"In our current democracies, there is too small a role for citizens"

Bijker's research focuses on the relation between technology, society, and science. Since the 1990s political and normative issues have been central to Bijker's research. He came to the UOC as a speaker with the presentation Looking beyond Europe: Rethinking Science, Innovation and Democracy, sponsored by the Programme Internationalization at Home (Obra Social "La Caixa"), which focused on how Europe could learn from other countries about issues like science and politics. Bijker's most recent work relates to vulnerability in a technological culture - including the fundamental need for some vulnerability in any innovating society.

Humans have always lived in vulnerable conditions, but in the old days these conditions were thunderstorms, earthquakes, epidemics... What has changed is that increasingly we live in a world that is made by science and technology and these sciences and technologies also create new risks. Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist who died last year, called this the "risk society". We're living in a society where risk is more and more a core characteristic, increasingly so because of science and technology. Of course, the other side of the coin is that science and technology also help to defend against risks. A pretty awful example is cockpit doors. After 9/11, the cockpit doors were mounted with all these devices to block the entrance; but then, as in the recent case of passengers on the German Wings flight, these technical devices create new hazards. Science and technology help to control risks but at the same time cause new risks. It is not only inevitable to live in a world that has risks, but it may actually not be a completely bad thing either. Perhaps the word risk is too one-dimensionally negative. Hence I use "vulnerable", because vulnerable has also a slightly positive connotation. If, for example within a group of friends, I make myself vulnerable: that means that I open up, that I'm listening to others, that I'll try to understand what they do and also change my own behaviour to respond to the others around me. The same applies to societies. When societies are open to change, flexible, learning, creatively reacting to danger, they inevitably must be a little vulnerable. Yes, and I want to make a clear difference between questions of security and safety, and questions of vulnerability. We need to think about the vulnerability that is created by the Internet and social media for our privacy, etc. Of course, Internet creates many new opportunities and good things, but it also creates new vulnerabilities. And those are a much broader set of issues than only security and safety, which are often interpreted as primarily physical and material. And the Internet is only one example; I think it is important that people realize that being vulnerable is inevitable, is part of la condition humaine. Life is vulnerable, and it's an illusion to think that we can live in a society without vulnerability. Society and institutions and politicians have to realize that vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of our life and it's better to think about it as a positive aspect. Absolutely. I think it's a very fundamental problem in politics these days. And I think they've reached a deadlock. The public holds the government, as much as the other way around. If some disaster happens, immediately the government is accused of not having proper regulations and safety standards in place. And then government and parliament react by adding a new rule or a new check. But then we also constantly complain about increasing rules and regulations that stifle normal life and create too great an administrative burden: nurses and doctors, but also teachers and other professionals, spend more and more time on administration rather than doing their proper job of caring and curing patients or teaching children and students. This deadlock in which the public and the government hold each other caused by the false illusion that a world without any vulnerability would be possible. We thus deny ourselves the chance to think in a new creative way about how to deal with vulnerability. I wanted to make the argument that we can learn much by looking beyond Europe. It not only adds case studies and new data, but it also offers new concepts and new theories and new ways of looking at the world. I think that those societies are fundamentally different. Compared to such non-European cultures can help us, for example, to experiment with our democracies. Vulnerability is one example. We shouldn't stupidly demand that governments protect us against everything, but we should develop new democratic mechanisms to increase the resilience of our societies. I think that, for example, we can learn from India about how to improve our democracies. India is the biggest democracy in the world, and has maintained democracy for the longest period since becoming independent after World War II. Of course, India also has problems of violence between Muslim and Hindu communities, and half of their presidents have been murdered... but we all have our problems. Yes, nothing is perfect but we can learn from that. It's valuable to look beyond Europe because we'll find new concepts. A good example is what I learnt from an Indian colleague, Shiv Visvanathan: cognitive justice. We have universal human rights, declared by the United Nations; we have children's rights; we have rights for patients, for consumers... Visvanathan has defined the concept cognitive justice. Cognitive justice makes the ethical claim that knowledge systems are worth maintaining, even if they are not scientific in the narrow modernist definition. In a world that is increasingly dominated by science, some tribes in the foothills of the Himalayas have maintained their own knowledge system parallel to modern science. Of course there are some contradictions but it would be very arrogant to claim that in all terms the Western type of existence is better than a local knowledge system. Yes and I want to avoid the conclusion that people think "Yes, ok, fine, for mythology, let's go East; for some piece of art, let's go East; but surely, for science we should stay in the West". That is partly true and party not true, I think. We do live in a world that is thoroughly scientific and technological; so one would think that the new religion is science; but at the same time, the authority of scientists, the priests of that religion, has diminished. That is a paradox: yes, science is the new religion; but no, we have not properly shaped our societies democratically while at the same time taking proper advice from scientists. Sometimes governments don't ask for scientific advice and then make big mistakes, which could have been prevented by giving a proper place to scientific advice in our democracies. I think citizens have a much bigger role to play in the interactions between science, technology, society and politics than they are now playing. I don't blame them for that, because all our democracies have constitutions that were written in the nineteenth century, following Montesquieu. At this moment citizens have the role to vote once every so many years. They are perhaps members of a political party, they may be members of some sports societies, but that is all for most people. In the basic and continuous working of our democracies, there is no role for citizens. And I think that in a world that is so thoroughly scientific and technological, that is a democratic deficit. We really should think about giving citizens a more active role. Involve citizens in policy making, thinking about our society - whether society has to develop in this or that direction - and how we want science and technology to help our society develop. That it the kind of new democracy we should develop. I am sure technologies will be an important element to develop democracy in that direction, but we shouldn't be naïve about the role of technology, about the possibility of a technical fix. Some people, 20 years ago, thought that the Internet would radically democratize society because everyone could talk to each other, everyone would have all the information.... It would be as if we were in the Ancient Agora of Athens where democracy was born. This idea that Internet technology would solve our democratic deficit proved to be an illusion, but in rethinking our democracies we certainly should think about including Internet and new social media. Governments should think about those new forms of communication between the citizens, stakeholders, civil society organizations and themselves. I do not see easy solutions and think that our societies have to be really clever in figuring out new forms of democracy, also using technologies. But if we leave it to technology alone, it will be a huge disaster.