The Hindu Business Line : Rationality, tradition and freedom

LAST week saw some heated action and controversy at the sleepy little village of Elavoor, near Angamaly, where some ardent devotees of the Sree Puthankavu Bhagavathi Temple attempted to carry out the religious ritual of "thookkam", in which a man is lifted to a height of 32 feet on a scaffold by hooks pierced to his back.

The traditional practice had been abandoned 16 years ago, and the attempt to revive what many rationalists and secular liberals regard as a medieval, barbaric and inhuman ritual was met with firm resolve by the State.

In the event, the attempt was abandoned totally, with not even a token alternative performance to appease the hundreds of devotees who had thronged the temple.

Scientific rationality may well appear to have triumphed at Elavoor and, in the end, what could have been easily transformed into an ugly battle over religion and tradition was very well handled by the State.

However, the incident also throws up an interesting contradiction in the collective ethos of Kerala - a State known for its superior physical quality of life and development indicators, all won through decades of public action founded, in large measure, on the principles of rationality and scientific objectivity. And that contradiction is the irony of the coexistence of radical rationality and cosmological "irrationality".

That may not be so surprising or harmful, even. The late Paul Feyerabend, radical philosopher of science, anarchist and professor at the London School of Economics, had much to say on the subject. So controversial was Feyerabend's iconoclastic stances that the journal Nature once labelled him "the worst enemy of science".

In his most famous book, Against Method, Feyerabend denied that there is any single form of reasoning that can be labelled "the scientific method", asserting brazenly that the basic rule in science is that "anything goes".

"The rise of modern science coincides with the suppression of non-Western tribes by Western invaders. The tribes are not only physically suppressed, but they also lose their intellectual independence. The most intelligent members get an extra bonus: they are introduced into the mysteries of Western Rationalism and its peak - Western Science," says Feyerabend.

Occasionally, he continues, this leads to an almost unbearable tension with tradition (as in Haiti). In most cases, the tradition disappears without the trace of an argument, one simply becomes a slave both in body and in mind.

Today, Feyerabend contends, this development is gradually reversed - with great reluctance, to be sure, but it is reversed.

"Freedom is regained, old traditions are rediscovered, both among the minorities in Western countries and among large populations in non-Western continents. But science still reigns supreme. It reigns supreme because its practitioners are unable to understand, and unwilling to condone, different ideologies, because they have the power to enforce their wishes, and because they use this power."

Feyerabend argues that a separation of science and State may be our only chance to overcome the hectic barbarism of our scientific-technical age and to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realised.

A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the State, he says, and especially from the process of education.

One may teach it, but only to those who have decided to make this particular superstition their own. On the other hand, a science that has dropped such totalitarian pretensions is no longer independent and self-contained, and it can be taught in many different combinations (myth and modern cosmology might be one such combination).

The later Feyerabend came to see science not as the only road to truth but merely as one of the ways of interpreting reality that a pluralistic society ought to include. In a famous 1974 lecture "How to Defend Society Against Science", he argued that we should regard all ideologies, science included, "like fairy tales which have lots of interesting things to say but which also contain wicked lies."

He argued that, although science was a liberating influence in the 17th and 18th centuries, in contemporary times it had become another stifling orthodoxy.

That is the sort of stimulating, iconoclastic polemic that many Keralites will respond to.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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