Shaping the ‘public good’
by Mia Jarlov and David Cromwell
A popular view today - that is to say, the prevailing view held by those in
positions of power and influence - is ‘that contemporary Western society and
more especially, the “American way of life” corresponds to the deepest needs of
human nature and that adjustment to this way means mental health and maturity.’
Thus warned the psychologist and social critic Erich Fromm in his classic 1955
book, The Sane Society. A cursory
examination of the popular media today reveals that the same prevailing wisdom
reigns supreme. Immediately following September 11, the public were being urged
by Bush and Blair to get out into the malls and high streets and consume like
never before.
All of this is no accident. The current
BBC2 series, The Century of the Self,
examines how the bending of social psychology to state-corporate imperatives
has disciplined the public mind rather effectively. Edward Bernays, the father
of what is euphemistically termed the ‘public relations’ industry – in reality,
a powerful engine generating propaganda that enables the ‘engineering of
consent’ - put it bluntly: ‘intelligent minorities’ should ‘mold the mind of
the masses’, thus ‘regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments
the bodies of its soldiers.’
And the result? As Erich Fromm warned, our
perceptions have thereby been moulded to regard the world as ‘one great object
for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers,
the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones – and the eternally disappointed
ones.’ Therein lies the necessary basis for the rampant success of global
consumer capitalism.
The myth that capitalism and democracy are
interlinked is again a success of the power of propaganda. The liberal
journalist Walter Lippman - along with Bernays, a member of the US Committee on
Public Information in the 1920s - revealed his true colours when he wrote that
the general public are ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ who should be mere
‘spectators of action’, apart from periodic choice among the ‘responsible men’.
The dangerous tendency of participatory
democracy, in which ‘the masses promised to become king’, could thus be
overcome by a system of representative
democracy, in which ‘responsible men’ take the important decisions for us.
The humanist theologian Albert Schweitzer
once warned that what passes for public opinion ‘is maintained by the press, by
propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at
its disposal.’ Any debate that purports to address the ‘public good’ but that
does not recognise the factors that shape how the public good is defined, has
so skewed the terms of discussion that it runs the risk of rattling around in a
vacuum.
This was the fate that befell the Royal
Society-sponsored public debate that took place this March at the Tate Modern
in London on ‘Art, Science and the Public Good’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one
on the panel was able to define satisfactorily what was meant by ‘art’ or
‘science’ or ‘the public good’, far less elucidate the links between them. The
destructive role of the mass media, shaped by elite state-corporate interests
and thus characterised by a systemic incapacity for informing the public of the
true state of society, was completely overlooked.
Some sharp points were nonetheless made.
One of the panellists, Guardian
columnist and environmental campaigner George Monbiot, reminded us of the
controversial decision by Nottingham University in December 2000 to accept
£3.8m from British and American Tobacco (BAT) to open a centre for ‘corporate
social responsibility’. It was a classic example, he pointed out, of the
systemic corruption of corporate funding. Science and society are in
crisis. A gradual narrowing in the scope of scientific research could render
science as the ‘guard dogs at the gates of perception’, warned Monbiot.
‘Scientific research could be the
quest for seeing “what we might be”, rather than just “what we are”. It could be the casting of a line into the
abyss, where lots of different bait must be used simply because there is no
knowing what kind of fish are out there.’ Monbiot concluded: ‘An open
quest for knowledge would need research to be free of preconceptions and
constraints.’
The influence of funding – attached
strings, expectations, social context - inevitably causes a bias, sometimes
even a corruption, in research priorities. US historian Howard Zinn explains it
thus: ‘To work on a real problem (like how to eliminate poverty in a nation
producing eight hundred billion dollars' worth of wealth each year) one would
have to follow that problem across many disciplinary lines without qualm,
dealing with historical materials, economic theories, political obstacles’.
Zinn continues: ‘Specialisation ensures that one cannot follow a problem
through from start to finish. It ensures the functioning in the academy of the
system’s dictum: divide and rule.’ He provides a potent example: ‘Note how
little work is done in political science on the tactics of social change. Both
students and teacher deal with theory and reality in separate courses; the
compartmentalisation safely neutralises them.’
In biology, political ideology has played
a part in directing research agendas away from key concepts such as symbiosis,
or even whole subjects such as ecology, towards a narrower vision of research
into the ‘vital processes’ of life – those relating to genes. In a new book, Liaisons of Life, biologist Tom Wakeford
shows how the powerful influence of the world’s biggest funder of biological
research, the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation, ‘has created a generation
of senior bio-scientists most of whom have little idea of the organismical,
ecological, social and political contexts in which genes work.’
On the same day as the Royal Society
debate at the Tate, The Times
usefully revealed that ‘smokers enjoy their cigarettes more, with a
drink’. The report entitled ‘Nicotine plus drink a double pleasure’,
described new research at Howard University in Washington DC showing that when
alcohol and nicotine are taken together, the amount of the pleasure-inducing
chemical, dopamine (released by the brain when stimulated by alcohol or
nicotine) is released in enhanced quantities, more than would be expected simply
from their cumulative effect.
It is thus now a scientific ‘fact’ that
smokers enjoy double the pleasure when having a cigarette with a drink. But
what is the funding public to make of this? Should we feel secure in the
knowledge that combined drinking and smoking is a synergistic phenomenon, in
which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? Do the research findings
somehow ‘legitimise’ smoking and drinking (how convenient for the manufacturers
concerned). Or should we relegate them to an amusing fact to tell our mates
down the pub only for them to retort: ‘They didn’t need to fund scientists to
the tune of thousands of pounds just to tell me something I knew already!’ In
other words, how does such research benefit society if it is neither of practical
use nor intrinsic interest? And why waste valuable newspaper space to tell us?
Is it not all a distraction from the real issues that a newspaper would
routinely cover in a healthy and dynamic society?
If the mission of biological research is
‘to improve human and animal health’, as Clare Matheson of the Wellcome Trust
put it in the Tate debate, then why are animals still being tortured on factory
farms, when research has shown that they do indeed feel intense pain? A
defining feature of modern farming methods, according to campaigning group
Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), is ‘intensive husbandry systems [which]
frustrate animals’ behavioural needs and often lead to serious physical
disorders and pain’. For example, battery-farm chickens are typically kept five
to a cage, unable to walk around, build a nest or even spread their wings. They
often suffer broken bones in the cramped conditions. Pig rearing is little
better: most pigs never see the light of day nor have access to fresh air, and
are packed together in barren, concrete-floored pens.
One of the most distressing examples of
cruelty to farm animals is the selective breeding for faster or larger growth,
which ‘has led to painful leg problems in chickens and degenerative hip
disorders in turkeys and to cows carrying such huge udders that their back legs
are forced outwards, causing lameness’. According to John Webster, Professor of
Animal Husbandry at the University of Bristol, ‘the chronic pain suffered by
millions of broiler chickens [reared for their meat] must constitute the most
severe example of man's inhumanity to another sentient creature’. CiWF
summarises with an understatement: ‘It is difficult to give general approval to
any system of husbandry that relies on painful mutilations to sustain the
system’. As George Monbiot once wrote: ‘Agony is the resting state
of the modern dairy cow.’
And why in the west is there more and more
human suffering from stress, anxiety, depression and ill health? Is
it not our mission – as scientists, artists, indeed as members of ‘the public’
- to change the world for the better, to reduce human and animal suffering? If
the answer is ‘yes’ - as it surely must be in a truly thriving, mature culture
- why are so few people seriously addressing the pressing issues of global
climate change, social injustice, exploitation and death by curable diseases
(to name but just a few key topics)?
The hint of an answer can be found every day
in the newspapers. Consider another article in The Times on the same day as the debate at the Tate; a ‘news’ item that
tempted the reader with the headline: ‘Isle of Wight find is a monster clue to
Europe's past’. The report described a bird-like predatory dinosaur
(accompanied by artist’s impression) ‘which lived 120 million years ago; its
presence in Europe was unknown until now’. This is intrinsically interesting,
even fascinating. But there are surely more urgent findings that should be
addressed in a daily newspaper. Even to raise this topic – of why
particular stories make the headlines, while others don’t - is to lift the lid
on our ‘free press’: our valiant ‘watchdogs of democracy’.
Take the UN economic sanctions, maintained
at the vigorous behest of US and UK politicians, that have resulted in the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq. This is a matter of pressing urgency, and something that ought to
be addressed prominently in the daily press. The media’s role, editors and
journalists would have us believe, is to serve the public and provide
information that allows individuals to make up their own minds about world
events. As Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of news, puts it: ‘we
believe that the provision of independent and impartial news is a fundamental
part of a free society and the democratic process.’ Would that the BBC
performed its publicly-declared aim! The public deserves to be trusted with
uncomfortable findings, especially where such findings reveal our own
government’s complicity in mass abuses of human rights.
And what about the art component of ‘Art,
science and the public good’? Art, claimed one member of the audience at the
Tate Modern, can be described as a depiction of the world in which we live,
with a philosophical reflection upon that world. This links art with science,
as in both there are preconceptions that are likely to determine the result:
indeed, quantum physics teaches us that the experimenter is part of the
experiment. How might publicly-funded science and art better ‘serve’ the
public? What is the ‘value’ of scientific research and art, to the public?
Don’t both offer a valuable means of expanding perceptions amongst all of us:
scientists and non-scientists, artists and non-artists: namely, everyone in
society? Doesn’t contemplating both the Crab Nebula and Vincent van Gogh’s
paintings of a corn field excite the same sense of wonder and exhilaration that
expand the sense of what it feels to be human? As Monbiot noted correctly, both
experiences pluck the same ‘heart strings’.
Instead, too much art today is
self-knowing, sneering and superficial, with one eye on the marketplace and the
other on fickle trends. David Rodway, a lecturer in art and philosophy who was
in the audience at the Tate debate, is one of a group of artists and academics
‘protesting against the shallow and facile nature of contemporary art fashions,
which, far from being challenging and cutting-edge, unknowingly recycle the
flawed values and assumptions of capitalism and commercialism’. The group, known
as Action to Transform Art & Culture (ATAC), point to ‘discoveries stemming
from the 20th century modernist revolution and its forebears [that]
provide the means to develop the language-like potential of visual statement,
and hence to express sophisticated ideas and comment absent from present art
styles’. These radical artists and academics cogently point out that the
‘success’ of the global capitalism project contains, via endless growth on a
finite planet, the seeds of its own destruction: ‘nothing fails like success’.
As Rodway sums up: ‘Only a fundamental paradigm change to an ecological way of
seeing, based on interdependence, not [Cartesian] division, can avert global
catastrophe, and achieve a sustainable, emancipated and enlightened world’.
Although the Tate discussion of ‘the
public good’ was woefully inadequate, for the reasons mentioned earlier, there was a useful exchange on the need to
link art and science to social science and philosophy: to utilise challenging
concepts from all these fields in an
attempt to expand the hermeneutic horizon, rather than accepting passivity,
compliance and inaction through commercially directed art and research. Such
ideas have a long and venerable history. Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the
Czech theologian and educational reformer, emphasised that cultural life in any
community is, or should be, a continuous path of learning. Art and science can
undoubtedly teach us a great number of things about ourselves and our
relationship with the wider cosmos, and have the potential to expand our horizons
to new concepts and paths of perception. This has to be part of the definition
of genuine ‘public good’.
Comenius believed in a ‘Universal College’
for the advancement of the whole of humankind. To recognise that behind the
mask which every one of us bears is a unique human being, is a fundamental
lesson for everyone. Comenius hoped that wisdom and learning would bring peace
and mutual understanding, and would ensure that all the members of a community
have the freedom and opportunity to realise his or her intrinsic human
potential. It’s a message that bears repeating in this modern era of ‘pragmatism’,
cynicism and saturation consumerist propaganda.
27 March, 2002