Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk by Ulrich Beck

Author:Ulrich Beck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

5

Implementation as Abolition of Technocracy:

The Logic of Relativistic Science

Let us suppose that the case of Galileo is reopened: natural science against the Church, heard in 1633 by the Holy Office in Rome. The Grand Inquisitor orders a retrial on the grounds of Chernobyl, human genetics and the rest. What would the verdict be today?

Only a decade or so ago, every schoolboy’s heart beat faster for the unyielding Galileo: ‘And yet it does move!’ That was the dream of the liberating power of science. Brech?s Galileo, written in exile in 1939, utters the bitter truth: ‘Take care of yourself; when you go through Germany, put the truth under your coat’ (1967, p. 27). The world may be in disarray, but the world view is correct. Truth equals science, and science is the hope of a world martyred by fascist madness and world wars. Even today, some scientists have to carry the truth under their coats – in order to keep the public from getting too scared.

Are the truth and foresight of the Grand Inquisitor beginning to dawn on us, living as we do after Nagasaki, Bhopal and Chernobyl, and before the ultimate victory of human genetics? Have we changed sides, behind our own backs, so to speak, in the centuries-old dispute between science and dogma? Or is it science that has changed sides, so that the fading cry of ‘Help, science!’ is ambiguous?

Are we now also being liberated from secular faith in science and technology, as people in the age of the Reformation were ‘released’ from the worldly arms of the Church? Are we experiencing the first waves of a scientific Protestantism in the public stands of critical nuclear scientists, geneticists, doctors, engineers? Will there be a great dispute over the vested interests of risk-intensive research ventures, like the dispute over the ‘sins of the Church’ which convulsed the late Middle Ages? Are the old spectres of irrationalism, long since pronounced dead, rising from their graves, and, now immune to a scientific critique that has deconsecrated itself, beginning to haunt us anew?

It is a mistake to throw these questions into the waste-paper baskets provided in our day for anti-technological rantings. Certainly, the music of world decline has accompanied the development of technology before now: a great deal sounds as it did 200 years ago, and frequently since then: sentimentalism about nature, alternative lifestyles, Luddism, etc. Yet today it is not enemies of technology, apostles of a new stone-age culture, who warn against developments, but specialists who know their way around and have courage. The situation is changed by the fact that the critique of technology and science is also domestically produced, and thus able to appear with scientific rigour and authority. The public self-refutation of scientific ideals of certainty does not indicate a failure of science, but a new phase in its development.

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