modern science – Close Read

Ayurveda is not a science – but what does that mean?

This post has benefited immensely with inputs from Om Prasad.

Calling something ‘not a science’ has become a pejorative, an insult. You say Ayurveda is not a science and suddenly, its loudest supporters demand to know what the problem is, what your problem is, and that you can go fuck yourself.

But Ayurveda is not a science.

First, science itself didn’t exist when Ayurveda was first born (whenever that was but I’m assuming it was at least a millennium ago), and they were both outcomes of different perceived needs. So claiming ‘Ayurveda is a science’ makes little sense. You could counter that 5 didn’t stop being a number just because the number line came much later – but that wouldn’t make sense either because the relationship between 5 and the number line is nothing like the relationship between science and Ayurveda.

It’s more like claiming Carl Linnaeus’s choice of topics to study was normal: it wouldn’t at all be normal today but in his time and his particular circumstances, they were considered acceptable. Similarly, Ayurveda was the product of a different time, technologies and social needs. Transplanting it without ‘updating’ it in any way is obviously going to make it seem inchoate, stunted. At the same time, ‘updating’ it may not be so productive either.

Claiming ‘Ayurveda is a science’ is to assert two things: that science is a qualifier of systems, and that Ayurveda once qualified by science’s methods becomes a science. But neither is true for the same reason: if you want one of them to be like the other, it becomes the other. They are two distinct ways of organising knowledge and making predictions about natural processes, and which grew to assume their most mature forms along different historical trajectories. Part of science’s vaunted stature in society today is that it is an important qualifier of knowledge, but it isn’t of knowledge systems. This is ultimately why Ayurveda and science are simply incompatible.

One of them has become less effective and less popular over time – which should be expected because human technologies and geopolitical and social boundaries have changed dramatically – while the other is relatively more adolescent, more multidisciplinary (with the right opportunities) and more resource-intensive – which should be expected because science, engineering, capitalism and industrialism rapidly co-evolved in the last 150 years.

Second, ‘Ayurveda is a science’ is a curious statement because those who utter it typically wish to elevate it to the status science enjoys and at the same time wish to supplant answers that modern science has provided to some questions with answers by Ayurveda. Of course, I’m speaking about the average bhakt here – more specifically a Bharatiya Janata Party supporter seemingly sick of non-Indian, especially Western, influences on Indian industry, politics, culture (loosely defined) and the Indian identity itself, and who may be actively seeking homegrown substitutes. However, their desire to validate Ayurveda according to the practices of modern science is really an admission that modern science is superior to Ayurveda despite all their objections to it.

The bhakt‘s indignation when confronted with the line that ‘Ayurveda is not a science’ is possibly rooted in the impression that ‘science’ is a status signal – a label attached to a collection of precepts capable of together solving particular problems, irrespective of more fundamental philosophical requirements. However, the only science we know of is the modern one, and to the bhakt the ‘Western’ one – both in provenance and its ongoing administration – and the label and the thing to which it applies, i.e. the thing as well as the name of the thing, are convergent.

There is no other way of doing science; there is no science with a different set of methods that claims to arrive at the same or ‘better’ scientific truths. (I’m curious at this point if, assuming a Kuhnian view, science itself is unfalsifiable as it attributes inconsistencies in its constituent claims to extra-scientific causes than to flaws in its methods themselves – so as a result science as a system can reach wrong conclusions from time to time but still be valid at all times.)

It wouldn’t be remiss to say modern science, thus science itself, is to the nationalistic bhakt as Ayurveda is to the nationalistic far-right American: a foreign way of doing things that must be resisted, and substituted with the ‘native’ way, however that nativity is defined. It’s just that science, specifically allopathy, is more in favour today because, aside from its own efficacy (a necessary but not sufficient condition), all the things it needs to work – drug discovery processes, manufacturing, logistics and distribution, well-trained health workers, medical research, a profitable publishing industry, etc. – are modelled on institutions and political economies exported by the West and embedded around the world through colonial and imperial conquests.

Third: I suspect a part of why saying ‘Ayurveda is not a science’ is hurtful is that Indian society at large has come to privilege science over other disciplines, especially the social sciences. I know too many people who associate the work of many of India’s scientists with objectivity, a moral or political nowhereness*, intellectual prominence, pride and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to play along with the state’s plans for economic growth. To be denied the ‘science’ tag is to be denied these attributes, desirable for their implicit value as much as for the opportunities they are seen to present in the state’s nationalist (and even authoritarian) project.

On the other hand, social scientists are regularly cast in opposition to these attributes – and more broadly by the BJP in opposition to normative – i.e. pro-Hindu, pro-rich – views of economic and cultural development, and dismissed as such. This ‘science v. fairness’ dichotomy is only a proxy battle in the contest between respecting and denying human rights – which in turn is also represented in the differences between allopathy and Ayurveda, especially when they are addressed as scientific as well as social systems.

Compared to allopathy and allopathy’s intended outcomes, Ayurveda is considerably flawed and very minimally desirable as an alternative. But on the flip side, uptake of alternative traditions is motivated not just by their desirability but also by the undesirable characteristics of allopathy itself. Modern allopathic methods are isolating (requiring care at a designated facility and time away from other tasks, irrespective of the extent to which that is epidemiologically warranted), care is disempowering and fraught with difficult contradictions (“We expect family members to make decisions about their loved ones after a ten-minute briefing that we’re agonising over even with years of medical experience”**), quality of care is cost-stratified, and treatments are condition-specific and so require repeated hospital visits in the course of a lifetime.

Many of those who seek alternatives in the first place do so for these reasons – and these reasons are not problems with the underlying science itself. They’re problems with how medical care is delivered, how medical knowledge is shared, how medical research is funded, how medical workers are trained – all subjects that social scientists deal with, not scientists. As such, any alternative to allopathy will become automatically preferred if it can solve these economic, political, social, welfare, etc. problems while delivering the same standard of care.

Such a system won’t be an entirely scientific enterprise, considering it would combine the suggestions of the sciences as well as the social sciences into a unified whole such that it treated individual ailments without incurring societal ones. Now, say you’ve developed such an alternative system, called PXQY. The care model at its heart isn’t allopathy but something else – and its efficacy is highest when it is practised and administered as part of the PXQY setup, instead of through standalone procedures. Would you still call this paradigm of medical care a science?

* Akin to the ‘view from nowhere’.
** House, S. 2, E 18.

Featured image credit: hue 12 photography/Unsplash.

An Upanishadic lesson for modern science?

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 chrysalis that isn’t there

I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. 🙂

I should really start keeping a log of different stories in the news all of which point to the little-acknowledged but only-evident fact that science – like so many things, including people – does not embody lofty ideals as much as the aspirations to those ideals. Nature News reported on January 31 that “a language analysis of titles and abstracts in more than 100,000 scientific articles,” published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), had “found that papers with first and last authors who were both women were about 12% less likely than male-authored papers to include sensationalistic terms such as ‘unprecedented’, ‘novel’, ‘excellent’ or ‘remarkable’;” further, “The articles in each comparison were presumably of similar quality, but those with positive words in the title or abstract garnered 9% more citations overall.” The scientific literature, people!

Science is only as good as its exponents, and there is neither meaning nor advantage to assuming that there is such a thing as a science beyond, outside of and without these people. Doing so inflates science’s importance when it doesn’t deserve to be, and suppresses its shortcomings and prevents them from being addressed. For example, the BMJ study prima facie points to gender discrimination but it also describes a scientific literature that you will never find out is skewed, and therefore unrepresentative of reality, unless you acknowledge that it is constituted by papers authored by people of two genders, on a planet where one gender has maintained a social hegemony for millennia – much like you will never know Earth has an axis of rotation unless you are able to see its continents or make sense of its weather.

The scientific method describes a popular way to design experiments whose performance scientists can use to elucidate refined, and refinable, answers to increasingly complex questions. However, the method is an external object (of human construction) that only, and arguably asymptotically, mediates the relationship between the question and the answer. Everything that comes before the question and after the answer is mediated by a human consciousness undeniably shaped by social, cultural, economic and mental forces.

Even the industry that we associate with modern science – composed of people who trained to be scientists over at least 15 years of education, then went on to instruct and/or study in research institutes, universities and laboratories, being required to teach a fixed number of classes, publish a minimum number of papers and accrue citations, and/or produce X graduate students, while drafting proposals and applying for grants, participating in workshops and conferences, editing journals, possibly administering scientific work and consulting on policy – is steeped in human needs and aspirations, and is even designed to make room for them, but many of us non-scientists are frequently and successfully tempted to address the act of being a scientist as an act of transformation: characterised by an instant in time when a person changes into something else, a higher creature of sorts, like a larva enters a magical chrysalis and exits a butterfly.

But for a man to become a scientist has never meant the shedding of his identity or social stature; ultimately, to become a scientist is to terminate at some quasi-arbitrary moment the slow inculcation of well-founded knowledge crafted to serve a profitable industry. There is a science we know as simply the moment of discovery: it is the less problematic of the two kinds. The other, in the 21st century, is also funding, networking, negotiating, lobbying, travelling, fighting, communicating, introspecting and, inescapably, some suffering. Otherwise, scientific knowledge – one of the ultimate products of the modern scientific enterprise – wouldn’t be as well-organised, accessible and uplifting as it is today.

But it would be silly to think that in the process of constructing this world-machine of sorts, we baked in the best of us, locked out the worst of us, and threw the key away. Instead, like all human endeavour, science evolves with us. While it may from time to time present opportunities to realise one or two ideals, it remains for the most part a deep and truthful reflection of ourselves. This assertion isn’t morally polarised, however; as they say, it is what it is – and this is precisely why we must acknowledge failures in the practice of science instead of sweeping them under the rug.

One male scientist choosing more uninhibitedly to call his observation “unprecedented” than a female scientist might have been encouraged, among other things, by the peculiarities of a gendered scientific labour force and scientific enterprise, but many male scientists indulging just as freely in their evaluatory fantasies, such as they are, indicates a systemic corruption that transcends (but not escapes) science. The same goes for, as in another recent example, for the view that science is self-correcting. It is not because people are not, and they need to be pushed to be. In March 2019, for example, researchers uncovered at least 58 papers published in a six-week period whose authors had switched their desired outcomes between the start and end of their respective experiments to report positive, and to avoid reporting negative, results. When the researchers wrote to the authors as well as the editors of the journals that had published the problem papers, most of them denied there was an issue and refused to accept modifications.

Again, the scientific literature, people!