Technoscientific Angst: Ethics And Responsibility

2 Public Expectations of Technoscience: From Truth to Immortality

Public Expectations of Technoscience: From Truth to Immortality The first part of this chapter explores how we have voluntarily brought ourselves into the modernist situation described in Chapter i. It focuses on the need for control of both the social and natural environments through an authority one can believe in, an authority that deflects superstition, dogma, and manipulation. The authority of rational discourse and practice of technoscience, with its logic and ordered reasoning, with its explanatory and predictive powers, remains an appealing candidate to accommodate the public's need for stability, security , and trust, especially in the postmodern age. I trace the quest for control through Ernest Gellner and Sigmund Freud, referring back to the ideas and principles of conduct of Epictetus , the Stoic of the first and second centuries A.D.If this control is placed in the hands of the technoscientific community and if this community adheres to Merton's ethos of science (as a community anyone can join), then the public may feel comfortable appealing to this community for its reassurance. If traditional obstacles to participation in control, such as lack of aristocratic standing or capital, are cast aside in the name of intellectual honesty, integrity, and fraternity, then the public's delegation of authority and power over the decision-making processes that affect its ability to control its destiny seems warranted. I end this chapter with a reminder of a trivial yet significant factor regarding the enhancement of the technoscientific community's power and control over the destiny of humanity: Technoscience maintains its 18 2 Public Expectations of Technoscience 19 modernist appeal because if offers practical fruits everyone can enjoy. These fruits are neither metaphorical nor abstract; they are contextualized within modernist and capitalist ideals and models and are made available at a price to anyone able and willing to pay. The eighteenth century is still with us. On Control Control is propelled by fear of the unknown, but at the same time it leads to new forms of fear. Instead of being a point of termination, achieving control is an intersection point through which the human psyche and behavior traverse over time. Perhaps the concluding lines of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents may serve to connect the previous chapter with this one and the subsequent one: Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (Freud 1989, nz) To some extent, we are always looking for an explanatory principle with which to handle a great deal of data, multiple phenomena, and complex situations. While religious institutions gave us many such principles in the form of sacred texts and dogmas, human curiosity, if not impatience, impelled us to develop concurrent explanatory models that eventually came to be known as science. (On the motives for scientific explorations, see Stephan and Levin 1992,.) When religious principles are cast aside, one worries that no explanatory model whatsoever remains, and therefore the growing appeal of science can be understood both in terms of its position as a replacement for religion and in terms of its partial success, which is commonly understood in the manifestation of technological innovations. However the choice between competing explanatory models is historically made, what remains relatively unshaken is the quest for some level of control of one's environment (in Baconian terms) and of one's life plan. Modern science embedded the quest for control in naturalistic terms and eventually added to them layers of theoretical principles and models. These were in turn used to justify one's choice of control mechanisms. However much the Enlightenment ideals unequivocally supported the principles of logic, reason, and rationality, these principles were 20 Public Expectations of Technoscience not well organized in general, nor were they powerful enough in particular cases, theories, and models. Bauman turns the tables on Freud and tries to tease out the scientific quest for order and certainty undertaken by Freud: It was in science, therefore, that Freud sought the court of appeal against the humiliation administered by a society which was neither good nor enlightened . . . Freud came to science as a rebel—even if, politically, he was moderate, liberal, mildly conservative and devoid of any sympathy for red flags and...