The bitter fruits of induced ignorance

In his 1995 book, The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer, Robert Proctor, a Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University, coined the word 'agnotology', from the classical Greek agnÅsis, not knowing, plus the suffix -(o)logy, a subject of study. Agnotology is the study of how ignorance, particularly in scientific, military and technical matters, can be manufactured and manipulated by strategies and campaigns dominated by vested interests.

Incidentally, this coinage appears to overlook the nineteenth century creation of 'agnoiology', which first appeared in 1854, meaning, according to the OED, 'the study of the nature of ignorance or of what it is impossible to know'. No matter; agnotology has swept the field.

Michael Quinion, author of the World Wide Words Newsletter, in 2013 defined agnotology as 'the study of culturally induced ignorance.' He quoted Londa Schiebinger, also a Stanford Professor of the History of Science, as saying in 2005, 'Agnotology refocuses questions about "how we know" to include questions about what we do not know, and why not.'

Quinion went on to state that among the processes that 'impede or prevent acceptance of scientific findings' were: the very human desire to ignore unpleasant facts, media neglect of topics, corporate or government secrecy, and misrepresentation for a commercial or political end. They often generate controversy, much of it ill-informed.

In the last decade and a half, agnotology has been applied in an ever widening range of areas. A recent study edited by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, titled Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008), focused on questions such as 'What don't we know, why don't we know it, what keeps ignorance alive, what allows it to be used as a political instrument?' By analysing contested arenas such as global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American palaeontology, and racial ignorance, they showed that ignorance in these areas was the outcome of cultural and political struggles.

The classic case of deliberately induced ignorance is the tobacco industry. In 1954, alarmed by public reaction to the thirteen scientific studies published over the preceding five years, Big Tobacco turned to Hill and Knowlton, one of the world's five largest public relations firms. They advised the industry, among other things, to set up their own research organisation, the Council for Tobacco Research, to produce 'science' favourable to the industry, cast doubt on all unfavourable scientific research, and oppose the case for regulation of tobacco products. A tobacco company executive wrote in a memo in 1969:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

In a powerful exposé of this whole campaign, David Michaels, a George Washington University epidemiologist, currently Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Health and Safety, published Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health in 2008. He revealed that the tobacco industry's duplicitous tactics spawned a multimillion dollar industry that is dismantling public health safeguards in the United States.

Michaels took his title from the 1969 memo, and wrote:

the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain.

These and other Big Tobacco strategies were successful for decades, and are still being used sixty years on.

Early in January 2014 the three giant cigarette corporations of America reached agreement with the US government on publishing nationwide 'corrective statements' - in newspapers, on TV, on the internet and on cigarette packs – acknowledging that they had 'deliberately deceived the American public'. Under the heading 'here is the truth', some of the facts proven about tobacco were to be publicised. This was an outcome of litigation started under President Clinton in 1999, using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act (RICO).

Less than a fortnight later, despite having been party to the settlement, the tobacco industry said it wanted to appeal certain of the required statements about tobacco and test its 'free speech rights' in court. As Richard Ackland wrote in his piece on this issue, 'This is tobacco's long goodbye, the slow stub-out. The negotiations will drag on, the tobacco lawyers will keep fighting until all that is left is ash.'

Michaels emphasised that tobacco set the pattern for many other industries. Hill and Knowlton had founded the 'Manufactured Doubt' industry. More generally, he argued convincingly that 'product defense consultants' and free enterprise 'think tanks' have increasingly skewed the scientific literature, used unscrupulous scientists and lobbyists to dispute scientific evidence, manufactured and magnified scientific uncertainty, and influenced policy decisions to the advantage of many polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products.

Their purpose is to keep the public confused about the hazards posed by global warming, second-hand smoke, asbestos, lead, plastics, and many other toxic materials. As a result, the public trust in scientific methodology has been seriously eroded, the process of weighing the quality, variety and quantity of scientific evidence for and against any position has been undermined, and the real risks arising from many issues are being ignored.

Significantly, Australians devised some of the most effective anti-tobacco campaigns in the world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, the BILLBOARD UTILISING GRAFFITISTS AGAINST UNHEALTHY PROMOTIONS, better known as BUGA UP, used billboard defacement and ridicule to attack tobacco advertising Australia wide. They were imitated overseas, the UK group calling itself COUGH UP. Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, a surgeon who saw tobacco-caused cancer first hand, fought the tobacco industry and raised awareness through the 'Non-Smokers Movement Australia' and the radio program Puff Off. He was an active member of BUGA UP, and continued to campaign when elected to the NSW Legislative Council.

As a result of activists such as these, Australia has led the world in tobacco control legislation, with ever widening smoke-free zones, the banning of billboard tobacco advertising in 1993, tobacco advertising through sports sponsorship in 2006, and the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act of 2011. This is currently under legal challenge by Philip Morris Asia, using a 1993 business agreement between Australia and Hong Kong.

The battle over the extent of global warming, the extent of the human contribution and the nature of consequent climate change, is another major example of the success of the 'manufactured doubt' and 'science obfuscation' industries. In 1988 the US fossil fuel industry became alarmed at the conjunction of the record-shattering heat and drought of that summer, the testimony to Congress of NASA's Dr. James Hansen, a leading climatologist, that human-caused global warming was partly to blame, and the increasing number of scientific studies pointing to fossil fuel consumption as a significant contributor. They launched a massive PR campaign, led by think tanks and individuals who had led the way in other campaigns to induce ignorance and prevent action.

Dr. Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at Weather Underground, the Internet's first weather site, and Weather Underground's chief blogger, has written that climate change theory is a highly politicized field, facing 'probably the best-funded PR effort in history against science'. He wrote in 2009:

Many of the same experts who had worked hard to discredit the science of the well-established link between cigarette smoke and cancer, the danger the CFCs posed to the ozone layer, and the dangers to health posed by a whole host of toxic chemicals, were now hard at work to discredit the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused climate change.

Moreover, Masters highlighted Centre for Public Integrity figures revealing that there were then 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill, or five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Those working for major industries outnumbered those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one.Canadian climatologists James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, in their Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (2009), examined in depth the 'public faces', phoney 'think tanks' and hidden funding in the US at the heart of the international campaign to manufacture doubt and induce ignorance.

Australia, one of the world's largest coal exporters, has its share of global warming sceptics and climate change deniers, pursuing the same strategies to obfuscate the issues. Their identities are easily discovered, by looking at the people who turn out to praise and promote the Australian tours of the itinerant charlatan, 'Lord' Monckton. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott once said in a speech that 'the climate change argument is absolute crap', and dismissed carbon trading schemes as the 'non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one'. Abbott's top business advisor, Maurice Newman, ranted in a column in theAustralian against 'the climate change delusion', claiming that Australia had 'become hostage to climate change madness.' Some commentators have labelled this as dog-whistling for Tony Abbott.

The two pronged strategy of threatened vested interest involves political manipulation and induced ignorance. The political clout of the Australian 'doubt industry' was starkly revealed by Clive Hamilton, in his Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change (2007). Among his sources he quoted Guy Pearse's PhD thesis (ANU, 2005), reporting interviews with fossil-fuel industry lobbyists, most of them formerly senior public servants, who called themselves the 'greenhouse mafia' and boasted that they controlled government policy.

Hamilton pointed to induced ignorance in his Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth about Climate Change (2010), when he mentioned a 2009 episode of The Simpsons. Lisa, anxious and depressed after researching a report on what Springfield would be like in 2059, was taken by Marge and Homer to a psychiatrist, who prescribed 'happy pills' known as 'Ignorital'. She then saw the whole world, including pollution, as smiley faces, but was in such a dangerous state of unreality that she had to be taken off 'Ignorital' for her own safety.

A classic recent example of climate change denial was John Howard's Global Warming Policy Foundation Annual Lecture inNovember 2013. Titled One Religion is Enough, thereby imputing religious zealotry to believers in man-made climate change, he explained away his support for global warming reality in 2006-07 as an act of convenient politics. He objected to the word 'denier' as 'offensive language', and said, 'I have always been something of an agnostic on global warming.' Preaching to the converted, he repeated most of the standard rebuttal mantras, such as 'Of course the climate is changing. It always has', and 'First principles tell us never to accept that all of the science is in on any proposition; always remain open to the relevance of new research.'

Prince Charles clearly targeted all such sophistry in February 2014, when he praised the finalists for the Young Sustainability Entrepreneur Prize, and criticized the deniers of human-made climate change as a 'headless chicken brigade' who are simply ignoring overwhelming scientific evidence. He asserted that through a 'barrage of intimidation, we are told by powerful groups of deniers that the scientists are wrong and we must abandon all our faith in so much overwhelming scientific evidence.'

There is a long list of areas where the application of agnotology would reveal the manufacture of doubt and inculcation of ignorance, in Australia and elsewhere. Among them are the alleged virtues and benefits of neoliberal capitalism, the claim that corporations should have rights just like individuals (and be able to sue Governments whose policies hinder profit making), the Immigration Minister Scott Morrison's instructions to his Department to call asylum-seekers arriving by boat 'illegals' and 'detainees' and blanketing the operation of Government policies in military secrecy, the Australian Hotels Association claims about how to curb alcohol fuelled violence, and the Australian Vaccination Network (a title recently stripped by the Administrative Decisions Tribunal) portraying themselves as providers of impartial and scientific information on which to 'make an informed vaccination choice'.