As technology develops and also links itself to the armaments industry, one must develop a futuristic interdiscipli- nary ethics, an ethics that goes beyond specialisms and masters a responsibil- ity for connectivities. Such an experi- ment in interdisciplinarity might be one of the most exciting ways of reviving university education today. It is not the information revolution that we need to understand, but the in- terdisciplinary revolution connecting knowledges, demanding new ideas of connectivity and morality. One wishes a few universities would become intel- lectual panchayats for such experi- ments.
flexive about one’s discipline, under- stand its limits. In fact many scientific disciplines as they are taught today lack this sensitiv- ity. It reminds one of what the physicist John Ziman once said. Ziman, himself a fellow of the Royal Society, com- mented “a scientist knows as much about science as a fish about hydrody- namics.” What Ziman meant was that a sci- entist because of his expertise has no sense of the philosophical roots, the so- cial connectivities of his discipline. Interdisciplinarity not merely con- nects texts from various disciplines but demands an awareness of contexts. For example one must also see how a metaphor which works well in one dis- cipline may not work with equal suc- cess in another. There is one part of the multi-disci- plinary world that few emphasise. This is the world of ethics and the varieties of ethics one must devise to meet the re- quirements of complexity, uncertainty and risk today.
Geddes in fact dreamt of a city as an interdisciplinarity entity, a space where even childhood is an interdisci- plinary space for enjoyment. He claimed that childhood is a world for learning crafts, for mastering languages because it is only through an access to plural worlds, alternative world views that one acquires the confidence to con- nect disciplines. Language in this sense becomes crucial and a multiplicity of languages gives us access to a range of cosmolo- gies, world views which makes life more open-ended. In this context, the Kannada author UR Ananthamurthy worried about the standardizing nature of education today. Ananthamurthy ob- served that in India, an illiterate worker often speaks four to five languages, while a convent school student is re- stricted to one.
FRAGMENTARY
Interdisciplinarity cannot be a frag- mentary exercise or an aggregative one. It needs encompassing frameworks. One has to be self-critical and self-re-
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