The Practice of “Cultivated Ignorance,” and the People Who Study It
Everything you need to know about an increasingly useful word: “Agnotology.”
If you’ve been following recent crises — like the Covid pandemic, the OxyContin epidemic, the denial of climate change, the denial of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the record-setting Fox News defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the broadcast of falsehoods, the claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, or former President Trump’s assertions that the numerous federal indictments against him are “political witch hunts orchestrated by the weaponized Department of Justice” — you have a first row seat in the classroom of agnotology. Agnotology is defined as the study of intentional, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt. The word is formed by the Greek word agnostos (meaning “not knowing” or “unknown”; formed from a-, “not”, and gnostos, “to be known.”) and the familiar word-forming element –ology (meaning “branch of knowledge or science”). The specific focus of agnotology is the ignorance or doubt achieved by the publication of misleading scientific or medical information by corporations, political parties, government agencies, and advocacy organizations. In a sense, culturally-induced ignorance is a more global or systemic version of gaslighting, the abusive psychological technique of lying, minimizing, or rewriting history to manipulate a partner into believing a deliberately false narrative that causes them to question their sanity.
As a piece of terminology, “agnotology” first appears in the book The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer (1995) by Robert Proctor, a professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. He writes:
“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 later book, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Proctor expands on the definition and origins of the term:
“My hope for devising a new term was to suggest… the historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known — and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things. In 1992 I posed this challenge to linguist Iain Boal, and it was he who came up with the term in the spring of that year.”
In The Cancer Wars, Proctor maps out the different ways corporations propagate doubt or ignorance, focusing on the tobacco industry’s public relations campaign to convince consumers — despite overwhelming medical evidence — that tobacco was not addictive, and the fossil fuel industry’s public relations campaign to convince Americans and politicians, despite scientific consensus, that climate change is a hoax. Quite often, calculated public ignorance of this sort is induced by creating an illusion that there is a “balanced debate” on the topic, framing the existing consensus as “one side of the story.”
A textbook case of agnotology was recently highlighted in the gripping Hulu series Dopesick, based on the book of the same title by Beth Macy. In the series, we witness how OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma sponsored manipulated clinical trials to generate a misleading conclusion that the drug was not addictive, encouraging doctors to write more than 68.7 million prescriptions a year and creating a generational catastrophe under the cover of a carefully cultivated ignorance about its cause. Ultimately, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to conspiracies to defraud the U.S. and violate the anti-kickback statute. (The Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, were ordered to pay up $6 billion to resolve widespread litigation that they fueled the opioid epidemic.)
In a fascinating 2016 essay for BBC Future by Georgina Kenyon, Proctor is asked to weigh in on his work in agnotology and the processes by which mass ignorance of this sort is cultivated and spread:
“We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise. 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.”
Kenyon also interviews another academic in the field of agnotology: David Dunning, then a professor of psychology at Cornell College (who is best known for defining the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people with low ability or expertise tend to overestimate their knowledge or ability). Dunning notes that the internet is only exacerbating a modern era of ignorance because of the ease with which it can create a false sense of expertise.
“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.”
Let us, for a moment, circle back to the definition of agnotology that we initially discussed. We learned that the specific focus of agnotology is the ignorance or doubt achieved by the publication of misleading scientific or medical information by corporations, political parties, government agencies, and advocacy organizations. But now, we face a new informaton nemesis: artificial intelligence. Recently, AI experts have been issuing dire warnings to anyone who will listen about the impending dangers of this technology. Imagine what will happen to society when the use of artificial intelligence— that will inevitably feed on our imperfections and foibles — becomes more pervasive and ultimately dominant in manipulating all the information we consume on a daily basis?
Although it was given its name by Proctor and Boal, the concept of agnotology was foreshadowed four decades earlier by Isaac Asimov in his brilliant Newsweek essay, “A Cult of Ignorance [1980].”
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has 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.’”
But whether you call it a cult of ignorance, systemic gaslighting, reality distortion field, or something else, it should be immensely rewarding to know that whenever you think about culturally induced ignorance from now on, you’ll be engaging in armchair agnotology.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy my book, Serendipitous Discoveries from the Bookshelf, based on my popular blog, Atkins Bookshelf, which explores the world of ideas — through books, movies, music, quotations, and the English language — for the intellectually curious.
