequality is income distribution. Although we
live in statistically overdeveloped and over bureaucratized societies, income statistics are
insufficient, even false. In international comparisons of income distribution, the tables published,
e.g., by the World Bank in its annual World Development Report are very prominent. But this is
little more than tea-leaf reading. Monetary and real income are two totally different things and
have totally different weight in different societies. Nonetheless those numbers are used for
research and enjoy the authority of the World Bank.
 Representative surveys are a very prominent instrument of social research. For reasons of cost
efficiency they are mostly conducted in standardized form. The respondent can answer a question
by ticking a box the scientist has provided. He or she must adapt to the categories which the
scientist considers as relevant - a scientist who very often has not the slightest idea of the real life
situation of the people in his or her sample. This becomes adventurous in the case of international
surveys.
 From the 1960s on, the broad field of the social sciences has undergone the quantitative
revolution. Statistical analyses have increasingly replaced substantial arguments. Much less
attention is given to data quality than to the sophistication of statistical algorithms. A typical
example: In a very popular series of German social indicators (Statistisches Bundesamt, WZB,
ZUMA) unemployment statistics are being reported which are generated by the Federal Agency
12
for Work. Although it has often been critized that these numbers underestimate real
unemployment by something like fifty per cent, they are published uncommented (like figures in
the Statistical Yearbook) and are taken as valid descriptions of reality by many researchers.
 But there is another problem to quantification: If we describe social reality in statistical
numbers, we only retain those parts of information which lend themselves to easy quantification thoughtless whether or not, and to what degree, the relevant part of the information may be lost
because it is not, or not as easily, quantifiable. Think of mathematical simulation models: It is not
only close to impossible to solve the problem of complexity - it may well be that exactly the very
information which is crucial for the understanding of the phenomenon to be explained cannot be
included because it is not easily quantifiable. What does not prevent researchers from advertising
such models as decision-making devices. What happens in the repeated tautological
transformation of data in statistical analysis (anyone who has ever hand-calculated a factor
analysis knows what I am talking about)? What is the representation in real terms when I square
the value of a variable and add it to the squared value of another one?
If science tends to degenerate into a procedure to veil reality, it may be because the last
proof of truth is seen in mathematics, or statistical tests. Everything must be formulated in a way
digestible by mathematical transformation. “I am speaking of the operationalism which reduces
reality to the reality accessible to the methods of science, and then reconstructs the ‘whole’ reality
- of nature, persons, or cultures - by extrapolating from that operational reality” (Nandy 1987:
116). An intelligence quotient is no longer seen as an insufficient approximation to a
phenomenon; rather, intelligence becomes what is measured by an IQ.
(6) The manipulation of our brains
Despite these and some other problems, scientists do succeed in keeping up the self-image of
science in public. Science has been extraordinarily successful to portray itself as value free,
neutral, altruistic and exclusively bound to the understanding of truth - and by this to ascertain its
privileges. Scientists would unconditionally obey those who control the access to such privileges.
This does not exclude that scientists themselves believe in the self-image of science; it is
prerequisite for them to see themselves in this light. We all follow a double and often
contradicting logic: On the one hand we carry this altruistic image of objectivity, of the common
good; on the other hand we use this image to egoistically justify and possibly increase our share
in money, reputation, or power. As common as it might be, it is rarely openly acknowledged.
To a large extent science is used to manipulate our brains. This is not only the case in
advertising but increasingly in the manipulation of public opinion, or “strategic communication”
as it is euphemistically called, as well as in “crimini di pace” (crimes of pacification) where
dissenting individuals are forced back into conformism (Basaglia et al. 1980). Of course, science
maintains and increases its own influence. Desires are artificially created, behavior designed,
loyalty produced, or deseases invented by the pharmaceutical industry. The consent of the
American population to the Gulf war of 1990-91 was deliberately produced by scientific methods
(Carlisle 1993).
5. The Globalization of Cynicism
The aggressive culture of the West has deep historical roots. The separation of humans from
nature, of soul from body, the struggle for survival in a hostile environment, the forceful
subjugation of nature are prominent themes in the Old Testament (Nandy 1987: 25, Galtung
13
1988: 15). Nature is principally hostile, and Adam is forced to kill animals and plants for his own
survival. “Chaotic” nature became gradually exterminated and replaced by orderly cultivated
fields and gardens. Within only a few centuries Europeans (and after their arrival in the New
World, white Americans) managed to eradicate and transform everything which would not obey
to their Christian desire for control. Until today the fiction of an principally endless nature with
its usable resources belongs to the dominant myths of western societies - despite better
knowledge. “A similarly hostile attitude was mandated against other gods and the sacred notions
of other cultures; they were to be seen as adversaries to the true god, and destroyed” (Sardar et al.
1993: 26).
The idea of other humans and societies being inferior to one’s own dates back to Greek
antiquity: Who could not speak Greek was Barbarian. “To say that some people could not speak
Greek was to imply that they had no faculty of reason and could not act according to logic; that
their intellect was poorly developed and unable to control their passions; and that while they
could apprehend reason they could not have possession of true reason” (ibid.: 26). This attitude
was later drastically expressed by attributing all sorts of monstrosities to the Other, the unknown,
the “Indian” (a term used for all unknowns), first of all cannibalism. This description did not
change over a long time irrespective of the fact that real contacts with others became more
frequent and intense. Thus, an image emerged over the centuries which separated the civilized
self from the wild, barbarian and incalculable Other. This image extends throughout Christianity
well into the European middle ages. “It is hard not to see this potent image of the naked, hairy,
club-wielding brute as a projection of all that European civility tried to distance from itself”
(ibid.: 35). Until today this inferior Other is being provoked when wartime propaganda portrayed
the enemy as “gooks” (the American expression for Vietnamese in the Vietnam war - gooks are
something easier to be killed than humans).
Both, nature as well as other cultures appeared to the Europeans as hostile and inferior at
the same time. The stereotype takes two forms: one of the wild, untamable cannibal (todays’
Islamophobic propaganda), or the one of the naive child in need of guidance and education (much
of todays’ development aid). The basic pattern of reaction is the same in both cases: the inferior is
either brought to servility, or exterminated. “The wild man had therefore to be either civilized or
sacrificed to civilization” (ibid.: 35). This pattern persists until today. Other systems of
knowledge, too, are seen as inferior and suffer the same fate. Even institutions which tend to be
quite sensitive to this problems like, e.g., UNESCO, are not free from offering scientific
“development aid” to non-Western countries.
In citing Ali Shari’ati, Abbas Manoochehri (in this volume) argues that the western
colonizers not necessarily negated the culture and the history of the colonized but rather tried to
convince the colonized that he is negative, inferior, unable to think. At the same time, by divide et
impera, the comprador bourgeoisie was transformed into a mere caricature of the western élite,
and cut off its own cultural roots.
But science is also directly used for the domination and control of developing countries,
as Johan Galtung has shown in his analysis of Project Camelot (1967) and his generalizing
conclusions (1970-71). This biggest social science project ever funded was supposed to
investigate how US-friendly governments in Latin America could be supported against
insurgency (the funding institution was the Pentagon). Social scientists of highest reputation
where involved in the project. It was discontinued in 1965 only after it became public and raised
opposition, and after Latin American social scientists refused to cooperate.
The aggressive character of western knowledge systems is revealed by the evidence that
there are other knowledge systems often called local, or traditional, or indigeneous (Galtung, e.g.,
compares Christian and Buddhist epistemologies, 1988: 15; see also the contributions to
14
International Social Science Journal vol 173, 2003). Everwhere on earth have people
accumulated knowledge suitable for their ecological habitat and historical experience. Usually
such knowledge is tied to a certain place, or culture, or society, it is dynamic and changes, it
belongs to social groups living in close contact with nature and is different from “modern”,
“western” or “scienific” knowledge. “It might include spiritual relations, relations with nature, the
use of natural resources, relations between humans and is reflected in language, social
organization, value systems, institutions and in law. It might comprise sacred texts, is often only
orally transmitted and lives in legends and stories. Therefore it is difficult to access for an
outsider, and vulnerable” (Studley 1998: 5).
While it is not neutral, or value-free, western science and technology succeeds in making
most people believe in its objectivity. This does not only endanger other knowledge systems but
also excludes any alternative within western thinking itself. Scientifically understood and
mastered, nature re-emerges again in the apparatus of technical production and destruction which
maintains individual life and, at the same time, subjects it to the masters of the apparatus. Thus,
rational and social hierarchies confound. If this is so, a change in the direction of progress able to
dissolve this fatal bond must impact on the very structure of science - the design of science.
Without loosing its rational character, its hypotheses would develop in an essentially different
context of experience (one of a pacified world); science would arrive at a very different
conception of nature and would arrive at essentially different facts (Marcuse 1964: 181).
Within the large and comprehensive context of cultural imperialism we can find a number
of mechanisms aimed at the global imposition of western conceptions of science and truth, and at
generalizing its harmful effects. From the “green revolution” to Monsanto’s “terminator
technology”, scientific progress has always been used to destroy local subsistence economies and
to force people under the dictate of the global economy, of commercialization, of monetarization
and of market rule. Structural adjustment with its rabid demand for opening up national markets
appears as one of the major instruments of this strategy, putting national economies under
tutelage. Both have led to the cleavage between the small number of rich (which, in their attitudes
and lifestyles follow the western model and which deposit their money in western banks) and the
overwhelming majority of poor people in the second and third worlds. There is a fatal paradox to
it: Exactly those who are supposed to demand and consume the overproduction of western
automatized factories are being deprived of the means to do so, while the tiny caste of oligarchs
does not invest its richesse (except to secure their own influence in the media, in commodities or
in corruption), but engages in speculation. When you can make money with money, human
beings become superfluous even as consumers.
Intentionally or not, development aid, international organizations, education, advertising,
university partnerships, computerization, access to the internet, recognition of university degrees,
fellowships, visiting professorships, internships: they all serve, recognizable or not, the same
purpose: the global imposition of western concepts of science and truth. This does not only
colonize the second and third worlds, it also colonizes the traditional and dissident sectors in our
own society. Here, too, we can find large “traditional” sectors of the population far away from all
the noise about the knowledge and information societies, for which the stock exchange is
meaningless and who don’t care about growth or maximizing individual material benefits, or
unlimited mobility.
The global imposition of western concepts of science and truth is only one little stone in
the big mosaic of cultural imperialism. Control of the news market is as important as the new role
of public relations, popular music as relevant as comics and junk food, films and soap operas
belong to it as well as global-style architecture, structural adjustment policies and the “war on
terror”, science and technology, englishification of language and the americanization of
15
universities. Taken all that together, we are on the way to generalize our model of social
organization forcively throughout the globe.
One might argue that it is neither science nor truth which are so destructive per se, but
rather their misuse by the polity and the economy. I doubt it; the story goes much deeper
historically and it has indeed inflicted our very understanding of science in a long process.
Opponents are rare, and reversal seems unlikely. There is a correlation between the progress in
science on the one hand, the aggravation of the Global Problématique on the other. To be sure,
correlation does not necessarily mean causality, but it makes one think. There is only a small little
detail those propagandists have forgotten: That this best of all possible worlds, western capitalism
with its unsatiable hunger for consumption and growth, is well on the road to destroying the
biological life support system of all human beings.
16
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