Unity of Art & Science
RETHINKING APPROACHES TO DECOLONISING CURRICULUMS
Considering how late in the day we are in addressing the oneness in art and science disciplines, especially at ensuring successful environmental and corporate sustainability, it is necessary that we have all the resources it takes to hurriedly make amends and tackle climate crises. Considering the damage Macaulayism has done to colonies and continues to affect the world, there is much to be done.
Furthermore, it is important to know what we are up against — Competing and complex narratives and perspectives on sustainability, on integration, on race, on gender, on religion, on region, on culture and even on resources.
A coherent picture to delve into would be impractical unless we make deliberate and purposeful attempts to press on away from specialisations and instead, be willing to see the whole picture —the big picture. And the first step towards that would be by acknowledging the oneness in art and science. Until then it would be as fraught with danger as separating the mind from the body.
Now, the oneness in art and science disciplines is not as simple and common as the popular narrative: art helps express the science of things or art is the main medium of communication. It is much more complex than that.
To gauge how widespread and long-term the damage has been, consider these examples:
Now, since Sanskrit poetry presents very many complex properties, as walking a tight rope, how would poets compose, particularly because the text had to be passed down orally? Mathematics in India has roots in Vedic poetry, too. Set in motion by an emphatic insistence on sound, Sanskrit poetry, thanks to Hemachandra and Pingala, among other Ancients, inspired many mathematical discoveries. Poets wrote:
So, in terms of beats, when composing a verse, the question is: In how many ways could a poet fill n number of beats with long or dirgha (d) and short or laghu (l) syllables in a verse? The solution derived by Pingala translates:
The nth number gives the number of possible ways of d and l to fill n beats. The sequence is:
This is known as Pingala's mātrāmeru from 3rd BCE India and known in the West as Fibonacci numbers from the thirteenth century,
Therefore, if n= 5, (in terms of Shakespeare’s preferred metre) then the number of types of morae from five iambic beats
(five da-DUMs) would be eight.
Similarly, for syllabic rhythms, too, the solution was worked out, that is, how many types of syllabic rhythms comprising of monomoraic and bimoraic syllables could a poet compose for a verse of n syllables?
Pingala answers:
Drawing from these examples, one would not have to probe any further to appreciate the oneness in Art and Science. It is definitively indisputable and is not merely about expression and communication. The scale of damage that specialisation has brought about to the world in the light of climate crisis, therefore, would be more discernible and deductive now.
(a) in terms of number of beats, and
(b) in terms of number of syllabic rhythms.
• Write the numbers 1 and 2
• Each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two
If n = 10, then 2^10 allows 1024 possible rhythms. This is what was called Pingala’s Meruprastaram in Ancient India predating Pascal’s Triangle in the West by at least 1800 years.
RELEVANCE OF ART IN SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS
Futurist, Jamais Cascio said, “In a world of constant, imminent existential threats, the ability to recognise subtle, long-term processes and multi-generational changes wasn't a particularly important adaptive advantage.” Untrue! Today in the Anthropocene, the threats, indeed, are multi-generational and one that can no more be denied or delayed. So, let us look at some of the enduring differences between Art and Science subjects referred to in the Anthropocene:
The American Chemical Society (ACS) in their effort at helping people understand the difference between art and science subjects gets it horribly wrong,
And ACS differentiates thus while also rightly quoting the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci:
And in doing so, the folly in their approach is unmistakable. Also, in spelling out science’s role as one that is to, “develop practical solutions that address challenges, such as climate change” and art’s as one where “artists strive to evoke a sense of beauty or an emotional reaction through their work — whether it’s in dance, music, painting, or other art form” it sheds light either on the scientific community’s inability to fathom the concept of deep time or the community’s arrogance and/or insecurity in acknowledging the profound role art plays, among other things, in addressing societal challenges, and in this context, climate change.
Naturalist E. O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge points out,
The oneness in the humanly separated disciplines is unfathomable even for Wilson, as he recommends consilience.
The academic fragmentation is at its pinnacle today and the damage done over centuries, of the illusion of separateness, would take continuous and purposeful efforts to minimise the conditioning it has brought about in people, to even begin repair work.
As sociologist Elise M. Boulding pointed out, we are suffering from “temporal exhaustion”. She had said,
It is crucial to take note here that the operative word is imagining, and imagination is both about art and science, as well as about a future that holds numerous questions: what is tomorrow? Will there be a tomorrow?
According to geologist Marcia Bjornerud Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and 'conceiving of time' as a geologist would do can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.
“There are certainly key differences between doing science and making art. The goal of science is to create new understanding of how the world works and develop practical solutions that address challenges, such as climate change. Artists strive to evoke a sense of beauty or an emotional reaction through their work—whether it’s in dance, music, painting, or other art form. Science is designed to be objective and guided by data; art is subjective and deeply influenced by feelings and opinions.”
"To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science. … The key to the exchange between them is … reinvigoration of interpretation with the knowledge of science and its proprietary sense of the future. Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts...
"Behind Shakespeare, Leonardo, Mozart and others in the foremost rank are a vast legion whose realized powers form a descending continuum to those who are merely competent. ... What the masters of the Western canon, and those of other high cultures possessed in common was a combination of exceptional knowledge, technical skill, originality, sensitivity to detail, ambition, boldness, and drive. … Even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them."
“If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”
ACKOWLEDGING THE SCIENTIFIC MERIT IN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Indigenous Knowledge refers to understandings, skills, and philosophies developed by local communities with long histories and experiences of interaction with their natural surroundings, according to the UNESCO's programme on Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS).
Professor David K. Harrison’s book titled When Languages Die is a revelation, in that it sheds light on how the scientific community, what he particularly calls Western Science, ignores the indigenous knowledge and how the compartmentalisation of study fields prevents accepting and exploring indigenous knowledge that are vital to our existence.
In an interview, Professor Harrison says: “Harvard Biologist E. O. Wilson has pointed out that something like 80% of the plant and animal species in the world have not yet been 'discovered' by scientists.”
Harrison here implies that Western Science and Scientists' approach Knowledge and People of the rest of the world as if they are ignorant, uncultivated or insignificant. The West's such limiting approach, highlights their own ignorance and damaging perspective of Science, which unfortunately continues to perpetuate this highly disastrous ignorance and foolishness throughout the world.
Harrison continues to shed light on such statements by Western Scientists. He points out that when making claims that 80% of plant and animal species remain unknown to mankind it only means that the unknowns species haven’t been taxonomised within the system of science perpetuated by the West and forced on everybody else.
He says, “If you go in and talk to indigenous people they do know intimately the plants and animals in their ecological niche and they understand how they fit into a holistic system: what are the dependencies among them, the interactions, the various interlocking cycles. So there is an immense body of scientific knowledge out there. You could call it folk scientific knowledge as long as you don’t intend to downplay it by calling it folk knowledge because in some cases their ways are more sophisticated than how (Western) Science classifies them.”
Harrison, having spend considerable amount of time with the speakers of many endangered languages, speaks of the Tofalar people of Siberia who are reindeer herders.
Further, Professor Harrison shares another example. He speaks of the Halkomelem Musqueam people, who are river-based people and their knowledge of fish in their region is unrivalled. Halkomelem Musqueam people live in Canada's British Columbia province.
We, as people of the world, knowingly or unknowingly are moving into homogeneity without stocktaking the perils that come with this. Professor Harrison is a linguist and an anthropologist and according to him and many other linguists who have been fighting to protect, conserve, sustain and decode indigenous languages and together with it their knowledge and oral tradition we do not have time enough to save the rapidly eroding languages, which are likely to halve from the now 7000 languages known to us by the end of the century.
“I don’t want to say that the indigenous knowledge is always more specific or always right but we should at least entertain the possibility that in it is the product of millennia of close observation of nature- a kind of experimentation, not the one that scientists do in labs but a lived experience kind of an experiment and so it can be more sophisticated and precise than what science knows,” says Professor Harrison
Professor Harrison attributes this attitude and degradation to the colonial paradigm, “ It goes all the way back to captain Cook and his voyages around the world. He had naturalists and botanists on this important trip with him and they “discovered” species everywhere they went but what they were really doing was getting rid of the native knowledge of plants and animals.”
What is alarming is that according to him even to this day the discovery paradigm continues. This knowledge gap, according to his is in our disfavour. "Much of the knowledge is held by indigenous people in endangered languages and it is eroding very rapidly.”
Further, our knowledge repertoire appears to be eroding at a rapid pace, and as a result knowledge development process is falling into a uniformity trap where “information” is increasingly replacing intergenerational, intragenerational and transgenerational experiences and knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable climate solutions. Indigenous knowledge exists amid us in oral literary form, folk art forms such as songs, dance, craft and so on but is often dismissed by mainstream, particularly, scientists of the West as primitive superstition and myth and seldom recognised as knowledge:
“They have a very intricate classification for reindeer. You can utter a single word in Tofa. So if I say the word Chary, it meant 5-year old, castrated rideable reindeer. Now I can express that concept in English but English does not provide us a neatly packaged concept that captures all of the parameters of reindeerhood. They have figured this out because their survival has depended on this. And you can also show cases where scientific knowledge held in indigenous communities is ahead of what western science knows.”
In his book Professor Harrison asks, what has been lost in translation? "Efficiency of information packaging."
These Halkomelem speakers who traditionally are fishermen and hunter-gatherers, he says, “There are four fish types they group together under a single label but in our English folk classification we call two of those fish salmon and the other two trout.
"So from our English point of view we can easily say that the Musqueam people got it wrong except that when a genetic study was done in the 1990s it was discovered that genetically the two fish belonged to the same species. The Western taxonomy had, in fact, got it wrong.”
Professor Harrison argues that he wouldn't pin down geneticists to assume that any folk taxonomy gets its genetic facts right, but that they ought at least to consider the possibility.
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India’s Chipko Andolan of the 1970s was one of the first successful ecological movements in the world. It was led by the indigenous people of Uttarakhand, mainly women
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A study that explored the history of the Amazon Rainforest found that indigenous people “coexisted with, and helped maintain, large expanses of relatively unmodified forest” for millennia … "Some propose that human influences played strong roles in the enrichment of ‘hyperdominant’ trees” that now dominate the forest were planted by prehistoric human inhabitants.
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A more recent example is the unfortunate and tragic— The European colonisation of Americas, which witnessed systemic destruction of indigenous knowledge systems, genocide, and abuse.