The advocacy of deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive developmental politics as is the advocacy of sustainable development. For one thing, deliberative development demands a highly transparent, generously publicly funded process of consensus science and invention coupled with a scientifically literate professional policy apparatus to assess risks, costs, and benefits and advise our elected representatives to facilitate their regulation and funding of research and development to promote general welfare.
But this is only half of what a truly technoprogressive advocacy of deliberate development would entail (although given the devastating debasement of consensus science under the Bush Administration an urgent and even exclusive focus on this half is probably warranted). The other half of deliberative development would seek to enrich and democratize the terrain of cost/benefit developmental policy analysis through the use of digital networked media to involve citizens more directly in the assessment of alternate science and technology policy initiatives themselves, to use social software to re-invigorate the concept of citizen juries on developmental questions, to create extensive occasions for citizens to testify to their own sense of technodevelopmental costs and risks and problems, and, perhaps most promising of all, implement peer-to-peer models of research over customary corporate-militarist models wherever possible. Such a commitment also demands, in my view, the promotion of scientific literacy and critical thinking skills for all citizens through a stakeholder grant in lifelong education and training, as well as access to dependable sources of information from consensus science and the most representative possible diversity of stakeholder positions on policy questions at issue.
In general I think that what are sometimes broadly conceived as “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to good governance are both indispensable to the facilitation of progressive and technoprogressive developmental outcomes. I have noticed that this kind of binocular perspective on developmental politics comes up again and again in my own technoprogressive formulations. And so, for example, I advocate world federalism and peer-to-peer democratization at once and as part of a single technoprogressive vision of global governance. I realize that each lens of such a binocular approach has its own palpable dangers and terrors to display. Some progressives are wary of threats to social justice and democracy from especially one direction, others from another.
But I think we should be careful not to fetishize only one mode of governance as the more properly or more essentially democratic one over the other. A fetishization of “top-down” implementations of progressive visions facilitated their perversion in state-capitalist models all through the twentieth century, for example, while the current overcompensatory fetishization of “bottom-up” implementations renders the contemporary left imaginary (and especially the technocentric left) deeply vulnerable to appropriation by libertarian ideology and its compellingly facile self-congratulatory fables of “spontaneous order.”
And so, yes, I really do think that deference to the advice of credentialed experts is indispensable to good governance and certainly to technoprogressive governance. The problem these days isn’t the administrative recourse to scientific and professional expertise; it is the substitution of public relations and partisan calculus for the recommendations of consensus scientists and other professionals.
Certainly, I keenly grasp the vulnerability to anti-democratic elitism in any “rule of experts.” But many things count as democratic within their proper bounds that are vulnerable nonetheless to misuses that render them anti-democratic at their extremes (what passes for “free markets” provides an obvious example). I was recently reminded that Bakunin made a useful distinction between being an authority and being in authority that seems relevant here.
I think it is important for technoprogressives to embrace a wide-ranging experimentalism and pluralism when it comes to the practical implementation of the rather broad value of democracy. So long as experts are beholden to elected representatives I don’t think we should think of their role as anti-democratic, nor should we necessarily be too quick to write them off as just regrettable but instrumentally necessary for the proper function of governance. I worry about the politics that gets stealthed under cover of presumably pre-political “instrumental calculation” in political discourse. I say, rather, that there are more-democratic and less-democratic implementations of a representative policy apparatus beholden to the verdicts of consensus science and that democratic technoprogressives want more democratic rather than less democratic implementations is all. I was going to say, “it isn’t rocket science,” but, then, at least sometimes, it will be.
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
IEET Blog