Opinion
I rather suspect that the fad for “indigenous maths and science” among Humanities academics is driven by their own inability to comprehend maths and science. Anyone can be a maths genius, after all, if your mathematics doesn’t involve counting past ten — twenty, if you take your shoes off.
And real science is really, really hard. It’s so much easier to explain an eclipse as “Oogabooga God angry!” than it is to wrap your head around stuff like orbital mechanics.
And it’s one thing to claim that there is no such thing as “truth” — quite another to prove it. Indeed, it’s logically impossible, as the claim that there is no truth is itself a truth claim. In other words, postmodernism is self-contradictory nonsense. No wonder “academics” love it.
The notion that postmodernism would stop at the walls of the hard sciences looks naive in retrospect. In recent years, efforts to “decolonise” the sciences have been successful in New Zealand with Maori “ways of knowing” to be taught alongside chemistry, physics and biology in science classrooms. Commenting on the New Zealand policy, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has described it as “pernicious nonsense”.
And that’s being charitable. The rest of us might describe it as “Stone Age fairytales”. Peddled by village idiots in blackface and borrowed labcoats.
To understand Dawkins’ ire, it’s worth digging a little deeper into what “decolonising science” actually means. It is an outgrowth of a larger push to “decolonise knowledge” inside the universities. Academics leading this movement explicitly reject the notion there are objective facts that can be discovered via rational or scientific inquiry.
And, rather than being a method to discover how the world works, such theorists argue Western science has been used as a tool to subjugate others.
Even the claim of “Western science” is stupid and self-contradictory. Firstly, because science is a universalist system: that is, scientific claims are true, whether one is male or female, gay or straight, Norwegian or Watusi. Throw a spear and its arc will follow the formula of y = xtan? – gx²/2v0²cos²?, no matter if it’s thrown by a Maori or a Anglo-Saxon.
Secondly, all science is in a very real sense “Western”, because science was invented in the West, and nowhere else. As physicist and historian of science Paul Davies has pointed out, if a large meteorite had struck Western Europe around the 13th century, it’s unlikely that true science would ever have evolved.
Few people seem to grasp just how unusual scientific thinking really is, for human beings. Even a great many practitioners of science don’t seem to be capable of fully grasping scientific thinking.
Hence, idiotic garbage like this:
Writing in The Conversation, academic Alex Broadbent, of the University of Johannesburg, argues: “There is African belief, and European belief, and your belief, and mine – but none of us have the right to assert that something is true, is a fact, or works, contrary to anyone else’s belief.”
The obvious retort to which is, “then you have no right to assert that any of that is true”.
But if we are to treat this claim seriously it takes us to some interesting destinations. It would mean ignoring modern medicine in favour of traditional healing practices when treating cancer or heart disease. It would mean denying the laws of physics that allow planes to fly safely, based on myths about human flight. And it would mean disregarding engineering standardsfor building safe bridges, roads and buildings, because such standards derive from colonial methods.
Please, don’t tempt them.
Or we’ll get more cretinous guff like this:
The Australian National University’s Mathematical Sciences Institute this month released a press statement about a special topics course in Indigenous mathematics. Course convener Rowena Ball is quoted as saying “Indigenous and First Nations peoples around the world are standing up and saying: ‘Our knowledge is just as good as anybody else’s why can’t we teach it to our children in our schools, and in our own way?’.” The press release also states that “Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in Indigenous mathematics”.
The Australian
In other words, it’s not mathematics at all.
Notably, a quick survey of Ball’s published papers shows a marked disinclination to prioritise “indigenous mathematics”.
It’s almost as if the professor is mouthing idiot platitudes she knows are a load of old bollocks, merely to pander to a few “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” KPIs.