~ Ignorance seems easier to generate than it used to be.
We’ve always been able to lie, but yesterday’s lies were crude. They fed on a scarcity of information. Today’s lies feast on a glut, and we can neglect, deflect, forget, or drown the truth more easily than ever. We can construct unknowings that not only survive contact with truth, but that are strengthened by the collision. Funding a flood of studies emphasizing the genetic correlates of cancer has allowed representatives of the tobacco industry to legally and truthfully state for decades that they’ve never lied about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer; they’ve simply continued to call for more evidence (Proctor, 2008). “More evidence” sounds virtuous, but it facilitates a more sophisticated kind of lie.
Paradoxically, it’s easy to culture ignorance when we are awash in “knowledge”. Social media allows exploiters to overwhelm most North Americans in personalized (non)information. We have to filter. But as our own gatekeepers, we tend to prefer what social authorities package as the familiar, internalizing the censoring disciplinary mechanism. In the age of curated online content, it’s hardly surprising that anti-intellectualism flourishes. As Dr. Monica Lee put it, without experts to refer to, we have only the prejudices shaped by our culture to determine what is “right” (2020). Self-serving notions of one’s morality like these contribute not only to crying “fake news”, but also a renewed interest in examining the ignorance underlying them.
Agnotology is the study of the cultural production of ignorance, typically for political purposes.In the field, agnogenesis – the creation and maintenance of ignorance – is typically divided into three categories: ignorance that is actively constructed, passively constructed, or as our native state.
First, ignorance can be actively constructed as a political strategy. Suppose that you were the leader of a powerful, democratic country, strongly motivated to maximize your nation’s economic performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. You know that lockdowns and physical distancing would likely result in fewer deaths, but would also diminish your GDP. What to do?
You could launch an information blitz about “herd immunity”, a strategy of allowing the virus quickly to sweep through the population, leaving the population immune (minus the half a million dead). Justify your strategy via a scientific advisory group, framing your economic interests as just “following the science”. Thus, although you hand-picked the members of this advisory group, excluding molecular virologists, immunologists, or social scientists who study community care, you aren’t “lying”when you refer to your “scientific advisors”.
In this scenario, you would be the United Kingdom’s government under Boris Johnson (Lee,2020). Consider also the countries that presented antimalarial drugs as a means of combating the virus without acknowledging the ecological fallacies in the original research (Fortaleza, 2020).
Granted, we may have to accept ignorance of some features of the Covid-19 pandemic insofar as the cost of gaining knowledge is too high, as in the case of experiments that would violate basic human rights in order to determine a disease’s transmission and virality. Yet our ignorance is often exploited by authority figures with expert advisors, often at the expense of the marginalized: the half-million casualties in Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom likely wouldn’t have been young, rich, and white.
Even if the scientists who researched the drugs were not consciously crafting ignorance, it would have been passively constructed by the culture that rewards papers with certain results over others.
Passively constructed ignorance is the second form of agnogenesis. Our cultural environment shapes what beliefs we focus on, scrutinize, accept, and align with. For example, people tend to scrutinize information more critically when it comes from “outside”. Su-ming Khoo (2020) writes about how the global North’s assumed superiority leaves it “ignorant” – deaf – to the global South’s knowledge relevant to Covid-19. South Africa has battled with AIDS denialism for decades, but their hard-earned lessons are typically viewed as regional knowledge.
Similarly, China’s pandemic response is often framed as authoritarian, its data ignored or rejected based on the assumption of that government’s manipulation (Zhang & Xu, 2020). This widespread narrative dichotomy of East against West has disrupted discourse in academia, where sharing of data is crucial to building generalizable models.
Two overseas Chinese researchers – Zhang and Xu (2020) – connected these threads, noting how Sinophobia reinforces exclusionary knowledge hierarchies. When Zhang sent Chinese data about the virus to colleagues in North America, she was offering them “subjugated knowledges,” Michel Foucault’s term for information disqualified or dismissed by the dominant discourses (Zhang & Xu,2020). That her information was marginalized by the scientists to whom she sent it -- predominantly Caucasian men -- speaks less to the character of the actors involved, and more to the intersection of race and gender in determining who is allowed to dispel ignorance.
But we should also consider ignorance on a more intimate level. How much do we know about how a face mask protects us from Covid-19? Do we know where the beliefs we’ve accepted came from,or their motivation? Ordinarily, how confident are we in these judgements? Can that confidence reflect the information outside of our scope of awareness?
Consider all the knowledge we are unaware of not knowing about our masks. Do we know whether a simple cotton mask provides protection against large droplets that lodge high in the respiratory tract, or small droplets that lodge low? Do we know what kind of droplets actually spread Covid-19? Isn’t it true that we routinely assume answers to questions that we are unaware of having asked, and even unaware of needing to be asked?
Thus, we see the third form of ignorance, to which cultural and political forces respond: as our native state. Ignorance is not an exception but the default, and we are awash in it without even realizing. Consider again the expanse of information we don’t know we are lacking about face masks.
To study agnotology in the midst of a pandemic is to see us trying to find our way through a vast marshland. Various authorities urge us to accept their guidance, their experts, their maps, and to do so without considering actively constructed chicanery or passively constructed biases. These figures might speak to the swamp’s native state of visual impenetrability, but only to promote their route through the murky waters. While agnotology won’t get us home, it can help us to avoid the more treacherous paths.
References
Fortaleza, Carlos Magno Castelo Branco. (2020). Evidence, rationality, and ignorance: Agnotologicalissues in COVID-19 science. Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical, 53, e20200475.Epub September 21, 2020.https://doi.org/10.1590/0037-8682-0475-2020
Khoo, S. (2020). COVID-19 Pandemic Ignorance and the ‘Worlds’ of Development. In Cannon C. (Author)& Carmody P., McCann G., Colleran C., & O’Halloran C. (Eds.), COVID-19 in the Global South:Impacts and Responses (pp. 7-16). Bristol: Bristol University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv18gfz7c.8
Lee, D. M. (2020). Covid-19: Agnotology, inequality, and leadership. Human Resource DevelopmentInternational, 23(4), 333-346. doi:10.1080/13678868.2020.1779544
Proctor, R. N. (2008) Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (andIts Study). In Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (Eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking ofIgnorance (1st ed., pp. 1-36). Stanford University Press.
Zhang, Y., & Xu, F. (2020). Ignorance, Orientalism and Sinophobia in Knowledge Production on COVID-19. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 111(3), 211-223. doi:10.1111/tesg.12441