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ISIS Report 02/06/05
What Science, What Europe?
Europe’s foremost philosopher of science offers a devastating
indictment of contemporary European science. Prof. Isabelle
Stengers
As a philosopher, I can imagine no better keynote to strike than: what
are you doing, what are you trying to do? Organizing a discussion on the
European Research policy matters! It matters because it is both urgently needed
and difficult.
How to read the seventh framework programme? The first point to note is
that this programme does not really invite political debate. Indeed we do not
dealing with choices that could be discussed but with what presents itself as
the simple enactment of the "Lisbon agenda", fully endorsing its slogans, such
as "knowledge society", "economy of knowledge", "knowledge and its
exploitation" as "the key for economic growth" and "the competitiveness of
enterprises." All this, leading, as we should trust, to employment, while
maintaining and strengthening the so-called "European Model", and also
providing an improvement of welfare and well-being, quality of life, health and
the environment; for such improvements rely, as history has shown, on the
progress of knowledge and its many applications.
In other words, what we are dealing with is an assemblage of what, in
French, we call "mots d’ordre". Mots d’ordre are not
made to induce thinking and debating but to produce agreement on consensual
perception, putting on the defensive those who feel constrained to a "yes,
but…" Yes to employment, yes to the European model, yes to all those
improvements, and certainly yes to the progress of knowledge. But… The
"but" is coming too late, after so many agreements, and it will be easy to fall
into the trap, instead of addressing the means while ratifying the perceived
consensual goals. It is the very functioning and aim of mots
d’ordre to capture and inhibit the capacity to think, that is also the
capacity to recall or keep in mind that there exists a world that demands
thinking, that will not submit to wishful thinking.
What this conference is trying to do is thus as difficult as it is
necessary both to resist the trap and to expose it as what it is. Otherwise,
the danger is that the opposition against something everybody should agree upon
will appear as sheer ideology. But whatever the difficulty, I would insist that
this should be done. Indeed, the political point is not only what European
money should support, which kind of scientific research it should privilege. It
is also what kind of role is assigned to scientists and scientific research for
problems that are first of all society problems, such as welfare and
well-being, quality of life, health and the environment. And it is certainly
what kind of scientists we need in order for this role, whatever it may be, and
not to be diverted.
To give just an example, animal welfare has now entered European
politics. This is not a result of the progress of scientific knowledge. On the
contrary, many scientists have seen this concern as a manifestation of the
irrational sensitivity of public opinion, and they demanded objective
demonstration that animals such as cows, pigs or hens are able to suffer. But
as soon as there is money, even sceptical scientists become interested. One of
the propositions stemming from the researchers of the French INRA (Institut
National de la Recherche Agronomique) was indeed an achievement. If farm
animals indeed do suffer, it is because they are stressed by the kind of
quality of life imposed on them. Thus we should obtain less stressed animals,
that is select them in order to produce animals who would accept without stress
the kind of life imposed on them. Selection, as usual, is the answer, an answer
the great rational advantage of which is that it will not endanger the
competitiveness of meat or milk production while answering the public concern.
Animals should thus be modified in such a way that they biologically
fulfil not only the production criteria but also the competitiveness criteria
that define as loss any money devoted to their well-being. They should only be
defined as meat or milk production devices.
Such an answer to public concern does not identify science as
intrinsically blind, calculating, and reductionist; because such an
identification would exclude as scientists those ethologists concerned over the
animal’s capacity to feel and suffer. It does reveal, however, that those
INRA researchers using European money made available because of public
pressure, were quite indifferent to the reasons why so many people had spent
their time
protesting and fighting against what they considered as a shame
upon humanity. The way those researchers provided the answer would probably
have cost them their very reputation if the public had their right to evaluate
how the scientists met their concern. The researchers would have been found
guilty on two counts: that they both felt free to propose such a research
project to alleviate animal suffering, and also that they had nothing but
contempt for the reason the question was posed.
What is striking in the FP7 is the very clear signal sent to
researchers that whatever the babble around sustainable development or public
participation, they do not need to listen and think too much. They may go on
living with the fairy dreams that if what they propose may be of interest for
the industry and its obsession with competitiveness, they are still addressing
the challenges of the future in the best rational way. They may trust that they
will be protected against the so-called irrationality of those who, as it has
already been the case with the GMOs (genetically modified organisms), refuse to
accept and say "yes" to the laws of the free market as the only road to
progress. They may even feel that if scientists leave Europe because some
public pressure complicate their collaboration with their industrial partners,
that would slow down or put into question that which should really be
motivating innovation and the transition to a knowledge economy.
Some sociologists tell us that the mode of production of science has
been transformed from what they call an academically centred mode 1 that values
scientific autonomy and peer evaluation, to a flexible mode 2 that deals with
uncertainty, tying multiple transdisciplinary and participatory links,
contributing to economical and social questions and adopting new norms of
adaptability, accountability, openness and responsibility.
Today such a mode 2 production is but an apolitical dream-image, and a
very tranquillizing and useful one. It is an image much beloved by European
authorities, just like the "knowledge society", because it allows them to have
the cake and eat it too. They are free to produce a list of problems that
"flexible" scientists should be able to contribute to and avoid asking hard
questions about the relevance and reliability of their answer, about how to
enforce the so-called norms defining an accountable, open and responsible
scientist; as that is said to be part of the contemporary mode 2 production of
science.
It is very striking from this point of view that intellectual property
rights are not mentioned once in the European document, nor is the matter of
conflicts of interests or the freedom of scientists under private contract to
play the role of whistleblower. There is no mention either of the need for the
training of researchers to include relevant means of inducing and empowering
sensitivity or a sense of responsibility in the face of public concern. Indeed
the whole message is framed to reinforce the view that today, more than ever,
lay persons must be kept at distance, must be kept in a position of trust and
belief that this new science is the answer to their problems, that mobilisation
in the economic war for competitiveness is the key to everything else. The
public is asked to say "yes" to a Brave New World where all European
stakeholders, as they are mobilised in this war, will contribute to the
improvement of welfare and well-being, quality of life, health and the
environment.
I am not sure at all that the kind of flexible scientists required by
the new economy of knowledge will be able to fulfil their assigned role. I am
personally impressed by the sadness and resignation of a great number of
researchers I meet. When I tell them of what interests me in scientific
practices, that are indeed specialized, but may be living, challenging and
intense, they tell me it is a thing of the past.
Despairing scientists feel that what is coming under the charming
features of the mode 2 production of science is a new mode of mobilization,
that is a new mode of direct appropriation and evaluation of knowledge. They
rightly feel that the so-called economy of knowledge asks for a new type of
scientist who will accept being flexible, in the same way that workers today
are asked to be flexible. They understand that they are told that scientific
knowledge has become a much too serious business for scientists to keep what
appears as outdated privileges; that they are told they must accept the common
fate, that competitiveness is the general rule, even if it means relaxing the
rules of sharing and collectively verifying knowledge in the scientific
community when those rules impede the competition for and accumulation of
intellectual property rights.
I think, however, that the great political challenge is to avoid any
nostalgia for the famous mode 1 production, the Golden Age so many researchers
are regretting. Indeed the so-called mode 1 was forged around 1870, a time
characterized by intense relations with industrial production and coincided
with the promotion of a new type of scientist, the specialized professionals,
thinking away everything that does not contribute to the progress of their
discipline and identifying the progress of their discipline with the only key
to human and social progress. This is the "golden-eggs-hen-which-should-not-be
killed" model: society should feed research and respect its autonomy in
exchange for the fruitful applications that only a disinterested quest for
knowledge will produce. This model was an apolitical model, since the golden
eggs of science, as incubated by industry, were defined as serving humanity
progress and well-being, transcending political conflicts. But those kinds of
eggs are probably not what we need today in relation to what is now called
sustainable development. What is such a development is still an unknown. What
we know, however, is that, if it is not to remain sheer wishful thinking, and
if science is to be able to contribute at all to what it demands, we need
thinking scientists, not believers in the direct link between progress of
knowledge and progress of humanity. Development, as linked to the mode 1 golden
eggs, is unsustainable development.
We should thus be able to listen and amplify scientists’ complaints
but succeed in disentangling them from nostalgia, with the aim of inducing the
scientist’s appetite and imagination for what is so very interesting in
the present. In order to do so, I would propose to take seriously the idea of a
knowledge society, but turn into examples of such a society the story of the
GMO protest, the growing unrest and opposition of NGOs against intellectual
property rights, the questioning of pesticides and the beginning concerns about
nanotechnologies.
In all those cases, protests gain some general public approbation,
however vague, as if, at last, good questions were produced. But what is
politically relevant is the effective learning process that enables concerned
people to penetrate questions they were not meant to approach. And what is
remarkable is a very slow, very timid recognition by some scientists, that
maybe the questions those outsiders have learned to ask are not so irrational,
after all.
It seems to me that politics means constructing a position the first
quality of which is not some adequacy to matter of facts, but the production of
the sense of possibility and the appetite required to transform matters of
fact. It may be interesting not to denounce the mot d’ordre,
order-word, that Europe has to become a knowledge society, but to affirm as
obvious that the true measure of this becoming is the ability of all the
concerned people to produce and assemble knowledge as it is relevant for the
issue which concerns them. And to affirm as obvious as well that this dynamics,
which is the very challenge of democracy, is also the chance for scientists to
escape flexible enslavement, and enter into new relations with people who learn
to become as interested as they are themselves, in the reliability and
relevance of their contributions. Such affirmations are a very small half of
the truth indeed, but what matters is that it is the interesting, appetizing
half, and that arising new appetites is the only way I can think of to escape
the trap of mots d’ordre.
This article is an edited version of her keynote speech to the
conference, What Science - What Europe, organized by the Greens in the European
Parliament, 2 -3 May 2005, in order to
launch a debate on FP7. Prof.
Stengers is a signatory to the ISP Statement to the European Commission on FP7.
Add your name here http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ISPF7.php
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