In science communication,why does the idea of a public deficit always return?

This article answers the question animating this competition in four ways, deepening the question with each level.

An epistemic community’s “standards of evidence and knowledge” are part of what’s understood to be its “paradigm.” Paradigms are generative: while potentially destructive, they are “dynamic” and can occasion immense creativity (Kuhn, 1962).

The question animating this competition is paradigmatic to the science-communications community. The most basic level of answer to the question is that the question always returns because we always ask it.

The way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them. Scientists and the public on the whole listen poorly to each other. They do not share membership in each other’s communities, apparently, nor has either sought membership as diplomats. The deficit is built right into the (non-)relationship. A slightly less basic level of answer to our question is that the public deficit always returns because it is not in the job description of the epistemic communities concerned.

It is “never good” because it never works; it is reifying to define a community you aren’t part of by its interests and some set of demands you think they should meet. We science communicators have been known to make such dramatic, humorless criticism of the scientific community. The question animating this competition is at risk of making this kind of criticism of the public, the contradiction between whose interests and our demands is what we define as a “deficit.”

The “public” is a term of art. Our art specifically. Much like a standard of evidence, terms of art are communal, and help define an epistemic community. In science communications, “the public” are defined by what they are not: non-scientists, non-science communicators, non-experts. In short, not-us.

Equally, then (what a relief!) we can define ourselves as “not-them.” The third answer to the question is obvious: those who are not-us have no obligation to meet our community’s demands. In fact, it would be bizarre if they did. They have their own obligations, however, to be sure, recognizable even by not-them. There are public standards of evidence and knowledge; they vary culturally, but within cultures and widely in the West at the very least, there is widespread public agreement generally about what is true and what is important to know. Think about the standards of good parenting, for example: immunization, while contested, falls on the side of what it is true and important to know (and do). The fact that very many parents do something different (myself included) that falls across that line demonstrates that there is such a line.

Not only that, in the tiresome recurrence of the public deficit is indication of the dramatic, humorless waste of time we have spent on the question itself.

Intra-communal questioning is generative: as science communicators, why do we continually bring up the question of the public deficit?

Now there is an active subject to the question. We are its subject. We are no longer subjecting another community to our demands. As a science-communications community member who is also a member of the public, I am part of the question, its “internal stakes,” and seek through this essay to participate in pointing out and using these stakes as community “vectors of invention.”

For me at this point, and I hope for you too, the question becomes interesting:

“Interest,” in fact derives from interesse, “to be between.” To interest someone in something, in the active sense, means above all doing what one can so that this thing … is able to concern her, to intervene in his life, possibly to transform it. (Stengers, 1992: 16–18)

The way to get someone to listen to you is to listen to them. To find interest, situate yourself at the point of what “is-between.” What is the public’s stake in science and science communications?

Do we know? Have we taken an interest? Beneath our community’s frustration with the public’s deficit is frustration with ours.

I write, for example, as founder of the US-based Adaptation Network, which sought, when “adaptation” was a four-letter word in the United States, (Mitra, 2011) to build climate resilience through crowdsourced adaptation policy and practice—from anyone with any useful experience to provide, layperson or expert.

Another way to answer our question is again inspired by Stengers: how can we make our community’s perspective more ecological, in her sense of that word:

The “ecological” perspective invites us not to take, as an ideal of peace, a situation of consensus in which the population … would find itself subject to criteria transcending their diversity in the name of … a good that would be superior to them. Ecology does not give [us] an example of such subjection. It does not know consensus, but at most symbiosis, in which each protagonist is interested in the success of the other for its own reasons. (Stengers, 1996: 8)

The question animating this essay can be heard as a desire to compel the subjection of the public to our superior good: What is wrong with them? (Even I can’t deny I have wished to compel “the public” to shut up and listen. I have felt a Climate Cassandra.)

The Adaptation Network made it our job to listen, since everyone else was already talking. (One of our sayings was “never reinvent the wheel,” strictly for practical reasons: there was simply too little time or money to do so.) Because we felt the US public had been infantilized enough by attempts at subjection by political forces privileging wealth over wellbeing, we greeted visitors to our homepage with these uncompromising words of Yevtushenko’s (1952):

Lies

Lying to the young is wrong.

Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.

Telling them

that God’s in his heaven

and all’s well with the world

is wrong.

They know what you mean.

They are people too.

Tell them the difficulties

can’t be counted,

and let them see

not only

what will be

but see

with clarity

these present times.

Say obstacles exist they must encounter,

sorrow comes,

hardship happens.

The hell with it.

Who never knew

the price of happiness

will not be happy.

Forgive no error

you recognize,

it will repeat itself,

a hundredfold

and afterward

our pupils

will not forgive in us

what we forgave.

Criticizing from outside is “never good.” It is a damned waste of time when the stakes are high, too. We, too, can decide with Yevtushenko to “forgive no error we recognize,” once we recognize our own errors, which we recognize by their being the ones we can actually correct.

It is fitting that this essay competition was born where Paulo Freire was born. By defining the public’s relationship to our communications as an absence, we fail to engage with what is in fact a presence we are uncomfortable with. Underneath public disdain or rejection of science communications which we have thus far interrogated as a “deficit” is terror, overwhelm and such massive uncertainty that the only way for us to understand it as science communicators is to understand it as those who are also-us: parents, adult children of fragile elders, people displaced, people at risk, people distressed at the wounding of our cherished places the word “solastalgia” was coined to express.

Our epistemic “twoness,” as W.E.B. DuBois (1903) called it, helps our diplomacy. And arguably, diplomacy is exactly our job. The public are not defective children; they are self-interested and scared. If we are honest, so are we. We can replace the question of their deficit and even of ours by inventing communication that starts with the already always high stakes of science communication. If we want to avoid Freire’s “banking model” of communicating science, we turn to what he called a “dialogical” model. But even dialogue can be oppressive, as we know—unless it is between people who have learned to interest each other.