The Science Communication Challenge

Front matter

THE SCIENCE COMMUNICATION CHALLENGE Truth and Disagreement in Democratic Knowledge Societies

Gitte Meyer ix

The Science Communication

Contents

List of Snapshots

Acknowledgements

I;

Chapter 2 SCIENCE AS ‘UNIVERSAL LIGHT”

After more than five centuries, Albrecht Diirer’s painting Christ among the Doctors is still likely to have an unsettling effect on most intellectuals. Completed in 1506, it is a symbolic representation of a confrontation between good, in the shape of Christ, and evil, in the shape of learned doctors with demonic features.’ The painting can be seen as a birth declaration of the modern strategy of demonization. It is also a stark reminder of the ambivalence towards learning and knowledge that forms part of the early, intertwined histories of modern Western science and modern Western thought in general. Both features are still with us — a tendency to demonize opponents and an ambivalence towards learning and knowledge. Both hamper the ability of contemporary societies to sustain habits of civilized exchanges about scienceand technology-related issues.

The secularization brought about by the Reformation included a novel leaning towards the demonization of humans. The Devil, who in earlier centuries had been depicted as fantastic and frightening animal hybrids, acquired human forms and faces. Fear and contempt of, for instance, scholastic doctors could now be expressed by demonic representations of them.

The mental climate that accompanied and brought forth the Reformation was marked by a loathing of the Catholic priesthood and scholastic learning. In the 1660s, scholastic learning — taken, it seems, to encompass most of the arts and letters — appears to have been still considered a prime danger and enemy by the founders of the Royal Society, the parent, if ever there was one, of modern science. They challenged the authority of scholastic learning and — carried along by a movement of science enthusiasm — aspired to take its place. That enterprise has been hugely successful.

Today’s widespread and forceful institutions of modern science, however, originating in rebellion against former authorities of learning and knowledge, appear to be very much at a loss when it comes to dealing critically with their own current status as knowledge authorities. The identity of modern science is surrounded by ambivalence and tension. There is ambivalence regarding how to deal with critique and critics. Demonization has remained an option. Some science advocates appear to follow in the footsteps of those early representatives of the movement of science enthusiasm who spoke about modern science in meta-religious terms as ‘Universal Light.” Others seem more inclined to simply perceive science as an intellectual activity originating in, and still continuously nurtured by, the intense, encyclopaedic interest in the world that characterized the early Enlightenment era.’ But then again — there is ambivalence also regarding the understanding of the very notion of the intellectual and its relationships with science. It would, indeed, seem strange to deny modern science the quality of an intellectual activity. Anti-intellectual traits can, however, be rather easily identified in its historical baggage. Along related lines, science can be seen as elitist but is also frequently described as a close relative of democracy.

There are loads of disagreement beneath the surface, affecting how it is possible to speak about science outside, and possibly even inside, the scientific institutions. ‘These institutions, in turn, are increasingly powerful societal institutions that tend to take for granted that their public relations — the ways they relate to the public at large — can be classified in a straightforward way as a didactic task of educating the general public. This is not a new phenomenon. The aim of spreading the light of science has been pursued for centuries. But as scientific methodology has expanded and come to be applied to evermore aspects of life, the muting — brought about by didactic approaches — of substantial disagreement, ambiguities and tensions has become increasingly problematic.

How did this state of affairs evolve and where might it take science and society? It seems timely to address the ambivalence directly, to make it talk and to talk about it. That, then, is the aim of this chapter: to trace some of the origins of some of the current tensions within and relating to science and, thereby, to facilitate forward-looking consideration of how to understand and how to speak about science in society.

Modern Science as a Movement

In the early eighteenth century, according to a relatively recent history of the British Enlightenment, science was ‘energetically promoted amongst the public. Initially in London’s coffee houses, lecturers began to offer demonstrations with globes, orreries and other instruments displaying the marvels of the clockwork universe, while performing chemical, magnetic, electrical and airpump experiments besides’.* A Spectator magazine of 1711 looked forward to the time ‘when Knowledge, instead of being bound up in Books, and kept in Libraries and retirement, is thus obtruded upon the Publick; when it is canvassed in every Assembly, and exposed upon every Table’.° ‘There was a movement of science enthusiasm.

Acknowledging the movement aspect of science may take us some way towards understanding the persistent dominance of the didactic frame. Modern science is, of course, much more than a movement. It is a body of knowledge and rational methodology, maintained globally by millions of scientists, aiming to come up with true, universally correct explanations of and solutions to technical questions and problems. And it is an intellectual endeavour, nursing habits of critical and sceptical thought within scientific specialities. Nevertheless, modern science came into being as a movement, dedicated to faith in science as a cause. Aims of conversion — the desire to move others to share the cause — have been present from the 1660s onwards and have also informed the development of science communication paradigms and practices.

The movement aspect of modern science may be difficult, and to some perhaps even painful, to recognize and cope with. This is because the peculiar modern trait of anti-enthusiastic enthusiasm seems particularly strongly expressed in modern science. Born in the wake of the English civil wars, it became marked, in a roundabout way, by the fear of enthusiasm those religious wars had brought about.’ In a sense, it began its life as an anti-movement movement of anti-enthusiastic enthusiasts, marked by a highly emotional aversion to emotions. That, in turn, has imbued the long-lived tradition of didactic science communication with significant missionary elements. A teaching—preaching ambiguity appears to have been present from the very beginning and is still with us, as is the strong presence of science enthusiasts in the field of science communication.

In order to get a rough idea of how such ambiguous features may have come about, let us take a brief look at four interconnected phenomena that were highly influential in the British Isles when the Royal Society was founded in the 1660s.

Two of those phenomena relate to experiences with religious enthusiasm and concern, respectively, religious truth-seeking and religious civil war. Two others relate to structural, economic and social changes and concern the early connections of modern science to the sphere of production — with its continuous appetite for new technologies — and to the marketplace and the upcoming and ambitious middle classes that challenged older elites. In varying combinations, these early influences — all of which have bearings on understandings of science communication — have continued to make themselves felt.

Influences from religious truth-seeking and strife

The founders of the Royal Society grew up and matured surrounded by religious crusaders who were convinced that they were in possession of the true

Snapshot I Contagiousness and Obsession

In 1919, the Danish bacteriologist Carl Julius Salomonsen (1847—1924) presented a new diagnosis to the world — dysmorphism. Drawing on the Greek dysmorphos — deformed — the term was meant to signify a hitherto unrecognized mental disease of a contagious nature. Those afflicted displayed a predilection for distorted, unnatural and ugly shapes. Their ability to recognize and appreciate forms and proportions had been damaged. As a consequence, they created expressionist works of art.

Salomonsen presented his theory to fellow members of a Danish association for the study of the history of medicine. The association, then, published the theory as a treatise. A highly respected scientist, founder and long-time director of the Danish Serum Institute, Salomonsen has been described as the Nordic pioneer of bacteriology and a great source of inspiration to the young scientists to whom he taught epidemiology. A furious debate followed in the wake of his expansion — drawing on his authority as a scientist — of the concept of contagion from the exact sciences to works of art that did not suit his taste. Fifteen years later, however, Salomonsen’s peculiar diagnosis could still be looked up in popular Danish encyclopaedias.

Concerned with contagiousness most of his time, he was probably disposed to spot it everywhere. Bacteriology was a young science, testing its limits and with a capacity for fascinating its practitioners as well as its audiences. Moreover, the terminology of contagion was common among social scientists concerned with mass phenomena, and Swedish psychiatrist Bror Gadelius (1862-1932) had described Expressionism as a symptom of pathological disintegration. So, Salomonsen was in line with the zeitgeist when he called Expressionism a psychopathic movement of art, an epidemic agitation psychosis spreading by way of mental contagion, akin to such earlier phenomena as the children’s crusades and the self-torturers — brought about, Salomonsen noted, by fanatic agitators.

The textual snapshot about contagiousness and obsession has drawn on Gitte Meyer, Hjernen og eftertanken [Brains and reflections], 38-40. Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) and Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) are two examples of European social scientists who in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century relied heavily on the terminology of social contagion. See Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, first published in French in 1890 and Scipio Sighele, Psychologie des Auflaufs und der Massenverbrechen, first published in Italian in 1893.

faith and felt obliged to impose that faith on the whole of society. That was the order of the day in the wake of the English civil wars (1640-60) and during Cromwell’s Commonwealth regime. Conviction was put in the centre of political conflict.’ No petty distinctions appear to have been made between religion and politics.* Religious truth-seeking was secularized — taken into the course of time’ — and gave birth to millenarian, chiliastic beliefs about the return of Christ to the planet. As time went by, such beliefs morphed into visions of using science to create a whole new world as well as new humans.

Probably, thus, a monistic understanding of knowledge came naturally to the founders of the Royal Society, many of whom had held high posts in Cromwellian Oxford.!°

They began their shared activity in the so-called Invisible College in 1645 and achieved their royal charter in 1662 as a permanent institution to promote experiments in physics and mathematics.'!

The new science, like monotheistic religious convictions, became tied to a search for The Truth, preparing the new approach to knowledge for a possible future career as a competing belief system. At the same time, however, religion was — temporarily at least — provided with a domain of its own. Science was linked to material reality as opposed to a spiritual dimension." It was perfectly possible — and, indeed, normal — to be both religious and a follower of the new movement of science enthusiasm. Among radical enlighteners of the following century, however, there was much hostility, at least towards established religion.’ An assumed dichotomy of science versus religion has been an element of Western discourse ever since. This conflict may be taken as evidence that science and religion have next to nothing in common. Alternatively, it may be taken to indicate that science and religion were competing for the same terrain and, thus, that science enthusiasts — to their possible embarrassment — had a good deal in common with religious enthusiasts.

Writing the first history of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat (1635-1713) can be regarded as one of the first propagandists of science as a cause. Thus, he is an early representative of the movement of science enthusiasm, marked — like the religious movements of the period — by a striving for purity, conversion and expansion and, thus, by a potential for schism, polarization and fear of possible heretics.

The conflict of 1640—60, it has been argued, ‘by polarizing the nation, bequeathed habits of polarized thinking’.'* Sprat’s history is also an early example of science communication of a missionary vein, written by a preacher who perceived himself to be merely a teacher and seems to have been unaware of his own tendencies to polarize.

Sprat’s writings were quite fiery. At the same time, they were informed by a fear of conflict. That fear of conflict, a founding element of the logic of modern science, can be seen as another long-term consequence of the fact that the logic — as well as influential strains of modern political thought — was shaped in the aftermath of violent and bloody conflicts, involving a large part of the total population, among fanatics. It has been estimated that more than one in ten of the adult male population bore arms, and that the conflicts resulted in the death of a larger proportion of the population than the Great War of 1914-18.” Even the decades after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were marked by the prosecution of Catholics — so-called Popists — and by continued conflicts among various Protestant sects!° and followers of differing shades of pantheism, often referred to as radical enlighteners.

It does not take much imagination to understand that this sort of mental climate generated a general fear of conflict and that to the founders of the Royal Society to create a refuge for their scientific activity, protected from the dangerous sphere of conflicting confessions, became a purpose in its own right: “Their first purpose was no more then [sic] only the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet with another,’ Sprat wrote, ‘without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age.’'®

Against the background of experiences with sectarian violence carried out by fanatics in the name of truth, Sprat was equally convinced that the new science was a source of universal light and truth; the ‘true Remedy’, redeeming ‘the minds of Men, from obscurity, uncertainty, and bondage’. He was also convinced that a belief in scientific truth was different from beliefs in religious truths. Based on pure observation as opposed to enthusiastic participation by potentially fanatical individuals and groups, scientific truth qualified as a representative of light as opposed to darkness and of consensus and unity as opposed to conflict and division.

Accordingly, the aim of searching for the truth was combined with a search for unity and consensus. Human social relations, at least insofar as they included attitudes, opinions, judgements — which might easily diverge from each other and, thus, result in conflict — came to be distrusted. Technical issues, concerning natural mechanisms, were taken to be safe.

When founding the Royal Society, the participants, according to Sprat, did not meet to discuss ‘civil business, and the distresses of their Country’ and did not concern themselves with ‘politicks, morality and oratory’.*? While, he argued ‘the consideration of Men, and humane affairs may affect us with a thousand various disquiets’, the contemplation of nature ‘never separates us into mortal Factions; that gives us room to differ, without animosity; and permits us to raise contrary imaginations upon it, without any danger of a Civil War”!

It is certamly not a new and original observation that disappointing experiences with social and political life — few experiences can be more disappointing in that respect than the experience of civil war — may lead people to turn their backs on civic engagement and activity. This point has been made frequently. Referring to the Reformation, for instance, the case has been made that ‘the promised simplicities and stabilities of the new evangelical religion offer[ed] the one point of repair from, and contrast to, an otherwise wholly untrustworthy and mutable civic experience’.*’ The advent of modern science offered another such opportunity at a point in time when it was much longed for. It did not, however, prove to be quite as peaceful as was intended. Typically, Sprat — although wishing to preserve peace — could not help finding himself at war. All civil nations should, he wrote, join the armies in a ‘philosophical war’ against the ‘powerful and barbarous Foes’ of ‘Ignorance, and False Opinions

It seems plausible that the development of ideas of science were informed by the very mental climate they were actually intended to counteract. In more than one sense, confessional features, connected to the notion of universal truth, seem to have been mimed. Prominent among such features was the commitment to a monistic search for truth, accompanied by a willingness to carry out crusades in its name. Apparently, tendencies to think in stark terms of pro- versus anti-science attitudes — and to practise science communication accordingly — are present offspring of that commitment. Likewise, the fear of conflict, expressed as an aversion to attitudes, opinions and judgements, has left its traces in the shape of the widespread idea(l) of simply communicating the facts — keeping a safe distance to differing interpretations that might reveal substantial disagreement and generate conflict.

Anti-enthusiastic enthusiasm

The evolvement of the baffling trait of anti-enthusiastic enthusiasm was an overall (and long-lasting) outcome, difficult to deal with and hold in check because it was (and has continued to be) widely unacknowledged. It was recognizable already by 1667 when Sprat enthusiastically reported that young men were now being ‘armed against all the inchantments of Enthusiasm’.”*

Enthusiasm had acquired the quality of a term of abuse. In eighteenth-century England, it has been noted: ‘Above all things, enthusiasm was regarded with horror, though it is fair to say that enthusiasm was then identified with fanaticism. On an eighteenth-century tombstone was inscribed as the highest of praise, “pious without enthusiasm.” ° Later, not least during periods of religious revival, enthusiasm acquired renewed respectability, unalloyed by the ambiguity that characterized the decades immediately after the civil wars. Those decades, however, are likely to have left a lasting mark on the logic of science, its methodological approaches, conceptual understandings and communication practices.

To no great avail, the dread of enthusiasm was criticized from an early stage. Ina letter concerning enthusiasm, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671—1713),

Third Earl of Shaftesbury, even ridiculed the idea of anti-enthusiasm. It was, he found, completely impracticable. One might as well attempt to outlaw love. It could not be done. And it should not be attempted. In the absence of enthusiasm all human enterprise would come to a standstill.

Following an interpretation of what Shaftesbury saw as the debating culture of antiquity, he went on to a critique of his contemporaries:

Not only the Visionarys and Enthusiasts of all kinds were tolerated, your Lordship knows, by the Antients; but on the other side, Philosophy had as free a course, and was permitted as a Ballance against Superstition. And whilst some Sects, such as the Pythagorean and latter Platonick, join’d in with the Superstition and Enthusiasm of the Times; the Epicurean, the Academick, and others, were allow’d to use all the Force of Wit and Raillery against it. And thus matters were happily balanc’d; Reason had fair Play; Learning and Science flourish’d. Wonderful was the Harmony and Temper which arose from all these Contrarietys. Thus Superstition and Enthusiasm were mildly treated; and being let alone, they never rag’d to that degree as to occasion Bloodshed, Wars, Persecutions and Devastations in the World. But a new sort of Policy, which extends itself to another World, and considers the future Lives and Happiness of Men rather than the present, has made us leap the Bounds of natural Humanity; and out of a supernatural Charity, has taught us the way of plaguing one another most devoutly. It has rais’d an Antipathy which no temporal Interest cou’d ever do; and entail’d upon us a mutual Hatred to all Eternity. And now Uniformity in Opinion (a hopeful Project!) is look’d on as the only Expedient against this Evil.”°

Idea(l)s of complete harmony were, to Shaftesbury, out of touch with reality and would only serve to inspire the kind of virulent conflicts they were meant to prevent. Human life, according to him, was fraught with ambiguities that had to be dealt with and could not be circumvented. He made the point directly and expressed it in his style of writing, marked by an affinity for the combination of contrasts appearing in sentences such as ‘the Harmony and Temper which arose from all these Contrarietys’ and ‘plaguing one another most devoutly’.

It was the overall message of Shaftesbury’s letter that whereas excessive enthusiasm was a problem, moderate enthusiasm was a necessity. However, he aired his annoyance with polarizing habits of thought in vain and did not manage to really influence mainstream thought.

The notion of impersonal, objective scientific knowledge, pure of human commitments and interpretations, gained an increasing number of enthusiastic followers, perceived as an idea(l) of knowledge that admitted only the slightest possible room for substantial disagreement and, thus, for violent conflicts. Only two sets of questions were considered legitimate and justified topics for exchange among scientists: What do we see, and what can we measure, as outside observers? And, are the measurements carried out correctly? Today, probably, Shaftesbury would have been amused to see how enthusiasm — now and again rather immoderate — finds ways to express itself in the rhetorical dress, designed to serve as a straitjacket for enthusiasts.

In practice, neither the origins of the feature of anti-enthusiastic enthusiasm nor its possible influences on understandings of science and science communication have been effectively confronted, either in public or within the scientific community. Therefore, it may have maintained much of its original capacity to generate excesses. Those who believe themselves to be completely opposed to enthusiasm are poorly equipped to identify and attempt to moderate that quality in themselves. Enthusiasm, then, may carry them away.

Throughout the history of modernity, now and again, the commitment to science as a cause has actually shown itself in radically utopian fantasies, inspired by such a runaway enthusiasm that is relatively easy to identify by those who are not thus disposed but potentially confusing to those who think of science as the epitome of realism.

A rich source of illustrations of that point can be found in the report from a symposium, organized in London in November 1962 by the then CIBA Foundation. More than 20 highly respected scientists, predominantly biologists from the English-speaking world, gathered to discuss the prospects of modern biology.” Their exchanges were fanciful. Participants, for instance, aired science fantasies that included, among many other oddities, visions of producing aseptic humans fitted for life in outer space, the colonization of which by humankind was expected to be imminent. Against that background, a debate took place about the possible future tensions between a new aseptic upper class, well suited for space travel, and old-fashioned humans, stigmatized by badly smelling faeces.”

Other participants envisioned the cloning of persons ‘of attested ability’, allowing them to bring up their own clones. Such cloning schemes, it was argued, would dramatically raise the possibilities of human achievement:

For exceptional people commonly have unhappy childhoods, as their parents, teachers, and contemporaries try to force them to conform to ordinary standards. Many are permanently deformed by the traumatic experiences of their childhoods. Probably a great mathematician, poet, or painter could most usefully spend his life from 55 years on in educating his or her own clonal offspring so that they avoided at least some of the frustrations of their original.”

Science was presented and discussed as a limitless enterprise: “You may wish for anything: a cure-all for cancer, a mastery of mutation, an understanding of hormone action, or a cure for any of the diseases you have especially in mind. None of your wishes need remain unfulfilled, once we have penetrated deep enough into the foundations of life. This is the real promise of medicine.” Other expressions of excessive beliefs in science are more subtle and more difficult to put one’s finger on. One example is the gradual naturalization of the idea of science as universal light, as a quiet and seemingly pragmatic, even profane everyday understanding of science as an all-purpose problem solver. The argument that decisions should be ‘made in the light of an adequate understanding of the issues’,*’ appears to be no more than common sense but may, nevertheless, be based on a deeply rooted belief that science, epitomizing reason and realism, is capable of providing all necessary understanding, has no limits and is somehow beyond assumptions, beliefs and personal judgements.

Belief and scepticism

Such deeply rooted beliefs are not easily combined with scepticism, but the quality of scepticism is widely regarded and claimed as a scientific quality. There is ambivalence. Scepticism is taken to be essential, but only for insiders. The display of doubt concerning scientific knowledge claims in public is a conflictual issue.

Within science, among scientific peers, the reliability of scientific knowledge claims is generally taken to be secured through the activity of organized scepticism.” The dominant science communication paradigm, however, has no place for the exercise of scepticism. Rather, prior to the dissemination of scientific knowledge to audiences of lay outsiders it is supposed to be removed, like a scaffold from a completed building. Which understanding of scepticism lies beneath this seemingly contradictory attitude?

In his history of scepticism from Erasmus (1466-1536) to Spinoza (1632— 1677), American historian Richard Popkin (1923-2005) recorded aspects of the concept’s troubled history, closely connected to religious strife. In the wake of the Reformation and leading up to the dawn of the Enlightenment, scepticism, he argues, was used as a machine of war in religious conflicts — not unlike, it seems, the ways uncertainty is currently being used in conflicts about science-related political issues. For some thinkers, Popkin observed, ‘it was a

Holy War to overcome doubt so that man could be secure in his religious and scientific knowledge’, but for others the battle was ‘not so much a quest for certainty, as a quest for intellectual stability in which doubt and knowledge could both be accepted’.**

In religious terminology, scepticism is considered a menace to religion and the religious. The sceptic, as a doubter, threatens belief and is condemned on par with the nihilist or the cynic. With respect to knowledge claims, on the other hand, it has been noted that ‘[one] of the most important intellectual trends in early modern Europe was the rise of scepticism of various kinds concerning claims to knowledge’.*! It has, however, never been clear as to what extent and in what way that rise of scepticism was intended to encompass knowledge claims originating in modern science.

From one position, viewing science as an intellectual enterprise, sceptical questions concerning scientific knowledge claims can be seen as challenges that must be met, allowing doubt and knowledge to coexist. According to this view, the expression — whether in scientific journals or in the public domain — of reasonable doubt about specific knowledge claims forms part of the ongoing discussion.

From another position, identifying with science as a cause, the exercise of scepticism in science may be seen along Cartesian lines, as a quest for certainty, a means to gain certainty and, thus, to overcome doubt and insecurity. When scientists have gained (near) certainty it is time to go and tell the people. Outsiders to the scientific disciplines in which knowledge claims originate are not licensed to express critique and scepticism except in the reduced sense of purely normative opposition to — or fear of — proposed uses of the new knowledge. Apparently without any recognition of double standards, the legitimate exercise of doubt concerning knowledge questions is considered the prerogative of the insiders — the representatives of the scientific disciplines.

Along the latter lines, in recent debates on science-related political issues such as climate change or vaccinations or plant biotechnology, the term ‘sceptic’ has been widely used as a term of abuse to signify non-believers in scientific knowledge claims concerning future events. It is a kind of usage that brings the scientific community dangerously close to an identity as believers even though scientists at large hardly identify with science as a belief system.

‘To avoid turning into its opposite’ it has been argued ‘skepticism must also be skeptical of itself’.” Approached as a belief system, however, science is disinclined to take that medicine and to consider its own possible limitations and shortcomings, both in general and from one case to another. The understanding of science as an unlimited enterprise with the capacity to turn on universal light provides scientists and scientific institutions poor protection against the airing of lofty science visions. Moreover, the largely unacknowledged ambivalence towards the exercise of scepticism may trigger the conviction that science, in order to uphold its status as a model of scepticism, should be tough on doubt and on doubters. Such convictions, obviously, hamper open and critical discussions about science-related issues in public.

Influences from economic and social developments

Today’s close connections between the world of science, on the one hand, and the sphere of production and the marketplace on the other, go far back in time. British science historian Herbert Butterfield (1900—1979), referred to the end of the seventeenth century when stating:

The passion to extend the scientific method to every branch of thought was at least equalled by the passion to make science serve the cause of industry and agriculture, and it was accompanied by a sort of technological fervour. Francis Bacon had always laid stress on the immense utilitarian possibilities of science, the advantages beyond all dreams that would come from the control of nature: and it is difficult, even in the early history of the Royal Society, to separate the interest shown in the cause of pure scientific truth from the curiosity in respect of useful inventions on the one part, or the inclination to dabble in fables and freakishness on the other.”