An Agency for the Global Future?

I was recently in Paris where the United States ambassador to UNESCO, David Killion, kindly invited me to address a luncheon at which most of the guests were senior officials of UNESCO. I’ve expanded my observations and am sharing with the C–PET list since they encapsulate themes we have often discussed, such as the global framing of core questions raised by the development of emerging technologies, and the fundamental fact of exponential change. As you may know, the United States ceased to fund UNESCO in 2011 (though at present we retain our membership) in response to the admission of Palestine.

I have always been a fan of UNESCO, since for all the frustrations we find in dealing with intergovernmental organizations its vision, founded in a remarkable effort to interconnect the global community on non–political questions in the aftermath of the Second World War, seems to me designed very specifically for the 21st–century.

The visionary individuals whose initiative led to the founding of the organization displayed a prescience that at the time would have made little sense. They were however aware of the fundamental significance of culture, in the broad sense, in setting the stage for the global order – at a time when that order had collapsed at the initiative (as we must acknowledge) of the world’s, or at least the West’s, leading cultural power. In those famous words from the UNESCO charter, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” (An aside: the adoption of British English by the UN system is itself a comment on how far we find ourselves in 2013 from the global order of the 1940s.)

For one thing, UNESCO’s focus spans the disciplines. In an age of deep disciplinary specialization, one of the characteristics of the 20th century and a core reason for its success – in Fordist approaches to management as well as the blossoming of “modern science” – UNESCO brings together education, science, and culture; which essentially cover all of our disciplines. And which, as I wrote in a piece about an earlier visit to UNESCO some years ago, if it were put together today would also include the business community. UNEBSCO was the name I conjured up. (Easy to Google; no one else has ever used the word.) Point is: UNESCO was designed in the mid–20th century to span the sciences natural and social, the humanities, their application in education, broader culture, and communication; the whole shebang of the efforts of the human mind. In one sense this harks back to the 18th century, where knowledge was so much more limited that intellectual leadership could come from individuals whom we would now see as generalists. Thomas Malthus, economist and demographer, was one. Thomas Bayes, whose innovative approach to statistics is now on everyone’s tongue, was another. Yet by trade they were both clergymen (Anglican and Presbyterian, respectively).

My point is that we have moved from pre–specialism through specialism and sub–specialism into an emerging context in which data is indefinite in quantity. Whereas this might seem like the time to hunker down and build bigger silos and sub–sub–specialize, which is what depressing numbers of people and institutions are doing, in fact we need to embark on something more difficult but a lot more interesting. Persons with deep expertise in one or more disciplines now need to operate at a meta–level. In one sense to say this is hardly to be revolutionary. In the United States the National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce initiated a series of far–sighted conferences in the early 2000′s under the rubric NBIC, standing for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science – Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. While there was a curiously transhumanist twist to some of the thinking, the embrace of convergence was deeply important. (Full disclosure: I presented at one of these events.)

A decade later I was present at the AAAS in Washington, DC, for the launch of an MIT report saying much the same thing – with a response panel including the White House, the head of the FDA, and one of the top officials of the NIH.

From another point of view, it is certainly revolutionary to speak this way. Even within the sciences and in the relation of science to technology there is little advantage and much disadvantage to researchers at more junior levels in doing anything which spans disciplines. Indeed, at the aforementioned AAAS meeting, I recall Alan Leshner, its CEO, who moderated, summing up with a distinctly cynical “this will create hell with our science funding agencies if it is taken seriously” (I cite from memory, but he certainly used the H word!). Interestingly, one of the more memorable responses to the MIT report (I forget whose) suggested that we need a fresh discipline of interdisciplinary competence. That idea went no further, but I found it difficult to suppress a guffaw. Since I was in the front row I’m glad I did.

UNESCO’s vision goes well beyond recognition that the sciences are converging and that they are converging with technology (and engineering). As the home of COMEST (the world committee on the ethics of scientific and technological knowledge) and the International Bioethics Committee, both lodged within the Social and Human Sciences sector, its recognition of the deep intersection of natural science and technology with the humanities and social sciences has long been institutionally acknowledged.

How are we to learn to think in these new ways? I offer three suggestions.

1. Do not despise the value of rearranging our practices so as to develop fresh, intuitive, relational understandings. (In the lunch I was particularly pleased to hear from several of the UNESCO officials how often they meet each other, informally as well as formally, across the structural divisions of the five “sectors.”
2. Keep focusing on the questions. At C–PET our motto is “Asking Tomorrow’s Questions.” It is in the constant asking of questions that we intuitively frame the agenda that will enable us to interrogate data and transform it into usable knowledge. And, in the process, raise those hard questions that are driven by our deep and common human recognition of the centrality of wisdom in our appropriation and use of knowledge. UNESCO’s founders knew how important this was, and it is instructive to review the extensive correspondence with which they engaged leading philosophers and theologians from around the world as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was welded. “Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers,” wrote Tennyson in his remarkable early poem Locksley Hall (another quote from which, incidentally, is to be seen on the wall of the House of Representatives Science Committee room). UNESCO is a deeply humanistic organization, not in the sense of being opposed to religion, but in focusing the centrality of the human questions – from which alone wisdom flows
3. To my mind, the single greatest source of our capacity to add value (in both the economic/market sense and that of “values” or ethics) lies in our ability continually to re–frame, re–shape, re–engineer traditional assumptions. A highly perceptive question over lunch led me to frame a blunt response in these terms. Every single day, read a little Thomas Kuhn and Leon Festinger. That is to say, Kuhn’s fundamental concept of paradigm shift is central to understanding the continual rapid changes characteristic of exponential progress across various fields of knowledge. And Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance shows us what we are up against. In short, it is all about re–framing.

So my vision for UNESCO, with its deep commitments both to learning and to human rights, is to evolve from a prescient agency of reconstruction in the late 1940s into the global futures agency – where the disciplines come together and are transcended in a context tied to the particularities and needs of the global community and energized by a vision for human rights – a vision that will become yet more significant as our technological revolution continues to intensify.

Nigel Cameron

(Chair of the Social and Human Sciences Committee, U.S. National Commission for UNESCO)

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