After last year's public discussion about the restitution of cultural treasures stolen from many other peoples of the world during the colonial period of our history, we all know what the term "cultural appropriation" means. One takes over the cultural achievements (both the ideas and the objects) of other groups of people and regards (or even sells) them as one's own. Even though you have contributed nothing to their creation. And even though you yourself are usually unable to understand their original meaning and their cultural value for their creators. Nevertheless, the former colonial powers tried for decades to integrate (appropriate) the "stolen culture" into their own cultural description of the world in which we live.
Today, it goes without saying that such an action is fundamentally wrong. However, few of us realise that a similarly wrong action, but on a much broader basis, has been going on unquestioningly since the beginning of the technical-scientific revolution. I am talking here about scientific appropriation, the almost self-evident appropriation of other people's scientific ideas. Yet the scientific description of the world we live in is just as much (if not more so) as the cultural description, a merely intersubjective "vision" of our world, and not an absolute or unambiguous, and certainly not a definitive description of it.
What does this mean in practical terms for all of us? Only the few of us (humans) are involved in the "creation" of the scientific description of the universe. Everyone else tacitly adopts the latest "vision" (ideas) of the scientists as their own description (and understanding) of the world we all live in. The engineers, the technicians, the politicians, but also all other scientifically interested people, adopt the most important ideas of science as their own, and claim that these describe their own "real" world. However, these ideas are never absolute truths. If the scientific paradigm changes, the most important scientific ideas also change. Then even the scientists themselves must change their "vision" (their ideas); and following them, so must all other humans. However, scientists (and especially the older ones) are the most conservative group of people of all. That is why a paradigm shift in science is a very tough process.
But what happens in the meantime, after the new paradigm (with its new ideas, with its new description of the world) is already "in place", but most scientists have not yet learnt about it and have not yet adopted it? I think that in such a case, the younger scientists would have to take the initiative and drive the paradigm shift forward without waiting for the "old guard".
In the meantime, we've just landed in the last few years. My Universal Philosophy of Life is the new paradigm, the new scientific description of the universe and life in it. That is why I try to familiarise young scientists with the ideas of the new paradigm through my online activities, but also through my books. If you also belong to this group, why don't you join in actively, get involved, ask questions, be an ambassador for the new knowledge. Not only "climate change", not only "energy change", but also a "change in consciousness" and also a necessary change in the coexistence of all people in the world, can all only be mastered in time with the ideas of the new paradigm.
And a word to the older ones among us. The First Global Civilisation, which affects all people on earth today simultaneously and equally, is no longer a vision, it has become a reality. The sooner the older generations of us realise and accept this, the less damage we will do to the earth and to ourselves before we leave the earth "as planned".
To summarise, scientific appropriation can be a curse if it slows down the further progress of science. On the other hand, however, unlike cultural appropriation (which, without the consent of the cultural creators, is always a robbery), it can also be a blessing for all students and other users of science, because they do not have to personally re-conceive or make every scientific idea or discovery themselves.
UP27. Scientific misappropriation; curse & blessing
