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Perspectives
Fundamentals and Fundamentalists
by Daniel Sarewitz
Welcome to the new CSPO website, and the new CSPO. Over the past
several months, the Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes has become
the Consortium for S, P, and O, our institutional home has changed from
Columbia University to Arizona State University, and we have moved our
office from Washington, DC, to Tempe, Arizona. The change from “Center”
to “Consortium” signals our commitment to building a network of
organizations and individuals working to understand and enhance linkages
between science policy decisions and desired social outcomes. The move
from DC to AZ does not signal a weakening of our focus on science policy
at the highest levels, but it does respond to an extraordinary
opportunity afforded by ASU to play a central role in the design of a
new type of outcome-oriented, research-intensive university.
As for the web site, it is very much a work in progress, and over the
coming months we will add functionality and content, with a longer-term
goal of making this the central node for ideas and action at the
triple-junction of science, policy, and social outcomes. This particular
space will be devoted to op-ed length pieces, contributed by a variety
of authors, addressing significant current issues of science and
society. We hope to sample a rich spectrum of perspectives and voices,
and thereby catalyze new ideas and fresh discourse.
For it seems that science policy discourse is remarkably, and
maddeningly, bound by a set of definitions and debates that have been
more or less in rigor mortis for the past fifty years. We can’t seem to
escape the black-hole attraction of Vannevar Bush’s Science the Endless
Frontier (even though we know that it was rooted in false
assumptions—assumptions that Bush himself knew to be wrong); the
tiresome taxonomies and axiologies of basic and applied, of science and
technology (even though we know that these categories have little
descriptive power); the continued dichotomization of scientism versus
luddism (as if action in the world can only occur at the extremes).
Yes, of course scholars who study science and technology as social,
political, and economic phenomena have a more sophisticated and complex
view of the world, but what was on display to a remarkable degree at a
recent Gordon Conference on Science and Technology Policy was the failure of that
scholarly community to export its ideas and insights to the rest of the
world. Talk about two cultures! Any reasonably acute fly on the wall at
this conference would have heard two mutually incommensurable
conversations going on simultaneously, one standing on the shoulders of
the old assumptions, definitions, and dichotomies, and the other
crawling around in the muck, trying to get a better view of the mutual embeddedness of science and society. But the major point is: no
communication.
The reason is obvious: for all the wonderful insights generated by
focusing a variety of social science lenses on the processes of
knowledge creation and innovation, in the real world it was, and
continues to be, the physical and life sciences who are fighting cold
wars, revitalizing industries, bringing home the bacon, remaking
society. They have all of the power and influence because they produce,
and this power and influence confers upon them the right to be
unreflective about why and how they do what they do.
Yet this license to cluelessness may be approaching its expiration
date—not because the ideas emerging from science policy scholarship are
gaining traction, but because the tensions built into the current system
are becoming unavoidable, and the standard response—that all problems
can be resolved with more funding, more velocity, more information, more
stuff—begins to strain credulity. These tensions manifest in, for
example: society’s inability to come to grips with global environmental
problems; ongoing opposition to genetically modified foods, and nascent
discomfort with nanotechnology; controversies over stem cells and human
genetic enhancement; an apparently open-ended participation in
asymmetric warfare; the pervasive use of alternative medicines;
grassroots opposition to globalization; etc. etc. etc.
From the perspective of the old assumptions, definitions, and
dichotomies, the main obstacles to overcoming any of these challenges
are scientific illiteracy, religious fundamentalism, and budgetary
limitations. Reality is beginning to test this formula. For example: It
turns out, according to some careful
survey work , that European opposition
to genetically modified foods does not reflect ignorance about risk, but
deep distrust of the corporations and institutions responsible for
producing and distributing these products, and concern about the impacts
of globalizing economies on culture. Surprise! This controversy is about
power and control in democratic society--not about understanding risk.
And those who think that opposition to emerging human genetic
technologies can only come from either fundamentalists on the right or luddites on the left will have a hard time explaining why such
politically diverse but essentially centrist voices as the conservative
political theorist Francis Fukuyama and the liberal political theorist
Michael Sandel have voiced profound concerns about the long-term
implications of these lines of research and innovation. In a way that is
not quite trivial, the delegitimation of Olympic competition because of
scandals over performance enhancing drugs is a nice metaphor for the
fundamental dilemmas we are unthinkingly beginning to unleash. In the
2016 events, I’m going to root for the long jumper with the
nanotech-enabled exoskeleton, while you pin your hopes on the guy with
the kangaroo gene.
Of course those on top are usually slow to recognize a weakening of
their foundations. In an amazing, and likely successful, attempt to
further bolster science’s isolation from such discourse, scientists and
venture capitalists in California have come up with
Proposition 71, a ballot initiative that will
make stem cell research a constitutionally protected right in that
state, and provide six billion dollars in research funding that is
completely protected from the scrutiny and oversight of the public and
elected officials—the funding entitlement that scientists have been
vainly seeking since President Truman rejected Vannevar Bush’s original
proposal for the National Science Foundation back in 1947. The obvious
irony here is that California’s proclivity for direct democracy in fact
short-circuits the difficult and often protracted work of democracy.
Vote now for science, and forever hold your peace. Millions are being
spent to promote Prop 71, which is being sold on the promise of miracle
cures for Alzheimers, diabetes, spinal chord injury, and most everything
else that ails us, if we would just give the scientists the money they
need and leave them alone. Little has been learned, it appears, from the
promise of nuclear energy “too cheap to meter,” elusive miracle of gene
therapies, and genetically modified foods that will end hunger. Under
the guise of rationality, and through appeals to the compassion of
voters, advocates of Proposition 71 advance their own fundamentalism
about science, and in the process have sought and will likely gain a
special exemption from the rigors of democracy. But history is very
clear on this point: such exemptions are bound to breed abuse and
backlash.
The tensions between an ideal of science taking us where ever it wants
to go, and a democratic society with some commitment to controlling its
own destiny, can only continue to grow. CSPO will attempt to document,
understand, and interpret this tension in its multiplicity of guises, to
design methods and tools that can facilitate productive and timely
intervention. Keep your eyes on this space . . .
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