But to be blunt and to the point, some of the objectivity of the sciences developed especially in Europe in the last 500 years or so is demonstrated by the expansion of European culture and system (bourgeoisdom) all over the world.
I am against imperialism, colonialism, ethnocentrism and racism as much as the next gal. The current European florescence has had both great achievements and enormous crimes against humanity and peace. But the economic and military conquest of the whole world by the West proves a certain level of objective truth of Western science relative to the other cultures of the world.
Eurocentric world dominance cannot be overcome without sublating the current European worldview, including the modern ,natural sciences.
This in no way denies that other cultural areas have led human developments in sciences and otherwise in previous epochs, before the current rise of Europe. Nor does it mean that even Europe's current rise is not based in part on some diffusion from other cultural areas.
Whether it is Indigenous American cultural liberation and revival or Tiv or Fijian, only the working class (that product of the Eurocentered system) can free all subaltern, colonial and oppressed classes and groups by putting the bourgeois on the garbage heap of history.
Charles Brown
Workers of the West, it's our turn.
>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> 12/08 1:22 PM >>>
I am much more interested in attacking Eurocentrism, and I tend to identify with the world-systems people like Blaut, Eric Wolf, Wallerstein et al. The Enlightenment is a particularly European construction and baloney like the "Asiatic Mode of Production" flow from it. What I have a problem with in particular is the schema that the world lived in darkness and superstition until the French and British Enlightment thinkers decided to apply UNIVERSAL REASON. Careful study of Chinese and Arab civilization would reveal an entirely different set of circumstances. If anything, the Mideast was much more enlightened than Europe for centuries before Decartes came along. I have been planning to get around to reading and reviewing Tariq Ali's historical fiction on these questions and will have more to say.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)