The Beginning of STS: De-enlightenment

Shigeru Nakayama[i]

1. Nineteen sixty eight - 1968

１９６８ is a remarkable year. It is the turning point in world history from industrialized society to something else, perhaps to be called eco-society or much later cyber society. STS is also starting at this turning point. This turning point was commonly experienced among those Western highly industrialized society, including Japan, and even Australia and New Zealand.

The following diagram indicates how sharp this turning point is: Yearly statistics conducted long time by a Japanese research institute shows a radical change from aggressive attitude to Nature to ecological perspectives in 1968.

(Figure 1)Man’s Relation to Nature

In that year, campus riots were found common in US, Japan, France and so on. Even though student radical movements were terminated within a few years, more importantly alternative way of thinking and counterculture has developed to replace industrial society. In US university discipline level, physics and chemistry became suddenly unpopular among students because of their involvement in military-industrial complex. It was also true in Japan as their responsibility for industrial pollution. In 1968, in socialist world and third world, people has their own, each different problems. In case of Korea, military and technocratic dictatorship was the problem they faced and later on they followed the precedents of developed countries. In China, the Cultural Revolution was  in full swing.

In 1971, when we had an occasion of the International Congress of the History of Science at Moscow, Derek de Solla Price was invited as the keynote speaker for a Symposium of “Science of Science” by Russian organizers. Price was known as the scholar who claimed ‘exponential growth of science”, impressed by post-Sputnik science boom in science budget, scientists’ number etc. The intention of Soviet side was to strengthen their own official position by following Price’s claim. Price, however, changed his claim from exponential to S-shape development as shown in Figure 2, and also claimed that at the turning point anti-science, critical science or STS (science, technology and society) issues appeared. Russians were terribly disappointed and embarrassed as their claim of infinite unlimited progress of science is said to be virtually impossible by Price.

(Figure 2)　The Logistic Curve

Such an optimistic belief in infinite progress of science has started in the eighteenth century enlightenment thought, as represented by Voltaire’s writings and his fascination in Newton. Upon such a thought, ignorant people must be educated and enlightened in science from top to down way, and strengthened with the success of industrialization throughout nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries. But, coming to the demise of industrialization ideology in the last third of the twentieth century, people started to realize that they had been well enlightened enough to be able to critically examine top-down, one-way enlightenment.

Technocracy is a governmental or organizational system of top down enlightenment with the heavy emphasis of science and technology, where decision makers are selected based upon how highly skilled and qualified they are. It often took a form of “developmental dictatorship” for the sake of efficiency in modernization.

In the course of development, however, people started to question of the validity of the technocratic policy, as it was found not representing the interest of people. In the latter half of twentieth century, nuclear research and development were questioned of its merit, necessity and controllability. Then, military-industrial-academic complex were often criticized of its lack of transparency and huge budget. The menace of industrial pollution was widely shared by people. In the year of 1968 in US House of Representatives, the office of technology assessment was created to embody the STS ideas into official form. Still further, the possible danger of recombinant DNA research was voiced from people, in which some practicing scientists and science journalists were involved. These are mostly bottom up critical appraisals from people, which the government had to listen to and STS was made to be an academic discipline.

2. Ideology of scientist vs. people

In the following, we shall introduced the most conspicuous case of STS issues, general intellectual criticized the physics community in Japan.

Japanese ‘postwar democracy’ generation based on their psychological abhorrence of wartime misery, takes a principle that everything conceivable out of wartime experience should not be duplicated in the future  Out of that psychology, postwar Japanese science and technology were totally demilitarized. For instance, Japanese physics community were nervously avoided of involvement in military affairs and in that sense markedly different from that of the USA, in which military-industrial complex were permitted and indeed supported the community. 

People might have thought that science makes people’s life unhappy as it produced nuclear bomb. But it did not lead to anti-science movement among people in right after Japan lost war, partly because Japanese intellectual, at least if not people at large, were fed up with irrational, anti-scientific attitude of wartime ideology. Science (and technology) was the ideology to bring economic recovery to Japan, which is the ideology of the MITI (the Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and shared with the postwar generation.

This ideology was tightly held during the high economic growth of late 50s and early 60s. but only in the late 60s it was questioned by producing intolerable degree of public pollution.

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Science has an absolute right to be disseminated to the populace from scientific top to popular ignorant people. It is still by some scientists accepted that view.

This is particularly strong in Japanese scientific community in general and its physics community in particular, as evidenced by the Kyoto Scientists Conference led by Hideki Yukawa, May 1962, for the abolition of nuclear weapons.[ii] They have tried to appeal to international elitist community rather than people at large.

Then, a literary critique, Junzo Karaki raised a question on physicists’ behavior, wrote a book “Memorandum on social responsibility of scientists” and posthumously published. It was quite unconventional for a man of literature to criticize science and scientific community, since the former is considered to be not qualified in understanding scientific matter. Karaki was, however, died testate to express his own long-embracing question on the matter of designing of nuclear bombs and criticize Yukawa explicitly. Karaki’s viewpoint is not that of scientists, as he does not know enough of physics community, but shares with that of lay people’s. Japanese physics community flatly ignored as it shows Karaki’s iability of understanding physics.

When I was asked from Japanese physics society to contribute an outsider opinion on physics community, I quoted Karaki’s opinion, saying this is a generally held opinion among lay people about physicists and physics community that physicists should know about.

Physics community is most proud, trying to evaluate others on the basis of the degree of proper understanding of physics. As the word “physics imperialism” suggests, this can be applicable in scientific community in which modern mechanistic paradigm is still prevailing, but not for the society at large.  From scientists’ viewpoint, it is quite easy to criticize Karaki’s view as an example of ignorance of physics, but lay people neither care of nor feel obligatory of learning physics.

3.De-Enlightenment

Freed from modern enlightened way of thinking, people may look physics community as most vicious rogues. As my philosopher friend, Shunsuke Tsurumi, outspokenly told me that not only physics community but all of military-industrial complex are the community of organized crime.

If physicists are deeply feeling guilty of their past conduct of liberating nuclear energy, they should abandon their profession. Those in scientific community may still think that physics is indispensable as the basis of modern scientific disciplines but ordinary people have never thought of it. In premodern Edo period, they were happy to live on without the Western knowledge of physics and so also in future. They will evaluate physics in relation to their daily life but not related to academia. They have their own right to criticize physics community without relating to their fundamental merit for promoting modern science.

This conflict between enlightenment ideology of modern science and the standpoints of people at large is still to be discussed, but I can point out a trend that those people who were already enough enlightened to fully understand the merit and demerit of modern science and technology now has right to choose what part of ideology of scientists (or practitioners of science) is acceptable and what not.

Taken another example of the hiatus between viewpoint of scientists and lay people from already described, people criticize objective scientific research on nuclear victims in Hiroshima, and cast a doubt that scientists were motivated by military purpose, as people do not recognize scientists’ motivation in objective research for new scientific finding and writing scientific papers.

If we enlarge this problematique to larger historical context of civilization, the Newtonian paradigm has been accepted in the non-Western area as a universally valid truth, but it can be understood as a symbol of Western supremacy and to legitimize Western imperialistic expansion among those colonized area. In such a context of neo-colonialism, even Albert Shweizer, the sage in jungle, was criticized as old-fashioned after 1968 as he has a notion that Western expansion is valid because it disseminates modern scientific knowledge to primitive non-Western society[iii].        

It may not be limited to the science-society problems. Once internet designed for scientific community are exposed to popular use since 1995, there are lots of menace way of applications, as it was quite often reported on the traditional mass media. Just like before 1995, it was argued that the net of academic and scientific community should be isolated from general network in order not to be invaded by popular and vulgar use. But it is technically impossible to isolate “intranet” from internet.  But intranet has no expansion function but always defensive. Internet, on the other hands, will be a public tool for social assessment of science.

Furthermore, once we liberalize academic network, then, the way of presentation of academic and technocratic science will become more bottom-up oriented, and infrastructure of science just like in reward system, referee system and presentation system itself will be revolutionarily altered from competitive to corporative in motivation. Traditional academic science could be maintained but the new way of science influenced in bottom-up way of “Service Science” to be assessed not by academic peers but by the council of citizens group [iv]. This trend should be further accelerated by adjusting to the internet use in future.                                      

Finally, we should say that the stages of these development toward the de-enlightenment reflects of the maturity of industrial societies. According to a recent newspaper poll.among people, the most appreciated keywords are ecology for Japanese, economy for Korean and science and technology for Chinese.