Can Nanotechnology Be Just?
On Nanotechnology and the Emerging Movement for Global Justice
Andrew Jamison
AalborgUniversity
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 newfields 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.
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Key words: global justice, social movements, innovation, nanotechnology
A new mode of knowledge making
As the links between universitiesand 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 totheir 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 whatscience and technology actually do, grows wider. A market-oriented approach to knowledge makingis, to put it simply, not the most appropriate way to alleviate injustice.
Nanotechnology is being developed, as are theother “high” or advanced types of technology in the world today, according to what might be called a commercial logic or ethos. The innovationsthatare selected for funding and then eventually work their way into production and intothe marketplace - as well as the scientists and engineers who do the innovating - are chosen on the basis of their anticipatedmarketvalue, not for any other particular value they might have.In the words of the European Commission, “the core objective” of research funding for nanosciences and nanotechnologies “is to improve the competitiveness of European industry and generate the knowledge needed to transform it from a resource-intensive to a knowledge-intensive industry.”(EU 2009)
This does not mean that applications of nanoscience and nanotechnology cannot have a social value, or, for that matter that nanotechnologists cannotcontribute to alleviating injustices and/or inequalities of various kinds; but it does mean that the innovation process is organizedand 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 discoverieswere 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 been a transformationin 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 fromwhat they term “mode 1”, or traditional, discipline-based science to “mode 2”, or context-basedknowledge 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)
The transition from a mode of knowledge production that was, for the most part, self-organized in the form of academicscience and engineering disciplines and thereby governed and controlled by the knowledge producers themselves, into one that is integrated into business networksand 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 makinghave served to turn most, if not all, science and technology, especially in new fields like nanotechnology, into competitiverather 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 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. 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 machinations of so-called “actor-networks” 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 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 tragedyit 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 technologyin 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 underlyingmeaning 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 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 story-line or narrative trope of economic innovationis 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 spaceavailable 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 sphereto provide opportunities for qualified reflectionorcultural 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 life-worlds 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 betweenthe 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 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, and which then was “sold” as an abundant source of energy, and a central project of economic development (before the problems of radioactive waste disposal became identified by anti-nuclear activists and led to the technology’s “undevelopment” in many parts of the world). Rather nanotechnology is slowly but surely insinuating itself into our societies in a highly fragmented and diffuse way. 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 market forces to seek out commercial opportunities, niches in a global competition for profits.