A friend of mine in Singapore believes my work
on anticipatory governance of emerging technologies barely cloaks an ingrained hostility to
science. Science is science, she thinks
and, like Max Weber argues in “Science as a vocation,” democracy doesn’t have
much place in it – unless it is perhaps through do-it-yourself approaches like garage
synthetic biology.
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Posts in Public Engagement
It has been a few days since I returned from the IHEST
meeting (see Blogging from France posts). Upon reflection, I realize that it was a number of
firsts for me. It was the first time a foreign government invited me to speak.
And it was the first time I was translated in real time during a talk. But the
thing that stands out most in my mind is that it is the first time I’ve ever
spoken to an audience largely comprised of government officials.
As Jameson Wetmore and
Mark Brown were recently in France and evoked the Débat Public initiative, I
would like to make a very short historic of Grenoble, using Brice Laurent’s
work as a model of perspective but going back further in this town's history.
There is certainly a place for consensus conferences as they can play an important role in identifying potential social issues early in the development of a technology. But it is interesting to think of them as just one tool in a larger toolkit that can generate productive discussion for building a better future.
I’m on the train leaving Arc-et-Senans, heading back to Paris to fly home .... There is certainly a lot to read and do and talk about. Among other topics, the IHEST affiliates are deeply involved with questions of public involvement in sociotechnical controversies, even more than I expected.
Part of me feels pretty dejected. I came all the way from Arizona, too! Why is
Benny getting all the attention?
Intellectual pyrotechnics before 10 a.m. isn’t for
everyone, but I thought it was an excellent way to start this third day at the
IHEST summer school on science and public debate. Is there such a thing as the public? Well, think of God, said the morning’s first speaker.
The notion of speech
designates "not someone who was speaking about a mute thing, but an
impediment, a difficulty, a gamut of possible positions, a profound
uncertainty." Neither humans nor nonhumans "speak on their own,"
as traditional epistemology suggests, but only through various mediators.
There was a fair amount of frustration in the air today. A number of talks stressed the idea that the public does not trust scientists the way it used to. The lament was that this turn away from science means that scientists lose some of their legitimacy and the useful advice given to policymakers does not receive the priority it deserves.
The trip from Arizona to the site of the IHEST Summer
School required a cab from Scottsdale to PHX, a plane from PHX to Charlotte,
another plane from Charlotte to Paris, Charles de Gaulle, a cab from CDG to the
Lyon train station, a 2-hour TGV trip to Dijon, and an hour cab ride to Saline
Royale, along the way crossing nine time zones in just under 23 hours of
travel. Needless to say I’m experiencing a bit of jet lag.
Until fairly recently, many considered technocracy as much a part of French culture as pan au chocolat and café au lait. I had one each of the latter at the train station in Paris this morning, on my way to the Saline Royale, in the countryside between Dijon and Lausanne.... The first talk this afternoon, by Jacques Bouveresse, a philosophy of science professor at the prestigious College de France, consisted of an extended discussion of Bertrand Russell’s views on science and democracy.
Heading home from work, I decided to exit the Metro three stops early
and drop in on an alumni meeting at George Mason University, my alma mater. After successfully establishing my ‘relic’
credentials (I was there when the school of public policy was merely an
institute and housed in two trailers), I was asked: “Were you here when Fukuyama was here?”
As
a social scientist I live for Census data.
I thrive on Census data and I wait with great expectation for the next
round of Census data releases.
It is interesting that democracies seem
particularly unwilling to engage their publics in meaningful dialogue. They’ll
poll them, but not ask them to participate in fashioning a collective future.
Perhaps it is a failure of legal imagination.
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