Science, Scientism, and the Liberal Arts
In much of the developing world today, particularly among countries populated by Muslim majorities, a dreadful ideological disease has erupted, spreading as an epidemic through several generations already. Arising out of presumptuousness, if not arrogance, as well as historical privation, if not cultivated ignorance, this is the disease of the conflation of science with scientism, a conflation that corrodes the faculty of imagination and critical thought of the inflicted, and eats up that very cultural space which provides for the free expression of ideas. The result is a fateful irony: the ostensible cry of scientism is “more science”! But scientism kills science! What is left is an ocean of electronic gadgetry, NMR machines, laboratories, technicians, computer programmers and a young generation with no cultural bearings, no cultural anchorage and a future utterly contingent upon the fluctuations of market forces: now rising, now falling.
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Syed Nomanul Haq
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