first came the empty chair. “Given the delay of its own ministry, France seeks a quota in the Ministry of Science” titled the article. He also stated that, behind the desire for quotas, there is a campaign document “with the Márquez proposal for science”, and that it is of poor quality. The journalists did not reach this conclusion from their own reading, but rather consulted the national wise men. “Poor, weak, vague and ambiguous argumentation”, the doctor Juan Anaya would have exclaimed.
Hours after the publication of this news, opinion leaders and influencers expressed great indignation with what they considered a return to the past. “The Ministry of Science and Technology will pass into the hands of Francia Márquez” several concluded and complemented with different and hurtful ironies. “Welcome to 1492” and “welcome obscurantism”, they sentenced, perhaps insinuating that Afro-descendant populations belong to the pre-Hispanic era and that, with the arrival of a supposed patronage of Márquez, the white teachings of Colombian science will be removed. “The issue is not to distribute class hours between different cosmologies,” argued Moisés Wasserman, another of the wise men, former rector of the National University, in his weekly column.
The column published in the newspaper Time it is an exercise in intellectual dishonesty. Rather than converse with the extensive work of the various academics who signed the document, Wasserman selectively picks up bits and pieces from the 16-page document that summarized some of the ideas of the presidential campaign. He mocks, like so many others, the slogan of “living tasty”. He mocks and complains and qualifies his ideas as “nonsense” (which in Spanish from the Royal Academy of Spain refers to the ideas of people with little “reason” or with “mental deficiency”).
“It is one of the worst documents I have ever read in my life,” says Wasserman. And he omits how this document addresses the way in which science and technology “have fostered relations of domination of bodies and territories.” For sample any military campaign. Any fumigation with glyphosate. Any balance of the chemicals that companies like Dupont disposed of in the Magdalena River throughout the 1990s. Nor does it say anything about the proposal (which was more than a government guideline was a compendium of the campaign) to “deepen into areas of modern knowledge to critically understand the processes of water pollution, hydrogeology and human health, but in meaningful dialogue with local communities”.
“Science for what?” wonders the document that Wasserman ridicules. “So there is no hunger, science so there is no racism, science to eradicate misogyny, science to reduce inequality, science to understand and preserve biodiversity, science for community flourishing, science to overcome this endless cycle of violence.”
Wasserman and many others close a conversation with a long Colombian tradition of participatory research. They also avoid a conversation with decades of work in the humanities and social sciences, which casts doubt on the possibility of combining economic growth with environmental conservation. Who knows that development in some places was and is achieved through underdevelopment in other places. Which preaches the need to make scientific approaches more transparent and accessible in order to increase the relevance of science to the needs of all social groups and increase our understanding of complex ecological changes. Who is suspicious of sages perched in hierarchies and prefers the flourishing of many different types of knowledge.
Instead of taking a global and contemporary debate seriously, Wasserman chooses to caricature it. He walks the opposite path to curiosity (which is finally what makes the sciences transform).