As nanotechnology begins to leave the laboratories and work its way ever more actively into our societies, there is a tendency to exaggerate what it is good for and, at the same time, to disregard the risks involved. There is talk of being able to redesign the human body from the “bottom up”, of manufacturing invisible products with an infinite range of uses, of vast fortunes to be made by exploiting the potential of the nanorealm.

Things behave differently down there, even though nobody seems to know very much about why that seems to be the case. This is a good example of Aristotle’s “techne” – the practical know-how of manipulating objects – rushing on ahead of “episteme” – or theoretical-scientific understanding. In the words of Jennifer Kahn, writing in the June 2006 issue of National Geographic, nanotechnology is like a tsunami – a “long, low wave whose power becomes clear only when it reaches shore and breaks”:

“Nanotechnology has been around for two decades, but the first wave of applications is only now beginning to break. As it does, it will make the computer revolution look like small change. It will affect everything from the batteries we use to the pants we wear to the way we treat cancer” (Kahn 2006: 100).

None of this will come automatically – technology is certainly not autonomous - and in many European countries, as well as in the European Union as a whole, nanotechnology is receiving large amounts of public funding. Apparently, private investors are still not sufficiently willing to put their money into this next big thing. And while concerns are beginning to be voiced about the potential dangers lurking in the nanorealm (and not just by horror story writers like Michael Crichton, whose novel, Prey (2002) gave us the vision of vicious swarms of nanoparticles attacking the scientists who had spawned them), only a small amount of the publicly supported research is going into issues concerning health and environmental consequences (see Ross 2006).

Instead, the ancient crime of hubris has experienced a new lease on life, as the emerging actor-networks of academic entrepreneurs and their supporters promise more than they should, and – as has been the case with genetic engineering - run a serious risk of generating opposition within society. Hubris is a word that comes to us from the Greeks, and has been defined as “an impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe. It is the sin to which the great and gifted are most susceptible, and in Greek tragedy it is usually the hero’s tragic flaw.” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2006). In the vernacular, it is commonly used to refer to the arrogance of those in power, when they exaggerate their military strength and superiority and forget the consequences, as has been the case in the war in Iraq.

As far as I am aware, it was the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright in his cultural writings of the 1960s and 1970s who first started to apply the term to the misuses of science and technology in the contemporary world. von Wright associated the “particular hubris of the modern technological way of life” with an “unreasonable redirection of nature’s causality for human purposes” (von Wright 1978: 90). In his influential book, Vetenskapen och förnuftet (Science and Reason), published in Swedish in 1986, he brought his criticism of the hubris of science and technology into the broader public sphere in the Nordic countries. In referring to classic tales of hubris such as the Greek myth of Prometheus and Francis Bacon’s vision of “New Atlantis”, von Wright attempted to mobilize cultural history and what he called the humanist attitude to life (livshållning) in order to evaluate the ways in which science and technology are used in society.

In the introduction to our recent book, Hubris and Hybrids (Routledge 2005), Mikael Hård and I characterize hubris as the “if only” syndrome, “the eternal technical fixation that is deeply embedded in our underlying conceptions of reality”:

“If only we could develop an even better instrument of production and destruction, if only we could tame another force of nature to provide us with unlimited energy, then our wealth and our capacities – the values by which we measure progress – would be so much greater. More than two millennia after the sun melted the wings of Icarus for coming too close, we are still under the spell of hubris, trying to fly higher and higher” (Hård and Jamison 2005: 5).

The tendency to hubris is not merely a matter of the hype that is so much taken for granted in our commercialized world as a regrettable, but necessary fact of life. The widespread selling of science in general and nanotechnology in particular is only a small part of the problem with the way nanotechnology is being appropriated into our cultures. The hubristic “crime” is not commercialization as such, but its overemphasis and the general lack of awareness and interest in any other possible meanings that nanotechnology might have. The tragedy is that “public relations” have been reduced to marketing. At a discursive level, what Mikael and I have previously referred to as the story-line of economic innovation is so dominant, so hegemonic that it tends to overwhelm all the other possible ways to talk about science and technology in society (Jamison and Hård 2003).

As in other fields of technoscience, there is also a noticeable lack of public accountability, an absence of procedures and institutions by which decision-makers are required to account for their decisions. This is, of course, not exclusive to nanotechnology, but, for a variety of reasons, it is particularly serious now – after five years of environmental skeptics and holy wars against terrorists. In most European countries, it seems fair to say that there is no public space available any longer for serious discussion and debate of science and technology, no meaningful effort in the media, the schools, or anywhere else in the public sphere to provide opportunities for qualified reflection or cultural assessment of what we, as a species, might actually want to do with these and all the other amazing new technologies at our disposal. Other concerns have colonized the life-worlds where technology assessment used to take place.

Among the scientists and engineers themselves, the makers, or constructors of nanotechnological products, the dominant values or “norms” are entrepreneurial. Decades of telling stories of innovation and linking universities to industry have transformed the identities of many scientists into project-seekers and networking money-makers. What used to be the responsibility of scientific societies and university departments - to discuss moral and ethical issues related to one’s scientific field – has been outsourced to professional philosophers and theologians. And many of them have also fallen prey to the urge to become entrepreneurs and sell their ethical insights to the highest bidder. The result is an array of competing firms, selling their own brand of nanotechnology, searching for markets rather than serving society. The actual scientific knowledge that is being made is subjected to what Aant Elzinga once characterized as “epistemic drift”:

“the process whereby, under strong relevance pressure, researchers become more concerned with eternal legitimation vis-à-vis policy bureaucracies and funding agencies than with internal legitimation via the process of peer review. This may be seen as a process of erosion of the traditional system of reputational control” (Elzinga 1985: 207).

It is as if the public information campaigns and media debates, the popular movements and expert criticisms against atomic energy – and for the development of renewable energy - during the second half of the 1970s had never happened. Those experiences led, in many countries, to agencies and offices and research programs in technology assessment, and made it mandatory at some universities for science and engineering students to be educated in what we in Aalborg still refer to as “technology, humanity and society” – and which we still teach courses about. Could it not be a good idea to bring back some of that concern with social responsibility – and not least back into our own field of science, technology and society studies?

Of course, nanotechnology is not atomic energy, it did not come into society in the form of a horrific bomb which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Rather it is slowly but surely insinuating itself into our societies. And as with other technological artifacts and scientific facts in the past, the chances are that nanotechnology will also tend to elicit different uses as it spreads across the social landscape. But like atomic energy, genetic engineering, and so many other momentous scientific and technical achievements of our recent history, the cultural appropriation of nanotechnology is skewed from the outset.

It is not motivated by responding to what we called in the 1970s “basic human needs”, or what we called in the 1990s sustainable development; rather, it is driven by “market forces” to seek out commercial opportunities, niches in a global competition for profits. Nanotechnology is supply rather than demand driven, the result of a modernist – and highly problematic – cultural fixation on novelty and “innovation”. And like the other fields of technoscience, nanotechnology is being subjected to the same tendency to exaggerate the benefits and downplay the risks that has been so apparent in relation to atomic energy and genetic engineering, as well as information technology.

This one-dimensional thinking, the tendency to hubris appears to be all powerful and all encompassing. The nanotechnologists, like the genetic engineers, information technologists and atomic physicists before them, are fast becoming contemporary heroes, the ones who are to lead Europe in the global competition for market shares and economic growth. And even those of us who should know better – the students of science, technology and society – are curiously silent, seeing the nanotechnologists as new objects of study, rather than problems that require reflective analysis and cultural assessment.

It often seems hopeless to challenge the dominant policy agenda with its story-line of innovation, the contemporary myth of Prometheus. The nanotechnologists and their paymasters – our paymasters, as well - play on such deeply rooted cultural values, and they are able to mobilize such enormous amounts of human and material resources that it seems impossible to try to bring them down to earth and get a serious conversation going. And yet, if we are not to do it, we who claim to know something about the relations between science, technology and society, then who can? It seems to me that the dangers – and the opportunities – are simply too great to leave the development of nanotechnology in the hands of those who still believe in what von Wright labelled the myth of progress.

The nanotechnologists and their supporters in government, industry, and the universities are not necessarily evil people. Like so many of our leaders, our power elites, they are simply afflicted with an overdose of arrogance and not a small amount of greed that calls for a form of socio-medical treatment rather than opposition. Their illness, their hubris needs to be diagnosed and treated. And that is where the hybrids come in. For if we are to make appropriate use of nanotechnology, the new knowledge needs to be combined with what we already know – about responsibilities to future generations that need to be fulfilled (remember sustainable development?), and about social and environmental problems that need to be solved (remember basic human needs?). We need to help foster a new way of talking about nanotechnology, a hybrid story-line, or policy agenda: call it “green nano” or “human nano”.

It is a multidimensional hybridization process that is called for, a vast project of socio-cultural learning. We, in the social and human sciences, and perhaps especially in the social study of science and technology need to work with the nanotechnologists to develop educational and research programs so that society can make beneficial use of their activity. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to educate them and those who support them in what Aristotle called phronesis, the kind of moral knowledge that is so essential, but so sadly lacking, in an age in which our scientific knowledge and our technical know-how are combining in such powerful new combinations.

Perhaps engaging with nanotechnology and nanotechnologists can be a way to escape from the ironic detachment that many in science and technology studies have adopted as their stance to society. It might be a way – to paraphrase my colleague in Aalborg, Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) – to make STS matter. If we live in a world that is no longer modern, or, as Bruno Latour so famously put it, a world that has “never been modern,” then we need no longer separate the human and non-human elements of our identity, nor, for that matter, reproduce, in our work, the barriers between the natural and technical sciences, on the one side, and the social and human sciences, on the other. And if our world – that is, if reality itself - is indeed one in which humans and non-humans can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from one another, and we find ourselves in a world of hybrids, then let us begin to think like hybrids and foster a hybrid imagination.

References

Elzinga, Aant (1985) Research, Bureaucracy and the Drift of Epistemic Criteria, in B Wittrock and A Elzinga, eds, The University Research System. The Public Policies of the Home of Scientists. Almqvist & Wiksell International

Encyclopedia Britannica (2006) http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9041378/hubris, accessed 26/09/06

Flyvbjerg, Bent (2001) Making Social Science Matter. Cambridge University Press

Hård, Mikael and Andrew Jamison (2005) Hubris and Hybrids. A Cultural History of Technology and Science. Routledge

Jamison, Andrew and Mikael Hård (2003) The Story-Lines of Technological Change: Innovation, Construction and Appropriation, in Technological Analysis and Strategic Management, 15, 1: 81-92

Kahn, Jennifer (2006) Nano’s Big Future, in National Geographic, June

Ross, Philip (2006) Tiny Toxins?, in Technology Review, June

von Wright, Georg Henrik (1978) Humanismen som livshållning och andra essäer. MånPocket (the quote is from a lecture from the early 1960s)