5.3 The Ideology of Power Epistemology
Knowledge is never neutral, it never exists in an empiricist, objective relationship to the real. Knowledge is power, and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution of power. The discursive power to construct a common sense reality that can be inserted into cultural and political life is central in the social relationship of power. (Fiske, 1989, p.149-150)
5.3.1 Issues of Power
It was perhaps in the17th century that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) first formalized a well-articulated theory of what I shall hereafter refer to as ‘patriarchal epistemology’. In essence Bacon was promoting a masculine version of the scientific knowledge that would lead to the conquest, control, and domination of nature (Laura & Heaney, 1990). In his Novum Organum (1620) he explicitly stated that ‘knowledge’ is power over nature’. Similarly, in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the production of new knowledge is always a form of efficient and effectiveimplication of power (Glaeser, 2003). In The Will to Power(1968, p.266) Nietzsche says: “Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power”. The point of construing knowledge as a form of power is that power provides the material advancement of human beings, and thus it is presumed that the more scientific knowledge we gain, the more control we have over the world around us. According to the constructivists, this is a view held by traditional theorists of ‘pre-Enlightenment’ philosophy, and itself as truth in the minds of some, ‘pre-reason-based philosophers’ of old. This position is quite different from Nietzsche’s early constructivist account which holds that knowledge is what is taken and conditionalized as knowledge through real life experience (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Glaeser, 2003). Michel Foucault and postmodern feminists claimed that ‘truth seeking’ is merely a socio-political instrument for domination, control and repression which should be substituted for pedagogic practices with a social dimension (Goldman, 1999). Foucault (1979) believed that the practices of social domination provide the site for the elaboration of scientific knowledge (ibid).
Bacon’s impact on the notion that knowledge is power has been significant. Because knowledge not unlike our view of reality, is an artificially socio-cultural construct (institutions, practices, beliefs, etc.), whose primary rationale is power and dominance. In China the government has invoked strategies of control, policies of subjugation and domination, with its insistence on sovereignty and hegemonic rule. These interpretations of cultural hegemony formed in a well-organized array of written and oral communications, moving down hierarchically from the party leadership, to the ministries in Beijing, to the local and regional officials, and ultimately, to peripheral magistrates. Since knowledge is mediated as a form of power and control, the more control we have of the world around us, the more secure we feel in it, or so Bacon, Nietzsche, and Foucault supposed (Laura and Cotton, 1998 & 2010). This being so, the “Will to knowledge” has quite literally transferred into the “Will to Power.” It is within this context that the ‘knowledge equals power’ argument has had a massive impact on the Chinese mainstream pedagogic position at every level. Postmodernists such as Foucault believe that knowledge is actually inseparable from power, for whenever we gain knowledge about something, we simultaneously improve our position on how to use ‘what we know’ to our own advantage. In this sense many countries, including China, turn knowledge into a form of empowering rhetoric. Knowledge can thus serve the purpose of political propaganda by creating a political discourse which then becomes the narrative by way of which knowledge is pragmatically exemplified to some power advantage. Exercising power is partly a process of unveiling of multiple discourse of knowledge at the right time (Narotzky, 2005). Within a discourse, knowledge is subject to the same rules of discursive control as determined by vested interests of power (Bruguier, 2008). We thus politicize our power over the environment and over each other by institutionalizing political goals as a discourse of vested interest. In that sense, epistemology is enfolded into political discourse as the medium for power and control (Kasman, 2003).
Part of the problem is that the epistemology of power has encouraged the presumption that the empirical model of scientific knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that there are many ways of ‘knowing’ which are not captured by the highly empiricist cannons of science, though its status pedagogically indicates otherwise. In many cases, for example, the competitors to scientific knowledge are systematically denied a place on the winner’s platform precisely because scientific knowledge has been given a priority throughout the globe which has led to its establishment institutionally as the ultimate or only truly objective discourse of knowledge. Power epistemology has itself become the arbiter of all knowledge. The intellectual imperialism of the West has in fact influenced the whole of the developed and developing world to adopt in one way or another the ideology of scientific materialism. This being so, virtually all technologized cultures has been mesmerized by the institutional politicization of this one particular discourse of knowledge, as if it were the only form knowledge could take. Several assumptions are presupposed by this dominant epistemological framework, but to keep this final chapter within manageable bounds, I shall focus only on two misguided presuppositions which have sued to legitimate the political discourse of power in ways which transcend reason.
- Knowledge is neither good nor bad in itself. What determines the value of knowledge, on this view, depends entirely upon how it is used.
- Technology, which is in essence a form of ‘applied knowledge,’ is in turn characterized as ‘value-free’ or ‘politically neutral’. It is what we do with technology that determines its value, so the argument goes.
5.3.2 The Epistemology of Power Politics and the Marginalization of Moral Discourse
Our emerging understanding of the socio-cultural evolution of knowledge-based technologized societies in both the East and the West involves, as we have now seen, making explicit a dominant epistemological tenet, namely, that “Knowledge is tantamount to Power”. I have argued that science, and the technology that derives from it, have ascended to a position of ideological dominance and politically vested interest. The relationship of science with the public has become conditioned and shaped by the ideological and political dimensions of the epistemology of power (Driver et al., 2000). From this it follows that the dominant conceptual approach to the technoligization of nature and thus to dam construction has been motivated by a particular theory of knowledge which is characterized by mankind‘s obsession with power, dominance and control. The affirmation of knowledge has in essence itself become an act of power. Development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) is, in many ways, a clear expression within China of the government’s ideological legitimation of its mismanagement of human rights associated with its ambitious engineering projects. This being so, the Chinese government has been able to exert control over the displacement of millions of people, with impunity (Kibreab, 2000; Oliver-Smith, 2001). To be forcedly dislocated is one of the most acute forms of disempowerment, because it constitutes the ultimate loss of control over one’s autonomy. As Margaret Rodman (1992, p.650) so incisively notes, “The most powerless people have no place at all.”
By showing that knowledge is value-laden and power-driven, we have seen that it is one of the most virulent forms of legitimized violation of human rights yet devised. Our discourse analysis has exposed the reality of dehumanization brought about by the epistemology of power. In the service of ‘the national good,’ we have been led to believe that political decisions such as the Three Gorges Dam will liberate us form poverty and bring happiness, without acknowledging the additional human suffering caused to achieve it. The lives of millions of people have been destroyed by the politics of exclusion and disenfranchisement (Bruguier, 2008). On this account of the value-ladeness of epistemology, there is no doubt that it is not merely the knowledge about what truth is, or of a how we can come to know the world in innocence. Instead, it is a political battle ground in which dominated participants are often from development agencies, research institutions including universities, consulting firms, and engineering companies (Gellert & Lynch 1993; Glenn, 2004). They help decision-makers to identify and assess possible solutions and outcomes (Gellert & Lynch 1993), but when all is said, they are excluded from the decision-making. Those “professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area” form “epistemic community” (Hass, 1992, p.3). Epistemic communities are rarely equal in terms of power distribution, especially for the epistemic communities selected deliberately by decision-makers with fixed political preferences. Gellert & Lynch (2003) explained the political mechanisms by way of which this unequal power regarding decision making among different members of the epistemic community are processed. Disparities in hierarchical ranking are implicitly made manifest by higher level authorities who control when a person is permitted to take part in the planning process. They write: and how it relates to the timing of them being brought into the project process:
Those who enter the process early are in a better position to raise questions about a project’s value; but the gestation phase is dominated by optimistic technical staff, largely engineers. Economists are brought in to do cost–benefit analyses which could be used to rank competing yet similar projects but which are more often used for project justification. Only when political and financial commitment is secure are social and natural scientists brought in to do social and environmental impact assessment. Where NGOs and community groups are included as ‘stakeholders’, they have traditionally been brought into the project process late and in a relatively powerless position. Gellert & Lynch (2003, p.21)
Epistemic communities and their knowledge contribution thereby become political tools in which unfavorable policy options are principally excluded. As Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow summarize the idea:
Political technologies advance by taking what is essentially a political problem, removing it from a realm of political discourse, and recasting it in the neutral language of science. Once this is accomplished the problems have become technical ones for specialists to debate. In fact, the language of reform is, from the outset, an essential component of these political technologies (quoted in Goldman, 1999, p.33)
Just like Dujiangyan reflects the Daoist philosophy of acting in according with the order of nature, the TGDP represents the Maoist/Communist (and Confucian) approach of subduing nature. The TGDP symbolizes the tragedy of the profound political insinuation of a seemingly innocent form of knowledge gone wrong. As Mao Zedong and in more recent decades, the former Premier of China, Li Peng have made manifestly clear, the construction of this largest hydroelectric power station in the world was intended to serve politically as a symbol to the world of the emergence of the awakening political and economic ‘giant’, China, the new ‘superpower,’ The Three Gorges Dam is a symbol of the power of China’s technology to produce a dam construction with a magnitude of water control unequalled on earth. The decision of building large dams like the Three Gorges Dam was made by a small group of elites with bureaucratic, political and economic power. The dams enable those elites to regulate the river for their own benefit, while and at the same time depriving some or all rights of access to the common riverine peasants who suffered displacement to ensure the dam’s construction. “The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Booichin, 2005, p.65). The domination of rivers through dam construction is probably the clearest illustration of the close link between the power over nature and the power over people (Laura & Cotton, 2002; McCully, 2002). The power of China’s government to make it happen, despite the protestations of researchers from around the world is a demonstration of its unbridled political power. But this is the same power that has left displaced, alienated, and desolate more than a million people who were homeless swept aside in its wake. Underpinning the political decision-making has been a ‘hidden-agenda’ itself ideology defined by the epistemology of power. One expression of political power is “the ability to move people and things about the landscape in any way you see fit” (Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.13). According to Laura’s critique of the Epistemology of Power, the problem is that the dominant paradigm of knowledge is motivated by the obsession of mankind with power, so power, not empathy, becomes the ultimate value which knowledge propagates by its deployment (Stapledon & Crossle, 1997; Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010; Patterson, 2001).
It is true that the Three Gorges Dam is politically applauded for several innovations. First, it is hailed as being the largest dam in the world, and second, it is touted as being capable of producing far more energy than any of the other major dams scattered around the globe (Allin, 2004; Gleick, 2008). Last but not least, it has unashamedly been exalted with pride as the most expensive construction project in the world (Kite, 2010; Hyde, 2012). The question I have posed and at least in part answered in this thesis is whether the price paid in terms of environmental destruction, humanitarian suffering, and ‘cultural genocide’ as I have called it, is a moral price worth paying. The phenomenon of the Three Gorges Dam is, as I have argued earlier, fundamentally a political one, driven by the obsession with power which supersedes the humane interests of the more than one million people who have been displaced to achieve this (Oliver-Smith, 2001).
Despite the protracted debate surrounding the Three Gorges Project, there has been little chance of resolving the issues, because the fundamental epistemological presumptions which give rise to the disparity in values-orientation underpinning the debate have remained elusive. The epistemological dimensions of the debate thus far have only been implicit. Although the moral consequences of the TGDP have not been teased out sufficiently in the Chinese public arena, I have argued that the deleterious environmental and social impacts of the Three Gorges Project are incontestable and can better be understood as representing the inevitable outcome of an engineering pedagogy based upon a misguided epistemology of power and control (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010).
Outside of its institutional monopoly and the vested structural interests which have been fostered to protect it, scientific knowledge is just one possible form of knowledge amongst many. Some philosophers would argue, for example, that moral sensibility – knowing what is right or wrong — cannot be generated from an epistemology of science which is in any case determinately empiricist, being rigidly delimited by its quantitative calculus of testability (see, for example, Empathetic Education 1998, The Paradigm Shift in Health 2009 and The New Social Disease 2010 by R.S. Laura et al.). Whatever the outcome of the debate on such matters, it is clear that the priority given to scientific knowledge is more a cultural and political phenomenon than a philosophically legislated truth. In eastern cultures different concepts of knowledge, for example, have been, and in some cases still are given a cultural priority akin to the status accorded to scientific knowledge in the West.
The point of these deliberations is to help us understand that the form of knowledge which has dominated in the West has been selected from amongst a range of possible forms of knowledge, but its failure to recognize its limitations has led to its epistemic arrogance. Science/technology-society interactions concern scientific and technological developments in their economic, environmental, ethical, social and political contexts (Pedretti, 2005). And through the exchange of resources, information, and knowledge, science technology and society are mutually dependent and connected (Kolstø, 2008). The point of these deliberations is to help us understand that the growing impact of scientific knowledge and research upon society, reflect the impact which cultural, social and political scenarios have on scientific knowledge and the development projects which depend on them (ibid). The rules in charge of the production process of scientific knowledge are a function as constitutive values in science, which also relate to institutional and political aspects of science ((Longino, 1983; Kolstø, 2008). Power epistemology occupies this special status because it encapsulates and enshrines a value, quite independent of its application, which reflects the materialist disposition of the western psyche more accurately than other aspirants to the epistemic crown. Of the many forms of knowledge available to the human mind, that is to say, the western world has chosen a form of knowledge which places a special priority on power, dominance, and control of everything. This being so, the particular conception of knowledge preferred is conditioned by the preoccupation to dominate and control the destiny of every living and non-living thing on this planet. Similarly, the underlying rational which motivates preferring one form of knowledge over another is the value expressed by this obsession with power. The insatiable appetite for power drives us to a way of relating to the world around us which permits us to reorder the world and our relationships in ways that suit our own ends and presumed interests, no matter how selfish or destructive those ends and interests are.
The epistemology of power has been sufficiently mesmerizing to ensure that control and dominance over our world and over each other has become an elemental facet of our socio-cultural existence. This being so, it has come to shape the dominant modality of knowledge which our culture has chosen to embrace educationally. The technologization of nature in the name of modernization is the fundamental methodological principle of power epistemology. The perceived conflict or conformity brought by the implication of various technologies with different kinds of moral values has generated a reasonable degree of dissonance amongst different social groups which assign different weights to the issues based on their different perspectives to the series of value selections available (Longino, 1983). For example, scientists who work for industrial research institution, most often have to set up their primary goal on solving problems closely related to industrial technological needs, instead of conducting the pursuit of knowledge in such a way that it reflects their capacity to honor knowledge as a value in itself (Ziman, 2000). Because the funding agencies of science, whether these are commercial firms, private organizations, governments, or military sectors, they increasingly want to ascertain what kind and form of return they are likely to receive for their investment, especially given that the research process have become increasingly costly (ibid). Given the commercial integration of science with industry and technology, the traditional interpretation of the scientific enterprise simply conducting research in “the disinterested pursuit of objective truth” (Ziman, 2000, p. 232) evinces a deep misunderstanding of commercially sponsored scientific research (Jenkins, 1992; Kolstø, 2008). Our drive for power and control, that is to say, engenders a competitive mode of interaction which impacts upon every aspect of our lives. Not only has it led to the desanctification of our natural world through the mindless expropriation of the earth’s resources, but it serves to undermine and depersonalize our human relationships on many levels. For example, it may impact upon the intimacy between a married couple, between co-workers, between brother and sister, or amongst friends. The population resettlement debate also sharply underlines the untenable disparity in power exercised by the planners, politicians and local officials. The nexus of vested interest that develops around any large project in society features prominently in relation to the TGDP. The extreme asymmetry of power structural status of the participants is expressed accordingly in negotiation process. For example, a small privileged group holding the dominant socio-economic status are the most capable of expressing and actualizing their interests, wishes, and needs and therefore tend to continue to prevail during the decision-making process due to their wide access to economic assets, their advantage of knowledge creation, and their educational privilege for advancement (Oliver-Smith, 2001; Saxena, 2008). Their domination and control over resources (physical social and psychological) distribution are multidimensional, across economic, socio-cultural and political aspects of difference (Saxena, 2008). On the other hand, most people facing resettlement, as supposed to being the primary beneficiaries of the development projects, belong to politically and economically invulnerable groups. This being so, they have little power and influence in the national or even regional contexts (Oliver-Smith, 2001). Power disparities between the privileged and the historically underprivileged make it almost impossible to undertake effective and equable negotiations since there is little to expect to be gained by the privileged community in remediation which supposes to address the wants and needs of all participants (Oliver-Smith, 2001&2010). “Equitable interactions” therefore are difficult to be achieved and fair outcomes also become impossible (Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.76).
Elaborating these points I have argued that the dominant form of environmental science in China is underpinned by what Laura has elsewhere called pedagogy of ideological commitment to the epistemology of power (Laura & Cotton, 1998). The idea is that the values which are covertly enshrined within the dominant pedagogy of environmental science depend upon an epistemological framework defined by an ideology which is motivated by an insatiable appetite for power. From this it follows that environmental decisions will enshrine a subtle epistemological presumption, namely, that power is a thing to be valued in itself. Thus, the value covertly placed on ‘power’ fosters the illusion that our relationship with nature is legitimated epistemologically by a right to dominate and exploit the world around us for our own purposes. The epistemic presumption is that having knowledge is tantamount to having power and that power is in essence the ‘tool’ by way of which we subjugate and control nature to serve our own vested interests. Moreover, we control the world by technologizing it in ways which allow us to dominate, subjugate and expropriate it.
I submit that the most efficient politics of power propagate themselves by implementing pedagogies of learning which are themselves informed and defined by the ideological symbols of power with which they surround themselves, along with the powerful people they need to make this happen. To ‘know’ the world is to gain power over it, and it is the power we have over the world that both enables and covertly encourages us to dominate and take control of it. Knowledge is not value-free, nor is the pedagogical frameworks in our schools which parade the outcome of technologization and modernization as the hallmark of progress and success. Social-political power requires the creation of the technological means to capture and direct the over-exploitation of the environment (Goldman, 1999). The epistemology of power fosters technological mastery over nature combined with political domination (Elvin, 1993). Just as one group claims superiority of cognition over another and uses this claim to justify its political, socio-cultural or economic domination, the other defers to the greater power to ensure that it shares in the spoils (Goldman, 1999). Resource distribution in terms of the recovery of resettlers’ livelihoods is, more a political than an economic or financial matter (Cernea, 1995b). Expropriation and displacement are only achieved under the auspices of State Laws and sometimes through sovereign force (ibid). Until we understand the extent to which the epistemology of power has shaped both our educational and political system, we shall remain imprisoned by the values of vested interest and exploitation which characterize not only our relationships with nature, but also with each other.