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 it turns
out, indeed I was. Reading the front
page of the New York Times the next
morning on my way to work I could not help think back to Frank’s very first
class on Culture and Policy that I took some 14 years ago.
“Many
residents simply do not believe that the oil is going away anytime soon,
whatever scientists are saying,” wrote Campbell Robertson, the article’s author
(In Gulf, Good News about Oil Is
Taken With Grain of Salt). “Smell that?” Robertson was asked by Forrest
Travirca III, field inspector of a non-profit land trust, as they drove along
the beach at Port Fourchon, Louisiana.
So what
did Fukuyama have to say about smelling the air to detect the potency of oil
spills? Nothing really that I can
recall. He did however talk a lot about
trust. His big thesis at that juncture, after
declaring that we had reached “The End of History,” was that cultural propensities
could be used to divide the world into high and low trust societies. Frank talked about the radius of trust. He talked about the capacity to spontaneously
form and sustain large professionally managed hierarchical corporations in the
private sector. The United States and
Germany could do those without governmental intervention because the radius of
trust in these countries extended way beyond just the immediate family. In other words, professionals are trusted or
valued more than your relatives and next door neighbors.
Taking
his thesis on its face value, and overlooking its fallacies for the time being,
I couldn’t help but wonder: why the radius of trust in a supposedly high trust
society like the United States now seems to stop short of the scientific
community? Why, apparently, after collecting
tons of samples, testing and retesting, sifting through huge volumes of data,
and analyzing and reanalyzing the results, the conclusions from a scientific
inquiry by a team of experts fail to generate public confidence? What’s missing from the ingredient?
Scientists
will claim it is scientific literacy; if only the public knew and appreciated what
they did.
The
public will point to the poor record of expert assurances: Katrina; Exxon
Valdez; and initial estimates of the oil spill.
Could it
be what’s missing from the process is not science education, not an untarnished
record of being right all the time, but something as simple as just ‘the public’?
Carlos
Melendez,
a graduate student in Michigan State, thought so. In our Table Top Salon discussions (#18)
during The Rightful Place of Science? conference, he
thought one way to bridge the gulf between the experts and the public was to
make the public a part of the process, not after the experts reached their
conclusions, as in a town hall or a public hearing, but before and as an
integral part of the deliberation process itself. [See more on the conference blog]
This was
a bit of a departure from the focus of our discussion—participatory technology
assessment (PTA). PTA is one of the tools
used in CSPO’s arsenal for anticipatory governance. We were talking about applications in
emerging technologies like synthetic biology and geoengineering where PTA could
be used to provide leading indicators.
The idea was, as Dan Sarewitz talks about in his Nature column this month, to reflect on societal
implications of technological futures long before they become entrenched in our
daily lives.
Could
PTA or some variation of it be used as an integral part of other expert
assessments? Could scientists and experts address during the process of their
analysis, not only the larger technical questions they have been asked to
answer, but also the more immediate concerns people have, like questions about
the oil that is “stratified underneath fresh sand or exposed in the surf at low
tide”? The idea is not to replace the
rigor of the scientific method but to insert into the process questions, answers
to which could only help acceptance of the broader conclusions; in other words,
pass the smell test.
