Community
Community is a term with widely varying historical and current meanings in both specialized and everyday discourse. It also possesses several dimensions—ethical, political, social, ontological, psychological, and epistemological—many of which are relevant to discussions of science and technology.
Theorists generally consider community to be a good that, carried too far, may undermine its own moral and political values for those both within and outside it. Community is an important source of meaning in human lives, and it encompasses the sets of values, beliefs, and interpretative frameworks by which the world takes on meaning. Indeed, the scientific and technological enterprise is often described as dependent on the special values of a scientific or technical community (Merton 1942). Community, however, may also manifest itself in oppressive political forms that defy universal values, shared rights, or basic forms of well-being of certain members of a society in the name of community. Political forms of community such as nationalism or populist fascism, or Thomas Hobbes's or Jean-Jacques Rousseau's different versions of collective identity, may belie other human values such as individual liberty. Members of the scientific community have also sometimes ignored the rights of nonscientists or the larger social orders of which science is a part.
At a minimum, community is a set of shared goals or values perceived as good by those who participate in their formation or by those who belong to the heritage these shared values define. A qualitative sense of belonging therefore attends community, and a broader notion of community also includes common language, rituals, geographical territory, religion, historical memory, and ethnic identification.
Community Versus Society
In 1887 the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies developed the distinction between community and society in terms of the informal, moral, familial bonds of traditional communal life and the formalized and impersonal, amoral, juridical, and administrative relations of industrial society. "Community" was taken to have an organic quality, whereas society was mechanistic in nature. The importance of this distinction relates to the sense of belonging in social relations and has applications for notions of citizenship, the legitimacy of political representation, ideas of the common good, and the meaning of public participation. "Society" corresponds to the "neutral" structural conditions of modern life. For better or worse, Tönnies's distinction has served to circumscribe much of the sociological, political, and moral meaning of community to this day. In contemporary political thought, for example, the distinction is manifested in terms of holistic communitarianism versus individualistic liberalism. While complex, these latter terms highlight the relative importance of participation in political life, whether the good is best articulated collectively or individually, and the extent to which institutions should choose between a fully embodied moral community and a minimally protective framework for individual liberties.
If one assumes that shared values and frameworks of belief are paramount in the legitimate governance of societies, Tönnies's distinction between community and society has also influenced modern science and technology in important ways. Twentieth-century critics of technology as varied as Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and early Jürgen Habermas maintain that the intrinsic qualities of communal life were slowly eroded by a postindustrial society of "technoscientific," instrumental emphasis on values of use and efficiency. Langdon Winner (1986) further argues that technological choices determine broader social and administrative structures and reframe the conditions of moral and political life, even though these choices remain beyond the scope of communities. In such views, modern society is an "organizational" society in which rationalizing "technoscientific" approaches to social organization root out the affective (emotional) characteristics of sociality and the bonds of community that Tönnies and others ascribe to community. Expert management replaces participation and communal frameworks of value as the main force of modern social and value formation. If moral value is rooted in community, then technical social management entails institutions that express a small set of values disguised as socially neutral instruments. Others argue, more specifically, that the global spread of modern technologies has served to destroy traditional cultures, communities, and economies and to undermine modern values such as sustainability (see, for example, Helena Norberg-Hodge's studies of Ladakh [1991]).
Scientific and Democratic Community
In contrast, John Dewey (1954 [1927]) and others argue that technological society, especially through new communications technologies, harbors the potential to revive local community. Similarly, Thomas C. Hilde (2004) suggests that the integration of modern technologies and science into the global formation of norms presents not only risks to traditional notions of community but also new possibilities. For Hilde this framework constitutes an "epistemic cosmopolitanism" capable of facilitating new forms of community.
The scientific sense of communal inquiry and of the production of knowledge is further developed by Peter
M. Haas (1990) and others as "epistemic community." Epistemic communities are, according to Haas, scientists and others united by both causal explanations (of, for example, ecological damage) and shared values regarding which policies should emerge from scientific evidence.
If scientific inquiry always harbors the preferences of a broader community and social organization in which scientists work (Kuhn 1962, Longino 2002, Harding 1998), then the currently dominant utilitarian values enframe the broader technological/scientific project. This, in turn, constricts the range of values embodied in technical decisions that influence the shape of society and its future policy outcomes. If this basic thesis regarding the importation of value is correct, then both community and scientific inquiry merit further discernment of beneficial preferences from damaging ones, and in such cases deliberation may be better sought through the broader community. Scientific inquiry might then better serve to advance not only the knowledge of the broader community, but also its methods of inquiry.
Civil Society;; Communitarianism.
Bibliography
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