On Dissent

   Always get your expectations right. That’s what they say. That’s why when it was announced that the forum will be about William of Occam and the lecture was really off, I was having doubts as to whether I was in the right room hall or not. Maybe I was in the right location, but the location itself has shifted to a parallel dimension. Regardless of what the actual state of affairs is, a short entry had to be written. Since not much information about Occam has been presented by the lecturer, aside from saying that Occam was persecuted, the topic had to change. Aligning myself to the lecturer’s topic, this entry will be about dissent and cultural change.

   As a background for understanding dissent and cultural change, he presented an introduction on Medieval Science. Apparently, the zeitgeist was like the The Script album: the struggle was between scientia (science) or episteme vs. doxa (opinion or faith). Politics and religion also had a pull on science. Credibility was measured by your authority. Proof didn’t matter if you did not hold a position of power. In addition, it was also heavily philosophical, and therefore relied more on logic than on empirical observations and data. The Medieval period was all about change. They wanted to know what changed and what remained constant, since the entities and relationships that remain constant are those that are from God and by God.

   Since this approach was terribly lacking, scientists had to engage in dissension. Dissent is basically, not consenting. No consensus is made. You do not agree. In this context, it is the breaking away from the current ideologies and ways of approaching science. Scientists who were involved in the dissension saw that in order to obtain knowledge (in spite of what the skeptics argue), they had to evolve. Using mathematical proofs derived from observing nature, they presented their different theories. Much like what Galileo did. And like Galileo, who was put on house arrest and whose work was made null and passed off as a mere intellectual exercise and void of all truth, many dissenters were persecuted, especially since it proved the officials in the higher echelons of power were mistaken and that their beliefs were inconsistent with what is actually the current natural state of affairs. 

   But because of this dissension, we achieved cultural change. With the changing of the mind-set from being authority-oriented to being proof-oriented, we are able to arrive at the current form of the scientific community. Valuing empirical data over authority paid off, causing great advances in science and technology. One current issue though, is the ethical issue still. Even if we are no longer being dictated what knowledge is (to some extent), there is still the issue of not stepping on the rights of others. 

   Changing mind-sets and shifting mental paradigms will allow us reach for cultural change. So the question is: “What mind-sets can we use in order to progress, given the Philippine context (while dodging the propaganda and the mind-sets that are being fed to us by first-world, capitalist countries)?”

John Paul N. Ada

2010 - 46567