Download Hubris or Hybrids

Can Nanotechnology Be Just?
On Nanotechnology and the Emerging Movement for Global Justice
Andrew Jamison
Aalborg University
A good technology, firmly related to human needs, cannot be one
that has a maximum productivity as its supreme goal: it must
rather, as in an organic system, seek to provide the right quantity
of the right quality at the right time and the right place for the
right purpose….The center of gravity is not the corporate
organization, but the human personality, utilizing knowledge not
for the increase of power and riches, or even for the further
increase of knowledge, but using it, like power and riches, for the
enhancement of life.
Lewis Mumford (1979: 166-67)
Abstract
Because of the overly market-oriented way in which technological development is carried
out, there is a great amount of hubris in regard to how scientific and technological
achievements are used in society. There is a tendency to exaggerate the potential
commercial benefits and willfully neglect the social, cultural, and environmental
consequences of most, if not all innovations, especially in new fields such as
nanotechnology. At the same time, there are very few opportunities, or sites, for ensuring
that nanotechnology is used justly and fairly, or for that matter, contribute to alleviating
any of the wide variety of injustices that exist in the world. Most of the public authorities
responsible for the development and application of science and technology are
uninterested and unwilling to “assess” the implications of nanotechnology, and there are
few, if any spaces in the broader culture for assessment to take place. Within the various
“social movements” that are, in one way or another, concerned with issues of global
justice, there is as yet little interest in nanotechnology. By examining the relations
between nanotechnology and the emerging movement for global justice this article
attempts to understand the enormous gap between the potential for science and
technology to do good and the actual ways in science and technology get developed, and
what, if anything, might be done to help close the gap in relation to nanotechnology, so
that it might better be able to contribute to global justice.
.
Key words: global justice, social movements, innovation, nanotechnology
1
A new mode of knowledge making
As the links between universities and the business world have become ever more
intimate, the knowledge that is made by scientists and engineers has become ever more
market-oriented. This is particularly the case in new fields like nanotechnology, which
has been a prime example of university-industry collaboration from the start of its brief
existence. But even in many older fields, support for scientists and engineers is
increasingly given because of the comparative advantage that their work is thought to
provide to their universities, sponsoring companies, and/or governments in the
competition for shares in the proverbial global market. As a result, the gap between the
promise and the reality of science and technology, between the contribution that science
and technology could potentially make to improving global justice and what science and
technology actually do, grows wider. A market-oriented approach to knowledge making
is, to put it simply, not the most appropriate way to alleviate injustice.
Nanotechnology is being developed, as are the other “high” or advanced types of
technology in the world today, according to what might be called a commercial logic or
ethos. The innovations that are selected for funding and then eventually work their way
into production and into the marketplace - as well as the scientists and engineers who do
the innovating - are chosen on the basis of their anticipated market value, not for any
other particular value they might have. This does not mean that applications of
nanotechnology cannot have a social value, or, for that matter that nanotechnologists
cannot contribute to alleviating injustices and/or inequalities of various kinds; but it does
mean that the innovation process is organized and managed in such a way so that such
contributions are of secondary importance, and by no means the main or primary
objective.
If, in the past, there was a kind of arbitrariness about which scientific and technological
discoveries were to be applied or transformed into economically viable innovations, such
is rarely the case in the contemporary world. In the course of the past century, there has
2
been a transformation in the cultural contexts in which scientific and technological
knowledge is made. Bruno Latour (1998) has called it a shift from “Science to Research”:
Science is certainty; Research is uncertainty. Science is supposed
to be cold, straight and detached; Research is warm, involving
and risky. Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes;
Research fuels controversies by more controversies. Science
produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the
shackles of ideology, passions and emotions; Research feeds on
all of those as so many handles to render familiar new objects of
enquiry (Latour 1998).
Michael Gibbons and his co-authors have influentially characterized the transformation
as an ongoing transition from what they term “mode 1”, or traditional, discipline-based
science to “mode 2”, or context-based knowledge production (Gibbons et al 1994). It is
more and more often the case, according to Gibbons and his co-authors, that knowledge
is produced within specific “contexts of application” in which scientists and engineers
transgress established disciplinary boundaries and identities, and thereby make
“transdisciplinary” knowledge. In the process, the boundaries between what has
traditionally been characterized as science and what has been characterized as technology
have become blurred in many fields, and inspired the coining of the term, technoscience,
to refer to the increasing mixing of technology and science in commercializable forms.
As opposed to disciplinary knowledge, the epistemic, or cognitive criteria that scientists
and engineers increasingly use in the contemporary world to make claims about the
validity, or truth of their research results must take into account the perceptions of reality
of those who provide the funding. As such, the quality, or truth value of transdisciplinary
knowledge depends on the context in which the knowledge is made. Instead of solely
evaluating their truth claims among themselves according to epistemic criteria that are
internal to scientific and engineering fields, “quality control,” as Gibbons et al put it, “is
additionally guided by a good deal of practical, societal, policy-related concerns, so that
whatever knowledge is actually produced, the environment already structured by
application or use will have to be taken into account.” (Gibbons et al 1994: 33)
3
The transition from a mode of knowledge production that was, for the most part, selforganized in the form of academic science and engineering disciplines and thereby
governed and controlled by the knowledge producers themselves, into one that is
integrated into business networks and managed by corporate executives and their “civil
servants” in governmental and intergovernmental bodies means that scientific and
technological development has largely come to be governed and controlled by its
sponsors, or funders. As a result, the changes that have taken place in the contexts of
knowledge making have served to turn most, if not all, science and technology, especially
in new fields like nanotechnology, into competitive rather than cooperative activities.
Nanotechnology, like the other fields of advanced science and technology with which it is
said to “converge” in powerful new combinations, has been constructed from its
conception in the 1990s with a very distinct set of uses in mind. Like the information and
genetic technologies, nanotechnology is borne out of a strategic approach to science and
technology policy that emerged in the 1980s with the rise of neo-liberalism and
globalization (Elzinga and Jamison 1995). It has been organized within business
networks, or so-called systems of innovation that are a component part of what has come
to be called a knowledge-based economy. All the money that has been invested in
research and development programs, in new academic departments and expensive
scientific instruments, and, not least, in marketing and advertising has been done in
behalf of strengthening international “competitiveness” and for the eventual creation of
new sources of profit-making and capital accumulation. And that inconvenient - or
perhaps, more accurately, unjust - truth affects in fundamental ways what
nanotechnology is good for.
While concerns are beginning to be voiced about the potential dangers lurking in the
nanorealm (and not just by horror story writers like Michael Crichton, whose novel, Prey
(2002) gave us the vision of vicious swarms of nanoparticles attacking the scientists who
had spawned them), only a very small amount of the publicly supported research is
devoted to assessing the social, cultural and environmental implications of
4
nanotechnology, or, for that matter, the relations between nanotechnology and global
justice.
Particularly in those countries, such as Denmark and the United States, where
“technology assessment” became an integral part of the science and technology policy
landscape in the 1980s and 1990s (Jamison and Baark 1990), nanotechnology has been
developing in a very different cultural climate. The places where technology assessment
used to take place in the US, Denmark and elsewhere have been significantly reduced in
size and influence during the past 15 years, beginning with the closing of the US Office
of Technology Assessment in 1994 and the coming to power of right-wing governments
in the course of the new millennium. Assessment has generally been replaced by various
types of forecasting, or foresight activities, which provide analyses of potential markets
and identify application areas that are most suitable for commercialization, rather than
investigating the social, cultural, and environmental implications of new technologies.
And many of those who previously took part in projects of “proactive” or “constructive”
or “participatory” technology assessment often with groups or movements within civil
society have turned their attention to the networking machinations of the
nanotechnologists and their supporters in the business world. As a result, assessment has
largely been transformed into promotion.
At the same time, the various social movements concerned with global justice, which
have emerged in the wake of “anti-globalization” protest actions at intergovernmental
economic meetings has as yet been unable to provide opportunities for discussing, and
developing alternatives for the cultural appropriation of nanotechnology, as previous
social movements have done in regard to scientific and technological development
(Jamison 2006). Within the emerging movement for global justice, opinions differ about
science and technology in general, and nanotechnology in particular, and there is little
active interest in trying to influence the development of nanotechnology, or, for that
matter, any of the other advanced technologies. There is thus little place in our societies
for discussing how we might go about using these and the other advanced technologies
fairly and appropriately; instead, the ancient crime of hubris has experienced a new lease
5
on life, as nanotechnologists and their funders promise more than they should, and carry
out their innovating activity in willful neglect of the social, cultural and environmental
implications of what they are doing.
The tendency to hubris
Hubris is a word that comes to us from the ancient Greeks, and has been defined as “an
impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe. It is the
sin to which the great and gifted are most susceptible, and in Greek tragedy it is usually
the hero's tragic flaw.” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2006). In the vernacular, it is commonly
used to refer to the arrogance, or mindless exuberance of those in power, when they
exaggerate their military strength and superiority and forget the consequences, as has
been the case in the war in Iraq.
It was the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright in his late cultural writings who
first started to apply the term to modern science and technology. von Wright associated
the “particular hubris of the modern technological way of life” with an “unreasonable
redirection of nature’s causality for human purposes” (von Wright 1978: 90). Following
in the footsteps of Lewis Mumford and Herbert Marcuse, who in the 1960s challenged
the “myth of the machine” and the “reification” of technology in their extremely
influential writings (Jamison and Eyerman 1994), von Wright spoke out against the
“myth of progress” that he felt had come to exercise a dangerous stranglehold on
contemporary society. As with the others, it was not technology itself that was seen to be
the problem, but its rationale, the underlying meaning that it had come to have in the
contemporary world. Because technology was being developed without proper attention
being given to its social, cultural and environmental consequences, its proponents could
be considered guilty of the ancient crime of hubris.
The tendency to hubris is not merely a matter of the hype that is so much taken for
granted as a regrettable, but necessary fact of contemporary life. The widespread selling
6
of science in general and nanotechnology in particular is only a small part of the problem
with the way nanotechnology is being appropriated into our cultures. The hubristic
“crime” is not commercialization as such, but its overemphasis and the general lack of
awareness and interest in any other meanings that nanotechnology might have. The storyline or narrative trope of economic innovation is so dominant, so hegemonic that it tends
to overwhelm all the other possible ways to talk about science and technology in society.
It is the eternal technical fixation that is deeply embedded in our
underlying conceptions of reality. If only we could develop an
even better instrument of production and destruction, if only we
could tame another force of nature to provide us with unlimited
energy, then our wealth and our capacities – the values by which
we measure progress – would be so much greater. More than two
millennia after the sun melted the wings of Icarus for coming too
close, we are still under the spell of hubris, trying to fly higher
and higher (Hård and Jamison 2005: 5).
As in other fields of contemporary science and technology, there is also a noticeable lack
of public accountability, an absence of procedures and institutions by which public
authorities are required to account for their decisions. This is, of course, not exclusive to
nanotechnology, but, for a variety of reasons, it is particularly serious now – after a
decade of environmental skepticism and holy wars against terrorists. In most European
countries, there is no public space available any longer for serious discussion and debate
of science and technology, no meaningful effort in the media, the schools, or anywhere
else in the public sphere to provide opportunities for qualified reflection or cultural
assessment of what we, as a species, might actually want to do with these and all the
other amazing new technologies at our disposal. Other concerns have colonized the lifeworlds where technology assessment used to take place.
Among the scientists and engineers themselves, the makers, or constructors of
nanotechnological products, the dominant values or “norms” are entrepreneurial. The
many years of telling stories of innovation and of increasing the links between the
academic and the business worlds have transformed the identities of many scientists into
project-seekers and networking money-makers. What used to be the responsibility of
7
scientific societies and university departments - to discuss moral and ethical issues related
to one’s scientific or technological field – has been outsourced to professional
philosophers and theologians. And many of them have also fallen prey to the urge to
become entrepreneurs and sell their ethical insights to the highest bidder. The result is an
array of competing firms, each marketing their own brand of nanotechnology, searching
for market niches rather than serving society or alleviating injustice. The actual scientific
knowledge that is being made is subjected to what Aant Elzinga once characterized as
“epistemic drift”:
…the process whereby, under strong relevance pressure,
researchers become more concerned with external legitimation
vis-à-vis policy bureaucracies and funding agencies than with
internal legitimation via the process of peer review. This may be
seen as a process of erosion of the traditional system of
reputational control (Elzinga 1985: 207).
It is as if the public information campaigns and media debates, the popular movements
and expert criticisms against atomic energy – and for the development of renewable
energy - during the second half of the 1970s had never happened. Those experiences led,
in many countries, to agencies and offices and research programs in technology
assessment, and made it mandatory at some universities for science and engineering
students to be educated in “science, technology and society”. Could it not be a good idea
to bring back some of that concern with social responsibility?
Of course, nanotechnology is not atomic energy, it did not come into society in the form
of a horrific bomb which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Rather it is slowly but
surely insinuating itself into our societies. And as with other technological artifacts and
scientific facts in the past, the chances are that nanotechnology will also tend to elicit
different uses as it spreads across the societal landscape. But like atomic energy, genetic
engineering, and so many other momentous scientific and technical achievements of our
recent history, the cultural appropriation of nanotechnology is skewed from the outset. It
is not motivated by responding to what were called in the 1970s “basic human needs”, or
what was referred to in the 1990s as sustainable development; rather, it is driven by
8
market forces to seek out commercial opportunities, niches in a global competition for
profits.
This tendency to hubris appears to be all powerful and all encompassing. The
nanotechnologists, like the genetic engineers, information technologists and atomic
scientists before them, are fast becoming contemporary heroes, the ones who are to lead
their countries and regions in the global competition for market shares and economic
growth. And even those of us who should know better – the students of science,
technology and society – are curiously complacent, seeing the nanotechnologists
primarily as new objects of study, rather than problems that require reflective analysis
and cultural assessment.
The trouble is that things behave differently down there in the nanorealm, even though
nobody seems to know very much about why that seems to be the case. This is a tragic
example of Aristotle’s “techne” – the practical know-how of manipulating objects –
rushing on ahead of “episteme” – or theoretical-philosophical understanding. The kind of
scientific and engineering knowledge that is mobilized to make potentially marketable
commodities in the nanorealm is filled with gaps and uncertainties and, like other areas of
science and technology, those uncertainties can only be understood by taking the contexts
into account, and by seriously investigating the social, cultural and environmental
implications of nanotechnology.
Even within the heterogeneous field of science and technology studies, however, it has
proved difficult to challenge the dominant story-line of innovation with other stories or
more reflective approaches. The nanotechnologists and their paymasters play on such
deeply rooted cultural values, and they are able to mobilize such enormous amounts of
human and material resources that it has proved difficult to raise questions for public
discussion. The nanotechnologists and their supporters in government and business are
not necessarily evil people. Like so many of our leaders, our power elites, they are simply
afflicted with an overdose of arrogance and not a small amount of greed that calls for a
kind of socio-medical treatment. Their illness, their hubris needs to be diagnosed and
9
treated. And that is why the global justice movement is so crucially necessary. For if we
are to make appropriate uses of nanotechnology, the new knowledge needs to be directly
connected to the concerns of the broader society, and in the past it has been social
movements that have served to provide public spaces for making those connections
(Jamison 2006).
The emerging movement for global justice
The emerging movement for global justice has been called a “movement of movements”,
a term that was coined by Naomi Klein in the wake of the anti-globalization protests of
the late 1990s, and captures well the heterogeneous character of the emerging movement
(Klein 2001). It is a movement that is filled with tensions and contradictions, composed
of a variety of groups and individuals who have begun to take political action in order to
protest the quite different kinds of negative consequences that they attribute to
globalization.
For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), the working class or “masses” that were
mobilized in the social movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have given
way to a “multitude” of disenfranchised and disenchanted global citizens. And while
there is growing awareness about the need for a movement for global justice, there is as
yet little agreement as to what the movement should do and how it should organize itself.
Like other social movements in their initial phases, there is as yet no real integration of
the relatively abstract theorizing about global injustice that has been voiced by writers
like Hardt and Negri with the vast array of protest activities that have been carried out;
there is, we might say, not yet a social movement with a coherent “cognitive praxis”,
such as has characterized historically significant social movements in the past (Eyerman
and Jamison 1991).
There are at least three different kinds of sub-movements, or networks, concerned with
global justice, and which take part in various international gatherings that are sometimes
said to represent the global justice movement. These three strands, which often find
10
themselves in conflict when it comes to particular topics like nanotechnology, tend to
mobilize different sorts of people with different sorts of grievances, and they tend to tap
into different traditions of ideas. On the one hand, there are the parties, organizations,
federations and other institutionalized legacies of the so-called “old” social movements of
the 19th and early 20th centuries, the various outgrowths of populist and labor movements
that have become integral parts of the political landscape. Issues of equality and justice
for workers have been central to these movements from the outset, and in the
contemporary world, they tend to base their political activity on socialist, or socialdemocratic values. In the emerging movement for global justice, members of these
organizations often enter into alliances with other kinds of organizations with very
different backgrounds and motivations, and as a result it has been difficult to reach
agreement, or come to a consensus about particular topics such as nanotechnology.
A second important component of the emerging movement is based on the concerns of
the so-called new social movements of the 1970s, especially the movements for
environmental protection and women’s liberation. These movements have tended to
become established fixtures in the contemporary world, primarily in the form of
nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. There is usually in these organizations a more
business-like, professional approach to politics, and, as is well known, these
organizations, much like university scientists and engineers, have become dependent on
external funding for most of their activity, which usually takes the form of specific
projects related to what are sometimes termed “single issues”.
In recent years, these “old” and “new” social movement-based organizations have been
complemented by a newer wave, or generation of activists, and by groups and
organizations, which are often more confrontational than the older movements, as well as
more directly focused on the negative consequences of so-called globalization. Beginning
in the 1980s, sometimes in the name of “environmental justice”, these groups have often
taken shape in direct opposition to particular manifestations of global injustice, in
campaigns against genetically-modified organisms, health and working conditions in
information technology factories, and the proliferation of fast food stores. These are, for
11
the most part, campaign organizations that band together in alliances of various kinds,
related to specific cases of global injustice. In recent years, there have been attempts to
arrange gatherings and manifestations, where the different component parts of the global
justice movement can meet and discuss their concerns. These various “social forums”, as
they have come to be called, have taken place both at an international level (at world
social forums, that have been held each year since 2000), as well as at more regional,
national, and local levels, particularly in Europe.
There are a number of tensions, not least generational and geographical, among the
various components of the emerging movement, and, as might be expected, there are also
some significant differences in regard to science and technology in general, and to
specific fields like nanotechnology in particular. Within this movement of movements,
opinions vary considerably about nanotechnology. The remnants or residues of the older
social movements, in the parties and organizations of the “left”, tend to be positive
toward technology, following a long tradition of analysis, inspired by Karl Marx, who
famously distinguished, in the 19th century, between what he termed the means and
relations of production. The attitudes of labor movements and social-democratic and
communist parties to advanced technology, such as nanotechnology, are thus largely
supportive, concerns are primarily expressed about the occupational hazards and safety
risks, especially for those working in production facilities.
The institutional legacies of the new social movements of the 1970s – primarily the larger
environmental NGOs - tend to see the advanced technologies primarily in terms of their
environmental implications. Up to now, the attitudes of environmental organizations have
tended to be skeptical and rather non-committal, since the environmental implications are
not very clear. But, as with the genetic technologies, there have been attempts, in the
form of reports and specific campaigns, to distinguish environmentally-friendly ways to
develop nanotechnology from what are seen as environmentally deleterious ways.
Nanotechnology has not been a major area of concern for environmental organizations,
since it is still largely in the experimental, or laboratory stage. For the most part. the task
has thus been seen to try to “turn nanotechnology green”, by encouraging
12
environmentally-friendly applications, in areas such as renewable energy, waste
treatment, and green products in manufacturing. There is a tendency, within
environmental organizations, to neglect the broader issues of justice and equality, and
focus attention more on the business opportunities in nanotechnology than on the social
and cultural consequences. At least some NGOs have joined in the market-oriented
approach to developing nanotechnology that is so characteristic of university scientists
and engineers.
It has fallen to a relatively small group of newer organizations and activists to alert the
public to the wide range of other challenges that nanotechnology raises in relation to
global justice and economic inequality. For these people, nanotechnology is, for the most
part, seen as an example of corporate expansionism. One of the leading voices of this
kind of criticism is the Indian physicist-turned-activist Vandana Shiva, who, at an EU
meeting in 2003, said that “the way in which nanotechnologies are being presented is a
betrayal of the science on which they are based. At a time when science allows us to see
the world in a deeper way, the quantums are brushed aside by the uses of the science”.
Following on her earlier and still active critique of genetically-modified food, Shiva has
been one of the relatively few, scientifically-trained participants in the emerging
movement for global justice to question the ways in which nanotechnology is being
developed. Her criticism is not about the technology itself, or about particular
applications, it is rather, as she put it, in regard to GMOs, a questioning of the social, or
cultural contexts in which science and technology are developed:
The conflict over genetically engineered crops and food is not a
conflict between ‘culture’ and ‘science’. It is between two
cultures of science: one based on transparency, public
accountability and responsibility toward the environment and
people and another based on profits and the lack of transparency,
accountability and responsibility (Shiva 2000: 109)
It will be crucially important in the years ahead whether these very different component
parts and their very different attitudes to science and technology that are to be found in
13
the emerging movement for global justice can reconcile their differences and generate in
the broader society, as previous social movements have done, processes of collective
learning so that the development of nanotechnology can be connected in a meaningful
way to the pursuit of global justice.
References
Elzinga, Aant (1985) Research, Bureaucracy and the Drift of Epistemic Criteria, in B
Wittrock and A Elzinga, eds, The University Research System. The Public Policies of the
Home of Scientists. Almqvist & Wiksell International
Elzinga, Aant and Andrew Jamison (1995) Changing Policy Agendas in Science and
Technology, in S Jasanoff, et al, eds, Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Sage
Encyclopedia Britannica (2006) http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9041378/hubris,
accessed 26/09/06
Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison (1991) Social Movements. A Cognitive Approach.
Polity
Gibbons, Michael, et al (1994) The New Production of Knowledge. Sage
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude. Penguin
Hård, Mikael and Andrew Jamison (2005) Hubris and Hybrids. A Cultural History of
Technology and Science. Routledge
Jamison, Andrew (2006) Social Movements and Science: Cultural Appropriations of
Cognitive Praxis, in Science as Culture, nr 1
Jamison, Andrew and Erik Baark (1990) Modes of Biotechnology Assessment in the
USA, Japan and Denmark, in Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, nr 2
Jamison, Andrew and Ron Eyerman (1994) Seeds of the Sixties. University of California
Press
Klein, Naomi (2001) No Logo. Flamingo
Latour, Bruno (1998) From the World of Science to that of Research, in Science, 10 April
Mumford, Lewis (1979) Interpretations and Forecasts, 1922-1972. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich
14
Shiva, Vandana (2000) Stolen Harvest. South End Press
von Wright, Georg Henrik (1978) Humanismen som livshållning och andra essäer.
MånPocket
15