Light in a black hole

Eco argued that ‘‘science’’ needs to be rescued from popular confusions and fashionable specters. All too often, it is wrongly held responsible for the ‘‘devilish pride’’ that is said to be leading humanity towards destruction. It is confused with technology and with ‘‘irresponsible technologies’’ in particular, say of atomic weapons.

Science is also unfairly identified with certain idealistic philosophies of the 19th century. According to these, all history is a story of ‘‘progress’’, an inexorable forward march. In other words, such a philosophy might propose that, because he came later, ‘‘Aristotle was more intelligent than Plato’’.

It is partly as a reaction to the crises in these ideologies of progress, suggested Eco, that many people today are reposing their faith in a conception of history which insists that the truth lies in going backwards—back to buried civilisations and dead ways of thought.

The writer argued that modern science could be a useful counter to the dangerous certitudes and fundamentalisms promoted by both conceptions of history. Because modern science is humble, it is based on the principle of ‘‘fallibilism’’. It progresses by ‘‘continually correcting itself, falsifying its hypotheses by trial and error’’. Modern science admits its own mistakes. Just like Stephen Hawking.

Watching Uma

‘‘A kind of lay nun’’ with a ‘‘gift for rabble-rousing’’ zips from being a ‘‘lousy’’ chief minister to a ‘‘rather good martyr’’ on the eve of a crucial assembly election. The Economist was sketching the curious scene of Uma Bharati’s sudden leap into the headlines. India’s main opposition party, it said, was in search of a cause and may just have been gifted one, make that two, including Savarkar. And Congressmen in Maharashtra mainly appear to wish that Arjun Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar would keep quiet.

Britain’s Financial Times was also watching Uma and reported that her Tiranga Yatra is aimed not so much at the people but at grass-root workers of the BJP, many of whom had been sullenly resentful of the party’s moderate platform in the last elections.

The FT plotted the BJP’s ‘‘sharp move to the right’’ since May. It saw a method in the party’s ‘‘apparent madness’’ as it sought to use the findings of the recent census—which demographer Ashish Bose told the paper was basically ‘‘a story of regions, with five northern states showing much higher growth than the rest of the country’’—to raise communal temperatures.

A unique protest

And what could Gandhi possibly do in a wearying conflict like the Middle East? This week in Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, Jonathan Cook counted out the reasons why he thought the Gandhian strategy of non-violent resistance does not carry to Gaza and the West Bank.

Cook was responding to the recent exhortation by the Mahatma’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, to the Palestinians to find new ways to resist Israeli military occupation. Gandhi and his supporters fail to realise, he argued, that a non-violent struggle requires specific conditions that are simply not present in this conflict.

According to Cook, those missing conditions are: That non-violence should carry with it a moral weight that makes violent retaliation unacceptable—Israel, on the other hand, has shown no compunction in using military force against unarmed citizens, even children. That the actions of the resistance must be collective and popular—but Palestinians are a completely fragmented population and Israel has encouraged their social, economic and ideological divisions. That the resistance should have the support and solidarity of left-wing groups within the oppressor nation—but in Israel, the politician-generals have neutered the Jewish left wing as forcefully as they have clamped down on Palestinian resistance.

For Cook, the colonial project planned by Israel’s politician-generals is unique. The resistance to it, therefore, cannot easily borrow from other vocabularies of protest. Not even Gandhi’s.