The history of science is replete with thousands of examples of the way modern or empirical science was opposed by well-entrenched forces in society at any given time. Some of the oldest cultures have also resisted scientific ideas based on their own interpretation of the physical world.
There have been innumerable debates and controversies about the power of scientific inventions and concepts since the Vedic times. At the Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai in 2015, there was a separate session on “ancient sciences through Sanskrit” that drew a lot of fire from rationalists and modern scientists. It was alleged that the session was organised just to please the new political dispensation in Delhi as the Prime Minister usually inaugurates the Science Congress every year. Many of the speakers on the Vedic sciences drew ridicule for not being able to provide any rational explanation of the phenomena they were trying to demonstrate. Subsequent Science Congresses have disbanded the ancient sciences session.
India was home to ancient universities or seats of higher learning of Nalanda and Takshashila that were either destroyed or decayed a long time ago. However, the government of India resurrected Nalanda, but the project is now mired in political infighting. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the first head has resigned. No one really knows what goes on at this university.
In the early part of the Christian era, science was strongly opposed. In the middle ages, western Europe was in scientific darkness. The Roman empire had no interest in science, and after its fall there was scientific barrenness. However, later, the universities in England and other European countries emerged as leaders in scientific research. By early twentieth century, North American centres of science, engineering and technology developed at the speed of light; the rest of the world has been struggling to catch up with the West in science even to this day.
The ancient church was vehemently opposed to modern science and even persecuted scientists like Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin, Hubble and Bertrand Russell. The church has also opposed modern social sciences by promoting and silently supporting slavery, anti-Semitism, witch hunts, sexual repression, censorship and the inquisition. The church has strongly promoted wars and capital punishment for even small misdemeanours. This kind of opposition to sciences in the church is called apologetics. Even today, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe in the theory of special creation which states that Earth was created 7,000 years ago.
They completely disbelieve in evolution and support the theory of intelligent design. Many modern-day Quran-thumping Islamic preachers also do not believe in evolution and preach the same with all fervour in their speeches around the world. There are many extreme right-wing Republican congressmen who strive hard to cut funding to science agencies.
What has happened in the present era of scientific dissonance is the emergence of highly organised and orchestrated anti-science movements aided and abetted by modern information and communication technology and so much funding that these movements have become a multi-million-dollar protest industry. The role of non-governmental organisations and the so-called civic society organisations keep a selective anti-science movement boiling. Some of the science and technology they seek to ban or be kept under wraps are nuclear technology, modern biotechnology and vaccines. They fight against some modern sciences so vehemently that polarisation is on the rise and even reasonable people have started to doubt scientific reason.
One branch of science called eugenics, which deals with the study of human genetics, came to earn a really bad name for good reason at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis. The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele conducted experiments on human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The eugenic movement started in California long before the Nazis adopted it as state policy with the intention of creating a race of superior people in Germany. The Rockefellers even funded the German eugenic movement. It is these kinds of misuse of science by wicked people that really heightened the anti-science movement in Europe, which is alive and kicking even to this day. The California eugenic movement died out, and today it is a state with some of the finest institutions for scientific research and development.
In Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr Strangelove, Jack Ripper, an American general who orders a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, had his own paranoid worldview; he believed that fluoridation of water was a monstrous communist plot. Anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories are now stuff of comedy. Some Americans don’t like the idea of government adding chemicals to water, forgetting that water is also a chemical – dihydrogen monoxide. The scientific and medical consensus is that fluoride, a natural mineral, at low concentrations protects dental enamel, prevents tooth decay and promotes public dental health. But the citizens of Portland town have banned fluoridation of water in their community because they don’t believe the scientific consensus.
In today’s world, modern sciences like the safety of fluoridation, vaccines, climate change and GMOs are furiously opposed, much against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Using their own sources of information, which is called parallel science, and the interpretations of their “scientific experts”, activists deny the mainstream expert scientific consensus. Doubting science has become pop culture. There is a whole bunch people who don’t believe that Apollo moon landing was real. A Hindu priest in Varanasi those days even said Americans don’t know our Chandrama, and they have landed somewhere else, calling it moon.
There are some farmers in Uttar Pradesh who believe that water supplied from hydro-electric dams is useless for agriculture as the dam has sucked all its power to create electricity and then sent down to them for use. Similarly, many NGOs started an aggressive anti-nuclear power movement in Kudankulam. That movement is not totally dead; it will raise its head again when other nuclear power plants are to be commissioned. A farmer leader, the late Professor Nanjundaswamy, used to say young girls working in the Bt cotton fields attain puberty much earlier than normal. Three NGOs in then Andhra Pradesh – ANTHRA, CSD, and DDS – started propagating a false story that hundreds and thousands of sheep died in the state for eating Bt cotton leaves, the only approved GM crop in India. None of these stories gained much currency in those years but did sufficient damage to stall further approvals of GM crops in India.
If these opponents of science and technology are not aware, they should know that science is what is running this world and it is all-pervasive. Even the opponents are beneficiaries of modern science and technology, but they militate to keep it away from the most deserving and the needy. They create non-existent and imaginary hazards and risks. The Ebola virus is known not to mutate to change its way of transmission in human beings, but a new type of “airborne Ebola” was created on the internet just to scare people. The irony is that opponents of science use information technology to attack biotechnology, both of which are cutting-edge technologies. Those who oppose GM crops for want of, in their view, sufficient scientific proof, wholeheartedly accept the scientific proof of global warming.
This duplicitousness of the opponents of science is what creates needless anxiety and fear in the minds of the public. Science is a series of methods to demonstrate natural reality by way of providing evidence that behaves according to the laws of nature. People have a challenging time understanding this methodology, and therefore get swayed easily by mischief makers. Whenever science goes up against human feelings and emotions, science always loses.
That’s how it has become difficult to convince people of science even though they all benefit from it in their day-to-day lives. Scientific truths are not self-evident, but they have been deduced from experimentation and critical observation which calls for people to exercise their brains. That’s where people give up and take the easy route and fall prey to the machinations of the anti-activists. People sub-consciously cling on to their intuitions. Even educated people have reservations about science.
A bunch of masters degree students in the Fergusson College in Pune, when asked if they eat DNA when they have their food, were unable to answer with any confidence. When such is the plight of students of modern biology and biotechnology, it is no surprise that anti-science activists exploit this kind of weakness to press their case. That’s how public opinion is created. These anti-science activists have done such a terrific job of creating doubt about science that even politicians have fallen for it all over the developing world. It is these ill-informed politicians who come in the way of making regulatory policies that affect the implementation of modern technologies. Unfortunately, scientists have done precious little to influence the minds of the same politicians. The result is that many progressive technologies are in a limbo.
In a scientifically advanced country like the United States, some of the far-right politicians of the Republican Party don’t want to fund research on embryonic stem cells and studies in reproductive biology and many of them don’t believe in global warming, and they sit on committees that decide funding for such researches. Indian parliamentarians during the previous regime also produced a scientifically retarded report on GM crops, heavily influenced by the virulent anti-GMO NGO Greenpeace, and submitted it to parliament and not one member of the committee had any inkling of the science or technology. The net result is, for the past seven years, approvals of GM crops have been completely suspended.
In addition to anti-science activists, some industries are also involved in peddling their faulty technology just to sell and make money. The well-known example is the more than 60-year-old stand that tobacco is harmless. The tobacco industry was lying for too long. Such blatant misrepresentations by the industry also erodes confidence in science and technology. The fossil fuel industry is also campaigning against climate change and that does not help the case of good science.
The news media also plays a key role by giving space and time, in the name of objectivity or neutrality, to mavericks, naysayers, soothsayers, professional demagogues and table thumpers.
Scientific enterprise has its own faults in its so-called peer review system. Many faulty and incorrect scientific results fall through the cracks of the peer review system. However, there is no better alternative to this system that by and large catches faulty science up to 95 to 98 per cent. In fact, if one were to critically examine the progress of science in the last 200 years, the peer review system has done a commendable job of advancing credible scientific progress, the benefits of which we all enjoy today.
The boring truth is, scientific progress, most of the time, takes place incrementally, which is why according to a Pew poll, only 40 per cent of Americans accept that global warming is due to human activity. A third of Americans believe humans have existed in their present form since time began. These are members of the anti-evolution league.
The polarisation on science is such that there does not seem to be any kind of middle ground because both groups live in their echo chambers, reinforcing their own beliefs. But the scientific facts are that GMOs are safe, climate is warming, vaccines prevent unwanted deaths. The scientific enterprise also causes confusion in the minds of people by publishing faulty papers like vaccines are linked to autism and GM crops cause terrible cancers, both of which were published the British medical journal Lancet. The vaccines and autism study was retracted by the journal and the report has been definitively debunked by scientists, but some of the most influential people in America are spearheading the anti-vaccine movement, and have even gone to the extent of bombing laboratories and issuing death threats to vaccine scientists who had to be provided protection.
In case of the safety of GM crops, Lancet published the paper by Seralini et al that had been debunked by the mainstream scientific community after it was published in a journal of toxicology and then retracted by it. Thus, even editors of scientific journals sometimes try to please the anti-science crowd in the name of objectivity. A scientific journal in biological sciences, then published by the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, injected itself into the great Indian GM debate and invited both proponents and opponents to write articles to make their case. Scientists did not respond to the call, but the anti-scientist-in-chief did, and the result was that his scientific nonsense prevailed just because it got published in the journal without any peer review.
The editor escaped his responsibility by saying that scientists had an opportunity to rebut and they chose not to. But, why would a journal publish something on GM crops, an issue that is hotly debated, without the benefit of sound peer review? It is due to this kind of naïve attitude to please all that scientists themselves do disservice to science.
The last word is about science teaching that starts in schools. It is taught as a set of facts and not as a set of constantly evolving methods of reasoning. Unless schools and colleges inculcate the scientific spirit, the chances of the public learning about science looks dim. Science is progressing rapidly and technological advances are breathtaking, so the challenge of communicating science becomes even more onerous and daunting.
The scientific community must train a new generation of communicators who are trained properly in science, but also know how to resonate with the public. Until such change happens, scientists will have to contend with the anti-science lobby and fight them as vigorously as possible on all fronts.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.