Page 145 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

140 Jürgen Habermas

think, be useful here. The only way out of the dilemma is to engage in
critical dialogue with future generations. Of course, that’s not a literal
possibility. But in current debates in genetics, future generations are
already routinely invoked: they already have their spokespeople.
Now, we could be content to conceive these debates as counterfactual
thought experiments, after Giddens and Beck. We could, following
Thompson, acknowledge that our communications with future
generations are ‘quasi-interactions’ funnelled through expert systems
of mediation where, for example, ‘public scientists’ like Lord Robert
Winston front television shows which explain the issues at stake, or
movies like Gattaca spark off debates between friends: these mediated
representations are, of course, the sine qua non of a contemporary
public sphere that makes onerous demands on citizens who are
expected to form opinions on an array of immensely complex topics.
We could instead adopt the ironic stance which is de rigueur in post-
structuralist discourse and proclaim that our communications with
the not-yet-born, like those with the dead, are in any case no more
problematic than those we convene amongst the living: in this case,
any concerns we may have about the quality of the information
or the balance of viewpoints in these media representations would
be a rather meaningless gesture based on a fantasy of ‘authentic
communication’. Or we could try to imagine the relevance of
discourse ethics to these impossible encounters. Given that we do
not know them and that, like us, they will probably speak with many
voices, aren’t ‘future generations’ best, if always imperfectly, served
by the most diverse range possible of representatives, representations
and discursive frameworks? Aren’t they best served by the existence
of spaces of debate that are independent of special market or political
interests? We absolutely require a diverse communication mix (web-
logs, lobby-group communications, public-service documentaries,
movies, poetry, radical media publications, stand-up comedy and
so forth) noisily kicking the topic around before we can even begin
to call it a ‘public sphere’. This plurality of communicative forms
(different genres, different motivations, different goals) does not,
in itself, guarantee the transition from ‘noise’ to ‘dialogue’. But
without such diversity of form and perspective, it is impossible to
claim sincerely that we are proceeding with the interests of future
generations in mind. If Giddens and Beck teach us the importance
of counterfactual thinking, Habermas reminds us that counterfactual
thinking is something that must occur ‘out loud’ amid the crossfi re
of diverse perspectives. Against those readings of Habermas which

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