Early
last week Mike Allen of Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s
forthcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and
Washington’s Culture of Deception. In it, McClellan confesses to have
knowingly kept the public in the dark on many important issues. Public
ignorance of government affairs is not a new development, but the kinds of
egregious abuses of information-withholding McClellan claims in his book
warrant another look at how ignorance is created and promulgated. What don't we
know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive and allows it to be
used as a political instrument?
These
questions are addressed in Agnotology (May 2008), an introduction to the
study of how ignorance is produced and maintained. Through a collection of
essays, Proctor and Schiebinger present a new and much-needed perspective for
scholars across all research fields (most of whom have spent their careers
learning what is already known). They also provide a theoretical framework for
non-academics who can recognize ignorance as more than a void.
The
essays assembled in Agnotology strive to prove just that – that
ignorance is often much more than a void of knowledge; it is the outcome of
cultural and political struggles. Arguing that ignorance has a history and a
political geography all its own, the authors outline why there are more than a
handful of things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our
product" is the tobacco industry slogan).
The
authors acknowledge that the causes of ignorance are multiple and diverse;
ignorance can be “brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction,
secrecy, or suppression.” But to facilitate discussion, Proctor and Schiebinger
divide ignorance into three broad categories: ignorance as native state,
ignorance as lost realm, and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and
strategic ploy. By defining and discussing the different qualities of each
category, the authors demonstrate that ignorance can be the result of pure
innocence, pure deceit, and everything in between.
Why do
so few people know that the biggest building in the world is a facility built
to produce explosive uranium-235 near a nondescript town in southern Ohio? Why
did epidemiologists miss the high levels of vitamin deficiency diseases among
early-twentieth-century African Americans? How did the first probes into the
effects of alcohol on fetuses become “scientifically uninteresting”? Proctor
and Schiebinger give such questions serious reflection and provide examples
from many subject areas: from global climate change to military secrecy; from
the female orgasm to Native American paleontology.
According
to Proctor, Schiebinger, and the collection of essays in Agnotology,
there is a lot to know about what we don’t know. Ignorance may seem like
nothing but it is, in fact, a myriad of things: “It’s no excuse, it’s what
can’t hurt you, it’s bliss.”
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