SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: THE NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT



remarks on Science and Society: the new Social Contract

at the World Summit on Sustainable Development

Professor John C Mutter

The Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, New York.

My view of the “new contract” and my remarks on the subject must necessarily reflect my experience as a scientist. I first worked as a scientist at a Commonwealth government agency in Australia at that time called the Bureau of Mineral Resources. The purpose of that organization was to map and asses the mineral assets of Australia (including oil which was my area) for the purpose of understanding the natural wealth of the county with a view to developing these assets commercially. In a way it was a development agency. When I worked there the main wealth was fairly well understood, and the organization had been responsible for the systematic mapping of the entire continent and its continental margins offshore with responsibility for parts of New Guinea as well. If I had any sense that there was a contract involved in my work it was a pretty simple one – my colleagues and I were paid reasonably well and we were expected to contribute to developing the wealth of the country through application of our science.

Nobody talked about a contract between science and society then. In fact, the contract between science and society is something that scientists even today don’t talk about very much. If one tries to begin a discussion of the contract it can be hard to get very far, It’s something that scientist just don’t talk about very much. Scientist do discuss the goals and priorities of science a lot. The establishment of allocations for science spending in the US involves an endless balancing act between competing priorities advanced by many different groups. There is a constant give and take and lobbying of one group after another until the final science budget is determined. Sometimes there is even some sense of a science policy to guide these debates, but it is often not clear what the policy actually involves. What most scientists don’t realize is that the context for this debate is very much rooted in the contract between science and society. What does society expect from science, and what should scientists expect from society? In many cases, the debate about priorities is a debate about the role and expectations of science in the national agenda, and is deeply imbedded in the social context and the contract. So I would like to concur with the closing remark made by the Honorable Minister *******, that perhaps it’s a little diverting at this stage in the discussion of sciences role in sustainable development to be discussing the new contract. I think it is far better to discuss the purpose and goals of science and the priorities of a science agenda for sustainable development. The contract must flow from those goals – or, at least there seems little point in discussing a contract unless the goals are first established. So I’ll take that viewpoint in these remarks.

In its broadest definition the purpose of science is to produce understanding. But understanding of what, and to what end? Therein lies the core of the debate and the connection to society. Science cannot do all things. We must decide what we will try to understand. These decisions have been made in the US on the basis of national social priorities. If you were to have taken an opinion poll in the US in 1958 (say) and asked the citizens of the country what concerned them most they would have said the main issues were their health and national security. In the latter case the concern was an external threat – the Russians. And the allocation of resources into science reflects those priorities.

Health has received consistent steady funding. Apparently people in the US believe that they should never be sick from anything, ever. And if they do accept the notion that illness is a natural par t of life they want that illness to be diagnosed immediately, and that there should be drugs available to cure whatever it is and mask the symptoms so that they need not suffer during the recovery process in any way. It would seem that many people in the US believe they should live forever, or if they do eventually die they will do so peacefully in their sleep after a long life that is full in every way. Many men seem to think they should have an active sex life until they die.

Defense spending is the other pillar. Much of what we know today about the physics, chemistry and biology of the oceans was learnt from projects sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Even aspects of the shape of the seafloor were determined in an effort to understand how to find Russian submarines and how to hide ours from them. A great deal of our very basic understanding of how our planet behaves including its climate system we owe to this funding. It is a relatively unknown benefit of the Cold War.

I think it is reasonable to ask if these priorities or goals reflect our core values. In some way they must. In the US great value is placed on freedom and defense spending reflects that core value. Everybody values good health and hence the priority in the US and elsewhere on health spending. More recently there has been a rising concern for the environment. In my view there is considerable confusion about environmental policy and associated funding. There are regulations to protect and programs to restore the condition of rivers, lands, forests and other natural assets so that they are not devoured in our endless quest for improved prosperity, but these are “keep it clean and nice looking” programs. They are not in any sense cast in the context of a sustainable development agenda, even one formulated for the rich world. Too often they are seen as the province of an elite or fringe and deal with issues that are more about esthetics than things that really matter. Worse, when they do try to take on global issues like the consequences of large additions of anthropogenic carbon into the atmosphere there is a distinct tension between the perceived benefit of the actions and our continued march toward ever increasing prosperity.

And prosperity is something we value above just about everything else. Almost all research in the private sector, a huge fraction of spending in the US involves creating means of improving the comfort and lifestyle of people who are already comfortable and well off. One could say that the reason we want to stay healthy is to enjoy our prosperity and the reason we defend ourselves is to retain that prosperity.

So the way we support science does connect to core values. Those values were articulated in the Bill of Rights where they are stated as inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life equals health, liberty equals defense and happiness equates to prosperity. These rights derive from a set of self-evident truths and as stated in the Bill of Rights and governments are instituted among “men” to secure those rights, and derives their just powers from the consent of the governed. Government allocates science funding to secure certain rights of the governed. These Rights were elaborated more than 200 years ago and pertain to the governed of the United States. As drafted they don’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the world, nor should they. The idea was to define and ensure the rights of those people governed in the US at a time when the world was far less connected.

Now fast forward to the 21st century. Many of the goals of US science have been achieved. Some of the debate about science in the US rotates around the idea that science can be used to design the future we want for ourselves. Imagine that! Just conjure up what we want the world to be like and have science design it for us. Major advances have been made in health care. In fact, a person can live a terribly unhealthy life through neglect and bad habits and have the consequences repaired through quadruple bypass surgery, for instance. I suppose that represents a healthy life by some odd definition. The Cold War is over. I don’t know that the US can take credit but it is over. The US is now in a deep turmoil trying to understand how to respond to new threats as brought home so starkly by the catharsis of Sept 11, and very, very few people see any connection to a world so deeply divided between the rich and the poor; the prevailing concern of the Johannesburg Summit. But that connection is deep and strong and the stark facts of that divide are what should motivate the concerns of all people of conscience throughout the world.

That is what should govern our assessment the self-evident truths of today, what the inalienable rights are of all people, how we think about governance including the allocation of resources for science, and what we mean by the social contract .

In today’s world, here in Africa, the Honorable Turner Isoun, Nigerian Minister for Science and Technology stated that the goals of an S&T agenda for Africa should be “designed to ensure economic, social, and environmental sustainability

That may not sound much like the founding fathers but in many ways I think it is an African echo of the same basic notions. Economic, social and environmental sustainability are inalienable rights. Channeling energy, opposing chaos and danger, and having individuals pursue individual goals and collective goals are implementation strategies aimed at ensuring those rights.

In setting out these goals the Honorable Turner Isoun proposes a type of African Bill of Rights. The science agenda and priorities that would help to ensure those rights are not yet elaborated in detail but many of the elements are known.

But what does this mean for the new contract between science and society? Let’s remember what the old contract said. Basically it said that if science funding was copious, scientists would work hard and reveal the secrets of nature and good things would follow. In fact, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project that built the first nuclear weapon said that you could not be a scientist unless you believed that revealing the secrets of nature was fundamentally an act of “good”. Scientists, in his view did good works like doctors and priests. But given the stark realities of our world today it is reasonable to ask … good for whom? Not for the sick, hungry and poor of this continent. Good for those who provide the resources that support the science is the historic answer.

That sort of contract won’t work today because Africa alone can’t support the science needed to secure the rights stated by the Honorable Turner Isoun. What needs to happen is that the world community of scientists and science funder come to understand that the goals of sustainable development are good for all the world, rich and poor and relate to a set of universal rights that apply to all humanity. They must become part of the core values of a global community.

Science by its nature is global. Scientists are one of the most globally connected of all professionals. The basic creed of science is universal and science produces universal truths. The outcome of science is value neutral, but the way science is conducted is not. Our first objective must be to shape a set of universal values for global science in which the advancement of all humankind comes first. From this we can construct a contract between science and society; but not until.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download