Regular blog commentator PSR posted this comment on the blog yesterday, responding to my lament on falling standards in public life. I think it worth sharing more broadly as the idea referred to - of agnotology - makes a lot of sense in the world that we now live in where it is a part of the new culture of corruption that the right wing are creating:
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I've been reading (wrestling) with Philip Mirowski's book ‘Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste' (2013) about how Neo-liberalism avoided its comeuppance after 2008.
This book is occasionally like walking in a heavily wooded forest, and then entering a clearing or beautifully illuminated glade where you come across something you have never seen before in all its glory (remember that I might not be as well read as people like John S Warren so take that last statement with a pinch of salt!). So here is what Mirowski (especially from Chapter 5, p.239 has revealed to me (wait for it — drum roll!!):
Agnotology: the study (and practice moreover) of how ignorance and doubt is spread in society.
Mirowski gives examples of how agnotology has been practiced in science, PR and advertising and highlights the methods cigarette manufacturers (but also think how climate change denial has been working) also worked along agnotological lines to supress the knowledge about tobacco's link to cancer.
Cigarette manufacturers even funded beneficial medical studies (avoiding lung cancer of course) in order to be associated with such positive activities to further create a picture of being ‘benign' organisations in the minds of the public. The idea was to create a form of ‘cognitive dissonance' in society which leads to uncertainty: on one hand these people are selling death to the public; but on the other they are funding valuable research into diseases and giving grants to poorer countries etc., etc. Are they good or bad people? ‘Well, I don't really know……….??”.
Now…..think about how Putin runs Russia. It is well known that his Government funds some of the opposition parties and that they may also have stirred up tensions in the former Soviet region, created artificial crises so that are seen riding to the rescue. People fall for it every time. It's hard for them to know who is saying what?
Think about modern ‘Think Tanks' — as we know here, how many of them have got questionable funding, decanting their rubbish into society, causing more doubt and confusion; The Great Barrington Declaration for example. What was that about really?
Mirowski accuses orthodox economists (Neo-liberal of course) of the doing the same in his book — noting how economists since 2008 created obfuscation about the causes of the credit crunch — economists are accused of deliberately not agreeing on the causes of the crash, or creating useless specious dissent in order to put people off the scent.
Think about how Trump ran his Government and his adherence to ‘alternative facts'? Think about the messages being bled into society about UK Government debt and who from? Think about the European Research Group (ERG) sounding like a serious, pious research body but in fact nothing but a group ‘swivel eyed loons'.
Mirowski points to the consequences — with so much doubt, there can only be stasis and indecision because no one is really sure — especially at the ballot box. And so what you get is TINA, and then Timothy Snyder's construct of ‘Inevitability Politics' comes more sharply into focus.
And all of this agnotological practice is turbo charged by the internet and the untaxed/corrupt wealth that funds it.
So maybe this is it — we are living in the ‘Age of Agnotology' — an age of mass mis-information. In order to keep us where we are, and to prevent a more courageous age.
Remember that word folks ‘AGNOTOLOGY'. In your neighbourhood since 2010.
SOTD — even Peter Oborne in his book ‘The Assault on Truth' (2021) p.17 points out that Johnson lied about Corbyn. How much of this went out on the internet and sullied him, God only knows.
Even the BBC has come across agnotology:
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The final sentence ends with a semi-colon, hence, seems to be unfinished.
I will check. I may have missed a link
A line of this is the creation of false scientific uncertainty and doubt to justify the continued use of harmful products such as leaded petrol or tobacco despite the clear evidence of significant adverse effects from the very earliest days. Similar methods have been used to cast doubt on the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Notwithstanding, many of the oil companies appear to be voting with their feet and getting heavily into renewables.
Fascinating, thank you.
Quite so PSR, Adam Curtis amkes similar (and for me. more easily digestible) points via his documentary series on theBBC iPlayer, here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p093wp6h/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head
You are right TAAB – Curtis identifies one Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov (Putin’s closest advisor) as a source of what we can now call agnotology in modern Russia.
I had a lecturer on my MBA who said that ‘There’s nothing as a good as a good theory’ because good theories can help you see what they mean in practice and using the label ‘agnotology’ for me at least is very important.
Because at last now we can see and say what it being done to us at the same time.
Again – we all now what ‘it’ looks and feels like. But now we have a name for it and might even say that we understand more.
Speaking for myself, that’s how I feel as a citizen who is trying to walk around with his head up and eyes open.
Also known as ‘FUD’ – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. In the IT sector, big players such as MS spread this misinformation to throw people off the dire quality of their wares when considering alternatives. It also occurs to me the way Think Tanks can be named with the academic-sounding ‘institution’ which is equating it with real places of learning (eg Courtauld Institute which is part of the Uni of London).
As for the BBC, they are part of the problem for sure.
I read Daniel Stedman-Jones ‘Masters of the Universe’ about the rise of neo-liberalism.
He shows that well funded ‘think tanks’ played a major part in spreading the ideology.
Ian, as for the BBC, I think the think tanks should not be quoted if their funding is not transparent. Who funds you is a website which does this. The more right wing, on the whole, the less transparent they are.
Yes – but the spread of ignorance or disinformation it is alsoenabled by a whole edifice of enablers/toadies – ‘trusties’ in academia, media etc.
Their stance is as objective observers, historians, etc. but they are essentially supportive and only critical sufficient to provide a semblance of detachment.
Lord Peter Hennessey is a prime example,
https://medium.com/@info_99507/whats-my-problem-with-lord-peter-hennessy-31958d300324
Andrew – this is exactly what Mirowski mentions in his book ‘Never Let a Serious crisis Go To Waste’. All Mirowski does is point out that orthodox economists have learnt to do the same thing, especially since the 2008 crash (although Neo-liberalism has a tendency to rely on ignorance anyway).
Hi All
Here is the BBC link missing from above (for a bit of tri-angulation):
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance
And I’ll re-post this: I’ve summed up examples of the cigarette companies and climate change, Think Tanks and economist agnotological behaviour from Mirowski’s book, Chapter 5 pp.239-246 (the beginning of — there are more examples to come, it’s a long chapter).
This book was written BEFORE Trump so I made that linkage myself, as I did the linkage with Snyder’s theses on ‘Inevitability politics’ and TINA, Putin’s Russia (thank you Adam Curtis — for introducing us to Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov , but also Snyder, Belton, Burgis), the misinformation about UK Government debt and the ERG’s role in BREXIT, plus the Great BD. Mirowski is only talking of how economists have employed agnotology in his book but I saw/heard of the same techniques in these areas through my reading and reflecting.
Mirowski also says that agnotological practice was also present in the Iraq war. Theresa May talking about the dealing with ‘burning injustices’ and then not actually doing anything about it is another form of agnotology.
I have to say that agnotology as a practice is an infernal one — one of its core components is duplicity in the name of control. A Government, corporation can be on both sides of the argument but those digesting the output may not have a clue that they are being manipulated by a single source.
Marowski quotes this chilling exchange with a Bush aide (pp.242-234) to illustrate the mind set that I’m sure is also quoted in the film ‘Vice’ about Dick Cheney:
‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ………and you, all of you will be left to just study what we do” (quoted from Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George Bush, New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004).
The key issue is how those in power create a reality for themselves and their objectives in order to act with impunity.
It’s gob smacking stuff. Forgive me but I’m just a ‘working stiff’ who finds time to delve into these matters — I hope this helps. But I’m sold on it. The agnotology paradigm seems to make sense to me.
Richard – thank you for taking an interest in my contribution even though you appear to be so busy at the moment!!
Busy may understate it…..
The flattery is, unfortunately for me misplaced; for I am obliged to confess I haven’t read Mirowski, but you have now filled that gap in my knowledge: the book is ordered. Thank you for the insight.
“Cigarette manufacturers even funded beneficial medical studies (avoiding lung cancer of course) in order to be associated with such positive activities to further create a picture of being ‘benign’ organisations in the minds of the public.”
This has a long history. When the medical profession attempted to challenge the tobacco industry in the 1950s over the causes of lung cancer, it was met with a powerful and implacable public relations reaction from an industry with enormous financial resources, and a serious interest in defending itself. It did not rely on mere (flawed) journalism.
The world leading, eminent statistician and geneticist Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962), a life-long smoker, was hired to demolish the medical arguments, root and branch, in public. Fisher was very effective in the short term. He was contemptuous of the statistics and the science of the medical profession and belligerent in pursuing the case that the medical profession was completely wrong, wherever a defence of the medical case was raised. His reputation in statistics was unchallangeable, and frankly proved some way beyond his own poor judgement. Only in retrospect have historians noticed the technical limitations in Fisher’s own specific experience and methodology in his own research. Meanwhile, it was a tough time for young and public-spirited medical researchers to stick their head above the parapet, in the interest of human life and health.
Fisher, it should be recalled was principally responsible for merging Mendelism with statistical analysis to produce the famous Neo-Darwinian Revolution, or modern evolutionary synthesis (and rescue Darwinism from the muddle and confusion in which Darwin and Galton left it). Fisher is generally given much of the credit, although Haldane and Sewell-Wright were also major figures in the synthesis. Fisher, it is also worth remembering, and just like Galton and many disciples of the time, was a eugenicist.
John
I’d be interested to know what you think of Mirowski’s writing style. I learnt more new words in his first few chapter that I can ever remember getting out of a book before.
Have a stiff whiskey (or expresso) before you embark is my advice.
Noted. It would require to be whisky (Uisge Beatha), and not whiskey here, but apart from that …..
One other example of retrospectively recognising humbug is the use of IQ tests to establish (in part) which school children went to. When I trained as a teacher, we were told that 80% of intelligence was inherited. Sir Cyril Burt had examined identical twins (same genes) raised apart. They had similar IQs ‘proving’ genes were the most important factor and that they could be measured by IQ tests.
The 1944 education Act which applied to England and Wales, had the 11plus exam to determine which school children should attend. Not all local authorities used it but most did. And some still do.
It was years later, after comprehensive schooling had become the normal that a researcher found Burt had fudged the figures to support his social views that most working class children were not able to benefit from an academic education. A radio 4 programme I heard said he even invented two studies which claimed to substantiate his conclusion.
Later research showed that stimulating a young mind can create extra neural connections and foster intelligence. That can also counter racist assumptions on the distribution of intelligence between ‘races’. Race itself being a dubious concept.
False science was enlisted to back up the existing social order. It hasn’t completely gone away.
Then of course there are the links between big oil and tobacco, working in tandem with many of the same actors to deny climate change and health impacts. Quite widely documented, here for example:
http://www.stuarthsmith.com/how-the-merchants-of-death-tobacco-and-oil-worked-together/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/
The current geological period has been called the Anthropocene. Perhaps the Agnopocence would be more accurate as it would explain much of why humans have made such a negative impact on the planet.
Very good….
Great article as ever, like many here I am aware of the; ‘never actually clearly taking a side concept’ ( thanks to Adam Curtis for the initial revelation) to create confusion and thus opposition struggle as they are not entirely sure what they are opposing. But was not aware of ‘Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste’ book, so thats! Another sale for Waterstones…..
So what to do? My only thoughts thus far are the Swedish form of ‘Open Government’ that is held to account. Easier in the Nordic countries as they have the agreed and powerful unwritten shaming contract that is ‘The Law of Jante’, summarised as ‘You are not to think yourself better than anybody else’. If ever there was a need for transparency and accountability as a policy proposal for any opposition party now is the time to prepare.
Note;The FOI act has been hijacked by Gove and his secret ( or not so ) little group who scrutinise applications, to redact , stall and reject as ‘they’ see fit.
Also just finished Peter Oborne’s book, ( conclusion; Boris is worse than I thought, we’re in big trouble, this man and his tin pot regime has to go).
So, Mr Starmer, you now have plenty of ammunition, when do you plan to use it? ( camera fixed on white purring cat in the lap of the megalomaniac dear leader).
You continue to be the go to source..thanks as ever.
Not started it yet, but the Left Book Club has just sent me ‘The Unknowers: how strategic ignorance rules the world’ by Linsey McGoey, originally published in 2019 by Zed books. It seems strategic ignorance itself is coming under the spotlight now.
Wow – thanks for that – I have a couple of Zed Books publications and they’ve not disappointed.
Yep – there it is – ordered, and here is an online article from the researcher you mention on the Zed Books website:
https://www.zedbooks.net/blog/posts/why-ignorance-rules-the-world/
Glad to be of help. I’ve just done a shift at Housmans bookshop and used my discount to order The Joy Of Tax by that bloke off Twitter. Finally!
🙂
I sem to reall King Edward in the 1930s famously came up with an impationed call that ‘something must be done’, after visiting impoverished mining villages in the North East. He gained much credibilty thereby but what was then done, by his majesty, was to talk with Hitler with a view to regaining his Crown after being ‘Fired’. Wiith hindsight, an example of a Right Royal Agnotologist perhaps?
It would be interesting to know what and how these people peddling “ignorance and doubt” and lies and misinformation actually think.
I wonder if there’s any research on the psychology, or is it pathology, of the intellectual crooks like the tobacco paradigm fellow travellers, whether executives or scientists or media or politicians. Do they know they are spreading “ignorance and doubt” and fear and despair and anger and are doing it deliberately according to a preconceived plan or do they believe their own propaganda and are convinced in their “truth” or is it much more subtle, perhaps like the (neoliberal) economists whose careers would be in ruins if they admitted that the whole edifice of “perfect markets”, “rational actors” and so on is a fantasy?
Take any one of Johnson’s lies exposed by Oborne and it could be a slip, an inadvertent misleading of parliament – and voters and citizens – but added together there is something more sinister going on surely. Most people I know, though I don’t know that many I have to admit, do not habitually lie, at least not after adolescence. So it is deliberate and he surely knows it is.
I wonder what is more disturbing, to lie as a matter of course and not realise it, or to lie habitually and to know you lie and to not give a damn because you intend to practise agnotology as a political strategy?
Hard to know
I worked with a habitual liar once
He seemed wholly unaware of it
All the good people working for him but all then ended up working together in various projects -our reaction was to be honest and trust each other
In the case of Fisher, he fell for his own propaganda. He was a heavy smoker, and seems to have thought of tobacco as principally a harmless, ‘soothing weed’. Here is what he wrote in a letter to the BMJ of July, 1957:
“Your annotation on ‘Dangers of Cigarette-smoking’ leads up to the demand that these hazards ‘must be brought home to the public by all the modern devices of publicity’. That is just what some of us with research interests are afraid of. In recent wars, for example, we have seen how unscrupulously the “modern devices of publicity” are liable to be used under the impulsion of fear; and surely the “yellow peril” of modern times is not the mild and soothing weed but the original creation of states of frantic alarm.
A common “device” is to point to a real cause for alarm, such as the increased in- cidence of lung cancer, and to ascribe it urgent terms to what is possibly an entirely imaginary cause. Another, also illustrated in your annotation, is to ignore the extent to which the claims in question have aroused rational scepticism. The phrase “in the pres- ence of the painstaking investigations of statisticians that are seen to have closed every loophole of escape for tobacco as the villain of the piece”, seems to be pure political rhetoric, even to the curious practice of escaping through loopholes. I believe I have seen the sources of all the evidence cited. I do see a good deal of other statisticians. Many would still fell, as I did about five years ago, that a good prima facie case had been made for further investigation. None think that the matter is already settled. The further investigation seems, however, to have degenerated into the making of more con- fident exclamations, with the studied avoidance of the discussion of those alternative explanations of the facts which still await exclusion.
Is not the matter serious enough to require more serious treatment?”
Fisher goes on to argue that the medical defence of a causal link between smoking and cancer (made by a Dr McCurdy), included the “non-sequitur that increase of smoking is the cause of increasing cancer of the lung”; a fallacious non-sequitur moreover, hidden by a “smoke screen of propaganda”.
Fisher’s vanity, arrogance and supreme self-confidence knew no bounds; in part because the whole world simply took him at his own valuation, as he confidently expected it to do; an expectation that became enmeshed with entitlement.
Examine not just the person, but the culture that created him.
I should add that Fisher had the audacity to accuse McCurdy of avoiding facts he already knew to exist. Fisher, however confidently fails to point out the pertinent fact – that he is a acting as a paid lobbyist by the tobacco industry; a fact that he no doubt considers irrelevant, because he is after all, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher; whose integrity is so far above reproach it may, and should (by all right-thinking people), simply be taken for granted on all sides.
This assumption of integrity that may simply be taken for granted without meeting any forensic test whatsoever, still seems to apply in Parliament, or by its loyal media.
Graham
The mind set is a power one. It’s about control.
It’s about getting you own way, not being denied by even so-called democracy. In fact is contemptuous of democracy and voters.
Look at the Bush aide excerpt above. Everyone involved in the Iraqi war on the U.S. side had long standing grudges or problems with the region, scores to settle and whatnot (like getting hold of an oil supply in the region to solve the perhaps the oil problem created when the West backed Israel).
I know that we now call what we are seeing ‘agnotology’ – but it is also the most cynical way to exercise power – heartless, manipulative. Cynicism writ large.
It is a method that enables the abuse of sovereign power in the pursuance of narrow defined objectives in a sustainable way. It’s a form of agenda setting, never being on the back foot.
Such people’s concern’s with process and method are secondary to the outcomes they pursue – usually aimed at expanding their wealth and that of their supporters.
I think the use of GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) as a basis for claiming that Scotland would struggle economically as an independent country is another current example of agnotology.