Seals at the Theater

How does the public come to know what it knows? Why do we believe some people and not others? And how do scientists, politicians, and the public interact in these arenas of civic epistemologies?

Hilgartner offered a novel metaphor for public discourse, based on that of the theater. Theaters are places populated by characters, people with qualities distinctly chosen to present a specific narrative. Theaters use sets, lights, and other tricks to separate the world into a frontstage and backstage. The frontstage is dependent on backstage to generate it's narrative, but nothing can be more damaging to the illusion of stagecraft than showing the backstage, the actors getting into costume, the sets that are nothing more than painted plywood, the wires, all of that. In the political realm, strategic leaks can disable an organization. Leaking has gone beyond the tactical deployment of a fact to discredit an opposition, and come into it's own as a strategy of unconventional warfare.

How does this relate to science? Scientific knowledge is supposed to be better than "ordinary" facts, or mere belief. It is supposed to be based on objective methods of discovery and truth, and relate in clear ways to the natural world. But this was not always the case, Boyle had to invent many of the methods of science as a public display to convince people of the truth of his science. It is only within the past hundred years that the lab became closed as a matter of course, that the lab became the backstage to the larger production of credibility in both natural and social realms. Michael Polyani described a "Republic of Science" holding to these high standards, and thereby trusted by the public, but within the republic there is no trust, rather organized skepticism of various degrees of aggressiveness.

Hilgartner describes how critics of the National Academies of Science attempted to shine a light on the 'backstage' of the reports, to reveal to the public how interested, how incomplete, and how simply wrong they were. The 2000 election represents a similar instance, where the existential threat to democracy was that the process of the recount would pull down the staging of the political theater that legitimates the transition of power every cycle.

It is easy to conduct boundary work to separate out the scientists and politicians. These are jobs, requiring some form of special expertise. But what distinguishes civic epistemologies from traditional theater is that it is participatory, though in large part the public remains passive, the audience can throw things at the actors, get up on stage and argue about the lines and blocking. The case of Sellafield, local farmers argued that national scientists lacked vital facts about the realities of sheep farming, but were essentially sidelined. Deep mistrust from decades of nuclear opposition had hardened into an unbreachable cordon.

So, how then to proceed? While an interested and educated public can be a valuable contribution to the process of discovering truth and enacting policy, the world is not entirely a stage. That which works in narrative can fail when applied in the ultimate laboratory of the real world. Center stage is held by those who give the public what they want, the necessary stories. But interested groups, whether they be patients with AIDS, or unemployed young have a shot at understanding and changing the world. The problem with democratic politics is that it has devolved into a circus, two ringmasters throwing fish at crowds of seals (to continue to mangle an image). But if we were interested, that is, we had well defined interests in the outcome of policies, and we decided our loyalties on those grounds, we might see a politics more rational, and ultimate more effective at governing.