Science and Technology in the Transformation of the World

On the morning of Monday 26 October, the participants proceeded by coach into Belgrade’s Old City to the Secretariat of the University for the formal opening ceremony of the symposium.

“Consider a typical country said to need ‘to be developed’. It’s probably of medium size, with a relatively large population; it has several natural resources that permit it a relative fmancial affluence and a genuine will to consolidate its political independence and to supply its economy with the means for autonomous growth. To these ends it is ready to set aside a not-inconsiderable portion of its foreign-exchange earnings in order to finance the importation of modern science and technology. And after a while this country realises that the conditions of a new dependence are being forged by means of technology transfer, the acquisition of prefabricated factories, even by means of technical assistance aimed at training the country’s own experts. From the difficulties involved in setting up a nation-wide engineering establishment capable both of mastering scientific and technical imports and of preserving one’s freedom of choice on the world market, the country realises that in order really to make use of the imported types of knowledge it would almost have been necessary to be able to produce them oneself. To use a comparison, the importation of science and technology acts rather as a drug upon which the country becomes dependent, and not as a form of nourishment for autonomous development.

If the first session of the conference developed the themes of globalisation and of the reciprocal interaction of science, technology and society, and if it likewise advanced the demand that the great potentials of science and technology should be integrated into social struggles for democratic rights, then this second session may be said to have followed a pattern according to which these various threads were woven together into a single design. The dominant motif of the session thus rightfully lay in defining a realistic strategy by which the underdeveloped countries — whose peoples, of course, comprise the vast majority of the population of the globe — would be able to overcome the present cruelly unequal distribution of power over the material, and especially the technological, resources of the world.

On Tuesday afternoon the conference heard three presentations which, from quite distinct points of view, evoked some of the complex aspects of interaction between a society as a whole and the various individuals who together make it up. In a session entitled ‘Biology, medicine and the future of mankind’ one was reminded that both biological theory and medical practice have to a significant extent been marked by a peculiar fixation on the individual organism. Such fixations, however, may be said to have been outdated by developments in both fields; and — almost the same way as in physics — considerations of a more general (and in this case usually social) character must be invoked in order to properly understand and deal with phenomena which surpass the bounds of that which was formerly taken as ‘typical’ or ‘normal’. At the same time, however, it is also clear that this fixation on ‘the individual’ (often connected with the name of Virchow) has by no means prevented constant depersonalisation of the doctor-patient relationship; neither has it prevented the utilisation of biological knowledge for purposes of increasing the uniformisation not only of animal and plant cultures, but also of human behaviour. After reading through the papers in this session, one might perhaps say that what they are calling for, then, is a heightened respect for individuality that is rooted both in enhanced forms of socialisation at several distinct levels and in an awareness of what are often social determinants of biological phenomena.

This fourth session focused mainly on control over geocultural space and geopolitical power, rather than over energy resources and the interplanetary regions. The key theme which underlay this session, negatively determining it and, indeed, placing it at the heart of the entire conference, was that of hegemony — the predominant control exercised by one or more foreign powers over the principal forms of the social life of a nation. The reader will have noticed that during the previous sessions criticism was repeatedly levelled against Eurocentric conceptions of the world; Drs Lefebvre, Štambuk and Mori, in particular, each formulated important objections from their own points of view. These objections were later to be further developed by several detailed expositions in the fifth session. Now, Eurocentrism can perhaps best be viewed as a particularly acute articulation of hegemony in the ideological sphere, and its force can be gauged by the extent to which it even penetrates mentalities about such supposedly ‘objective’ subjects as science and technology. Criticism of Eurocentric notions is undoubtedly an essential part of the struggle against hegemonic relations in the world today. However, a part should not be taken for the whole. Quite apart from the fact that many peoples within the European cultural area itself continue to be held in a state of dependence and poverty, how illusory it would be to think that the inequalities in the world are simply the results of narrow prejudices, misconceptions and ungrounded ideas. These inequalities are rather grounded in and embody a system of power relations, and hegemonic power lies at the heart of this system.