Book Review of

Unersättliche Neugier. Innovation in einer fragilen Zukunft

Markl, Hubert S.: Fear of the future. Will scientific innovation bring progress and benefits, or just risks and danger? In: nature, Nr. 437, 15.09.2005, S 319f

Fear of the future

Will scientific innovation bring progress and benefits, or just risks and dangers?

Helga Nowotny is not only la grande dame of science studies in Europe, she is also one of the most savvy and influential people in European research affairs. She chairs the European Research Advisory Board and is a board member of the nascent European Research Council. Reason enough, then, to turn to this book with high hopes (or even, to borrow from the title, "insatiable curiosity") for her deliberations on science, technology, innovation and the human future.
I must admit though that this half-popular, half-scholarly essay made rather uncomfortable reading for a dyed-in-the-wool natural scientist like me, who finds himself the guinea pig of science sociology studies. A psychoanalyst might say that such resistance is the first sign of trouble with our scientific-rational world-view. Or, as German chemist Justus von Liebig once remarked: "I seldom have a good idea, but if someone else comes up with one, I immediately have a better one!" However, it is useful to see how a highly knowledgeable sociologist of science looks at our science through the lens of her discipline. I assume Nowotny had precisely this in mind: to incite readers from any persuasion to argue emphatically about the issues she raises in this book.
What are these issues? The subtitle says this is a book about innovation and its decisive role for our unpredictable future (I wonder what is meant by "fragile" future - has it ever seemed anything else?). Nowotny tells us a great deal about the sources of scientific and technological innovation and its increasing influence on economic competitiveness in a globally accessible world. Solving problems and serving desires, and thus creating new problems to be solved, with respect to energy supplies and world climate, resource depletion and waste accumulation, water and food availability, pandemics, the flood of global media and rising social unrest. All this is argued persuasively, although not always in a novel way, and there is a sense of anxious urgency, like that of a rodeo rider clinging to the back of a bucking bronco.
The book contains some interesting historical vignettes and clear-sighted comparisons between biological and cultural innovations. They strongly emphasize symbol technologies, although strangely the book neglects the human achievements that drove the most innovation: tool-making and language. In fact the whole exercise seems somewhat mistitled: the book seems profoundly ambivalent to innovation. Of course, like other texts from the sociology of science, it is not so much a book on science as on writing on writing on science, far enough removed from the research enterprise to take the sometimes rather supercilious attitude occasionally found in research on research on research.
Above all, the book never fails to chastise the "hubris of believing in progress" - that deeply flawed illusion of the past centuries - while passing over the doubling or tripling of life expectation, the abolition of regular mass starvation in many formerly stricken countries, the conquering of diseases such as smallpox and poliomyelitis in large parts of the world, the disappearance of many horrendous superstitions, and so on. These achievements are presumably not even worthy of notice, as all of this and much more is taken for granted. This is not progress, but entitlement, according to those critical of progress, although strangely enough these are not goods received from caring gods, but from that progress-blinded sci-tech civilization. The fence between pro- and anti-science, and pro- and anti-innovation, seems to be firmly straddled here - maybe not the most pleasant place from which to dwell on thorny issues. Is it not difficult to both have one's cake and discard it as garbage?
Nowotny makes the point that our future is wide open to risks and dangers of our own making, as we try to steer between 6 billion and 9 billion humans through the uncharted waters of their unknown destiny. She emphasizes correctly the increased volatility of too many of the foundations of our wheelings and dealings. But I wonder whether the future was any less unpredictable for those ancient women and men, scared by the vicissitudes of only too certain failed harvests, plagues or threats from fellow beings. Such scenarios cannot have been less menacing than those of our innovation-bound societies. Of course, if you include the religious promise of eternal life after death, life expectancy wasn't quite as bad back then, as historian Arthur Imhof has remarked. But when humanists belittle the progress made in the past few centuries, I doubt that they would have us regress to such pre-Enlightenment conditions.
This book seems to emanate a feeling of suffering from modernity, while emphasizing that innovation will be the inevitable hallmark of modernity (or rather, postmodernity, as the dark alley ahead of modernity will always have to be called). As the Roman historian Titus Livius succinctly put it more than 2,000 years ago, "Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus" ("We can endure neither our vices nor their remedies"), which shows that this ambivalence is not so recent.
There are a few minor points to be raised. First, it seems regrettable that this essay from a leading European science-policy figure has not been published in English. Maybe this is because the mixture of socio-scholarly, doubtridden, intellectual Zeitgeist and Menschenbild worries is only too German? It is to be hoped, however, that this is not the Menschenbild exemplified by the art of Patricia Piccinini on the cover of this book, which depicts a young family of pig-like humans or humanized pigs! If there is to be an English edition, hopefully minor errors, such as the claim that prokaryotes evolved from eukaryotes (it was the other way round), or the figures for derivative financial markets, which mix up US trillions and the German Trillionen, can be corrected.
Such minor quibbles aside, this is a very readable book. It is thought provoking, but also incited me to disagree with some of its doom-laden messages. Insatiable curiosity? Let's hope so, under the challenging demands of unending necessity.

Hubert S. Markl is in the Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.