All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma I’d had at the time involving Lawrence Krauss. Chadha’s proposed resolution to it could in fact settle another matter I’ve been considering of late, involving Tamil actor-politician Joseph Vijay.
But first a recap. Gita Chadha is a sociologist and author, a professor at Azim Premji University, and an honorary senior fellow at the NCBS Archives. Her 2020 talk was titled ‘Exploring the idea of ‘Scientific Genius’ and its consequences’.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a cosmologist, sceptic, and author, former chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an alleged sexual predator, and a known associate (and defender) of convicted child-sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2020 he was a year away from publishing a book entitled The Physics of Climate Change, combining two topics of great interest to me, but I wasn’t sure if I should read it. On the one hand there was the wisdom about separating the scholarship from the scholar but on the other I didn’t want to fill out Krauss’s wallet — or that of his publisher, who was trading on Krauss’s reputation — nor heighten the relevance of his book.
Finally, I’ve been thinking about Vijay more than I might’ve been if not for my friend, who’s a fan of Vijay the actor but not the politician. Whenever I express displeasure over her support for Vijay’s acting, she asks me to separate his films from Vijay the person, and politician. I haven’t been convinced. Is Vijay a good actor? I, like my friend, think so. My opinion of Vijay the politician declined however following the crowding disaster in Karur on September 27: while his party’s cadre whipped up a crowd whose size greatly exceeded what the location could safely hold, Vijay made a bad situation worse by first insisting on conducting a roadshow and then arriving late.
Today, I firmly believe separating the work from the person doesn’t make sense when the work itself produces the person’s power.
I first realised this when contemplating Krauss. When I asked during her talk about how we can separate the scholarship from the scholar, Chadha among other things said, “We need to critically start engaging with how the social location of a scholar impacts the kind of work that they do.” Her point was that, rather than consider whether knowledge remains usable once the person who originated it is revealed to have been unethical, we must remember prestige is never innocent: because it changes what institutions and audiences are prepared to excuse.
Broadly speaking, when society puts specific academics “on pedestals”, their eminence and the grant money they bring in become ways to excuse their harm. This is how people like Krauss were able to conduct themselves the way they did. Their work wasn’t just their contribution to the scientific knowledge of all humankind; it was also the reason for their universities to close ranks around them, in ways that the individuals also condoned, until the allegations became too inconvenient to ignore. The scholar benefited from what the scholarship was and the scholarship benefited from who the scholar was.
So a good response isn’t to pretend that it’s possible to cleanly separate the art from the artist but to pay attention to how the work builds social capital for the individual and to keep the individual — and the institutions within which they operate — from wielding that capital as a shield. Thus we must scrutinise Krauss, we must scrutinise his defenders, and we must ask ourselves why we uphold his scholarship above that of others.
(Note: We don’t have to read Krauss’s books, however. This is different from, say, the fact that we have to use Feynman diagrams in theoretical physics even as Richard Feynman was a misogynist and a creep. It doesn’t have to be one at the expense of the other; it can, and perhaps should, be both. I myself eventually decided to not read Krauss’s book: not because he defended Epstein but because I wanted to spend that time and attention on something completely new to me. I asked some friends for recommendations and that’s how I read When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu.)
The same rationale also clarified the problem I’d had with my friend’s suggestion that I separate Vijay’s work as an actor from Vijay himself. For starters: sure, an actor can play a role well and thus be deemed a good actor, but I think the sort of roles they pick to the exclusion of others ought to matter just as well to their reputation. And the parts he’s picked to play over the last decade or so have all been those of preachy alpha-males touting conservative views of women’s reproductive rights, male attitudes towards women, and retributive justice, among others. It’s also no coincidence that these morals genuflect smoothly to the pro-populist parts of his political messaging.
Similarly, Vijay’s alpha-male roles that I dislike aren’t just fictions: they’re part of the public persona that Vijay has deliberately converted into his newfound political authority. Once a ‘star’ enters electoral politics, “watching for entertainment” is hard to separate from participating in and enabling a machinery that’s generating legitimacy for the ‘star’. The tickets sold, the number of streams, the rallies attended, and the number of fans mobilised all help to manufacture the claim that Vijay has a mandate at all. As with Krauss, participation increased, and continues to increase, material power and relevance as well as paves the way to claim and probably receive immunity from the consequences of inflicting social harm.
But where the case of Vijay diverges from that of Krauss is that the former presents much less of a dilemma. When a person goes from cinema to electoral politics, separating their work from their personal identity is practically indefensible because the political leader himself is the vehicle of the power that he has cultivated through his film work. That is to say, the art and the artist are the same entity because the art fuels the artist’s social standing and the artist’s social standing fuels his particular kind of art.
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off.
I found on LinkedIn that “Industrial47” is a fund with the aim of “backing the forerunners of India’s Industrial Revolution”. I must say it’s quite dubious to read about a country-specific “industrial revolution” more than two centuries into a global post-industrial era. But maybe historical accuracy isn’t the point here so much as the josh elicited by those words. By this time, another member of the group had pointed out that all of India’s nuclear tests had been underground and that the one in the image depicts an American test.
Source: WhatsApp
Where technology meets people
According to its official website, Industrial47 currently funds companies developing technologies of the future. Why then did it have the image of a nuclear weapon going off? And why is there to be an Indian “industrial revolution”? *scrolls down the website* Here’s an answer — what looks like a mission statement. Let me annotate it.
We believe India’s moment is now.
Okay.
Our engineers aren’t just coding software anymore – they’re designing satellites, building robots, revolutionising agriculture, reimagining defence and rethinking energy.
There are five items listed here. The first two are factually accurate, the last two are unfalsifiable, and the third one is misleading. There’s no agricultural revolution. Let’s talk when it happens.
They’re tackling challenges that will define the next century of human progress.
Okay.
The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives.
The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.
It’s not clear where “here” is, but okay. Also there’s a grammatical problem: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons” seems to say the problems will ripple across eons, not the solutions.
This is more than a story of one nation’s rise. This is about humanity’s next giant leap.
…
When software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms – therein the future is forged.
And Industrial India will build out the next century.
See, now there’s a problem.
Since listening to a talk by Gita Chadha in 2020, I’ve been wary of the idea of “genius”. Among other things, I’ve noticed that there aren’t nearly as many “geniuses” in the social sciences and humanities as there are in the natural sciences. All these enterprises are littered with very difficult problems waiting to be solved but the idea of “genius” — as and when it is invoked — seems to apply only to those in the natural sciences. Even in the popular imagination, a “child prodigy” is expected to become a gifted mathematician or scientist, not a gifted poet or anthropologist. Great intellectual ability is preordained to be devoted to problems in science. Sometimes I amuse myself with the idea that problems in the social sciences and humanities simply overwhelm this “genius”.*
If the “future” of a country is to be “forged” at the moment “when software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms”, and without room for where technologies meet people — which technologies, which people, when, how — it sounds like a project that expects the socio-economic and the political pieces of the “future” to fall in place in accordance with the engineering goals alone.
You’re reading it wrong, you say. The fund only claims the future will also be forged in the solutions to engineering problems. We shouldn’t overlook these problems. I reply: Are you sure? Because I don’t see a fund to solve problems like increasing people’s trust in EVMs, improving MSPs for farmers or ensuring machines, not people, clean sewers (and I mean everywhere and in practice, not just in isolated pilot projects). How about putting the best minds together to work on the problem of developing a socio-political ideology to ultimately restore a politics of dignity and common welfare? It’s nasty, arduous, wicked work but it’s also the ultimate challenge — one that, if it succeeds, would obviate the need for most of these other interventions. But if you’d rather begin with a specific one: did you know there still isn’t a smokeless stove for rural India’s millions, leaving the country the world’s largest consumer of fuelwood for household use? Here’s a summary of Shankar Nair’s pertinent comment in The Hindu in February 2023 by ChatGPT; I hope it encourages you to read the whole thing:
The launch of Indian Oil Corporation’s solar cook-stove at India Energy Week 2023 casts a harsh light on India’s ongoing efforts to transform household energy consumption. While promoted as a low-carbon innovation poised to reach three crore households and save costs, its steep price of ₹15,000 raises concerns about accessibility. This initiative echoes past efforts like the National Physical Laboratory’s solar cooker in the 1950s and the 1980s’ “improved chulhas” program, both of which failed due to poor design, high costs, and ineffective implementation despite government subsidies. The historical parallels underscore a recurring gap between state-led energy innovations and practical adoption, as well as the lack of focus on improving rural incomes, which strongly influence energy choices.
This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.
Social ignorance is social harm
Projects that offer new technological solutions these days to old problems almost never account for their social dimensions. They are instead left to the state. Isn’t this cynical? Last year’s controversy about using satellite data to track farm fires offers another good example — as does the overarching endeavour to stamp these fires out. When a new project starts up, it may advance the technology, have some companies make money, and they all move on. The socio-political and socio-economic needles almost never move. The problem of scale matters as well because of the financial implications inherent to the economic relationships between people and their technologies. At this stage of development, it is hard to give every new scheme and fund the benefit of the doubt when it ignores the question of minimising social harm and maximising social welfare. In fact, it seems like an expedient exclusion.**
Air-purifiers come to mind. Researchers have found links between air pollution on one hand and biological and psychological development on the other. (Update, 9.10 am on January 15, 2024: Nature has just published a news feature entitled ‘Air pollution and brain damage: what the science says’.) In New Delhi (or any city with foul air for that matter), clean air is becoming increasingly vouchsafed for those with air-purifiers, which cost a good deal of money, require constant power supply, and of course owners that can pay these bills. The better and the more numerous the air-purifiers around you, the cleaner the air around you is, and the lower your risk of impaired biological and/or psychological development. Over time, people that can afford these living conditions — typically the “upper class” and, almost inevitably, “upper caste” lot — accumulate the benefits of clean air whereas those that can’t accumulate the ill-effects, and thus the gap between their fortunes slowly but inexorably widens. Every time the AQI crosses some headline-worthy threshold, New Delhi breaks out the “smog towers” and the “mist cannons” and home-appliance companies advertise newfangled air-conditioners and air-purifiers whereas state-led attempts to move towards a future in which no one needs air-purifiers flop. If I’m cynical to doubt initiatives like Industrial47, what would you call this?
Technologisation isn’t implicitly virtuous: to succeed in the fullest sense of improving the quality of life of all Indians, it needs specific social and political conditions as well. “1947 marked our political independence, 2047 will mark our technological sovereignty,” Rahul Seth, the person behind the Industrial47 fund and “an Infantry Officer with the Indian Army Reserves” with the rank of major, wrote in a LinkedIn post (whose card displayed the nuke test). His comment and its rapturous reception assume a clean break between political and technological achievement when in fact there’s no such thing.
Indeed, the comment is reminiscent of China’s rise as a “scientific superpower”. Part of this supposed achievement is founded on the slew of sophisticated and expensive scientific experiments it has executed, often in collaboration with other countries; its accelerating space programme; and its rapid industrialisation of the energy sector. The country is now planning to build the world’s largest hydroelectric-power dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it subsequently enters India. Until this new dam takes shape, China’s Three Gorges dam will continue to hold the torch of physical magnitude. I hope by now the dangers of building dams in the Himalaya should be clear enough to discourage unbridled enthusiasm for projects of this nature. This said, many have marvelled at the Three Gorges dam and what they claim it says about China’s ability to plan and execute such projects: as if flawlessly.
But the country’s surveillance and censorship apparatus hampers us from knowing how people on the ground suffered as they were forced to make way for the monstrous facility. Attesting to such concerns are anecdotes that have managed to escape plus informed scholarship (see here and here, for example). Frankly, I prefer the amount of friction local movements in India have brought to bear on new “development” projects in the country. Friction is good: it ensures project proponents think twice about what they’re doing if they already haven’t. And increasingly often, they haven’t, and why should they when the current national government seems to be doing its damnedest to dilute the friction? The LinkedIn post goes: “You can be the right person, in the right place, at the right time – and yet have a few key pieces missing. Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici. Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore. Chandragupta Maurya had Chanakya.”* To this I’d add: India once had friction, then squandered it.
Source: Google search
When do we become scared?
The quip about “technological sovereignty” rankles in this regard. On any day ‘sovereignty’ is a powerful word, not one to be invoked in vain. Here, the term fantasises a future in which technology reigns supreme, but its framing also leaves open the question of India’s place in the comity of nations, which the country has worked hard to attain, continues to build on even today, and will for the foreseeable future. Recall that obnoxious piece on NASA Watch where a former JPL science-worker called NASA’s decision to downsize JPL’s workforce — due in part to budget overruns by the Mars Sample Return mission — the “fall of a civilisation”. It was reckless fear-mongering: among other things, NASA, and the US by extension, are currently more beneficiaries of an international collaboration than patrons of the spacefaring world. “In this milieu, harping on sole leadership because it’s the ‘American way’,” as the science-worker insisted it was, “is distasteful” (source). In the same vein, consider the example of ISRO’s forthcoming space station and Indian-on-the-moon plans. Its scientists and engineers are working hard but what are they working towards? Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued orders from on high to ISRO to build the ‘Bharatiya Antariksh Station’ by year X and land an Indian on the moon by year Y. And then what? We wait for the next diktat?
Imagine a future 50 years from now when it’s possible there are a few space stations in orbit around Earth and maybe even the moon, and when it’s plausibly (and relatively) more affordable, and not just in economic terms, to send people to stay and work there than to build a station of one’s own. Imagine if India owned and operated one of these stations instead of Indians having to lease time on another, you say. I reply: Sounds good, but where’s the cost-benefit analysis to this plan? Because unless you can demonstrate the benefit, we’re riding the coattails of speculation here and, importantly, you’re motivated by little more than the idea of Indian leadership rather than a proof of leadership de facto.
It’s reminiscent in turn of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955: it was chaired by Homi Bhabha, a representative from India, then a country that didn’t have nuclear power of its own. Conferences are not countries, you say. And leadership doesn’t demand “steel”, “craft” or “atoms”, I reply. This is in fact what the comity of nations allows us: leadership in various forms, and freedom from the tunnel vision that condemns the country to just one. The aspiration to “technological sovereignty” rankles specifically because, taken together, it offers one pointless pinnacle at the expense of others, and without the requisite justification of its presumed supremacy.
The image of the nuclear weapon slips back into view. It’s from a promotional video in Seth’s LinkedIn post. It opens with a staccato montage of the Indian flag atop a temple tower, atop a mountain (Kargil?), atop the Red Fort, atop a glacier (Siachen?), and atop the moon.*** Perhaps the fund’s ultimate priority is national security, yet “technological sovereignty” implies even greater ambitions — as do other visuals in the video**** and the enterprises Industrial47 has already invested in. National security also exists today in a baleful avatar. Rather than inculcate something the armed forces deem worth fighting for, the government’s narratives have often attempted to cast soldiers’ “spirit and courage” themselves to be the objects of desire, the thing citizens at large must prove they deserve. The government has also invoked national security as a spectre, bolstered by periodic allegations of threats to Hindus, disinformation about the intentions of Muslims, and in general the communalisation of public life, to deny requests under the RTI Act about information as benign as the designs of scientific spacecraft. Unspecific appeals to national security have also become the basis for jailing students and academics for indefinite periods of time, expel foreign journalists, rebuke foreign governments’ comments on the country’s “internal affairs”, and deny the findings of international democracy and welfare research organisations. If this is national security, I sincerely dread a deeply technologised form.
It’s just a video, you say, and you’re seeing meaning that isn’t there. Most of you must’ve watched Oppenheimer by now but let me call your attention to something Leona Woods asked Enrico Fermi after the world’s first nuclear reactor went critical: “When do we become scared?” Call it the naïvety of eggheads or political premeditation, Oppenheimer et al. had control of the Bomb until suddenly they didn’t. Its very existence reshaped the world order. Whether or not it actually went off was secondary. This is scope creep: when the parameters of a project are changing so slowly as to not be threatening, until one day you realise they’ve crossed some threshold, an unforeseen tipping point, and significantly altered the scope of the project. You thought you had a hand on the wheel, and maybe you did, but the car’s almost imperceptible drift to the right now has you endangering oncoming traffic, and yourself, on the other lane. Call it pithy, call it a cliché, but science and the technologies that follow need a hand on the wheel to adjust the course of their fantasies every now and then instead of going with the flow. Politics needs your other hand on another wheel to do the same thing, considering science is already a reason of state in India. Otherwise, we’re left staring at “technological sovereignty”.
Or maybe these are all just words trading in josh on an investment fund’s webpage — although it does alert us to one particular plausibility and renders the words more potent: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives. The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.” When do we become scared? I don’t know, but when you do, don’t ignore it. That’s all I’m asking.
* “Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici” and “Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore” — and of course a wider socio-political environment that they navigated as well, but this aside: notice the distinctive singularity of “genius”, its manifestation with problems amenable to being solved by individuals, often working alone, as was once the case in some of the sciences but hasn’t been so for more than a century — and as has more rarely been the case in the social sphere, virtually by definition.
** I can seem like a habitual naysayer but I assure you I’m not. I can’t get onboard with new technology + business ideas if they’re ill-conceived or if their social and political implications haven’t been thought through. If I keep saying ‘no’, it’s because I’m being met with a continuous stream of half-baked ideas. I have no obligation to put up with one every now and then.
*** The video includes footage from Associated Press. I hope it was licensed properly.
**** The video’s theme seems to be masculine middle-class fever dream. The scenes of its montage go space, space, sport, space, cricket, space, EV, sport, sport, a CEO, software code, sport, a CEO, a CEO, automation, an award, music, the stock market, Rajpath, military, Taj Mahal, IT, IT, a CEO, a CEO, space, space, mountains, tigers, IISc, IISc, metallurgy, military, Mahabharat on DD, space, some nuke test, polio vaccine, Shah Rukh Khan, Modi performing aarthi like a priest, AR Rahman, cricket, military, military, a CEO, automation, the “shayari jugalbandi” in Parliament, CV Raman, an Amul ad, military, that nuke test, military, military, Parle G biscuit dipped in tea, military, metallurgy, military, space, and finally Nehru hoisting the flag in front of a crowd of thousands.
Do the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads lack the “baggage of biography” – to borrow Amit Chaudhuri’s words – because we don’t know who the authors, outside of the mythology, are or – as Chaudhuri writes in a new essay – do these texts carry more weight than their authors themselves because Eastern Philosophy privileged the work over its authorship? Selected excerpts:
One might recall that the New Critical turn against biography is related to a privileging, in the twentieth century, of the impersonality, rather than the emotional sincerity or conscious intention, of the creative act. This development is not unrelated … to the impact that certain Indian texts had on modernity after they were translated into European languages and put into circulation from the late eighteenth century onwards. …
By the time the Gita’s Krishna was first heard in Europe, all judgements were deemed, by the Enlightenment, to be either subjective or objective. What kind of judgement escapes this binary by being at once passionate and detached, made in earnest without mindfulness of outcome? Immanuel Kant addresses this in a shift in his own thinking, in his writings on aesthetics in 1790 … Five years separate the Gita’s appearance in English, and three years its translation into French, from Kant’s intervention in aesthetics. It’s unlikely he’d have been unaware of the work, or made his sui generis departure without it. The second time such “disinterestedness” appears as a concept, when Matthew Arnold redefines what criticism is, the link to the Gita is clear, and doesn’t require speculation. …
The Gita’s practice of “impersonality” points to T. S. Eliot’s attack, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1919, on the idea that poetry is an “expression of the personality” or of “emotion”. It’s no accident that the final line of The Waste Land is the Upanishadic refrain, “shantih shantih shantih”, the Sanskrit word for spiritual peace or even-mindedness …
It’s uncertain in what way these conceptual departures would have existed in modernity if these texts hadn’t been put into circulation when they were. Yet a great part of this history of ideas remains unwritten.
Chaudhuri also sets out the relative position of the Upanishads in modernity, particularly their being in opposition to one of the fundamental tenets of modern philosophy: causality. Per Chaudhuri, the Upanishads “dismantle” the causal relationship between the creator and the creation and “interrogate consciousness” through a series of arguments that attempt to locate the ‘Brahman’ in human and natural logic.
He concludes this portion of his text by speculating that the Upanishads might in fact have been penned by “anomalous Brahmins” because in the Bhagavad Gita, which is contemporaneous with some of the Upanishads and followed the rest after more than a century, Krishna asserts, “Neither Vedas, nor sacrifices, nor studies, nor benefactions, nor rituals, nor fearful austerities can give the vision of my Form Supreme” – whereas just these rituals, and their privation, concern the typical orthodox Brahmin today.
While the essay provides much to think about, the separation of creator and creation – in terms of the Upanishads being disinterested (in the specific sense of Chaudhuri’s definition, to mean an ‘evenness of the mind’ akin to unfixation rather than uninterestedness) with both a godlike figure or rituals and making room for biographical details in their verses – is incredibly interesting, especially in relation to modern science.
As Chaudhuri writes,
… “the field of knowledge called “the history of Western philosophy” could just as easily be called “the history of Western philosophers”, inasmuch as Western philosophers are the sum total of their lives and works, and we often defer to both biography and thought when we interact with the philosophy. Each body of work has a personality, but so does its author; in almost every case, we can, literally, put a “face” to the work, whether that’s a photograph of Bertrand Russell or a fourth-century BC bust of Plato.”
Prof Gita Chadha alluded to the same trait in the context of science pedagogy – in The Life of Science‘s promised postscript to their webinar on July 10 about ‘geniuses’ in science. In response to a question by Mrinal Shah, as to how teachers and educators could disprivilege the idea of a ‘scientific genius’ at the primary school level, Chadha said (excerpt):
There is an interesting problem here … In trying to make science interesting and accessible to children, we have to use relatable language. This relatable language organically comes from our social contexts but also comes with the burden of social meanings. So then, what do we do? It’s a tricky one! Also, in trying to make role models for children, we magnify the individual and replay what goes on in the world of science. We teach relativity as Einstein’s theory, we teach laws of motion as Newtonian laws of motion. The pedagogic need to lend a face to an idea becomes counterproductive.
‘Geniuses’ are necessarily individuals – there are no ‘genius communities’. A genius’s status as such denotes at once a centralisation of power and authority, and thus influence; a maturation of intellect (and intellect alone) presented as a role-model to others; and, in continuation, a pinnacle of achievement that those who profit from the extraction of scientific work, such as universities and research funders, valorise.
This said, I can’t tell if – though I suspect that – the modern history of ‘Western science’ is largely the modern history of ‘Western scientists’, especially of the ‘geniuses’ among them. The creator causes the creation, so by contemplating the science, you contemplate the scientist himself – or, as the ‘genius’ would have it, by contemplating the science you necessarily contemplate the creator and his specific choices. And since the modern scientific enterprise was largely harmonised to the West’s methods in the post-colonial period, this is our contemporary history as well.
Chadha had previously noted, in response to a question from yours truly, that she struggles to argue for the non-separation of science and scientist in the context of the #MeToo movement. That is, our liberty to separate important scientific work from the (extra-scientific) actions of an errant scientist may not be so easily achieved, at least if one intends to the extent possible to not participate in the accumulation of power. Instead, she said, we must consider them together, and call out “unethical or non-inclusive practices” – and by extension “you will also call out the culture to which they belong, which will help you to restore the balance of justice, if I may say so.”
This resolves to some extent my issue with Lawrence M. Krauss (although not fully because while Krauss’s culture has been dismantled at his previous university, however temporarily, he continues to maintain an innocence grounded in distasteful convictions). However, I’m still adrift vis-à-vis the late Richard Feynman and others. As a physics journalist first, I can’t help but encounter Feynman in one form or another – but how do you call out a dead man? Or does calling out the dead man’s culture, as perpetuated by the likes of Krauss today, suffice?
Chaudhuri has a similar question: “What do we do with a philosophy when there’s no philosopher in sight?” This matters because the philosopher’s “absence constitutes a problem in giving, and claiming, value. Meaning and significance in Western culture are not just features of the work, but pertain to, and arise from, the owner of the work – the author is the work’s first owner; the author’s nation or culture (“Greece” or “Germany”, say; or “the West”) its overarching one.”
So as with the Upanishads, would we be better served if we concerned ourselves less with deities and their habits and more with the “impersonal” instruction and interrogation of what is true? This seems like a straightforward way out of the problem Mrinal Shah poses, but it doesn’t address, as Chadha put it, the “pedagogic need to lend a face to an idea” – while “impersonal” interrogations of what is true will wrongly ignore the influence of sociological forces in science.
However, all said, I suspect that the answer is here somewhere. The ‘scientific genius’ is a construct and a shared one at that. When we contemplate a body of groundbreaking scientific work, we don’t contemplate the work alone or the scientist alone; we contemplate the work as arising from the scientist but even then only in a limited, constructive sense. But there is more at play; for example, as Chadha said, “We need to critically start engaging with how the social location of a scholar impacts the kind of work that they do”. If I write an article calling X a ‘genius’, X wouldn’t immediately occupy that position unless he is held there by social and capitalist forces as well.
The Upanishads in this context encourage us to erase the binary of ‘creator’ and ‘creation’ and with it the causal perspective’s temptation to think the scientist and the science are separable. In their stead, there is I think room to compose a communitarian story of science – where good arises not from the one but the whole, where power becomes, in keeping with the Upanishads, impersonal.
The Life of Science team uploaded the video of their webinar on July 10, about the construct of the genius in science, on YouTube on July 14. Please watch it if you haven’t already. I had also blogged about it. During the webinar, Gita Chadha – a sociologist of science and one of the two guests – answered a question I had posed, which in turn had arisen from contemplating whether I should read a soon to be published book authored by Lawrence M. Krauss.
Specifically, Krauss has been accused of being a predator and is also tainted by his association with and defence of Jeffrey Epstein. He will soon have a book published about the physics of climate change. I was and am inclined to boycott the book but this is an emotional response. More objectively speaking I didn’t/don’t know if my decision was/is as a matter of principle the right one. (More detailed deliberation, taking recourse through the stories of Geoffrey Marcy, Georges Lemaître, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman as well, here.)
So at the time of registering for the webinar, I had recorded this question: “How can we separate scholarship from the scholar when the latter are ‘geniuses’ who have been removed from pedestals for abusing power?” Chadha’s reply follows (from 36:45):
I got the question as – how can you separate scholarship from the scholar? This is an extremely complex question.
I find it extremely difficult to argue for the non-separation. For example, after the #MeToo movement, a lot of us faced the following situation. Suppose I know that some scientist or social scientist has been named a predator. What do I do with their work? Do I stop using or teaching the work, or something else? These are dilemmas. I would argue saying that it is impossible to keep the work away. But when we know they are capable of unethical or non-inclusive practices, it becomes inevitable to call them out. Because in calling them out, you will also call out the culture to which they belong, which will help you to restore the balance of justice, if I may say so.
But I would push the question further and say that we need to critically start engaging with how the social location of a scholar impacts the kind of work that they do. It’s very important, the kind of things Shalini Mahadev [the other panellist] has been talking about. Why do we privilege a certain kind of abstract work? Why do we privilege a certain kind of abstract testing of intellect? Why do we [pursue] work in [some areas over others]? Why is ‘glorified work’ in mathematics in number theory? How is knowledge constructed by the social location of caste in India, for example?
This question about the knowledge and the knowledge-maker is a deeper question. I would think it’s important to keep the connection between the two alive. Them being on pedestals is a different question. This is exactly what I was trying to say: There is no talent, there is only the struggle for eminence, awards… [these are] ways of wielding power. And that power you wield, because you are an eminent scientist, will always give you the clean chit: “He’s a genius, so it’s okay if he’s a wife-beater”, “it’s okay if he’s a predator,” etc. His genius and his work needs to be preserved. That is where the problem arises.
This is all insightful, and partly helpful. For example, a lot of people have called out Krauss and he also ‘retired’ shortly after. The effects of the #MeToo movement have prompted some reforms – or at least reformatory tendencies – in a variety of fields, as a result of which more than a few scientists have been ‘outed’ thus. More importantly, abusing the power imbalance between teachers and students is today widely understood to be an implicit bad, at least in quarters from which other scientists have been already removed. We have not restored the balance of justice but we have surely, even if imperfectly, started on this path.
However, Krauss continues to stand his ground, and soon he will have a book. If in this context I’m intent on keeping the connection between knowledge and the knowledge-maker alive, I can read his book. At the same time the act of purchasing his book will make this predator-in-denial richer, financially more powerful, and as a scholar more relevant and therefore more employable. Considering Chadha only said we must call out the culture to which such scientists belong, and nothing about whether the scientist in question should repent, I’m still confused.
If I’m wrong or have lost my train of thought in some obvious way even as I mull Chadha’s words, just as well. But if you know the way out of these woods, please don’t keep it to yourself!
A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more broadly, we often don’t stop to question the conduct of science itself, how it’s done, who does it, their privileges and expectations, etc., and limit ourselves to the outcomes of scientific practice alone. The Life of Science is one of my favourite publications for making questions like these part of its core work (and a tiny bit also because it’s run by two good friends).
I imagine the organisers will upload a recording of the conversation at some point (edit: hopefully by Monday, says Nandita Jayaraj); they’ve also offered to collect the answers to many questions that went unanswered, only for lack of time, and publish them as an article. This was a generous offer and I’m quite looking forward to that.
I did have yet another question but I decided against asking it when, towards the end of the session, the organisers made some attempts to get me to answer a question about the media’s role in constructing the scientific genius, and I decided I’d work my question into what I could say. However, Nandita Jayaraj, one of The Life of Science‘s founders, ended up answering it to save time – and did so better than I could have. This being the case, I figured I’d blog my response.
The question itself that I’d planned to ask was this, addressed to Gita Chadha: “I’m confused why many Indians think so much of the Nobel Prizes. Do you think the Nobel Prizes in particular have affected the perception of ‘genius’?”
This query should be familiar to any journalist who, come October, is required to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for that year. When I started off at The Hindu in 2012, I’d cover these announcements with glee; I also remember The Hindu would carry the notes of the laureates’ accomplishments, published by the Nobel Foundation, in full on its famous science and tech. page the following day. At first I thought – and was told by some other journalists as well – that these prizes have the audience’s attention, so the announcements are in effect a chance to discuss science with the privilege of an interested audience, which is admittedly quite unusual in India.
However, today, it’s clear to me that the Nobel Prizes are deeply flawed in more ways than one, and if journalists are using them as an opportunity to discuss science – it’s really not worth it. There are many other ways to cover science than on the back of a set of prizes that simply augments – instead of in any way compensating for – a non-ideal scientific enterprise. So when we celebrate the Nobel Prizes, we simply valorise the enterprise and its many structural deformities, not the least of which – in the Indian context – is the fact that it’s dominated by upper-caste men, mostly Brahmins, and riddled with hurdles for scholars from marginalised groups.
Brahmins are so good at science not because they’re particularly gifted but because they’re the only ones who seem to have the opportunity – a fact that Shalini elucidated very clearly when she recounted her experiences as a Dalit woman in science, especially when she said: “My genius is not going to be tested. The sciences have written me off.” The Brahmins’ domination of the scientific workforce has a cascading set of effects that we then render normal simply because we can’t conceive of a different way science can be, including sparing the Brahmin genius of scrutiny, as is the privilege of all geniuses.
(At a seminar last year, some speakers on stage had just discussed the historical roots of India being so bad at experimental physics and had taken a break. Then, I overheard an audience member tell his friend that while it’s well and good to debate what we can and can’t pin on Jawaharlal Nehru, it’s amusing that Brahmin experts will have discussions about Brahmin physicists without either party considering if it isn’t their caste sensibility that prevents them from getting their hands dirty!)
The other way the Nobel Prizes are a bad for journalists indicts the norms of journalism itself. As I recently described vis-à-vis ‘journalistic entropy’, there is a sort of default expectation of reporters from the editorial side to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for their implicit newsworthiness instead of thinking about whether they should matter. I find such arguments about chronicling events without participating in them to be bullshit, especially when as a Brahmin I’m already part of Indian journalism’s caste problem.
Instead, I prefer to ask these questions, and answer them honestly in terms of the editorial policies I have the privilege to influence, so that I and others don’t end up advancing the injustices that the Nobel Prizes stand for. This is quite akin to my, and others’, older argument that journalists shouldn’t blindly offer their enterprise up as a platform for majoritarian politicians to hijack and use as their bullshit megaphones. But if journalists don’t recast their role in society accordingly, they – we – will simply continue to celebrate the Nobel laureates, and by proxy the social and political conditions that allowed the laureates in particular to succeed instead of others, and which ultimately feed into the Nobel Prizes’ arbitrarily defined ‘prestige’.
Note that the Nobel Prizes here are the perfect examples, but only examples nonetheless, to illustrate a wider point about the relationship between scientific eminence and journalistic notability. The Wire for example has a notability threshold: we’re a national news site, which means we don’t cover local events and we need to ensure what we do cover is of national relevance. As a corollary, such gatekeeping quietly implies that if we feature the work of a scientist, then that scientist must be a particularly successful one, a nationally relevant one.
And when we keep featuring and quoting upper-caste male scientists, we further the impression that only upper-caste male scientists can be good at science. Nothing says more about the extent to which the mainstream media has allowed this phenomenon to dominate our lives than the fact of The Life of Science‘s existence.
It would be foolish to think that journalistic notability and scientific eminence aren’t linked; as Gita Chadha clarified at the outset, one part of the ‘genius’ construct in Western modernity is the inevitability of eminence. So journalists need to work harder to identify and feature other scientists by redefining their notability thresholds – even as scientists and science administrators need to rejig their sense of the origins and influence of eminence in science’s practice. That Shalini thinks her genius “won’t be tested” is a brutal clarification of the shape and form of the problem.
