The
man who studies the spread of Ignorance
How
do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and
obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which
defines this phenomenon.
By Georgina Kenyon
6 January 2016
This story is
featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2016” collection. Discover
more of our picks.
In 1979, a secret
memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the
Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the
Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the
tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.
In one of the
paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market
cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is
the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists
in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of
establishing a controversy.”
This revelation
piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from
Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of
tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking
caused cancer.
(Credit: Getty
Images)
The tactics of big
tobacco to obscure the facts of smoking’s harmful effects led
Robert Proctor to create a new word (Credit: Getty Images)
Proctor had found
that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms
of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the
health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for
the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.
Agnotology is the
study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell
a product or win favour
It comes from
agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or ‘not
knowing’, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with
the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread
confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.
“I was exploring
how powerful industries could promote ignorance to sell their wares.
Ignorance is power… and agnotology is about the deliberate creation
of ignorance.
“In looking into
agnotology, I discovered the secret world of classified science, and
thought historians should be giving this more attention.”
The 1969 memo and
the tactics used by the tobacco industry became the perfect example
of agnotology, Proctor says. “Ignorance is not just the
not-yet-known, it’s also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by
powerful agents who want you ‘not to know’.”
To help him in his
search, Proctor enlisted the help of UC Berkeley linguist Iain Boal,
and together they came up with the term – the neologism was coined
in 1995, although much of Proctor’s analysis of the phenomenon had
occurred in the previous decades.
Balancing act
Agnotology is as
important today as it was back when Proctor studied the tobacco
industry’s obfuscation of facts about cancer and smoking. For
example, politically motivated doubt was sown over US President
Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he
revealed his birth certificate in 2011. In another case, some
political commentators in Australia attempted to stoke panic by
likening the country’s credit rating to that of Greece, despite
readily available public information from ratings agencies showing
the two economies are very different.
(Credit: Thinkstock)
The spread of
ignorance is as relevant today as it was when Proctor coined his term
(Credit: Thinkstock)
Proctor explains
that ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced
debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two
opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This
was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look
harmless, and is used today by climate change deniers to argue
against the scientific evidence.
“This ‘balance
routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today,
to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts
disagree’ – creating a false picture of the truth, hence
ignorance.”
We live in a world
of radical ignorance – Robert Proctor
For example, says
Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were
conducted in mice initially, and the tobacco industry responded by
saying that studies into mice did not mean that people were at risk,
despite adverse health outcomes in many smokers.
A new era of
ignorance
“We live in a
world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth
cuts through the noise,” says Proctor. Even though knowledge is
‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed, he warns.
“Although for most
things this is trivial – like, for example, the boiling point of
mercury – but for bigger questions of political and philosophical
import, the knowledge people have often comes from faith or
tradition, or propaganda, more than anywhere else.”
(Credit: Thinkstock)
When people do not
understand a concept or fact, they are prey for special interest
groups who work hard to create confusion (Credit: Thinkstock)
Proctor found that
ignorance spreads when firstly, many people do not understand a
concept or fact and secondly, when special interest groups – like a
commercial firm or a political group – then work hard to create
confusion about an issue. In the case of ignorance about tobacco and
climate change, a scientifically illiterate society will probably be
more susceptible to the tactics used by those wishing to confuse and
cloud the truth.
Consider climate
change as an example. “The fight is not just over the existence of
climate change, it’s over whether God has created the Earth for us
to exploit, whether government has the right to regulate industry,
whether environmentalists should be empowered, and so on. It’s not
just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and
into such facts,” says Proctor.
Making up our own
minds
Another academic
studying ignorance is David Dunning, from Cornell University. Dunning
warns that the internet is helping propagate ignorance – it is a
place where everyone has a chance to be their own expert, he says,
which makes them prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately
spread ignorance.
My worry is not that
we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s
becoming too easy to do so – David Dunning
"While some
smart people will profit from all the information now just a click
away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise. My worry
is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but
that it’s becoming too easy to do so. We should consult with others
much more than we imagine. Other people may be imperfect as well, but
often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own
imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their
errors,” warns Dunning.
(Credit: Getty
Images)
US presidential
candidate Donald Trump's solutions that are either unworkable or
unconstitutional are an example of agnotology, says Dunning (Credit:
Getty Images)
Dunning and Proctor
also warn that the wilful spread of ignorance is rampant throughout
the US presidential primaries on both sides of the political
spectrum.
“Donald Trump is
the obvious current example in the US, suggesting easy solutions to
followers that are either unworkable or unconstitutional,” says
Dunning.
So while agnotology
may have had its origins in the heyday of the tobacco industry, today
the need for both a word and the study of human ignorance is as
strong as ever.
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