One of the most respectable and thought-provoking websites, Edge.Org, has made two interesting observations in the past few months. Recently, it emphasised that the founders of Internet, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and E-Bay were driving progress in the 21st century. They are all engineers and scientists. The message is clear. Politicians and philosophers are not leading the world on the path to progress.

A few months ago, the website argued that scientific and technological progress did not require political sanction. It said: nobody voted for printing; nobody voted for penicillin; nobody voted for the internet; nobody voted for search engines. All these breakthroughs took place without political decisions and the best path to progress was characterised by the abstinence of government.

There is no doubt that scientists and technologists have emerged as the most significant drivers of progress, or are perceived to be so. There is no doubt that there is no globally influential philosopher, nobody who holds moral compass for the world, nobody who is capable of changing our way of thinking about nationalism, war, conflict, and deception the way Tim Berners Lee, Bill Gates and the Larry-Sergie trio have changed our way of thinking about work, relationships, and information. Since Mahatma Gandhi and others who ended the concept of colonialism and Schumann who created the modern concept of cooperation, there have been very few statesmen – Willy Brandt, Olof Palme, Martin Luther King, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela. Should we then forget about philosophers and politicians and look at scientists and engineers to drive progress?

About 1500-2000 years ago, India experienced how good science depends on good politicians. For a while, the Maurya emperors provided an enabling political environment, which made it possible for scientists to invent new theories. In the sixth century, Aryabhatta discovered that the sun was at the centre of the solar system and the earth revolved around it. However, later kings after Chandragupta Maurya and Samudragupta wasted their time infighting. In the absence of good politicians to promote knowledge nobody heard about Aryabhatta’s theory. It took exactly a thousand years for Copernicus to state the same scientific truth and another 100-200 years for the European political class, which was essentially the theocratic class to accept it. The world lost 1200 years in the development of our understanding of how the universe works.

About a thousand years ago the Arabs repeated history. The Ummayad and Fatimid emperors promoted plurality and creative freedom. The Arab scientists developed algebra, astronomy, medicine, chemistry. Later on, Arab kings wasted their time in measuring victory and defeat until they were so weakened that they lost Baghdad to the Mongols. What did the world achieve? All the progress made by the Arab scientists reached nowhere for a few hundred years until some of the ideas began to trickle into the European Renaissance and the industrial revolution. The Arabs consciously rejected printing just as the Chinese later on deliberately gave up on shipping – both because of bad politics. The world lost 500 years in the development of medicine, chemistry and mathematics.

If good philosophers capable of conceiving progressive models of society and good politicians capable of executing such models had more or less consistently continued to exist in India for the two thousand years and in the Arab world and China for at least a thousand years, we would be living the kind of life in 1500-1600 that we live today, with some differences. And we would be living today how we hope to live in 2500 AD.

But instead, scientists and technologists who drive progress all happen to be in North America, Western Europe and Japan. The Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Sri Lankan software programmers are merely masons and labourers and the CEOs of software and outsourcing companies in these countries are pompous PR experts. All that Asian, African, Arab and Latin American industrialists can claim are awards for corporate excellence and corporate social responsibility, given by their own peers or owners of financial newspapers. No Asian company based in Asia has come out with an original technology which can change our way of life. With the exception of Brazilian sugar-based bio-fuel, no Asian, African, Arab, Latin American product has the potential to influence the future of mankind.

Why is it that almost all leaders of technology in the last 150 years, from Wright Brothers to the Google pair, have been based in North America and Western Europe? Why is that almost all great scientists ranging from Einstein to Craig Venter belong to the same part of the world and even Hargobind Khorana and Venkaraman, born in India, became great scientists only after migrating to the United States? Why is it that Jews who are Americans or Europeans have won hundreds of Nobel prizes but Jewish scientists in Israel have won only five or six Nobel prizes?

Now let’s examine where all of our globally influential philosophers and political innovators worked in the last 300-400 years. Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Russell, Jefferson, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Adenaur, Brandt conceived and promoted discourse on ideal society on the two sides of the Atlantic which makes it possible for Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Craig Venter to have freedom, resources and appreciation so that they can indulge in creativity, and which attracts Har Gobind Khorana to migrate to undertake original work on DNA. Is it that Africa, Asia and Latin America failed in the last few centuries to produce philosophers and good politicians, with the exception of Mahatma Gandhi who was assassinated as soon as India became a nation governed by the Indians; and Nelson Mandela who was ignored once South Africa became a nation governed by the African National Congress?

The success of Western scientists and technologists is essentially based on the vision and competence of Western philosophers and politicians. Good science and technology and good philosophy and politics are essentially interdependent and collaborative endeavours. One cannot prosper without the other. A few decades ago Einstein and Russell joined hands to issue a manifesto about how the world should be governed. We need descendants of both fields and we need them to collaborate with each other. So long as Western scientists acknowledge their debt to those who founded their mindset, instead of believing in an illusion that a few engineers drive the progress of the world, science and technology will advance.

The three large continents of the world, where more than five billion of the world’s 6.6 billion people live, should understand the legacy of their great minds 1000-2000 years ago and missed opportunities since then due to their failure to produce thinkers and leaders. Only when small leaders of the great continents stop imitating the dominant theory of the day delivered from London or Washington, only when they stop taking pride in producing low cost garment workers and software programmers, only when they realise the urgency to come out of this insolvency of mind by fostering partnership between scientists and philosophers and technologists and politicians, only then is there  hope for progress amongst the majority of the world’s people.