Good Oil readers will be only too familiar with the phenomenon of being browbeaten about ‘indigenous knowledge’. As if any group of people who’ve occupied an area for more than a couple of generations wouldn’t be intimately familiar with its natural phenomena.
It’s a basic survival mechanism, after all. Whether it’s learning the habits of local fauna and weather patterns, if you’re a hunter-gatherer utterly reliant on such things to survive, or a farmer who knows when to bring the lambs into the top paddock or if you’re a city dweller who’s learned which streets to avoid at night and the best route to work in the morning.
Yet, we’re somehow expected to believe that such knowledge, when acquired by ‘indigenous’ people, is little short of esoteric magic.
Even worse, though, is that increasingly we’re being told by people who should know better that the ooga-booga, demon-haunted world of Stone Age tribes is ‘science’.
According to Ed Husic, the Minister for Science, Indigenous Australians were “the nation’s first scientists”, whose insights, obtained “through observation, experimentation and analysis”, rested upon “the bedrock of the scientific method”.
Excuse me, but what?
Let’s remind ourselves again what the scientific method is:
The scientific method is critical to the development of scientific theories, which explain empirical (experiential) laws in a scientifically rational manner. In a typical application of the scientific method, a researcher develops a hypothesis, tests it through various means, and then modifies the hypothesis on the basis of the outcome of the tests and experiments. The modified hypothesis is then retested, further modified, and tested again, until it becomes consistent with observed phenomena and testing outcomes. – Encyclopedia Britannica
This is, of course, a highly idealised version of how science is often done in practice. More often than not, researchers begin with their hypothesis and work from there. It also leaves out a cornerstone principle of the scientific method: falsification. Falsification is the requirement that, in principle at least, a theory can be disproved. If it can’t theoretically be disproved (for instance, experiments could disprove Einstein’s theories, although none so far have), it’s not science.
With all that in mind, I invite anyone to tell me what’s ‘scientific’ about the claim that rain is water pouring out of the Moon, which is a bowl that periodically fills and empties? Or that the Sun and Moon are a magic man and wife pursuing one another across the sky? Or that the Milky Way is the smoke from the campfires of Aboriginal ancestors who have ascended to the sky.
Who would seriously call such fairy tales ‘science’? Unfortunately, too many people in positions of authority...
Nor is Husic alone in making those claims. Thanks to generous taxpayer funding, a burgeoning industry promotes “Indigenous science” in venues ranging from schools to universities.
Which suggests that they know as little about science as indigenous society.
Husic’s claim is not just absurd. It is, like Bruce Pascoe’s fantasies about settled agriculture, deeply patronising. Husic plainly does not grasp the complex of ideas that comprise the scientific method. But he clearly believes that Indigenous culture, if it is to be respected, must be cast as an anticipation, if not a mirror, of Western culture. If we had science, whatever that may be, they must have had it too – and many centuries before us.
More to the point, it also suggests that, tacitly, the painfully woke fools who promote so-called ‘indigenous science’ are, deep in their hearts, aware of an unsettling truth.
That truth is that, for 50,000 years, Aboriginal society was mentally moribund. For a sparsely populated hunter-gatherer society, Australia generally provided an easy living (which could still be precarious enough, hence the brutal rules of Aboriginal marriage and procreation, which strictly regulated the population and harshly erased genetic defects). It was 45,000 years of ‘feet up, mind in neutral’ (rather like ancient Egypt for 4,000 years).
Remind me again of what, exactly, we’re supposed to celebrate about a literal Stone Age culture?
