September 24, 2004

The Bombers and the Bombed—II

Seen from the perspective of the colonized people, the most important aspect of  Western civilization is its awesome technology. This was recognized early by those who encountered European armies equipped with arms superior to their old swords. These armies had suddenly arrived on their shores to bomb them out of existence from a distance. Since that time, which marks the first real encounter of the modern West with the Muslim world, Western technology has remained the most fearsome, the most sought after and the most dreaded enterprise for the colonized masses.

Though the rallying cry of Muslim reformers has been science and more science, it is really not science but its off-shoot, technology, that is the desired product. It is technology which has reshaped and redefined the way we live today. From the way we procure food to the modes of communication and traveling, everything has been redefined by technological progress and all of this originates in the West. Then it trickles down into other societies, which become consumers whose hunger for new products can never be satiated. And out of all technologies, it is the military technology that has given the West in general and the United States of America in particular, its strategic edge.

This US superiority in military technology was demonstrated during the first Gulf War, which stands as a watershed between old style warfare and a new style in which the military only advances after the other side has been bombed out; the invasion of Iraq was the first real display of this new method of warfare. By the time American soldiers set their feet on Iraqi soil, the Iraqi army had been dispersed, its communication and command system had been destroyed and most of its ammunition reserves had been bombed out of this world.

Along with terrible fire power unleashed from air, the United States had the cold-blooded nerve to televise this show of its supremacy through the lenses of automatic cameras fitted on the bombers and later through the eyes of embedded journalists. This global show was nothing but an arrogant display of American military technology, a display which was meant to create awe and shock. Those who watched the bombing of Iraq on their television screens and heard screams of B-52 bombers, were really shocked and they consciously or unconsciously developed a fear and awe that is going to condition their responses to technology for the rest of their lives.

But in spite of this awesome power, the United States army has found it impossible to win a war which even Kofi Annan has been constrained to call “illegal”, as if any war can ever be legal! This is the limit of the power of technology: Technology can bring an army to a foreign land thousands of miles away, but it cannot win that land. This has been proven time and again in history.  The French had a similar advantage over the Vietnamese whom they bombed ruthlessly, killing them in their thousands, but ultimately, it found itself in such a terrible mess that it had to leave Vietnam. Years later, the United States experienced similar humiliating defeat, although it learnt nothing from its misdeeds in Vietnam.

Contemporary life is not only shaped and defined by technology, it is solely based on it. From the cellular phones to the internet and from the genetically modified food to diapers for babies, everything is technology dependent. There has never been any time in human history during which humanity has been so shackled by the devices of its own making.

This high degree of dependence on technology has brought numerous inevitable disasters with it. For those societies which have been at the receiving end of technological development, the price has been much higher; this fact has certainly been recognized by many perceptive minds in the West. Already in the middle of the twentieth century, Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), the celebrated physicist whose 1927 indeterminacy principle had turned the laws of physics into statements about relative, not absolute, certainties, had said that compared to the West, modern science was going to have a very different kind of impact on the rest of the world. “One has to remember that every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created,” he wrote in 1958, “…in those parts of the world in which modern science has been developed, the primary interest has been directed for a long time toward practical activity, industry and engineering combined with a rational analysis of the outer and inner conditions for such activity.”

Technologies do not come alone; they come as a package, bringing with them a lifestyle, a mode of relationship and a mannerism. This leads us to another aspect of modern technology: What avenues are open for non-Western cultures to preserve their cultural and spiritual values in the face of the rapid penetration of an alien tradition through modern science? This is the question that is especially important for Muslim societies and the one that has vexed several generations of scholars, thinkers, reformers and politicians. It is frequently assumed by a majority of reformers and politicians, and even by some scholars, that Muslim societies can overcome their economic, political, and social problems by importing Western science and technology without importing any of the philosophical and ethical values that lie behind this science and its products.

This facile assumption is based on another assumption: the supposed objectivity and neutrality of modern science—a Newtonian legacy which has been shattered by developments within science itself. Newton had left the impression that there are no assumptions in his physics which are not necessitated by the experimental data. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become apparent that this assumption was not valid. Expressed positively, this means that the scientific theories are neither a mere description of experimental facts nor something deducible from such a description; instead, facts are theory laden and theories are formulated on the basis of certain philosophical assumptions. These developments in modern science, especially in quantum physics, have been instrumental in shaking the hold of scientism and many Western philosophers of science have written about various kinds of reductionisms that underlie scientific methodology.

These efforts have not only yielded a clearer understanding of the issues involved, they have also suggested careful approaches to technologies; instead of plunging headlong into modern technological life, non-Western societies in general, and Muslim societies in particular, need to carefully weigh implications of an imported lifestyle constrained by technologies which are foreign to their customs. This restrain and caution must be observed not only to preserve our values and customs, but also to save ourselves from plundering nature, which is inevitably result of the consumer culture propagated by Western technology.

(Concluded)