Harvey Brooks: Science and Society

by Howard Silverman

August 23, 2010 10:48PM

"In 1977 Harvey Brooks, a leader in rethinking the effects of science on society, pointed out that long-term environmental problems pose a special challenge to humanity," writes Kai Lee in the 1993 book, Compass and Gyroscope.

Lee continues:

Brooks warned that the very fact that our most advanced societies are pluralistic in goals and democratic in governance would make the environmental contradictions of industrialism virtually intractable.

Harvey Brooks passed away in 2004, after 50 years at Harvard University, where he founded the Kennedy School of Government's Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program.

From Brooks' 1977 paper, cited by Lee, "The Resolution of Technically Intensive Public Policy Disputes":

One can distinguish two basic views of the relationship between technical issues and policy decisions. One view is that careful analysis of a problem should permit breaking it down into purely technical and purely political components, and experts should deal only with the technical issues, turning their evaluations over to the political process for determination of the appropriate policy response. …

The other principal view is that policy disputes, no matter how heavily dependent on scientific considerations are inherently value-laden and that there is no practical way of disentangling the value issues from the technical issues, especially in the presence of a considerable range of uncertainty over the "facts."In this view, the policy issue can only be resolved by mixing together experts and generalists and forcing a continuing dialogue among them. ...

One does not have to be a cynic about democracy to believe that broad public participation is not necessarily the best way to resolve technically complex issues. ...

[I]t might be worth experimenting with an appeals body representing some sort of "hybrid" between the typical appointive commission and the typical jury.