A conversation with Sheila Jasanoff, on SRM
Mark Turner
"I think that the people who are pushing for solar radiation management or indeed any massive technological solutions to climate change are not naïve people. They are quite interdisciplinary in their outlook, and they have many ways of talking to other people.
On the other hand, forgive my saying so, but with engineering, and particularly with physics and the hard sciences, there does come a kind of arrogance. It is The Two Cultures kind of arrogance going back to C.P. Snow decades ago, that the scientists think that they can do the softer stuff, the humanities and what people need, very well, whereas the humanists cannot do the things that they do, the calculation and the engineering, at all well; and therefore a thoughtful engineer is a better judge of where humanity ought to sit and where humanity ought to go than even the most erudite and esteemed philosopher on the planet.
That is an occupational hazard. It is affecting places of higher learning, like my university, where people are voting with their feet.
But, sitting where I sit, at the nexus of science, technology, and society, I also see a huge number of STEM students who realize at some point that they don’t understand this complex machinery that is society and that it actually takes incredible immersion and a different kind of thought to get at the bottom of what people feel and think and how they behave and react and also the institutional interfaces — how should people be involved?
I think it is not the case that engineers and scientists, especially the ones who are proponents of solar geoengineering or any of these other technological interventions, are naïve and that they don’t get that people are out there. The ones I know personally or have encountered in my professional life are very sophisticated people. I do think that they don’t have a sufficient understanding of the complexity of the experiential system out of which people come when they are looking at these kinds of interventions. They don’t understand the role of memory, for instance, and the ways in which past experience affects one’s understanding of the future, or if they do, they tend to turn that into a science.
This is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. When human beings deviate from what the scientists and engineers want to tell them, the reaction within the behavioral sciences has been to say: “Well, there must be something the matter with your brain. There must be these biases that you are inbuilt to forget the distant past and only remember the recent experience,” or “You exaggerate the things that you yourself have experienced at the expense of the statistical knowledge that you ought to have,” and, “Look, you are more afraid of flying in a plane when planes are x percent safer than riding in your car, and you ride in your car every day.”
There has been this tendency to depreciate the forms of knowledge that people bring to the table, and that is not doing anybody a favor. That is actually, I think, contrary to the very idea of democracy, that you have to take people and their understanding of politics and power and work with that, not say, “This is an illegitimate understanding” from the start. "