The Crisis of Western Science and A New Search for Truth

An edited presentation given at the symposium, “The Crisis of Knowledge & The American University: James Baldwin and the Struggle for Our Human Future” on June 2nd, 2024.

My name is Nandita and, for those of you who don’t know me, I did my PhD in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania and in my presentation I want to examine the state of the natural sciences at this time. I think we’ve established already that the American university today acts basically as a part of the American state and works to lay the ideological foundations for the justification of war. 

I think that too often the natural sciences are thought of as exempt from critique and are thought of as “above ideology.” But really what I want to say here today is that the natural sciences, and definitely physics, is a part of the ideological landscape, and in many ways the kind of framework that Jeremiah laid out about postmodernism, you can see in the natural science academy in this time.

So, first of all, as we all know already, most physics departments, most natural science departments now are funded by the military. It can either be directly or it can be through private companies that invest in war and in weapons. To put it plainly, scientists in this time are acting as henchmen for war: for the war economy and for the war machine—unless they oppose it, which most of them don’t. 

You go into the academy thinking you’re going to investigate questions that interest you, or you’re going to have some kind of search for the truth. But the reality is that the questions that you can investigate are already kind of defined and laid out; and basically you make a choice about which professor you find least oppressive and choose to join their group. 

So the whole thing of “academic freedom,” I think, is really a myth in this time. And even beyond the structural problems of natural science departments, there’s a real crisis in thought. Physics and scientific departments don’t know where to go.

The major questions of the time have been settled, and similar to Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” it is now the end of science. What you can do, as a graduate student or as a young professor, is make tweaks. You take a central theory, you change one assumption, you publish 10 papers on it, and you get tenure. So the fundamental questions that face us in this time are not thought of as a subject for scientific inquiry. The natural sciences, I feel, really have the power to deal with some of the questions that face human beings as a whole, and part of this is the question of the nature of reality: What is truth? Can we know the truth? What is our relationship to the truth? How do we know the truth? 

I think a lot of the debates go back to the time of the Second World War, and a lot of these debates first started when Albert Einstein comes on the scene and he talks about the special theory of relativity. And the reason why it’s so path-breaking is because he puts the question of the observer into his theory. How does the observer interact with what he is observing? And does the truth depend on how you observe it? 

It is in this context that a lot of the people who worked on quantum mechanics come on the scene like Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Max Born. They kind of take it a step further and they say, “Well, the truth does depend on your measurement.” There’s a debate at the time—and Einstein is on the opposite side of this—where a lot of the mainstream physicists were saying that the truth depends on your perception. This should remind you of what Jeremiah was saying about postmodernism. They weren’t quite there yet, but there was a move towards that. You can see this in the existentialists who are dealing with the crisis of war in Europe, and also dealing with this question of: Is there an objective reality and can we know it?

So there is this debate and I think that the position that a lot of these physicists take at that time, you could connect that to what eventually happens with the atomic bomb and with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer didn’t think morality has anything to do with science. “If there is no truth then how does it matter what I do? How does it matter that I drop this bomb which kills millions of people and makes generations of Japanese suffer?”

But there were always dissenters like Frédéric Julio Curie, who was part of the peace movement; Stephen J. Gould, who was an anti-racist and fought for anti-racist values within science; D.D. Kosambi, a colored scientist who put the question of hunger on the table. But really I think the final blow to the scientific academy comes with McCarthyism, and this witch hunt of communists and anybody branded as a communist. You didn’t have to be a communist to be hunted down in that time.

So there was purge, from the academy, of anybody who thinks creatively. You put into place this system of ideological discipline—and that’s the tenure system. “Yes, you can join us if you want to work on exactly what we work on, but if you’re interested in something else—No! Sorry! Our agenda is already set by war, so we cannot accept you.” 

It is during this era of McCarthyism when, really, this whole idea comes about in the scientific departments that you should “shut up and calculate.” Don’t think, don’t ask questions, don’t think about where your funding is coming from, don’t think about what your scientific work is being put to, what use it’s being put to: “Shut up and calculate.” 

I was talking to somebody who’s a pretty senior person in the American Physical Society recently and he was telling me how the APS has undertaken a study of what would happen if North Korea was to launch missiles at American soil. They have a whole simulation and a study of what the U.S. defense mechanism would look like, and they plan to blow up these missiles over China. They’re open about it. They know the work that they’re engaged in. 

It is in this context, in this context of McCarthyism, of the ideological disciplining of the scientist, that string theory first makes its appearance. String theory kind of inherits some of the questions that quantum mechanics is trying to deal with: the question of reality and most centrally, a unified “theory of everything.” So the attempt of string theory is to make a theoretical foundation that can explain everything from planetary motion to how atoms behave. So they’re trying to combine general relativity—which has to do with gravity, which deals with long-length scales—with things that deal with atoms.

You may think, “How exciting!” But really it’s not. First of all, string theory doesn’t even qualify Karl Popper’s criteria of falsifiability. There are no experiments, real or proposed, to verify the claims of string theory. There are all of these absurd claims about multiple dimensions and very intricate mathematical formalism, and it’s so obscure really that not even other physicists understand it. So it’s kind of like postmodernism. It’s a lot of language and a lot of mathematics and, really, even within the field, people don’t understand each other.

I should mention it’s a very small and a very select group of people who are leading string theorists. I would say maybe even as little as a few hundred people all over the world. They meet in very exclusive exotic locations for their conferences and they present work which I don’t know if others understand. It’s an obscuring of knowledge and obviously the ordinary person doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They themselves don’t know what they’re talking about and so the question is: Where do they get their authority from? If it’s not from knowledge, where do they draw their authority from? It’s from the ruling class of this country. 

It’s like a harkening back to the church. “We set the terms because we own this nation. We are going to set the terms of what is science, what is discourse and there’s not really any reason except the fact that we’re university professors and we’re tenured.” So that’s kind of where we are.

It’s really a social system that sustains all of this. There’s a lot of social signaling. You have to agree with certain things. You have to agree that China and Russia are oppressive, that North Koreans are crazy. You have to signal that you are socially liberal, and will not question the foreign policy of the U.S. or the work the department does to support it.

The scientists have exhausted themselves: they do not have a direction in the search for truth and they operate, as I already said, as henchmen for war. To be totally blunt, they must be held responsible for what is happening in Gaza right now because a lot of the technology that is being used there, that has been used across the world, comes from these university departments, whether people choose to accept it or not. 

So where do we stand now? I believe that the academy, the American university, is incapable of taking us forward. The Western academy, in this time, has compromised the legacy of the Enlightenment which it inherited. And so we must look elsewhere, and the question is: Where do we look? 

I think that there are two challenges to the Western academy that have arisen from within the trajectory of the Enlightenment: the first is the Soviet school of philosophy and science, and the second is the Black Radical Tradition, the main proponents of which are W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr. I believe that there are philosophical directions that can be pursued in both of these schools that could take us to a new stage in human knowledge, in human consciousness.

Let us take for example the question of the truth. How do you search for the truth? The Soviets would say well, you have to employ the dialectical method: the study of contradictions, the study of synthesis in this time. I feel that maybe they did not even realize the full implications of the dialectical method and indeed maybe you have to go to James Baldwin to see the full implications of the dialectical method in this time. So the dialectical method is not only about mechanisms, it’s not about structures; it’s about intuition and it’s about the dialectic between knowledge and the purpose of knowledge. You have to, to some extent, know the human being. You have to love the human being. Love is a prerequisite for knowledge. 

If I was saying this at a university seminar, I would be laughed at. The idea that love can be a part of your scientific framework is totally outside of the bounds of knowledge in this time. 

The other question which interests us is the study of the human being, and you can’t really understand the academy in this time unless you study the human being, because the scientists and their actions are not rational. They don’t behave in ways that are rational. It is the pathology of the scientist that one has to understand in this time: the human being created by McCarthyism, by the history that they’ve gone through, who does this kind of science day in and day out, and tells themselves a lie. And who else can explain it except James Baldwin?

I feel that the study of the human being is one of the central questions of this time and it is in this context also that the academy is pushing artificial intelligence upon humanity. What a strange and horrific way to discard the human being. In one sweep you’re going to say we can reproduce the human being in machine? I think it tells you something about how the professoriate think about themselves. What do they think about their own humanity, if they think a machine can reproduce the scientific work that they engage in? 

The other thing is that you have to study them as people, and if you go to one of these university departments and you meet these professors, you see them as weak. They’ve exhausted themselves and you can see that they’re not capable of even holding down a conversation on philosophical terms, much less training the next generation of scientists. 

So I think this is where I’ll end, but I think the ideas of postmodernism have affected scientific inquiry in this time. They have created a kind of human being that is not worthy of teaching young people; but also young people, I think, can see that they don’t want to be like them. That’s a good thing and I don’t think we should reproduce these human beings.

So just to end I want to read out something by Paul Robson, because you know he’s also addressing Western science, and really he’s living through a time when Western science is moving forward. But I think when we read him today it has different implications for us, maybe even more stringent implications for us. 

He says, “I’m not going to belittle the achievements of science. Only a fool would deny that the man who holds the secret to those holds the key position in the world. I’m simply going to ask—having found the key, has Western man—Western bourgeois man—sufficient strength left to turn it in the lock? Or is he going to find that in the search he has so exhausted his vitality that he will have to call in the cooperation of his more virile ‘inferiors’—Eastern or Western—before he can open the door and enter into his Heritage?”