When Colors of Sciences are Embedded in Our Institutionalised Life
When Colors of Sciences are Embedded in Our Institutionalised Life
escrito por Dini Harmita
Blushed by colours of thousand moles of sciences, Casal Bértoa (2022)1 revisited Peter Mair's by simply summarising in beautiful way that in political sciences, party system can be frozen due to lack of ability in adapting towards changes be it to collaborate which tends to be in positive ways, and or to compete that can be positive and or negative. As humble as Peter Mair himself, euphemistically he mentioned it as 'misdirected matching' in natural science. As part of Party Institutionalization and Party System Institutionalization indicators, Casal Bértoa (2017)2 mentioned stability as one of the subsections. In 2022 when he delivered the 10th Peter Mair's lecture, he reflected the stability in human relationships. "Routine creates stability", he wrote (2022, p.8).
To ease us with our jobs, be it scientifically or practically, we tend to classify things such as into, through, or with taxonomies, families, genus, dimensions, sectors, and or colours. As other authors tend to be always sparked by, my curiosity about how we should properly engage sciences internally including the practices integratedly has led me to write this paper. This paper is written based on a compilation of my daily analysis and summary towards articles I read, so it's mainly built from secondary data.
Social Sciences: Life and Death
Just like poverty, as reminded by Güell (2023)3 in his article titled El Nuevo Sentido Público de La Ciencia, sciences have many dimensions; including how we perceive it, be it as a scientist, a practitioner, both, or neither. One of the important dimensions is about its moral of being positive or negative, for social sciences; and for example, positive or negative relationships for quantitative analysis. For natural sciences, I am going to talk about it in the second chapter.
Soriano Mendiara (2023)4 with his article titled Una Historia de Dos Presidentes, triggered me to develop debates between politicians, at least Joe Biden and Donald Trump, of the greatest Americans, by using the majestic 5W+1H question words. The questions I developed also include questions related to natural sciences, trying to understand more what Güell (2023) means about positivity and negativity of sciences.
Most people think that life and death are matters of natural sciences, such as cardiologists could heal heart diseases, engineers could create electric vehicles so that people would survive winter with more affordable prices, climatologists could combat climate changes, when actually some people couldn't breathe not only because of the weak heart but also because of too many pressures, electric vehicles need good sales and marketing to reach the heart of the customers, and it takes patience to remind all of us about healthier diet and sustainable living. That's why, social sciences also have a lot of things to do with life and death. Not to mention, a micro and meso system would not be able to exist without the macro one, thus there's always an art and science in governing.
It goes without saying to Biden and Trump. From all of the proposed simple questions to both, the predicted answers relied mainly upon not only each other's strength and weakness, but also interest. Given that Americans are always proud of being Americans, the answers of both would actually be similar, but since changes are the only sure thing, for example for the very current climate change and war issues, they would also consider their larger groups' interest, not only theirs or their political parties. In social sciences, this could be explained by political science's behavioural organisation theories, psychology's interdependence theories, economics' monopoly and imperialism theories, sociology's conflict of interest theories. How about natural sciences?
Natural Sciences or Sciences Sciences: Nobel Materials
European dependency towards Russia and China's energy has challenged scholars to write about it and practitioners to act upon, including Gil Teltre (2023)5 who wrote an article titled El Año en Que (Casi) Todo Cambió en La Política Energética Europea. He mentioned natural gas as one of the main energies being dependent upon, with diversification, green acceleration, and demand reduction as efforts to reduce the dependency.
Gil Teltre (2023) showed the reduction as the increase of energy independence percentage averaged 70% to 85% in the whole Europe from November 21, 2022 to January 14, 2023, with Germany being 88%. With such data we can actually calculate the speed tendency thus I can predict that we need 0.2-0.4% increase per day by March 17. Since we need to survive the energy necessity during the winter itself, I suggested the facilitation process follows the demand reduction to be able to acknowledge what people really need and want, by also considering the nature of each country's latitude and longitude.
Such science utilisation should be notably and nobly useful for humankind and our ecosystems, but how far both social and natural sciences can complete each other?
Completing the Round if it's a Circle: Social and Natural Sciences
It sounds like elections indeed, when we hear the word 'round', but indeed life is a cycle. Just like how Longo (2023)6 explained about the never ending series of corruption especially among politicians through his article titled La Insoportable Levedad de La Malversación. He mainly defined corruption as the act of using public money for personal interests. Using mainly the experience of the Catalonia Community in Spain, he briefly explained the circle of corruption.
Building follow up arguments upon his, I compared the Spanish with general facts and discourses growing around especially in Indonesia. With the similar definition, we can actually see the corruption itself from different points of view including the eyes of the victims and corruptors themselves. Longo (2023) mentioned that its punishment tends to be validly legal everywhere, yet it's no longer an assumption that most of the time one corruption case needs to be covered with other cases, which lead to normalisation of corruption. Its tolerance level increases especially when the victims do not know that they're softly helped by the corruptors. Trapped into the system, the corruptors themselves are sometimes pushed to use the public budget for their personal interests, not only for fulfilling their own wishes but also to secure next year's budget. Extending the definition into time corruption, it's not rare to find cases especially in developing and underdeveloped countries where the employers don't pay their overtime properly. Corruption then becomes a habit. With colours of corruption, judicial, legislative, executive, monarch, even grassroots, corruption can easily be found. As a result, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With the help of a very simple statistic saying that Spain has 47.42 million population in 2021 and 21.70% of them are at risk of being poor, I then compared it with Indonesia that has 273.8 million population in 2021 yet in March 2022 9.54% of them are poor. Whether the poverty reduction in Indonesia includes any definition of corruption or not must require another set of research but such a combination of sciences may give us perspective of the interactions between sciences be it within the social sciences itself and or with natural sciences. As for the Spain case, paying more attention to the poor or marginalised or vulnerable people as potential victims of any corruption, thus I suggested perhaps because both Sanchez from PSOE and Feijoo from PP whom big possibilities will be fighting for the next election have limited knowledge about it, they should then try to know them better. That's presumably how science and practice could interact better. Collaborating with other related scientists, natural scientists or quantitative social scientists can even build the maths of corruption not only to solve it, but also to prevent it.
The Theory of Everything
Inevitably, Stephen Hawking will come to our mind when we talk about the Theory of Everything. I watched the movie a thousand times but just now -literally just now- when I am writing this I come to understand why he wanted to build a single equation that can explain everything when he was asked what was next after his doctoral study. It's not because we want a template but because we want to ease everyone's job including ourselves to prevent and solve problems. In my case I want to build a formula when the sciences can collaborate with each other, not only the scientists themselves. I guess it can be called humanisation or personification or science.
Following the wars, especially Russian aggression to Ukraine since February 24, 2022; Petrenko (2023)7 in his article titled Condiciones de Un Acuerdo de Paz con Rusia explained softly the emerging question among readers about when the war is going to be ended. He mentioned that political scientists also have the same question but in addition with how it's going to be ended.
By reading his article automatically I made a timeline, one of my favourite methods, not only because we can see the bigger picture that makes our whiteboard full but also we can analyse many things from it. We can see the causality, anomaly, and tendency, including the positivity or negativity of events that I believe would lead us to better facts and understanding mainly of the use of sciences.
The objective is clear. I wanted to negotiate with Russia, especially Putin and their allies, because one of the current most possible ways to have the war ended is by having them withdraw the troops from Ukraine, by keeping in mind the involvement of the defence business system. By literally calculating everyone's efforts including battles in the fields, fundraising, defence system support, refugee shelters, winter package, sanctions especially for the oligarchs and related sides who help Putin with percentage, I could identify a 5% gap. My analysis of several videos of an autocratic leader such as Putin can't made me realise that he can't negotiate with others by himself. He is only strong among his robots. Even the innocent people of Russia who fought in the field are already tired following what he wants. He threatened his people to do such mobilisation, he threatened the world with nuclear and next aggression cooking, including to Japan, and he spread propaganda saying that Russia wants peace while Zelensky does not, which is 100% incorrect.
As I mentioned in Chapter II, Europe tends to depend on China too. With a thriving worry that the EU would make the same mistake as what happened with Russia, Arnal (2023)8 wrote an article titled 'China: Will the EU make the same mistakes as with Russia?'. The highest figure of the dependency she mentioned is reflected in the statistic saying that 98% of rare earths consumed by the EU come from China. Grasping the whole idea where China has also lent 100 billion $ to developing countries under the Belt and Road Initiative but with a weak framework, I noticed that we need to support both EU and China, especially because it leads to a sustainable living of all countries, including Democratic Republic of Congo where the EU got 68% of Cobalt from.
I had the chance to observe China directly around two decades ago. It was their land system that is very distinctive, the Government rents their land for factories from all over the world. With a lower wage for labourers, China became a haven for producers, especially manufacturers. When the time comes for them to realise the importance of taking care of their environment too, they do not stop doing their business obviously. Therefore, they have been curing their country's environmental issues and trying to involve others to help them with Designed in China products, instead of the common Made in China. So having this in mind, we can actually make the best use of science interaction to work as one universe.
Conclusion: Revisiting Einstein
When Einstein developed E = MC2, he must be thinking about the theory of everything too because it's literally applicable for many things, being the square can also be calculated by multiplying the C, so it can also be MCB, MCC, MCQ, etc; and M can be a sum, also C, B, and Q.
By keeping that in mind, it means the formula can also be used to predict polarisation. If E is a bipolarized world, then M can be Westernization, and C can be Orientalization. Let's bear in mind that C can be one too, thus let's treat it that way so there will be less inequalities. Now if we want to create a multi polarised world, what the MC should be? I would say indigenous development for M but since indigenous is often defined and perceived for example as tribe and ethnic groups, let's borrow Mansuri and Rao (2013)9's term: localised development. While for C, since systems interact with each other, localised developments need to be synergistically harmonised. As Stephen Hawking, who was inspired by Roger Penrose, who was inspired by Albert Einstein would say: "wouldn't it be nice?", but allow me to follow with a different question, "if such sciences can be that reciprocal?".
References
1Casal Bértoa F (2022) The problem of party system change revisited: the 2022 Peter Mair Lecture, Irish Political Studies, DOI: 10.1080/07907184.2022.2161034
2Casal Bértoa F (2017) Political parties or party systems? Assessing the ‘myth’ of institutionalisation and democracy, West European Politics, 40:2, 402-429, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2016.1216921
3Güell E (2023) El Nuevo Sentido Público de La Ciencia. Agenda Pūblica El País
4Soriano Mendiara P (2023) Una Historia de Dos Presidentes. Agenda Pūblica El País
5Gil Teltre M (2023) El Año en Que (Casi) Todo Cambió en La Política Energética Europea. Agenda Pūblica El País
6Longo F (2023) La Insoportable Levedad de La Malversación. Agenda Pūblica El País
7Petrenko I (2023) Condiciones de Un Acuerdo de Paz con Russia. Agenda Pūblica El País
8Arnal J (2023) China: Will the EU make the same mistakes as with Russia? Agenda Pūblica El País
9Mansuri G, Rao V (2013) Localizing Development : Does Participation Work?. Policy Research Report;. Washington, DC: World Bank. © World Bank. https://open
Pknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11859 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO
