Science in the Public Sphere

A history of lay knowledge and expertise

Agusti Nieto-Galan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317277927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Science in the Public Sphere presents a broad yet detailed picture of the history of science popularization from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Global in focus, it provides an original theoretical framework for analysing the political load of science as an instrument of cultural hegemony and giving a voice to expert and lay protagonists throughout history.

Organised into a series of thematic chapters spanning diverse periods and places, this book covers subjects such as the representations of science in print, the media, classrooms and museums, orthodox and heterodox practices, the intersection of the history of science with the history of technology, and the ways in which public opinion and scientific expertise have influenced and shaped one another across the centuries. It concludes by introducing the "participatory turn" of the twenty-first century, a new paradigm of science popularization and a new way of understanding the construction of knowledge.

Highly illustrated throughout and covering the recent historiographical scholarship on the subject, this book is valuable reading for students, historians, science communicators, and all those interested in the history of science and its relationship with the public sphere.

1
Introduction

The discontent of scientific culture

In 2003, philosopher Joseph Agassi perceived popular science as: ‘vital for culture at large. . . to widen horizons and rationalize life. . . to break the isolation of science from rest of culture’.¹ But his optimism did not hide his concern about the role of science in our contemporary societies and the need to reassess its position. Despite many efforts in favour of its effective dissemination and its growing influence on major political and economic decisions, for many privileged observers, science would have been relegated, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, to a certain marginalisation and isolation in relation to ‘culture’. In his famous book, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) – translated into English as Civilization and Its Discontents – Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) believed that modern science had failed to make the Enlightenment dream come true; a dream where the progress of natural philosophy had to yield to the progress of moral philosophy. Most scientific advances have only apparently affected human happiness. Once the euphoria of novelty had worn off, an inevitable hidden face would always appear. In Freud’s own words:

In the last generations, man has made extraordinary strides in knowledge of the natural sciences and technical application of them, and has established his dominion over nature in a way never before imagined. . . But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly-won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfilment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier. The valid conclusion from this is merely that power over nature is not the only condition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of civilization’s efforts. . . If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would never have left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice. . . What is the use of reducing the mortality of children, when it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest moderation on us in begetting them. . . And what do we gain by a long life when it is full of hardship and starved of joys and so wretched that we can only welcome death as our deliverer?²

This controversial Freudian diagnosis of our supposed unhappiness should be analysed in depth in its own historical context – a task that obviously goes beyond the scope of this book. But Freud’s dissatisfaction with the results of scientific progress does not seem to have been completely eradicated in the present, and has become a passionate topic of debate, which certainly requires further analysis.

The positivist optimism that advocated a direct link leading from scientific to moral progress experienced a serious setback with the crisis in capitalism of the stock market crash in 1929, the same year that Freud began to write Civilization and Its Discontents. But this regression was only aggravated through the second half of the twentieth century, especially after the appalling consequences of World War II: the tragic end of the German scientific hegemony in 1945, which inspired Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947);³ the start of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War; the persistence of poverty and hunger among much of the world’s population; and rising concern over the environmental price of industrial growth.

Perhaps the American historian Leo Marx was right when he said that the second half of the twentieth century was the time of ‘post-modern’ pessimism, a period that witnessed the death blow to the old Enlightenment dream of progress. The horror of the Nazi military-industrial complex, which was capable of unleashing the Holocaust, the terrible deaths among civilians with the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and accidents such as Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez and Chernobyl were all combined with a worrying process of natural degradation, loss in biodiversity, air and water pollution, acid rain, deforestation and desertification, the greenhouse effect, a hole in the ozone layer and the threat of climate change.⁴ Along similar lines, when analysing the role of science throughout the twentieth century, the prestigious historian Eric Hobsbawn stressed that:

The progress of natural sciences took place against a background glow of suspicion and fear. . . fuelled by four feelings: that science was incomprehensible; that (both) its practical (and moral) consequences were unpredictable and probably catastrophic; and that it underlined the helplessness of the individual and undermined authority.⁵

That pessimism could be even partly quantified. In the 1990s, more than 6,000 scientific articles appearing in the British press between 1946 and 1990 were analysed and classified. Among other striking results of the study, in around 1960 there emerged a kind of natural split between two contrasting views of science. In the preceding period, despite the horrors of the two world wars, the start of the Cold War and the arms race, the press still mainly disseminated a positive image of science as beneficial for humanity, and one that deserved to be celebrated by reporting on the major events in the lives and deaths of the great scientists and their discoveries. However, articles dating from post-1960 generally showed a much more negative, critical image filled with risks and dangers, albeit without delving too deeply into the underlying causes. ⁶

As Harry Collins discussed in his recent book on scientific expertise, we have moved from a heroic image of science to a new scientific culture of everyday life in which things are crowded and complicated, full of uncertainties and risks that weaken the authority of the experts.⁷ The following section is an attempt to analyse the possible causes of this shift.

1.1. The 'deficit model' legacy

In view of this negative image, which questioned the underlying values of Western societies, voices came to the fore that attributed dissatisfaction to the supposed scientific ignorance of the public at large, to a growing distance between contemporary societies and their expert elites.⁸ In the 1980s, the ‘deficit model’ became popular in the English-speaking world through a movement called the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ (PUS), which assumed a considerable epistemological inferiority between experts and receivers of a scientific discourse. PUS stressed the chasm separating both camps and reinforced the role of scientists. It legitimised new professionals, science communicators, who were supposed to act as mediators to effectively and faithfully transmit ‘official’ knowledge to lay audiences, the latter receiving information acritically and supposedly passively via simple accumulation. This was the only way to improve the public image of science, which had been considerably damaged.⁹

The supposed public deficit justified a kind of scientific ‘crusade’, one that was vertical and one way, top-down, which legitimised an alliance between scientists’ professional interests and political and corporate power, which was more concerned with justifying science than with it being effectively understood among large audiences. In theory, PUS was supposed to bring benefits to science itself and to the economy, the nation, the individual and the democratisation of society as a whole, along with moral, aesthetic and intellectual benefits. It would also act as an antidote to ‘anti-science’ movements which promoted pseudoscientific practices that had always caused consternation among contemporary science popularisers and professional scientists.¹⁰

PUS was largely justified by the professional scientists’ own discomfort with the supposed ignorance of the public, with hopes that better information would ultimately lead to greater social acceptance of science. In 1989, an article entitled ‘The Public Understanding of Science’, which appeared in the prestigious journal Nature, concluded that, based on several surveys conducted in the United Kingdom and the United States, the public had a very low level of scientific understanding. Citing the example of Isaac Asimov (1920–92), one of the top science writers of the twentieth century, the authors of the study stressed that in order to eradicate the mistrust caused by disinformation, PUS’s popularisation efforts should build a new image of respect and admiration for science. Science popularisation therefore became a prime weapon, the ideal antidote to combat this discontent in scientific culture which had moved large swaths of the population to scepticism, often tinged with parascientific influences regarded as irrational. In its conclusions, however, the article displayed a certain degree of optimism:

Finally, there is the question of the relationship between public understanding and public support for science. . . Preliminary analysis of results on these measures indicates that there are important relationships between public understanding and public attitudes, with a tendency for better-informed respondents to have a more positive general attitude towards science and scientists. . . The results we have provided indicate that although the public is largely uninformed, it is also largely interested in science.¹¹

The problem, however, seems more complex than a certain ingenuous optimism about PUS indicates at first glance, and it dates from decades earlier. Back in the 1960s, numerous intellectuals criticised the populations of Western countries for blithely approving billions of dollars for scientific research through their votes, despite being incapable of understanding the meaning of this research. Unable to organise a political response, the new users of ‘black boxes’, unaware of their mechanisms and explanations, more or less explicitly mistrusted contemporary science. Its complexity and hyperspecialisation accentuated scepticism and ultimately led to a gradual expert–lay distancing.¹² Despite its qualitative and quantitative exponential growth, along with its intense process of specialisation, professionalisation and institutionalisation over the past two centuries, the social ‘conquest’ of science had never been fully accomplished. Traditional, popular wisdom had probably prevailed in the most stable communities and among the least adaptable individuals. In spite of the optimism of PUS campaigns, familiar beliefs and practices and a varied set of strategies of resistance would have remained.¹³

In 1965, the American historian Oscar Handlin claimed that the public had learned to tolerate science but not to assimilate it; it had tended to accept science as a useful ‘truth’ but one that was disconnected from their everyday beliefs or habits. This was top-down science, a science that had not truly changed the ancient beliefs in nature and morality and which had led to the coexistence or juxtaposition of two different kinds of knowledge that were supposedly disconnected from each other. In his unquestioning defence of expert science, Handlin contrasted academic knowledge with a vague, messy set of beliefs that he wished to eradicate. However, their very existence revealed that something had gone awry in the experts’ popularisation plans.¹⁴

Along similar lines, in 1976 the prestigious American physicist Gerald Holton, who had a keen intellectual interest in the history and philosophy of science, was concerned about the poor public image of science in contemporary Western societies despite the vast efforts invested in reporting on it.¹⁵ Holton expressed a certain unease regarding the spectacular growth in educational projects, science museums and audiovisual products whose results were questioned then and still are today. His book Science and Its Public (1976) was primarily a reaction to the virulent criticisms against science in the nuclear age and the Cold War.¹⁶ Ultimately, Holton sought to use public debate to forge new alliances between science and society; new mechanisms of communication in a context of rejection and criticism.

However, communication problems also emerged within expert circles. As the literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905–75) bemoaned in his 1972 essay ‘Mind in the Modern World’,¹⁷ the core of modern scientific knowledge was not shared by many people in the world of the humanities and social sciences. In other words, Trilling was reviving the old debate from the 1950s unleashed upon the publication of the famous book by British scientist Charles Pierce Snow (1905–72), which criticised the increasing gulf between humanistic culture and scientific culture in Western societies. Snow signalled a gradual impoverishment and isolation of the different expert groups who were unable to engage in fluid, open dialogue, which in the long term would affect their ability to communicate.¹⁸

Some of these problems, which showed symptoms of a Braudelian ‘longue durée’,¹⁹ seemed even t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the discontent of scientific culture
• 2 Printed science
• 3 Spectacular science
• 4 Heterodox science
• 5 Classroom science
• 6 Technological science
• 7 Media science
• 8 Democratic science
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index