My old friend, Aelian De Silva, Chartered Electrical Engineer in his role as a nationalist, has taken issue with me on whether modern science and technology can be acquired in Sinhala. He cites a series of achievements in technology accomplished by our ancestors in the Middle Ages. When a series of changes takes place in a short period of time, unlike any other period in history, we say there is a new phenomenon- a revolution, where there is a change in substance rendering the old order, is no longer valid. The changes in technology which took place in the West during the 17th century are considered as the Industrial Revolution. It was preceded by the Scientific Revolution inaugurated by men like Galileo and Isaac Newton. The momentum generated during this period is still going on and innovations continue. Can one compare the isolated instances of technology change in the East, in China or India or Sri Lanka comparable to this situation? Aren’t the latter more like flashes in the pan?

There is another difference in the scientific and technological revolutions in the West. The changes in technology in the West were based on the changes in science. It is true that in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the changes in technology were limited and the inventions of James Hargreaves and others in the cotton spinning and weaving industry did not require an understanding of science. But nuclear energy, the atom bomb etc., are direct applications of modern physics pioneered by Einstein. The changes in technology in the East were not based on any science as such. Science and the scientific method developed only in the West.

Western philosophers had since the days of the Greeks accepted the existence of an objective external world which although different from our observations could be subject to experimentation and analysis. Eastern religions had denied the existence of an objective reality outside one’s mind. As Dr. Nalin De Silva says every week, the world is only a creation of the mind and the world can be understood only by analyzing the mind and not any external phenomena. It is not a question of which world view is true. What I am saying is that with such a world view, there is no rationale for studying the external world since it doesn’t exist. So there is no non-western science as people understand science. "Science is a special activity or mode of knowledge by which man relates to reality, from the perspective of the truth, truth here meaning somehow getting at reality as it is."

Whether an Eastern science based on the Eastern world view will emerge or not remains to be seen. The success, of western science and its acceptance by India and China, Japan, etc, is due essentially to its sustained application to technology which has brought on prosperity for their peoples.

The adoption of western science and technology requires a cultural revolution as China realized. It is no accident that Deng Tsiao Ping appeared only after the Cultural Revolution spearheaded by Mao TseTung. This Cultural Revolution led to the denigration of Confucian culture. We witness in several countries the revival of ethnic religious revivalism and religious fundamentalism. Their leaders have used post-modernist theory to defend their cultural sovereignty.

  For thousands of years, economies in the ancient world stagnated. There was no perceptible growth in Output or GDP as the studies of Angus Madison have shown. It was only with the Industrial Revolution that there has been rapid economic growth and there is now a distinct possibility of overcoming poverty for the first time in world history. But economic development must be driven by changes in technology. The human mind has emerged as the all important resource, not natural resources. But the human mind must be released from the shackles that have bound them in the name of tradition.