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Wikipedia et l'oligarchie de l'ignorance

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Wikipedia et l'oligarchie de l'ignorance

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Sur Hayek et la promotion de l'ignorance

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Sur Hayek et la promotion de l'ignorance

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[This is one of several posts discussing Philip Mirowski's plausible and well-referenced Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013). Mirowski uses the term 'neoliberalism' for what I call 'economism'; for purposes of this blog I have relabeled his ideas accordingly.]

Both in The Golden Calf and in this blog I have stressed economism's internal contradictions. Not too surprising for somebody trained in philosophy, I have treated this aspect of economism as a major weakness, one that can be exploited by those seeking to oppose its hegemony in American policy circles today.

Mirowski stresses this feature of economism also, referring to it as the "double truth doctrine." However, Mirowski offers a deep analysis of where this comes from, and why, in a sense, economism is immune to any objections people like me might launch against it on this score.

We start with what Mirowski (here following Freidrich Hayek) believes to be the most important central feature of economism-think, which he accuses the left today of really missing the boat on: that the market, much more than being a vehicle for the physical transfer of goods, is a super information processing system. Going back to my own terms, in which economism functions logically as a quasi-religious ideology, we have the idea of an omniscient God who has laid out a plan for the history of the universe, in exquisite detail, but only God and never mere mortals can comprehend this plan. Just substitute "market" for "God" and you have economism.

It follows from this view that there can be no such thing as a "market failure"-something even Hayek in his sensible moments was able to contemplate. Whatever the market says must be right. If the market appears to be producing a disaster, it must be our problem of limited perceptions and understanding that make it seem as a disaster; if we only had the God's-eye (or market's-eye) view of the matter, we'd see that all is really happening for the best, and the only way it could have. Think the Black Death sweeping Europe and killing off a third of the population, and all the religious of the day could do was go to church and pray, and say that God must have done all this for excellent reasons.

The next thing that follows logically is that we humans must become much more humble about thinking we know anything at all. The market knows all, but being of such limited information-processing capability compared to the market, that phenomenal supercomputer, we don't know diddly. The people who have to come in for special opprobrium in the economism world, whom must be publicly derided and sneered at at every opportunity, are the intellectuals and the scientists, those people who dare to assert that they know things independently of what the market decrees. (Presumably, according to economism diehards, the law of gravity would cease to function, if ever the market decided in its infinite wisdom that gravity was inefficient.)

So now we come to the danger point. The know-nothing populace is OK with the teachings of economism,, and are happy to buy into the propaganda that intellectuals and scientists are just a bunch of elitists trying to snooker the really-wise Average Joe on the street for their own suspect agendas, so long as everything is going along swimmingly and we all have jobs and cash in our pockets. But when the stuff hits the fan, as it did with a vengeance in 2008, then the natives get restless, and start to call for answers and (worse), programs that might fix things. The unruly populace at times like this must first be mollified and ultimately distracted from interfering with economism's pro-market and pro-corporation policies.

Mirowski believes that economism has, over its roughly four decades of dominance, perfected a strategy for accomplishing this distraction and mollifying, and it's called agnotology (you can look it up in Wikipedia). Agnotology is the study of ignorance, when that ignorance is deliberately created as a political tactic. The term was coined following analyses of how the tobacco lobby reacted to the initial scientific claims that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco folks figured out pretty quickly that they were going to lose if they ever claimed that they could prove that smoking did not cause cancer and was safe. So they brilliantly realized that they could accomplish all their political goals, at least in the short run (and giving them enough time to plan a longer term strategy) if all they did was spreaddoubt about whether smoking causes cancer. They hired on a few like-minded scientists (however marginal these people were within the legitimate scientific community) to study all the findings and proclaim, "Oh, it's not really certain, all the data aren't in yet," and so on-a strategy that worked so well that the forces of economism followed it exactly later with climate change.

The media (assuming they needed any urging and were not simply captive to the economism program to start with based on which huge corporations own the media outlets) aided the campaign mightily with their so-called "fairness doctrine," meaning that if you quoted a real scientist saying real facts about the dangers of smoking, you then had to give equal time to a fringe, wacko scientist spreading the message of doubt. Being told by the media that doubt was every bit the intellectual equal of facts, the public naturally became befuddled, lost interest, and went back to watching football or "reality" shows. Economism mission accomplished.

Now we come to the key point--is all this merely an exercise in cynicism? If so, then economism contains at its core a critical intellectual weakness. At some level its devotees have to know they don't really believe what they are saying. But Mirowski shows how economism dodges this bullet (maybe the single most important message in his book). Recall that the overriding take-home message for economism is that we humans can't know much of anything and have to be subservient to the omniscient market. If that's so, then of course scientists know nothing either, and when economism befogs the public debate with ignorance and doubt, all it really does is teach us the important lesson about how little we know and how we have no choice but to trust the market. So the believer in economism can promulgate all the ignorance and doubt he wishes and feel righteous about doing so.

This finally shrinks the scope of the "double truth doctrine," since there is no contradiction in the everyday economism devotee spreading doubt and ignorance. The only people subject to "double truth" are the inner circle of intellectuals like Hayek himself back in the 1940s and 1950s-who claimed on the one hand that only the market could know, and on the other hand that he knew that only the market could know. People like Hayek then presumably become economism's equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. These few high priests know that their doctrine is riven though with illogic, but suck it up and accept the heavy burden of knowing that and keeping it secret from the masses. It's all done out of love for the common people, ignorant asses that they are.

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Mirowski: Why Economism Spreads Ignorance and Doubt

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This is one of several posts discussing Philip Mirowski's plausible and well-referenced Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (Verso, 2013). Mirowski uses the term 'neoliberalism' for what I call 'economism'; for purposes of this blog I have relabeled his ideas accordingly.]

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Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. More generally, the term also highlights the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

Coined in 1995 by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor, along with linguist Iain Boal, the word is based on the Neoclassical Greek word agnōsis (, 'not knowing'; cf. Attic Greek , 'unknown') and (). Proctor cites as a prime example the tobacco industry's 40-year public relations campaign to manufacture doubt about the adverse health effects of tobacco use. This technique and its subsequent adoption by the fossil fuel industry in a similar campaign against the scientific consensus on climate change is the focus of the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

David Dunning of Cornell University warns that "the internet is helping propagate ignorance,... which makes [users] prey for powerful interests wishing to deliberately spread ignorance." Irvin C. Schick refers to unknowledge "to distinguish it from ignorance," using the example of " terra incognita" in early maps to note that the "reconstruction of parts of the globe as uncharted territory is...the production of unknowledge, the transformation of those parts into potential objects of Western political and economic attention. It is the enabling of colonialism."

Active causes of culturally-induced ignorance can include the influence of the media, corporations, and governmental agencies, through secrecy and suppression of information, document destruction, and selective memory. Another example is climate change denial, where oil companies paid teams of scientists to downplay the effects of climate change. Passive causes include structural information bubbles, including those created by segregation along racial and class lines, that create differential access to information.

Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not "come to be," or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was censored and delayed for at least a decade because some evidence remained classified military information related to undersea warfare.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

The term "agnotology" was first coined in a footnote in Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor's 1995 book, The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer:

Historians and philosophers of science have tended to treat ignorance as an ever-expanding vacuum into which knowledge is sucked - or even, as Johannes Kepler once put it, as the mother who must die for science to be born. Ignorance, though, is more complex than this. It has a distinct and changing political geography that is often an excellent indicator of the politics of knowledge. We need a political agnotology to complement our political epistemologies.

In a 2001 interview about his lapidary work with agate, a colorful rock, Proctor was quoted using the term to describe his research "only half jokingly" as "agnotology." He connected the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal, all of which have much higher commercial value. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest," the same "structured apathy" he called "the social construction of ignorance."

He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 The New York Times story on medical historians who testify as expert witnesses.

Proctor co-organized a pair of events with Londa Schiebinger, his wife and fellow professor of science history: the first was a workshop at the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 titled "Agnatology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance;" and later a conference at Stanford University in 2005 titled "Agnotology: The Cultural Production of Ignorance". In 2008, they published an anthology entitled Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, which "provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about 'how we know' to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know?" They place agnotology within the larger field of epistemology.

In 2004, Londa Schiebinger gave a more precise definition of agnotology in a paper on 18th-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, and contrasted it with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how humans know while the former questions why humans do not know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."

Its use as a critical description of the political economy has been expanded upon by Michael Betancourt in a 2010 article titled "Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism," and expanded in the book The Critique of Digital Capitalism. His analysis is focused on the housing bubble as well as the bubble economy of the period from 1980 to 2008. Betancourt argues that this political economy should be termed " agnotologic capitalism" because the systemic production and maintenance of ignorance is a major feature that enables the economy to function as it allows the creation of a "bubble economy."

Betancourt's argument is posed in relation to the idea of affective labor:

The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of reality - the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage - contentious and a source of confusion, reflected by the inability of participants in bubbles to be aware of the imminent collapse until after it has happened. The biopolitical paradigm of distraction, what [Juan Martin] Prada calls "life to enjoy", can only be maintained if the underlying strictures remain hidden from view. If affective labor works to reduce alienation, agnotology works to eliminate the potential for dissent.

In his view, the role of affective labor is to enable the continuation of the agnotologic effects that enable the maintenance of the capitalist status quo.

The availability of such large amounts of knowledge in this information age may not necessarily be producing a knowledgeable citizenry. Instead, it may be allowing many people to cherry-pick information in blogs or news that reinforces their existing beliefs, and to be distracted from new knowledge by repetitive or base entertainments. There is conflicting evidence on how television viewing affects value formation and intelligence.

An emerging new scientific discipline that has connections to agnotology is cognitronics:

Cognitonics, first of all, aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields. Cognitronics is studying and looking for the ways of improving cognitive mechanisms of processing information and developing emotional sphere of the personality - the ways aiming at compensating three mentioned shifts in the systems of values and, as an indirect consequence, for the ways of developing symbolic information processing skills of the learners, linguistic mechanisms, associative and reasoning abilities, broad mental outlook being important preconditions of successful work practically in every sphere of professional activity in information society.

The field of cognitronics appears to be growing as international conferences have centered on the topic. The 2013 conference was held in Slovenia.

A similar word to agnotology, agnoiology, comes from the same Greek roots and is used to mean either "the science or study of ignorance, which determines its quality and conditions" or "the doctrine concerning those things of which we are necessarily ignorant," describing a branch of philosophy studied by James Frederick Ferrier in the 19th century.

Anthropologist Glenn Stone points out that most of the examples of agnotology (such as work promoting tobacco use) do not actually create a lack of knowledge so much as they create confusion. A more accurate term for such writing would be " ainigmology", from the root ainigma (as in 'enigma'); in Greek this refers to riddles or to language that obscures the true meaning of a story.

Antiscience - Attitudes that reject science and the scientific method

Anti-intellectualism - Hostility to and mistrust of education, philosophy, art, literature, and science

Cancer Wars, a six-part documentary that aired on PBS in 1997, based on Robert N. Proctor's 1995 book, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What we Know and Don't Know About Cancer

Cognitive dissonance - Stress from contradictory beliefs, a social psychology theory that may explain the ease of maintaining ignorance (because people are driven to ignore conflicting evidence) and which also provides clues to how to bring about knowledge (perhaps by forcing the learner to reconcile reality with long-held, though inaccurate beliefs; see Socratic method)

Cognitive inertia - Lack of motivation to mentally tackle a problem or issue

Confirmation bias - Tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or values

Creationism - Belief that nature originated through supernatural acts, systematic denial of scientific biological realities by misrepresenting them in terms of various dogmatic tenets

Denialism - Person's choice to deny psychologically uncomfortable truth

Doubt Is Their Product - 2008 book by David Michaels

The Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their skill level, and people with high ability at a task underestimate their skill level.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), a disinformation technique using the appeal to fear

Intelligent design - Pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, a class of creationism that attempts to support assorted topics in biological denialism by misrepresenting them and related junk science as scientific research

Japanese commercial whaling - Commercial hunting of whales by the Japanese fishing industry, an attempt at obfuscation of the culpability of commercial whaling by misrepresenting its junk-scientific rationale as scientific research.

Junk science - Scientific data, research, or analysis considered to be spurious or fraudulent

Merchants of Doubt - 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Historical negationism - Illegitimate distortion of the historical record

Neo-Luddism - Philosophy

Obscurantism - Practice of obscuring information

Sociology of scientific ignorance - Study of ignorance in science, or Ignorance Studies, the study of ignorance as something relevant.

Subvertising - Parody advertising

The Republican War on Science - 2005 book by Chris Mooney

Vaccine controversies, based on assorted junk-scientific strategies to misrepresent life- and health-saving technologies as harmful rather than beneficial.

Angulo, A. J. (2016). Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-1932-9.

Kenyon, Georgina (2016 January 6). "The man who studies the spread of ignorance." .

Michaels, David (2008). Doubt is Their Product: How industry's assault on science threatens your health. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530067-3.

Proctor, Robert N. (1995). Cancer Wars: How politics shapes what we know and don't know about cancer. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00859-9.

Proctor, Robert N.; Schiebinger, Londa, eds. (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (PDF). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5901-4.

Smithson, Michael (1985). "Toward a social theory of ignorance". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 20 (4): 323-346. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1985.tb00049.x.

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Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. More generally, the term also highlights the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.