From: The Role of Social Science in Nepal by Dev Raj Dahal
Spiritual blindness of Nepalese social scientists has thus opened multiple gaps between their worldview and those of the citizens on various frontiers--theoretical knowledge and practical experience, technical understanding and composite knowledge and secularity of social science and the vitality of the Hindu-Buddhist scriptures in the popular mind, culture, behavior and practices. This has reinforced a division between the system of knowledge of social scientists and the life-world of people.
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The Nepalese social scientists have to labor hard to creatively interact with various disciplines, build academic cooperation, construct scientific concepts from the social processes of the society and supply the politicians, policy makers and students illuminating insights to liberate them from primordial naive belief that the God, social scientists or scientists have magic formula to solve the entire problems and puzzles the ages have posed to the Nepalese society. Similarly, the geographic isolation of Nepal is no excuse for the intellectual marginalization nor is their revolt against the feudal order a guarantee of virtue so long as their own society becomes closed nobility unintelligible and inaccessible to ordinary public. Enormous internal diversity of the ecological and social life of the nation has given them enough room for cross-cultural comparison, generalization and theory building. But, their inability to move away from a preoccupation with power and unaccountable activism to a position of reclaiming relevance of ethics, discourse and difference to express a sense of moral responsibility for the life of citizens requires their own liberation. It is central to creative knowledge production. As a result, the position of Nepalese social scientists in relation to policy adaptation is high while innovation is pathetically low. This requires them to reconnect to the wider world of philosophy as participant in the production of knowledge and refining it through citizens' experience for public policy output. Is there a possibility for this? The historical trends indicate the impossibility of breaking this conceptual jailbreak in the short-run and, consequently, social scientists will be fated to repeat its deep-seated, petrified cultural patterns over and over again.
Enamored with grand theories of the West Nepalese leaders, policy makers, planners and intellectuals since the 1950s have uncritically imposed them to the Nepalese society for modernization, rationalization and development of the country regardless of knowledge about preconditions, contextual relevance and negotiation with ground realities. The Nepalese social scientists can, therefore, be acknowledged as "paradigm consumer" and their integration in the world is characterized by unequal exchange and unequal division of labor in the global social science market. There is a need to reveal their creative potential before they engage in the emancipation of citizens. The conquest of Nepalese social scientists over the Hindu-Buddhist philosophies' utility in public policy has not liberated the citizens from the historical vale of fear, tear, existential crisis and the crisis of identity—personal and national. Nepalese economic historian Mahesh C. Regmi aptly argues, "…every Nepali of the present lives a vicarious existence, with the atavistic urges for political power and economic security and feels strongly that political rivalries among the political elite today are no less pronounced than they were two centuries ago."
This vicarious existence of citizens has an effect exactly opposite to the one intended to thwart by Nepalese faith intellectuals, planners and social scientists. What is the difference between native intellectuals—priests, wanderers and sages—and modern social scientists—teachers, researchers, policy makers and preachers in terms of the utility of their outcome to national upliftment? There is a big pause as modern social scientists, like their native counterpart, have not been able to liberate scholarship from political power. The social sciences have according to Richard Rorty "served as instruments of the disciplinary society, the connection between knowledge and power rather than between knowledge and human solidarity." Can they collectively reflect about their failure and learn from each other for the refinement of their knowledge and practical applicability of their ideas in teaching, research and policy making? Development success largely depends on appropriate adaptation of the universal knowledge, tools and policy as per the cultural traits, social norms, history, ecology and institutions. The blanket imposition of the grand theories invented in an entirely different industrial context into agrarian societies of Nepal has evoked continuous growth of the ignorance of planners about social reality and corresponding development failure, crisis of institutional stability and a growing disharmony between the society and the state.
This failed development implies the failure of social scientists to apply creative mind and prescribe to the leaders a reasonable course of action to prevent the downward spiral of the Nepalese state, polity, society, economy and overall psychology. Today, Nepalese society is terribly suffering from collective anxiety, tension, conflict and self-doubt and exposed to painful choices—in the restoration of order or work more for freedom. Its effect is: inability of the leadership to think and plan beyond affno manchhe, one's own close circle of friends, relatives and clients. This has undermined the possibility to develop the concept of nationality—the attachment of the citizens with the state and its ideology—nationalism and constrained the possibility to evolve a cosmopolitan outlook. The growing shrinkage of the public sphere of the nation is the symptom of the failure of governance. It is a clear inversion of Hindu-Buddhist concept of emancipation through the abnegation of self for public good. Has there been no reflection by social scientists about it? Or, have they found more benefits in transplanting new ideas and projects of conflict or post-conflict planning than resorting to concrete social learning? Or, are they incapable of indigenizing universal knowledge to local conditions?
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