Futures 32 (2000) 505–507www.elsevier.com/locate/futures

Reflections

The future politics of science

Jerry Ravetz*

Research Methods Consultancy, 196 Clarence Gate Gardens, London NW1 6AU, UK

A new politics of science, which could be very important in helping the transitionto a future, healthier world order, is emerging. Science is becoming the focus ofpolitical struggles, conducted both within and outside the scientific community. Thisis not the first time that such conflicts have occurred; hitherto they have been rare,occurring mainly in periods of general instability. Typically, they involved extremistsagainst a solid centre, who sooner or later won. Now we may be into a new game.

What is new this time is that much of science is seen to have been captured bycorporate interests, state or private. Big science, effectively a part of technology, isindustrialised in its social structure, and is also incorporated into the institutions thatpromote it. The lone independent discoverer has largely been replaced by researchworkers, hired and fired like any others. All this has been happening for decades;but its consequences are now becoming painfully clear.

The scandals in Britain over BSE, which involved the manipulation and suborningof scientists by the state, and then Genetically Modified crops, where science-basedtechnology is assaulting peoples and the environment, have put the issues beyondall doubt. Either these interests are stopped, or they will poison us and the planetbeyond repair. For, it is clear, the corporations do not care; their precautionary prin-ciple applies for profits before safety.

It is also clear that, thanks to the triumphs of science in the past and the creationof modern society, the struggle is a sophisticated one. It was mass consumer pressure,aroused by the media and the pressure groups, that have brought Monsanto to heel.And now the promoters of new technological ventures are very nervous. Even ifthese new ‘green’ radicals cannot bring down the whole system, there is no tellingwhich vested interest will be the next target.

It is possible to imagine this as just another temporary scare, even a fad. We havejust had a collection of food and safety scandals, and when these have died away, life

* Tel: +44-20-7224-7084; Fax:+44-20-7487-3360.E-mail address:jerry ravetz@lineone.net (J. Ravetz)

0016-3287/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S0016 -3287(99 )00092-0

506 J. Ravetz / Futures 32 (2000) 505–507

would return to normal. After all, since our whole civilisation depends so critically onscience, people must trust it; there is nowhere else to go.

But there is; not in a wholesale rejection of everything that science has achieved,but in a basis for an informed personal critical assessment of where science helpsand where it hinders. This is the political significance of the whole complementaryand alternative medicine movement. Just as science had told us that various things,like nuclear power and DDT, were good and safe, it had also told us that variousother things, like acupuncture and faith healing, were useless and possibly dangerous.And without any overt political activities or even awareness, this advice from sciencehas been increasingly, now overwhelmingly, ignored by the public.

Of course, until recently, it did require a positive decision to explore the ‘alterna-tive’ things; one could incur ridicule from one’s friends, and condemnation fromone’s doctor. Now, everybody does it, and seem none the worse, perhaps even bettersometimes. Even the medical schools are taking it up, on a large scale in the US,and getting underway in Europe. For an older generation of believers in Science, itis bewildering and outrageous. For them it seems like a mixture of traditional super-stitions with New Age nonsense; irrationality is now taking over. In one sense theyare right, for the reductionist world-view established by Descartes and Galileo iscrumbling, and new realities are coming in through the cracks.

But for the general public, complementary medicine represents the most real sortof democracy: the ability to choose one’s path for the protection of one’s self andone’s own. Those ‘public understanding’ scientists who laud Progress and condemnalternatives, will soon be as lonely as those Catholic priests who warn their par-ishioners that contraception is a sin. And just as the Catholic Church has lost itscredibility because of the cover-ups of all the abuses of children, so may the officialscientists go down as discredited defenders of dirty and reckless science and runawaytechnology. These new dogmatists will follow the old, as they too are no longerneeded for people’s security.

Inside science, the struggle sharpens. On the one hand, scientists have lost thetraditional security that went with academic positions. They are more subject topressures to conform and to bend their work around the requirements of their man-agers. But on the other, the complacency that afflicted scientific communities in thepast, born of the experience that they were helping humanity while gratifying theirown curiosity, is now totally gone. It is a source of pain and anger, that the public’strust in scientists has been so cruelly betrayed and is now lost. And scientists are partof the public, sharing its worries about contamination and irresponsible institutions.

The issues for the struggle within science have scarcely been identified. Theycannot revolve around ‘independence’, for that was a feature of the vanished goodold days. But employed, professional scientists can fight for ‘integrity’, which rangesfrom elementary honesty in reporting results (not to be taken for granted!) to anawareness of the social, environmental and ethical dimensions of research and advice.

There is another sort of connection between the two developments; in a sense,ontology has been politicised. For the reductionist style of science which followsfrom the reductionist world-view is all too easily harnessed to the myopic style ofengineering which is so convenient for the achievement of power and profit. This

507J. Ravetz / Futures 32 (2000) 505–507

is most easily seen in Economics, the elite folk-science of the modern world order;what is not bargained for in a transaction is only an ‘externality’; or, as they saybrightly, ‘what can’t be counted, doesn’t count’. In the case of Genetically Modifiedcrops, do we believe that all the properties (including the ecological) of a piece ofDNA can be known by science, or do we recognise uncertainty and ignorance? Inboth cases, the battle lines between the vested interests and the friends of the earthare clear.

It is all early days, of course. But we can rest assured that the future of scienceis been changed. Trend extrapolation is now meaningless; mounting evidence thatsomething has gone drastically wrong with Science does not allow us the luxury ofprojecting the trends of the recent past and the present into the future. When thepublic starts to debate the issues of Quality, and who controls its controllers, thanfutures begin to be shaped rather than projected. We are in for a most exciting andcreative time in the historical evolution of the scientific endeavour.