In the February 3, 1995 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Howard Segal, author of Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America and professor of history at the University of Maine, raised a dissenting voice in the general clamor for improved scientific literacy. In an essay entitled "The Sea Change in Attitudes About Technological Progress," he asserts that widespread concern over such phenomena as environmental degradation, nuclear war, and the replacement of human workers by machines have eroded our traditional optimism in the potential of scientific achievement to improve our lives. "Notwithstanding a temporary resurgence during the Persian Gulf War," Segal states, "Americans' hitherto enduring faith in science and technology is steadily giving way to skepticism and even pessimism."
This "sea change" from optimism to pessimism toward science has gone largely unnoticed both by scientists and by politicians, Segal asserts. Despite the fact that a vast majority of respondents to a 1993 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers opinion poll said they foresaw no transformation in their lives in the next decade as a result of new technological advances, Segal observes that scientists and politicians alike remain blind to the public's growing disenchantment with the promise of science. As reflected in a report entitled "Science in the National Technology," recently issued by President Clinton's Office of Science and Technology, politicians continue to embrace enthusiastically and unskeptically the cause of scientific literacy and new technologies such as the Information Superhighway. Segal concludes by calling for increased efforts, both in and out of government, to assess the ramifications of technology for American society.
Endeavors asked two members of the UNC-CH community to respond to Segal's claims. Paul Jones is systems programmer for UNC-CH's Office of Information Technology, co-author of The Web Server Book and an award-winning poet. Judith Farquhar is associate professor of anthropology and the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994).
Howard Segal suggests that there was a happier time in America's past when scientists were more highly regarded and funding was freer. In this Edenic period, which one assumes must be the fifties and early sixties, the public, while unaware of exactly how science worked, was willing to pay for large projects without trying to second-guess the scientists who dreamed those projects up.
To this version of history I have a one-word rebuttal: Godzilla. What most controlled the public mood and our trust in science was not a feel-good era, a morning in America, but an incredible fear of the Communists and their science. Cold war, not warm feelings, funded the Space Race and the Atomic Age. In the absence of a kind of education that could have allowed people to articulate an intelligent response to the new technologies, fear expressed itself in the popular poetic imagination as atomic fire monsters, giant ants, triffids, gigantic robots who could stop the earth from spinning. These creatures of bad, but delightful, poetry, of impoverished scientific education, were reflections of our uneasiness with the research of Big Science during the period- stand-ins for fall-out shelters, air raids, evacuation plans, their Sputnik.
This fear did eventually lead to something constructive, a much-needed improvement in the science portion of our public education. Many of us-especially those of us trained in the new sciences-would not be at the University without that improvement and the financial support that fear brought. I don't mean to sound un-grateful when I say that we learned to question the very basis of our own education. After all, that kind of questioning has given us a way to see problems that fear and ignorance kept hidden.
For example, while the public may-wisely to my mind-defund the Supercollider, an expensive project with elusive benefits, we also fund the Human Genome Project.
We demand oversight of experiments using human subjects more strictly and wisely than before. We want our scientists to consider the impact of their work over a length of time rather than look at the immediate results. More and more often, we are participants in the research rather than distanced observers.
We do, despite the polls cited by Segal, accept technology at a very fast rate. Digital sound systems, personal video systems, and microwave ovens are commonplace in American homes. Computers are in over 40 percent of our households and are in demand by every K-12 school system. What we are seeing is not pessimism, but rather an easy acceptance of consumer technology and a reasoned, educated questioning of large, expensive projects.
Without Reds under the bed or atomic monsters in our collective dreams, we have become more reasonable and more likely to require science on a human scale. We are adult enough, aware enough and complex enough to face an imperfect future.
I recently saw an announcement for a New York Academy of Sciences conference, "The Flight from Science and Reason." In contrast to Segal's moderately worded cautions, this flyer diagnoses what it calls "antiscience" and "fashionable irrationalism" as a "flight from Reason" and a "denial of even the hope of objectivity." Clearly if we dare to question big science, madness (or at least a crippling subjectivity) is just around the corner.
This slightly ridiculous case of panic errs in the other direction from federal inattention to the issue of the public's disenchantment with science. Yet the New York Academy is right about one thing: it is not easy to separate policy issues surrounding public expenditure on basic and applied sciences from deeper philosophical concerns. In this century the institutions of the sciences have been successful in setting the philosophical agenda and dominating common sense. The very definitions of rigor in argument that we are taught in high school and college derive from the philosophy of science. A commitment to objectivity (even long after many philosophers have demonstrated its impossibility) continues to inspire empiricists, from biology lab-oratories to history seminar rooms. And an inability to think formally outside of a protocol that begins with "the hypothesis" and ends with "the data" governs the grant-reviewing process. We have incorporated science's underpinnings so well, it seems only right to allow our most highly trained scientists and engineers to take charge of the (unquestioned) growth of knowledge in the public interest.
But skeptical voices have grown too numerous and too insistent. We cannot persist in a credulous surrender of common interests to the technocratic experts. The New York Academy conference quite knowingly attempts to preclude questions that are being raised with increasing sophistication by humanists, social scientists, and working scientists themselves. Conflating scientific rationality with all rationality, and attacking those who would examine the assumptions of "the scientific method" as merely fashionable, this mode of thinking prevents sober and effective examination of the work of the sciences in late-twentieth-century societies.
And sober and effective research on the sciences as a social, political, and economic force does exist. Studies on the practice of working scientists may have eliminated idealistic claims of disinterestedness by exposing bias in research, but they have at the same time revealed important practical forms of internal debate. Critical discussion of the collusion of natural scientific research with a (not-yet-dead?) Cold War militarism has been followed by commentary that insists on the centrality of newer fields like ecology and epidemiology to the policy process. Public critique of scientific practice is an ongoing process in which both more and less than "truth" and "rationality" are at stake as we struggle to determine how science affects our lives. The knowledge we gain from this self-scrutiny shows that our ambivalence toward science and technology is justified, and it's not going away.
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