8 - Science and Governance

Summary

What is necessary for building a well-functioning state? The answers, of course, are various, and are often enshrined in constitutions – the principles or laws that define and govern particular nations. In India one such constitutional principle is the notion of scientific temper, which is presented as one of the ten central duties of citizens. ‘This clause’, explain Anwesha Chakraborty and Poonam Pandey, ‘makes embracing scientific and rational thinking and ways of life a duty and responsibility of Indian citizens’. Based on the work and writings of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, scientific temper is:

[T] he scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems.

Indian citizens are thus expected to embrace not just science and its applications, but the mindset that is understood as tied to it: critical thinking, the capacity to change one's mind, the rejection of irrationality and ‘religious temper’ (which Nehru framed as the opposite of scientific temper). Science is thus constitutionally central to citizenship. Similarly, in 2009 the then-new President Obama promised to put science in its ‘rightful place’ in US society and politics. In both cases, the assumption is that science is central to society, the state, and to politics, and that its ‘rightful place’ is at the heart of the political system, speaking truth to power. Indeed, for some commentators science and democracy are intimately connected, sharing central values such as rationality and working in constant support of one another. In this view one cannot have one without the other.