Modernité en transit - Modernity in Transit

2: Modernity, Science and Democracy

2 Modernity, Science and Democracy* Sandra Harding University of California at Los Angeles, United States T he “modern” in “modern science” is a relatively unexamined concept within the sciences and in the philosophy, sociology and history of science; it is a concept for which theories have yet to be developed, this at a time when other aspects of Western sciences have been fruitfully explored in critical and illuminating ways, and when the exceptionalism and triumphalism characteristic of Western attitudes toward our sciences have been explicitly criticized and purportedly abandoned by many of the scholars working in science studies fields. By exceptionalism is meant the belief that Western sciences alone, among all human knowledge systems, are capable of grasping reality in its own terms—that these alone have the resources to escape the human tendency to project onto nature cultural assumptions, fears and desires. By Modernity, Science and Democracy 71 * This article was first published in Social Philosophy Today, vol. 22: Science, Technology, and Social Justice, ed. J. Rowan, Charlottesville,Va: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2007. It will be also published in O. Skovsmose, P. Valero et O. Ravn Christensen, éd., University Science and Mathematics Education in Transition, New York, Springer. triumphalism is meant the assumption that the history of science consists of a history of achievements—that this history has no significant downsides. Hiroshima, environmental destruction, the alienation of labour, escalating global militarism, the increasing gap between the “haves” and the “have nots”, gender, race and class inequalities— these and other undesirable social situations are all consequences of social and political projects, to which the history of Western sciences makes no contribution. Such conventional, Eurocentric assumptions no longer can gather the support either in the West or elsewhere that they once could claim. In recent decades a huge literature on modernity has emerged from the social sciences and humanities. Stimulated by the massive shifts in local and global social formations during the last half of the 20th century and by the postmodern response to such changes, social theorists, literary and other cultural critics, and, especially, historians have debated the uneven and complex origins, nature and desirable futures of modernity, modernization and modernism. Such controversies about modernity are first and foremost about a culture’s relation to its past and its possible futures. They arise as ways of asking what went wrong and what needs to be corrected. The last half-century has witnessed the global decline and fall of belief in the unquestionably legitimate authority of the white, bourgeois male. Contributing to the epistemological, economic, political and cultural rubble left by his demise—or, at least, deflation—have been compelling and influential counterhistories of social relations between the races, classes, genders, and within colonial and imperial eras. In light of such extensive recent discussions of modernity and its woes, one might wonder whether yet another engagement with the topic could be worthwhile. I think there are two reasons to do so. Most of these accounts do not have modern science and technology clearly in focus, nor do they seem to think that gender relations are relevant either to modernity’s crisis or its possible successor. First, the science and technology issue. When authors support the Sandra Harding 72 humanities or classical social theory and its successors in the West, and when they are politically on the Right, Left, or Centre, science and technology are usually to be found off at the periphery of their accounts. Modernity for them is about exclusion of the influence of religion and kinship in forms of government and citizenship, economy and education, and about a shift from past to future in social orientation. Such exclusion makes possible the creation of autonomous, rational institutions, including those of value-free modern science and, consequently social progress. Since these scholars are largely unfamiliar with the critiques of exceptionalist and triumphalist science indicated above, they often treat modern sciences as if they played no role in whatever economic, social and political ills lead them to question modernity. Yet interrogating what is meant by the modernity of Western sciences, and what have been the consequences and will be the likely futures of commitments to modernity in scientific institutions, their cultures and practices, is a more important intellectual and political task than such accounts reveal or comprehend. Such a project poses frustrating questions, which challenge familiar ethical and political assumptions, and even seem critical of the psychic framework, which well...