Re: Cost-Benefit Analysis for metaphysical Systems: Postmodernism versus Modernism
graham
"Lance" <lache...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote in message
news:1103024629.8...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Philosophy
Nature as Dogma
Yaron Ezrahi
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Bruno
Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. xii + 307 pp. Harvard
University Press, 2004. $55 cloth, $24.95 paper.
This seems to me to be applying deconstructionist theories and techniques,
that have plagued Eng. Lit. departments, to science.
When will it all end?
Graham
Lance
"graham" <stra...@shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> This seems to me to be applying deconstructionist theories and techniques,
> that have plagued Eng. Lit. departments, to science.
> When will it all end?
> Graham
As for when it will all end I think it is dangerous to prophesy, especially
about the future.
Lance
Lance
Nature as Dogma
Yaron Ezrahi
Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Bruno
Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. xii + 307 pp. Harvard
University Press, 2004. $55 cloth, $24.95 paper.
As a thought experiment on the connections between nature, science and
politics in contemporary democracy, Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature
is exceptionally brilliant and thought-provoking. As a critique of
modern conceptions of and practices pertaining to those relations, it
is nearly always compelling. But as a recommendation to the public to
adopt a radically alternative model of thinking about, and relating to,
nature, science and politics, I found it neither persuasive nor
feasible.
Latour, one of the most original contemporary thinkers in this field,
invites us to abandon what he regards as the metaphysical universe of
modernity and to deliberately adopt a new metaphysics to guide our
lives and to relate the world to our concerns. In the new world he
conceives, Latour banishes both the concept of nature as an objective
entity that obeys its own laws and scientists who claim a privileged
authority to represent the facts of this external realm and to
interpret their implications for our lives. He advises us instead to
imagine ourselves as living in a world in which facts and values,
reality and morality, science and politics, and causal necessity and
freedom are seen not as dichotomous but as inseparable aspects of the
same things, processes, choices and actions.
Latour believes that his new metaphysics will liberate us from the
fiction that nature is nonnegotiable. He maintains that both as a
category of thought and as an idea that regulates practice, nature has
been functioning in the universe of secular modernity as a dogma. By
presenting external reality as an objective limit on human freedom, he
insists, nature and its representatives, the scientists, have actually
limited rather than expanded human options. If the right to represent
nature is expanded to include not just scientists but also ethicists,
poets, farmers, architects and laypeople, then things that have in the
modern system been regarded as inanimate external objects imposed on us
as incontestable givens will become "humanized" as more integral,
elastic and "articulate" components of our world.
Latour expects that such a development will result from the adoption of
his new metaphysics and will be "the simple consequence of the
disappearance of the notion of external nature." He adds that "There is
no longer any space set aside where we can unload simple means in view
of ends that have been defined once and for all without proper
procedure."
Latour gives asbestos as an example of a "modernist" object. It was
used extensively for years in construction and for other purposes
without its multidimensional character and effects being adequately
assessed. In the beginning it was welcomed as an "inert, effective and
profitable" entity that could be usefully integrated into human
environments. But over the course of many years, the status of asbestos
shifted radically, and now it is categorized as a major health hazard
associated with serious lung problems, including cancer. Latour
suggests that in the modernist framework, the procedure that allowed
asbestos (and many other now unwelcomed substances, technologies and
nonhuman entities) to enter our world was too narrow in scope and
failed to take in consideration the many perspectives and concerns that
eventually led to their exclusion.
In the postmodernist conception, the notions that nature is an object
and that the scientific priesthood has a privileged authority to
represent it are banished, and we move to a scheme in which both human
and nonhuman agents can be more inclusively, equally and harmoniously
woven together. This is a universe in which the scientific,
technological, ethical, political, aesthetic and economic aspects of
any entity, agent or action that is a candidate for passing through the
entrance gates to our common experience are considered simultaneously
and continually. This new world is, Latour says, a better one than the
one we are used to living in: It is more respectful of the multitude of
diverse viewpoints, more egalitarian and more deliberative, and its
denizens are ready to resolve conflicts through compromise rather than
by appealing to unchallengeable knowledge or final truths.
Since Latour's preferred world is one in which both nature and science
are politicized, where Science is replaced by many sciences, Nature by
many natures and the Public by many publics, it is no wonder that some
scientists, academics and other surviving modernists have regarded
Latour's vision as a casus belli.They view his breaking up of the
conventional dichotomies (facts and values, science and politics, the
discourse on causality and the discourse on responsibility) as an
assault on the greatest achievements of progressive modernization.
Those achievements include having replaced mythological, magical or
religious notions of agency and causality with secular, mechanistic or
organic ones; having made knowledge and instrumental rationality the
new basis of public affairs; having guaranteed the autonomy of science
and academic institutions vis-à-vis church and state; and having
checked arbitrary political authority by speaking truth to power.
Nevertheless, this intense science war and particularly the predictable
attacks on Latour and other philosophers, historians and sociologists
of science appear to me to be misguided and intellectually shallow on a
number of counts. Although Latour's "experimental metaphysics" is an
exceptionally incisive critique of modern conceptions of nature,
science and politics, many similar critiques of heg-emonic "modernist"
practices and of the science-based "solution approach" to social
problems have been made since the early decades of the 20th century by
such influential figures as John Dewey, Charles Lindblom, Don K. Price,
Daniel Moynihan, Aaron Wildavsky and Edward C. Banfield. Moreover, such
procedures as "Technology Assessment" and "Evaluation Research," as
well as the very tendency to replace the word "nature" with the word
"environment," have long pointed to shifts in sensibilities and
practices that have echoes in Latour's politics of nature.
Instead of attacking Latour, his critics should respond to his
challenge and try answering the question of whether his new metaphysics
offers a feasible and a desirable alternative to the modern metaphysics
whose weaknesses and anachronisms he so effectively exposes.
On the issue of the feasibility of convincing the public to shift its
allegiance from modern to "postmodern" metaphysics, Latour seems to be
vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that he ignores the
characteristics of common sense as a cultural system that cannot be
engineered by philosophers and other intellectuals. Also, the modern
popular metaphysics that he criticizes did not become the hegemonic
common-sense metaphysics in the West by fiat-it took several hundred
years for the premodern notions of causality and agency to be
replaced-although, as Latour himself notes, even this process of
conversion has never been complete, and in some sense (as the title of
one of his earlier books puts it) "we have never been modern." The
public is unlikely to leap from a tested system of beliefs that have
survived the trials of experience to a largely untested radical
alternative.
But suppose it were feasible for the public to make such a clear-cut
public choice between alternative metaphysical systems. Is the option
offered by Latour preferable to the existing one? Because he admits
that the choice is between two systems that are equally
metaphysical-each consisting of fictions and beliefs, not facts-it
is clear that we need not decide on the grounds of which of the two is
true and which is false. Rather, we must consider which is more
advantageous or beneficial in making sense of our experience and
guiding our conduct. We need to perform a sort of a cost-benefit
analysis of alternative metaphysical systems, examining their relative
responsiveness to our concerns.
Here Latour is least persuasive. Using very belligerent language
against modern metaphysics and especially against the imagining of
nature as a lawful, objective realm of necessary facts, Latour neglects
to consider that historically, precisely this conception of nature has
served as a powerful resource of modern democratic political culture.
As I have indicated elsewhere, nature as represented by science has
been used as a powerful means for inducing consensus, coordinating
behavior in nonhierarchical social systems, empowering the rights of
individuals against arbitrary power and authority, grounding criticism
of institutions and practices that violate "nature" conceived as a
universal norm (Thomas Paine), creating an imaginary space outside
society as a cultural-psychological resource for the development of the
modern individual (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and facilitating the rise of
the modern press based on the useful fiction that facts can be
separated from opinions. Surely nature has also been used to defend
"bad things," such as monarchy, ruthless market practices and war. But
a serious consideration of a world without "nature" and external
factual "reality" requires a comprehensive examination of these factors
and of many others that Latour neglects, such as the impact of the mass
media and globalization.
Still, Politics of Nature constitutes a major contribution to
contemporary thought and discourse. Although I question some of the
book's key premises and recommendations, I anticipate that it will
increase recognition that we can make our institutions and policies
more responsive to our concerns by taking a deliberative, critical
approach to the metaphysical foundations of our attitudes toward
nature, science and politics.-Yaron Ezrahi, Political Science, The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
American Scientists
Scientists Bookshelf