Opinion
Science in the Middle East: A key investment
In light of the Arab Spring, there lies a new potential for investment and work
in the sciences in the Middle East.
Daniel Hind Last Modified: 30 Apr 2011 13:06
In the New Scientist, the Nobel laureate and US Science Envoy Ahmed Zewali
writes about the prospects for research in the Middle East. He identifies three
steps that countries in the region can take and sketches the terms on which the
West should provide assistance. The three steps are:
1. Increase participation by promoting literacy and female emancipation.
2. Institute reforms "to allow freedom of thought, reduce bureaucracy,
minimise bureaucracy, reward merit, and create credible - and enforceable -
legal codes".
3. Create centres of excellence to show that "Muslims can compete in today's
globalised economy and to instill in the youth the desire for learning".
The West should assist, first and foremost by creating partnerships. Aid is
also a possibility, "but only under certain circumstances". Rather than funding
individual projects, "better results can be achieved by directing a significant
fraction of the assistance to programmes of excellence selected to build up
both infrastructure and human resources". The West should also avoid giving
support to undemocratic regimes; "in the long run it is far better to be on the
side of the people, not on the side of a dictator".
Zawali concludes his article by pointing out that "knowledge-based societies
are better equipped to be part of the world economy. They will also contribute
to progress and enlightenment, and hence peaceful coexistence and a more
civilised and truly global humanity".
There are indeed glittering prospects for science in the Middle East. The
revolutionary mobilisation in Egypt and elsewhere looks very much like an
attempt to describe the world accurately in societies that have been forced to
pretend that two plus two is five for decades. Dictatorship and science do not
sit well together.
But science will only take off in any country now if the desire to know, to
understand, and to improve our conditions in the here and now, is freed from
the bonds of both state and corporate power. The assumptions and procedures of
science in the West have long been shaped by military and commercial
imperatives. The scientific establishment has accepted these shaping
constraints, reluctantly or enthusiastically, but they have had little choice
in the matter.
But it is now possible to sketch the outlines of a more thoroughly
participatory science, in which the objectives of research, if not the details
of method, are discussed openly by an interested public. I've described such a
system here, in the New Scientist. In Europe and the United States, an
oligarchy of experts has managed science and governed the distribution of funds
in accordance with the needs of powerful institutions. Science has delivered
great public benefits - but it has been forced to concentrate on creating goods
that can be sold for profit or on developing weapons of ever more astonishing
lethality.
Middle East potential
The Middle East has in its power to make science anew, as the conscious and
rational means by which our desires for a safe and prosperous world can be
realised. Learn from the West, certainly - but note that science here is
silting up, becoming removed from any defensible account of what we need and
want. The commodity and the crime of war engross our brightest minds and
distract them from important business. There is another way, that takes
decisions about the ends of science away from politicians and bureaucrats and
gives them to the people as a whole.
If science is to serve the public then the public must take the power to
determine its objectives. People will complain that the public do not know what
they need. But does the Pentagon know? Does Pfizer know? And besides, power is
a great teacher.
The aim of science should not be to create things that are expensive, but that
people can be persuaded to buy. And science should not be the plaything of
generals. Science must now seek to make the necessities of life as cheap as
possible, to make them free, even, so that we can devote more of our time to
the importance business of learning and having fun and being free. The
alternative is a world of ever more opulence that fewer and fewer of us can
afford, a nightmare of fictitious scarcity and very real violence.
The peoples of the Middle East are on the brink of a new era of discovery and
intellectual excitement, perhaps. I hope very much that they are. There is
youth there, and hope and the incipient genius that comes from the knowledge
that they are right - that their regimes will have to change, that the truth
will triumph at last over lies.
If that spirit takes them forward then it will do more than enable their
countries "to compete in today's globalised economy". That spirit, the spirit
we saw in Tahrir Square, that has said no dictatorship and no lies, may yet
save the world.
Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is the author of two
well-acclaimed books: The Return of the Public and The Threat to Reason. He is
also a regular contributor to The Guardian.
Follow him on Twitter: @danhind
Hind's 'The Return of the Public' was first published by Verso, the UK
publishing house.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:
Al Jazeera
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