Essential Parallel Between Science and Democracy
Article: Sheila Jasanoff. The Essential Parallel between Science and Democracy. Seed Magazine, February 2009.
URL = http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/02/the_essential_parallel_between.php
See also: Technologies of Humility
Excerpt
Sheila Jasanoff:
"the sound conduct of science and the sound conduct of democracy both depend on the same shared values.
History supports this analysis. For all practical purposes, the birth of experimental science coincided with the rise of democratic accountability in politics. Where democracy is strong today, there science also enjoys a respected place. In strengthening democratic values, we also renew the preconditions for scientific discovery and technological innovation.
The converse, however, is not always true. Modern science is a clutch of complex institutions and practices, carrying tendencies that do not always converge with the aims of democracy. Accordingly, simply throwing more money at science, or even listening to the best-qualified scientists for policy advice, may not ensure that research and development are conducted for the public good. Care must be taken to avoid the tunnel vision that frequently accompanies expertise. Studies of disasters — Challenger, 9/11, the financial meltdown — all confirm a sadly recurring story. Complacent or arrogant technical experts refused to heed early warning signs that could have prevented the worst consequences from materializing. It would be a pity if the present administration lost sight of the need for powerful countervailing voices to question conventional technocratic wisdom.
There are other reasons to cultivate the critical sensibility that a robust democracy encourages. For one thing, much of science today is closely linked to special economic and political interests. Indeed, in the effort to speed discoveries into commerce and everyday lives, US public policies have fostered a partnership between science and business that strikes many as too intimate for detached inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. For science to regain its rightful place, it will be necessary to rebalance the portfolio of public science, rethinking the mix of curiosity-driven and mission-oriented research, of science that tackles fundamental questions and science that serves corporate interests, of science for pleasure and science for pay. It will be necessary to create more safe havens where smart minds can tackle hard questions without any expectation of immediate applications. It will be necessary to reward discovery as well as invention, and to reaffirm that ours is a society that values the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Scientific knowledge is a public good, and courageous policymakers should be prepared to pay for that resource without imposing the same utilitarian calculus on all publicly funded acquisition of knowledge.
Science, moreover, should be nested in spaces for intellectual endeavor more broadly defined. A useful reminder in this context is that the word "science" does not mean the same thing to all people. The German word Wissenschaft is translated as science, but its scope is much wider than the natural sciences alone. It encompasses all branches of systematic or disciplined study. In his inaugural address, President Obama called for a union of imagination and of common purpose. Imagination, however, is not uniquely the preserve of science. It is fed by language, watered by history, nourished by art, and liberated by social thought. Many developing countries invested narrowly in science and engineering education in the postwar period. Some have attained higher levels of scientific and mathematical literacy than the US, but there is no evidence that they have made the great leaps forward in science and technology that remake an era.
Returning to our own context, rebalancing the incentive structures for science will call for a revision of current intellectual property laws and practices. The old Jeffersonian dichotomies between discovery and invention, and between laws of nature and their useful applications, are too simplistic to serve a scientific culture in which even abstruse mathematical formulas can acquire unexpected economic value and the first person to identify a new biological structure stands to profit hugely from simply naming it. There is great need for a renewed societal conversation about what in our natural environment should be viewed as humankind's common property and what can be owned by the fortunate few who first gain access to it.
These questions will raise hackles and temperatures because they are both hard and pervasive. May a scientific journal require corporate researchers to disclose less of what they know than is asked of university professors? Can a multinational company own a plant long known to local people for its medicinal properties because company scientists were the first to genetically sequence it? Is the insertion of a single gene enough to convert an animal from a thing in nature to a product of human invention? Which biological structures derived from the human body can be treated as property without violating human integrity? Should scientists be required to make public their data-sharing practices, and should the same rules apply whether a research institution is publicly or privately funded? When, if ever, should intellectual property rights take a backseat to ethics? Questions such as these have been germinating on the internet, in NGO campaigns, in relatively unpublicized lawsuits, in letters to editors, on op-ed pages, and in doctoral dissertations — but not in the halls of government. If science is to regain its place as one of our most valued democratic institutions, then it's time for such issues to be widely and publicly debated.
In restoring respect for science within government agencies, the new administration should recognize that our understanding of the relations between knowledge and power have changed fundamentally over the past 50 years. A new branch of research — science and technology studies (STS) — has sprung up that takes the interplay of science, technology, and society as its object of investigation. STS scholarship suggests that science's role in "speaking truth to power" is much more complicated than was once thought. The old formulation suggests both the accessibility of an unambiguous truth and a clean separation between knowledge and power that are radically at odds with the ways in which knowledge actually develops in disputed policy contexts. Rather than claiming the rarely attainable high ground of truth, scientific advice should own up to uncertainty and ignorance, exercise ethical as well as epistemic judgment, and ensure as far as possible that society's needs drive advances in knowledge instead of science presuming to lead society.
Such humility requires experts to sometimes bow to others who are less technically informed, but subordinating expert preferences to democratic priorities may be a tough act. The roots of resistance run deep. They are grounded partly in the innocent, wishful, antiquated notion that science would be apolitical if only it could be left alone. Today science neither wants to nor can be left out of political calculations and policy choices. In part, opposition to public involvement in defining the goals of science reflects a horror of disastrous state-sponsored scientific projects, such as Lysenkoism in the former Soviet Union and race science in Nazi Germany. Many scientists also unconsciously buy into the logic of technological determinism: the belief that certain technological advances are inevitable, and that societal responses must follow the paths carved out by technology's forward march. All we can do, on this view, is act collectively to prevent technology's most harmful consequences, such as risks to health, the environment, or human well-being on a mass scale. And guarding against risk only reinforces the need to rely on science and expertise.
A paradigmatic moment in postwar American history illustrates how firmly these views are lodged in the most brilliant minds. Robert Oppenheimer emerged from the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a committed opponent of an atomic arms buildup and research into still more lethal nuclear weapons. Yet he famously changed his position on the development of the hydrogen bomb when he learned that it was a feasible project. His words are well known to historians of the period:
The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political, and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it.
In this short text reflecting some of the most wrenching moral conflicts of the past century, we see the dynamics of scientific separatism and technological determinism at work. For Oppenheimer it was possible to argue that a technological program was unnecessary only so long as "it did not make a great deal of technical sense." Once the sweetness of the technical solution became apparent, he felt one could no longer argue about its further development. At that point, the scientist's responsibility turned to making the thing; all other issues — "the military, the political, and the humane" — became someone else's concern, as "problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it."
Here in the early years of the 21st century, we need a more sophisticated reading of history and a clearer understanding of what it means to link scientific and technological developments to democratic ends. Today's dangers are not mostly those of totalitarian societies, in which the ideologies and aims of a murderous few deprived people of any say in their scientific, technological, or political futures. Today we are more likely to suffer from a largely unregulated relationship between science and private interests that drives discovery without attention to the collective good. We remain captive to expensive defense projects, justified by appeals to fear, that stand outside the processes of democratic control. And we risk the possibility that, fueled by financial greed and media hype, ethically and environmentally problematic inventions will be launched into the world before thoughtful people have had a chance to reflect on why we need them.
Finding the rightful place for science in these circumstances demands a Second Enlightenment. This time, we do not need to overthrow the false gods of superstition or the self-serving autocracies that thrive by creating their own reality. This time, like the fox of Greek philosophy, we already know a great many things about how to examine life, harness energy, measure society, create incentives, and use statistical evidence to support rational public decisions. Nor should we hesitate to learn more. But do we, like the hedgehog, also know the big things? What makes for human happiness? Which manipulations of nature are we too ignorant to safely undertake? When might attempts to enhance human capability bump up against deeply held beliefs about the value of being human?
The Second Enlightenment must be the enlightenment of modesty. All through the 20th century, grand attempts to remake nations and societies failed. Today, as this nation heeds its president's call to "begin again the work of remaking America," it would do well to reflect on those modest virtues that underlie the long-term successes of both science and democracy. These are not the programmatic ambitions of revolution or of wholesale system redesign, but rather the skeptical, questioning virtues of an experimental turn of mind: the acceptance that truth is provisional, that questioning of experts should be encouraged, that steps forward may need corrective steps back, and that understanding history is the surest foundation for progress.
In rejecting "the specialness of science," and in accepting the essential parallelism between scientific learning and democratic learning, science in the new administration will find its rightful place." (http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/02/the_essential_parallel_between.php)