Multiversity:
Its Idea, Tasks, and Future

. . . . . . The idea of Multiversity (a name proposed by Anwar Fazal) was first discussed at RECSAM with Uncle Idris and Chandra Muzaffar in 1994.

For whatever reasons, it lay dormant till it sprouted finally in the year 2001. The first conceptual note, "Recapturing Worlds," questioning the basis of the continuing dependence of our academic departments on Western godfathers and other colourless intellectual mafia, and the consequences this was having on the integrity of our own ways of thinking, life and cultures, was circulated among a small number of people that year. We decided to have the inaugural of the Multiversity in February 2002. The record of the discussions in February and what has happened thereafter are recorded in the pages of the book that will be released by the Hon'ble Chief Minister of Penang later this morning.

It will be useful at this stage to recall Multiversity's preoccupations in this area:

1. To excoriate, critique, ridicule and debunk the Eurocentric model reigning in the field of higher education; for some major reason, most of the gallant literature here has been generated by Africa's writers and thinkers. Despite the plaints against Eurocentrism, it continues to remain solidly entrenched. Can the legitimate critiques against the Eurocentric discourse translate into practical courses, some proposed for Western universities as well?

2. Attempt to restore equality and mutual respect between developed and developing societies through the Multiversity proposal to develop a wholly new social science called Europology. Only in the study of Western societies in reverse anthropological terms will the recognition dawn that all societies can be said to fail or succeed only when they are measured up against their own ideals. Malaysia, for example, has recently set up a Centre for Occidental Studies. Can Multiversity, for example, after this conference, put together a reader for the science of Europology?

3. Exhume the deep political biases and intentions of conventional social science, as demonstrated by the work of Edward Said or Rana Kabbani. While sensitive Western sociologists attempt to overcome the debilitating legacy of decades of positivism, we have a double burden to overcome: the myth of objectivity and the problem of relevance.

4. To carry out an evaluation of the basic assumptions of inherited or borrowed social sciences, of their origins, contents, method and perceptions and possible transcendence. We suggest they are "borrowed" because they are still mainly theirs and we participate on the fringes. Very often we do not even figure in their discussions, though they always dominate ours. While they believe they can do social science without reference to our work, we do not believe that we can do social science without reference to them, their theories, their camps. Can we return what we have borrowed?

5. As far as this meeting is concerned, the objective of the exercise is specific: the creation of better and more meaningful curricula, designed by ourselves, from our own intellectual traditions and cultures and respectful of reality around us.

6. Far better methods of academic research than the West has had to offer in the last couple of centuries so that students can be induced to return to academic studies and engaged in a more persistent and meaningful way in the generation of knowledge as well. (It bears reiterating - because we often forget - that countries like India and China had universities several centuries before they appeared in Europe.)

Multiversity already maintains a regularly updated website (www.multiworld.org) and an internet based library where one can already freely download over 50 titles written by scholars and thinkers from Asia, South America and Africa. (We intend to have 500 books eventually.) Multiversity brings out occasionally a small newsletter called Kamiriithu.

We spend a lot of time focusing on people who are willing to continue their learning outside the formal framework of school or college. This is because of the common perception, even among educationists, that institutions of learning today have little connection with learning, and have more to do with business or training recruits for employment as serfs in corporate life. Having de-professionalised ourselves, we try and create learning situations that are distinct and often contrary to what is done within universities. For example, in India, we have been associated with a programme with walk-outs (not dropouts). We work with people who have left school because they were dissatisfied with it as a learning place. We encourage people not to leave learning to formal institutions because in today's world, such institutions actually retard the kind of learning required for survival as individuals and as communities.

The thinking that led to the calling of this conference

We decided during the course of discussions on the Multiversity project that we would have two major meetings, one on the social sciences, and the other on the conventional, colonially bequeathed system of factory schooling. We believe we are on schedule. The international conference on the inherited colonial system of factory schooling will be held in India late next year.

We expect both these meetings to generate major controversy and rethinking about the assumptions driving present day educational aspirations among the peoples of the world.

The dominant driving assumptions behind the education of people (at school or college) over the last two centuries have remained on a collision course with those that ensure the survival of the latter as human beings raised in their own diverse environments with different beliefs and theories of the universe.

I am happy that the conference on social sciences is being inaugurated today, with a brilliant set of serious people from all across Asia, Africa and South America. Scholars who have taken the trouble to come to Penang include some who have done radical critiques of their own social sciences and others who have gone further and done practical work on designing alternative curricula as well. Half of the hours of this conference will be devoted to the first theme, the other half to the other.

Why this exercise of churning, you will ask.

On the surface, the circus of higher education appears to be well-oiled and running smoothly. Convocations are held, graduates are dubbed, certificates are issued certifying people as learned. But even the most insensitive will notice the extended suffering of those undergoing the educational process in our times. Students in India, for example, are made to study paraphrases of texts written by American scholars forty years ago! This is called "higher education". In few universities are students able to figure out what these social sciences stand for, what they are useful for, whether they are worth studying at all. All go through the rigours only because of coercion and due to the demands of getting a degree which is assumed to be a prelude for employment of some kind.

The almost continuous suffering has generated, paradoxically, mostly universal boredom and sterility and eventually a certain feeling of pointlessness as most often the study does not even match the nature of the employment received, if employment is even gained. The profoundly natural exercise of learning is reduced for millions of young minds to spending endless hours mugging texts whose utility for any meaningful purpose has never been assessed?

The real mystery is how this ordinary perception, so readily available to all, has provoked so little rebellion and resistance. In this system, there are only failures. Even the successes are failures. They are also unwanted. What do you do with students who have history or psychology degrees? What honest job can you give to a person with a political science degree? Why is it we do not question the givers of the wisdom in their thousands: the teaching institutions, research bodies, educationists, professors, think-tanks. How come all this army of people presumably thinking of the simple question: what and how people can learn, can actually create a system that in fact militates against learning, where knowledge is identified with text books, and delivering jargon that few understand.

Why are there so few in our part of the world who have said: Basta! This is enough!

Seyd Hossein Alatas, Renato Constantino, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chinweizu, Ari Sitas, Theofilus Obenga, Walden Bello, Ashis Nandy, Gustavo Esteva, Grimaldo Rengifo, the list does not include everyone in this area of work or even within this group of participants, but we have even today to strain when we wish to recall names and signposts. Compared with the armies of sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, psychologists etc who go about carrying on their shoulders the baggage they have accepted as their burden from the white man, from the West, those who refuse to surrender their sense of self-respect are few and far between.

We have student agitations but they almost never agitate against the education system itself though it kills them as individuals and destroys their spirit of learning. These are the best years of one's life, but we compel young people to fritter them away for a paper degree stamped in a government printing press.

Mohd. Idris has been disturbed about this for a long time. I told him of a meeting that I attended in Singapore years ago, where a Malaysian scientist read out a paper on the Malaysian environment. The paper had been constructed out of the opinions of several Western scientists and environmentalists. Not a single Malaysian ecologist or scientist was referred to. When I queried him directly on this, he demurely complained that if he had quoted Malaysian scientists, no one would be reading his paper! Now how does one control rage in such circumstances? People are willing to develop rage over traffic, but in my mind, such attitudes as the one displayed in the incident above should provoke anger as well. They don't. Because intellectuals today in developing countries have little sense of their own worth, they are willing to continue pedalling stuff which they have had no hand (or mind) in creating.

How do you call yourself an intellectual and then make a living selling the output of other people's intellects, like a peanut vendor? Can we continue to proclaim our learning by quoting the work of other learned people?

When I visited Indonesia, I asked them for their social science journal. They produced two journals in English. One was by the Indonesians, the other by the Australians who dominated Indonesia's academic (not intellectual) life. The Indonesians we met recommended the Australian journal. They said it was better produced and more respectable. So why did they produce their own journal? Because their printer needs employment? There was really no answer. They did not have the courage to kick out the Australian journal. They had no courage to stop their own journal either. Now it is not that the Indonesians do not have courage. For example, for the brutalities committed in East Timor and now Acheh, in the face of world opinion, you demonstrate extraordinary courage. But against a journal, even the mightiest general, becomes a mouse.

There is this story of the Mulla Nasiruudin who one evening was found in the brightly illuminated village square desperately searching for something. An onlooker asked him what he was looking for. The Mulla told him he was searching for something he had lost in his house. The onlooker was completely taken aback. So why are you looking for it here, he demanded. Because, said the Mulla, there is more light here!

The Mulla's antics nicely illuminate why we all return to academic universities, all located in the West, at Harvard or Sussex, for enlightenment, for the latest theories, to find solutions for problems thousands of miles away. We unashamedly conduct intellectual discourses in Delhi or KL through the brains of people living in Germany or France or the USA and then criticize Africans for using a telephone system that is routed through Paris. We have been educated to believe there is better light there. All our scientific activity is guided from there.

When the pioneers of economics were called to assist the so-called third world with the latter's economies, they created almost overnight, a development economics, a eunuch of some kind, with misplaced parts which they could not teach in their own universities for their own kind. But they had to teach it to somebody. So they created development institutes to teach such gibberish to the sons and daughters of the ruling classes from our continents who can get there on scholarhips.

One professor of psychology from India (Sinha) wrote a book which he called "Third World Psychology". He told us that third world people were too anarchic to fit into the elegant categories that psychology demanded (and got) in the developed world. Therefore, he had proposed in his book a third class, watered down, psychology for third class people. He even managed to get the book published by a respectable publishing house. Thankfully, it has not survived. That gives us hope.

But who has the better psychological theories and therapies to learn from even in today's world? Patanjali and the Dalai Lama, who teach you how to temper your inner demons or American behavioural psychology still unable to get out of the tunnel vision of learning from rats. So why do we teach American psychology in our universities? Because we are all convinced it is science, a universal social science invented first by the Europeans and later, advanced by the Americans, and ready textbooks manufactured by American researchers. There is no other psychology. So who said this? First they, now we, with equal vehemence, though in a country like India we have a psychological tradition that goes back several centuries!

In India, I was asked why don't we teach political science from the Mahabharata and Kautilya's Arthashastra. I had no answer, except that Daniel Lerner would be upset and the US State Department might take notice.

And let's not talk too much about anthropology either. This colonial science is still alive in many of our universities because administrators of the department are simply unaware that we are now free societies. After Claude Levi Strauss dismissed the idea of colonised people doing anthropology (it's a science of victors about vanquished or victim societies, he said), we still read anthropology. We do not even think we should do reverse anthropology. We baulk at the idea.

When will scholars from our part of the world write analytical treatises about the psychopathologies that inflict the normal mind and soul of people in the West? Is it so difficult to find the material? It's all coming out in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nandy, Sardar, Davies and myself wrote a slim little book ten years ago called The Blinded Eye. It was politely written, did not use bad language, yet got most Westerners in a rage. The Blinded Eye was pure Europology. We have only three or four texts that pass off as reasonably good Europology: Bizimana, Orientalism, The Blinded Eye, Rana Kabbani.

Anthropology's perjorative literature on the people that live outside the rim of the West is sufficient to create a mountain higher than the Petronas towers. But we can count on only three or four texts that attempt to do to the West what the West has done to us for over 500 years. We have a lot of work to do.

The real reason we carry the tattered baggage of the West in our domains is that we have frankly never looked at the assumptions on which Western academic knowledge is based. The serious lapse is that we have accepted these assumptions without having examined them. For if we did, we would have found out that these are nothing but what we call them: assumptions!

Gandhi in Hind Swaraj said that banishment to the penal colony of the Andaman and Nicobar islands was the only punishment he would give to those who spread the illness of bourgeoise European civilization and its thought. But today, we have made entire continents into penal colonies. We live caricatured lives. We mutilate ourselves to become mimic men and mimic women. Most of this is possible because the education system laid the ground for thinking homogeneously in this manner. Till we deal with this system and examine its assumptions, why it was brought here, how it developed, how it was patronized, and what functions it provides today, we will live life as in a penal colony.

Like prisoners, we will only be allowed to function as per the rations given to us. Forays will be allowed on restricted space and time. We will have to ask permission to take a leak. Only if we promise to behave, write what is wanted, play the language game and not disrupt the colony, will we be allowed any freedom. Freedom means meekly carrying out the predetermined lies the system demands. We learn this discipline in school. We carry it all our life. Is this why nature went into evolution over millions of years? To produce cartoons like this?

I am not saying these are not difficult problems. When I did my Ph.D. by accident in Holland 25 years ago, I had to pad it with a whole lot of references in order to make it look scientific. But it was a political treatise though it dealt with the history of science and technology in India and China and it took a political stance which the university could not reject because it was a liberal institution. What Gloria Emeagwali has done for Africa, I did for Indian and Chinese science and technology and succeeded in persuading a panel of professors from various Dutch universities that much of the written and published Western history of science and technology was not history but badly constructed myth.

I gave up this type of writing after some time, not just some time, a considerable period of time. First, I dropped references to Western academics altogether. Then I stopped providing references to anybody altogether. I figured that if I had nothing to say of my own experience after 50 years of living, I should put myself out to grass and stop writing altogether. I found great inspiration in our Asian greats, Tagore, Aurobindo, MaoZedong, Gandhi. These guys wrote from their heart. They hardly referred to others for giving their words authority. If the only reason you are going to open your mouth is because you want to convey what someone else has said, or what fifty other people have said, let us all recite together: Eliminate the middleman!

In the next three days we shall discuss bravely how to get rid of the middleman (or middle woman).

The objectives sought for this workshop

The principal objectives of this meeting are the need for curriculum changes and how these can be achieved, in different social sciences currently taught in universities and colleges in Asia, South America and Africa.

Multiversity is convinced that though critiques of social sciences are available, some from within the Western world as well, these have not led to practicable changes either in the methods of teaching, learning, or course design. Though we continue we are captive minds, we refuse to get out of captivity. We know what is the eventual fate of captive chickens in the market!

One of the practical outputs of Multiversity work is going to be the laying out of formal outlines for new social science courses in basic disciplines like philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology, economics and anthropology. We consider this as necessary but transitional work.

As these become available, they will be posted on the Net, printed out and circulated to various associations and universities for discussion and consideration.

Eventually, Multiversity wishes to encourage scholars to work towards an academic structure that is not fixated as at present on well-demarcated disciplines worked in separate departments, but in some more holistic way that attempts to match the holism of the real world.

We also want to bring about radical changes in methodology and in the learning of such sciences. The present methods are conducive not to study but to desertion of study. Can we reduce classroom teaching by more than 50% and return to regimes of self-learning where guidance on how to learn once again predominates over what is learnt?

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