The Oregon Petition: A case study in agnotology

Doesn’t agnotogeny just recapitulate foologeny?

Well to promote ignorance would require you to be at least somewhat in the know, not? If so it’s a possible strategy to demonstrate that those who promote ignorance do in fact know better. On the other hand there maybe those that are so zealous in their defense of the possibility of some reasonable right that they become unreasonable in it. These are harder to deal with – as they have something of an allergic reaction. It is better to wait for them to be desensitized to be starting up the debate again as anything you say to address them whilst still overly sensitive will just bring out another allergy attack.

Your “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine” link (in the middle of the “The promoters, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine are obvious fruitcakes” bullet point) doesn’t point anywhere valid. OK, maybe it’s a subtle joke, but I figured it might just be an unintentional error.

I don’t know whether or not there is something distinctive about climate delusionism, but if there is, the description of it as advocacy, in which different and inconsistent arguments are put forward so long as they all support the position “we are good, they are not” doesn’t get at it. A cursory glance at the current UK election reveals the appropriteness of that description for all three parties.

John, the link to your 2002 post didn’t work for me. It appears as:
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2002/09/02/expertise-bias-and-argument-ad-hominem/

Two thoughts:

1) Let’s go with “agnotology.” May not be the perfect neologism. But at least it’s a neologism. Much better than misappropriating a philosophical term that means something totally different.

2) My guess is that the prehistory of this particularly rightwing habit of mind is a darkside argument regarding Communism: i.e. the dishonesty and unscrupulousness of the (then presumed) Communist foe requires conservatives to be equally dishonest and unscrupulous in the defense of freedom/capitalism/the Constitution/liberty etc. Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland (p. 437): “When Richard Nixon had a dirty job to get done, he often dispatched it to a Goldwater conservative. ‘Healthy right-wing exuberants’ were more likely to understand that civilization was at stake in defeating the enemy, and the end thus justified the means.”

“Doesn’t agnotogeny just recapitulate foologeny?”

You win the internet

Very interesting topic.

There are some problems with criticising the adoption of inconsistent positions, though they aren’t necessarily applicable in this case:

1. Arguing in the alternative is not necessarily inconsistent (in arguing legal cases, for example, one doesn’t try to establish contradictory propositions): ‘There was no dog, but even if you don’t accept that, there certainly wasn’t a bite, and even if you insist there was a dog and a bite, any such dog certainly wasn’t mine.’

2. The inconsistent positions may not actually be put forward by the same people: instead there may be a coalition – or axis – of dog-sceptics, moderate anti-bitists, and ‘wet’ ownership-deniers, all arguing against the same thesis. An extreme example in which this fact is ignored is that of so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’. Of course this stricture can also be taken advantage of, (sometimes) deliberately with the interpersonal distribution of arguments allowing any given individual to appear (indeed, be) consistent. (There is perhaps an element of a different and more subtle phenomenon in academic economics: an overall impression or position has dominance, even though individual economists all deviate from that position, or regard it as a vulgarisation. The deviations or rejections all go in different directions, so the methodological ideal remains the centre of gravity for economics as a whole…)

3. The ad hominem issue (properly so called, i.e. relying on inessential inconsistencies in the opponent’s position) might be relevant in some cases, if you want to take the high ground of impartial truth seeking rather than advocacy. That very much depends on whether the opposition is testifying to factual claims, or putting forward a logical argument. ‘Ad hominem’ is irrelevant in the factual case: pointing out inessential inconsistencies – or unrelated falsehoods – goes to the the reliability and even honesty of the witness, rather than being an argumentative strategy, and is an entirely appropriate (indeed required) move in impartially assessing evidence.

Another point perhaps worth making is that promoting ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean knowing the truth, nor deliberately propagating falsehood. Harry Frankfurt’s article (and impulse-buy pocket book), ‘On Bullshit’ discusses the state of being entirely indifferent to the truth, and I think this – with varying degrees of self-deception, bad-faith, repression of sneaking doubts etc – is a common enough phenomenon (e.g. in connection with WMD ), which muddies the waters considerably. This is a kind of plausible deniability (‘I don’t want to know’, like Odysseus’s shipmates) taken to its extreme in self-deception or ‘closing one’s mind to an obvious fact’ – to use a memorable judicial phrase which IIRC caused a good deal of trouble in relation to a definition of recklessness.

Relatedly, ignorance may be promoted without disseminating falsehood at all, knowingly or otherwise. Perhaps an example would be parapolitics (‘conspiracy theories’), in which area there is a great deal of bullshit (and its cousin, argument biased by unconscous prejudice), but also a parallel strategy of discouraging serious investigation, by rhetoric like that of the ‘paranoid style’ or by changing the subject to a non-existent ‘conspiracy theory of history’, as well as more overtly enforced taboos in e.g. the academic study of history.

Btw, (excuse the personal note but it’s highly relevant) I suppose I adopt a position somewhat similar to that described in to point 4 (may I suggest using numbers instead of bullets?): I have some doubts , around the 30% mark, that the official consensus position is correct, but since the policies it is driving are largely congenial to me, I have no interest in spending any time investigating an issue of which I’m currently 70% satisfied. (Obviously the figure is not a rigorously-defined quantity, though I think I’m more justified in providing a ‘merely indicative’ figure than those who usually use that phrase, i.e. statisticians.)

I also don’t tend to go on about these doubts because the 30% figure is apt to be ignored by both ‘sides’. I have no desire to bolster the 100% denialist position, nor to attract opprobrium nor to damage my reputation (or rather jeopardise any future need to avoid a bad reputation), especially since I’m mostly interested in the study of ‘conspiracy theories’, in which area one is constantly on the brink of being dismissed as a fruitcake.

(Missed a few posts while writing this one – hence BS ref)

Even if you’re not a cynical liar, you can’t call out the cynical liars on your side because they’re on your side.

That follows logically. One has to suppose that at least *some* on the Right are as intelligent as Dostoevsky’s inquisitor, and could argue that rhetoric and passions, not facts and logic, drive public discourse; hence the intelligent wingnut tolerates, even promotes, lies and fallacies because that is how one gets the results one desires.

Maybe one day in a fit of unemployment I will actually write The Red and the Blue, an updating of Stendhal in contemporary America. Closet liberal decides he has to fake his ideology to succeed; gets job homeschooling wingnut pol’s family … sub law school (& Federalist Society) for the seminary … D.C. for Paris … it could work!

“The converse question for the left, is whether there is any benefit in engaging intellectually with anyone who is, in the end, promoting ignorance and dishonesty by virtue of their affiliations.”

Oh yes, this. Well, that engagement wouldn’t be so bad, by itself. Unfortunately, nearly everyone who does it spends most of his time chiding other people for not doing it and boasting about how much of a better person he is than those who don’t.

I don’t think BS covers it though, and I don’t actually think Frankfurt’s characterisation cuts things at the joints, either, for all that his discussion is fairly interesting.

BS on his account is different from lying (I agree), because it is produced without concern for what the truth is. That’s fair enough, but I don’t think it’s a very significant difference. (Lying, btw, can arguably be done even by making a true assertion – if one believes it false.) What one believes is the key, but belief itself admits of degrees. I may be doing something very like lying if I say something while strongly suspecting it to be untrue; or while ‘deliberately’ ignoring strong grounds for doubting it.

I actually think the key to bullshit – its difference from the varieties of lying and similarly dishonest speech – is that one is not ‘primarily’ (excuse fudge) concerned to instil in the listener any particular belief. The kind of mutual grooming involved in pub discussions depends on agreeing, allowing each other to appear knowledgeable, etc. Often it’s quite clear that the person holding forth is literally making it up as they go along (UK readers may be familiar with Viz magazine’s ‘legal advice from the man in the pub’). While it may unfortunately give rise to beliefs in some participants, the aim of the person holding forth at any given time is really nothing to do with the topic, and this is understood by most participants. Instead it’s showing off, asserting dominance by commanding agreement, some ind of binding, whatever.

Similarly, ‘fast-talking’ bullshit is generated in pursuit of some goal like being admitted to a club – or of course, selling something – and comes as part of a package of which the primary components are typically nothing to do with eth content of what is being asserted – perhaps this claim can be part-operationalised by asking ‘would the speaker actually prefer it if the meaning of what is beiong said washed over the other party altogether?’

Denial of human-reversible CC is however aimed – at least in some cases – at convincing people of a factual claim (or in eroding belief in its contradiction). At one point, Frankfurt discusses Augustine (I think, could be Aquinas) on lying. IIRC, ‘A’ only considers lying to be ‘real’ lying if its intention is to instil false beliefs for the sake of doing so – I suspect this is tied up with Double Effect, since otherwise this seems a bit odd. But in any case, I don’t think the CC denial campaigners can be described as ‘only incidentally’ wanting to convince others of a particular claim in any plausible sense.

(A bit rambling, not well thought out, sorry.)

Gary Trudeau has a relevant strip, today.

“To avoid thread derailment, I’d like to defer to a separate thread (coming soon, I promise) the main rightwing response, which is a tu quoque, that is, that the left (here meaning Democrats and everyone to their left) is just as bad. I don’t believe there is anything comparable to the Oregon petition, but I want to leave this for a separate debate.”

I await that thread as the only thing about climate change that bugs me quite so much as those denying its existence on the basis of no knowledge at all (or even manufactured absebnce of knowledge) are those who propose solutions on similarly no knowledge at all (or manufactured absence of knowledge). Which does become rather a tu quoque.

I don’t think that large oil and coal companies often really have political beliefs, as such. They’re are just gaming the system for their benefit, in the same way as they game the electoral or regulatory political systems. If they decided that “left wing” beliefs served them better, they’d do that in some sense.

Left-wing beliefs can’t serve them better, or, indeed, at all. Left-wing beliefs hold that democratic government exists to benefit the people in general, not whoever can most successfully game it in their direction. The whole enterprise (and I use that word advisedly) of running the government for private benefit is right-wing (as the wings are defined in the present-day US.)

Oh yeah, I’m really waiting for that other thread too, so Tim Worstall can tell us how much people ignorantly proposing solutions bug him, and so that Tim Wilkinson can tell us about his 30% doubts (if he really has them, and they weren’t part of a hypothetical; I couldn’t quite tell). Really, truly, sincerely looking forward to it. Because really, that stuff is just as important as the organized campaign to discredit science, and we wouldn’t be fair and balanced if we didn’t give people a chance to address it at length.

Tim Wilkinson: I think Rich is right on when he points to the corporate funding of this stuff. The oil companies, the tobacco companies, and all the rest are not just stumbling around looking for things they can use to prop up ideologies they’re generally committed to – they’re looking for defense of their privileged positions, and for tools to improve them. Right-wing political movements make themselves useful for this precisely because they are hostile to outside truths and often overtly committed to ignorance as a virtue in the general public.

In this particular case, the phrase “the right wing” has particular content in contemporary America, as well as a history of meaning going back to the French Revolution.

Sure. But the association of conservatism and the Republican Party with the interests of big business has existed since, well, big business, and big business played a huge role in the *creation* of conservatism and of the Republican Party (which, after 1877, had rather lost its raison d’etre). If it’s succeeded in persuading any leftists that this is not “political” in a nontrivial sense, well, that’s another feather in its cap.

In a country with some democratic features, the more oligarchical your party is, the more you have to lie. There is an irreducible contradiction between egalitarianism and the defense of privilege. The novelty in the case of environmental issues is that the anti-evolutionary position is not only maintained in the interest of a group that is a minority relative to the other people living now. It is also a combination against people who haven’t been born yet. (Nice symmetry: conservatism, which maintains that the dead should have a vote, engaged in a struggle with those who want to extend the franchise in the other direction.)

The basketball analogy is illuminating, even for someone such as myself who lacks any knowledge of the rules. It also adds a tinge of irony to Sarah Palin’s use of an extended basketball analogy in her speech announcing her resignation as governer of Alaska:

“Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me and that’s sports. Basketball! And I use it because you are naïve if you don’t see a full court press from the national level picking away right now. A… good point guard here’s what she does: she drives through a full court press pro…tecting the ball, keeping her head… up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win *gasp* and that is what I’m doing – keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities remember they include energy independence and smaller government *gasp* and national security and freedom and I know when it’s time to pass the ball… for victory.”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin

The problem have with “Agnotology” and similar terms is that it buries all sorts of things under a single word for a process.

It’s not the name of a process, it’s a topic or field of study. The aim being digging all those things up and having a good look at them.

My basic point is that the conservatism of big business is not really in any important sense the same thing as the conservatism of the right wing.

A screw and a screwdriver aren’t the same thing either, but understanding either without knowledge of the other is difficult at best. Studying them in isolation would be perverse.

Not to be too shameful in my self-promotion, but there’s a book I can recommend on the subject, the paperback edition of which debuts tomorrow.

Barry is right, although I’m interested in other aspects of the relationship as well. chris, I think you’re being too reductionistic. The whole Nixonland thing, in America, just would not work without race. And racism doesn’t simply reduce to business dividing the proletariat. Racism is bound up with America from slavery on, and while modern, corporate big business certainly has used it, it’s really overestimating what they can do to say that they primarily created it or maintain it. Sure, if you’re studying a political system you want to study all parts of the system, but you have to study what’s actually there.

Here’s an example. In some ways, especially in its origins, global warming denialism was a business effort. And they’re always provided experts for it. But right now I think that it functions in the U.S. more as a proxy for racism than anything else. Ressentiment at elites who tell them what to do is how right-wingers have been trained to come together around the basic hatred of black and brown people that it’s no longer respectable for them to express.

My initial reaction to this post is that it seems rather silly and self defeating. Large political coalitions always contain great diversity and draw various malcontents, demagogues, and publicity seekers.

A great example is the Lyndon LaRouche political cult. These days they attend Tea Party rallies, generally with “Obama as Hitler” and impeachment signs. They attract the press, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, a few years back they could be found with similar signs about Bush at anti-war rallies. What does their participation in those events tell us about the other people at those events? Very little, though it can be mistaken as emblematic, either by those ignorant of what is actually going on or those blinded by their own bias.

This petition in Oregon–for which you deserve at least this credit: I heard it here first–does not represent “the right” or even all those who question whether global warming is indeed a crisis which requires an immediate, massive, coordinated, and very expensive solution.

If you sought an honest debate, you would look for the most honest and thoughtful persons on “the right” or among those who question global warming. Instead, you “present only evidence that supports your case,” by presenting the worst, rather than the best, of your opposition. From the tone of your post, one could easily get the impression that, in your view, people who agree with you are good, people who are not like you are bad. Very disheartening.

Racism is bound up with America from slavery on, and while modern, corporate big business certainly has used it, it’s really overestimating what they can do to say that they primarily created it or maintain it.

Well, I suppose that depends on whether or not you’re willing to extend your definition of “big business” into the past, to cover business arrangements that existed then. The Civil War was basically fought (on the South side) by poor whites to defend the slaveowning rights of rich whites and to this day it’s primarily poor whites who still have Confederate flags on their property. That may not be *corporate*, per se, but class is also bound up with America from the Revolution on (or even longer) and the phenomenon of using racism to distract from class issues is quite old.

I see what you’re getting at with the ideology taking on a life of its own, but was it ever *really* off life support from the Scaifes and Murdochs of the world? It certainly isn’t today — look at the (now semi-) secret backers of the Tea Party for example.

I think it fuels the growth of the Tea Party for its members to believe that they’re not on anyone’s leash. I think it is dangerous to conclude that they are not, in fact, on anyone’s leash.

P.S. The fact that “the whole Nixonland thing” works through race does not necessarily mean it *couldn’t* work without race, but only that it would have to take a different form. Race is a convenient tool because it’s there and powerful, but other tools could be found or made if needed. Religion is popular, historically speaking. You can divide the people according to their favorite chariot racing teams if no other division is handy.

Are you seriously claiming that the Oregon petition is endorsed, implicitly or explicitly, as a rightwing dogma? This can’t be right: there are many people on the right who believe that global warming exists and is at least partially due to man’s influence. People that have said so publicly. Including the most famous Republican governor, as well as the most recent Republican presidential candidate. But also hosts of others. The claim that the petition has been endorsed or silently tolerated on the right is wildly and manifestly false. It has been clearly implicitly rejected by a great many on the right – all of those that “believe in” global warming. Yes, explicit rejections are more rare. But so what? Explicit rejections of lots of things are rare.

Multinationals would mostly prefer to get the climate change issue settled, but it’s become a cultural totem for the Anglospheric right

I find it difficult to believe that America’s corporations really would like to see a climate bill, but are unable to make their $$$ effective in marshaling public opinion.

-ology is now a standard English suffix, so we can use it however we wish without worrying about Latin roots if the stem is English, e.g. ‘kidology’. Otherwise we still have to worry as much as ever.

Oh yeah, while I remember: the aim is present advocacy for the general proposition “We are good, people who are Not Like Us are bad” seems wrong to me. Wouldn’t that general proposition function in any given case as a premise/supporting evidence rather than being the conclusion/probandum? E.g. ‘people not like us are bad, therefore CC is wrong QED’

John Quiggin is basically right, I think, that multinationals in general would rather just get the issue settled and go on. Oil and coal companies might not, but they are a minority of multinationals in general. The reason that they can’t “make their $$$ effective in marshaling public opinion” is because they have no strong motive to. While they might have a preference to just see the end of the dispute, it’s not a large enough preference to make them throw lots of money at it.

As for ressentiment at elites — well, I can quote Lee Atwater, who was an expert in this if anyone was:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

I don’t know how much you know about the U.S., but approval of a war against brown people is not a counterexample to ressentiment against elites. It’s a very coded use of “elites”. Forced busing, state’s rights, even taxes — those were things presented to the right as things that “elites” were making them do, “big government” (a later phrase) taking control of their lives. Of course they knew that it was all about their racism. But they were bitterly angry that society was becoming less racist.

A few decades later, and the dog whistle has gone up another octave. Now it’s climatological science as focus for displaced anger at “elites” forcing “big government” on them. But that itself is a displacement for anger about their racism.

John Quiggin may be right to generalize to a cultural dislike of people Not Like Us. But this expresses itself in different places according to well-marked historical paths. I don’t think that you can really understand why so many people in the U.S. seem to care so strongly about their global warming denialism without understanding that it’s a proxy for racism.

If anyone really wants to dig into this topic, take a look at the first few pages of my Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony, a 185-page report that details the 20-year history of climate anti-science of which OISM petition was one step, created by familiar players. (In this case, OISM was likely acting as a front for the George C. Marshall Institute.)

It discusses overall machinery, differing sets of reasons for anti-science (some derived from discussions at JohnQuiggin), funding flows in some detail, chronologies, specific activities (including OISM), and organizations+people. For the latter, this is mostly North American-oriented, but Australia is hardly omitted!

It especially notes the conservative family foundations who fund a lot of this (along with ExxonMobil), such a Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers (who I suspect most readers have never heard of. There are ~9th & 10th richest people in USA; their father cofounded the John Birch Society… Koch Industries is 2nd largest private firm in US … oil&gas)

There is a large tangle of financial, political and ideological interests in all this, and one needs care to avoid over-simplification. Much of this is driven from Washington, DC, specifically within a block of “K-Street” (Lobbyist Central), but people are involved around the world. See this Google Map, which shows many of the organizations. The report gets updated as more information appears, of which a small tidbit is over at Deltoid,Wegman and Bl*ck H*licopters. I don’t know if you those in Oz, but it is an article of faith among some in US that they are out there, watching and waiting .

arrgh, blockquote fail. My kingdom (small and dusty) for a preview button.

In any study of the origins and cultural significance of the phenomenon in question (whatever you call it), I think you have to consult the work of slacktivist, who has investigated it exhaustively from an evangelical Christian perspective.

For instance, his post on False Witnesses, and how the patently ludicrious rumor that Proctor&Gamble was a satanic cult was spread, and re-spread, and spread again. In talking to many, many of his fellow Christians about this rumor, he discovered:

The following are all true of the people spreading the Procter & Gamble rumor:
1. They didn’t really believe it themselves.
2. They were passing it along with the intent of misinforming others. Deliberately.
3. They did not respect, or care about, the actual facts of the matter, except to the extent that they viewed such facts with hostility.
4. Being told that the Bad Thing they were purportedly upset about wasn’t real only made them more upset. Proof that the 23rd largest corporation in America was not in league with the Devil made them defensive and very, very angry.

He argues — persuasively — that while the people who started the rumor had an “honest” money motive to do so, most of the people who spread it were not innocent dupes, but *complicit* dupes.

In False Witnesses, Part 2, he talks about the motive of fear, and one way of fighting it

requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.
This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.
Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty? Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other.

I don’t know what the link-limit is here, so I’ll stop for now — but you may also wish to check his latest post, on “Empathy and epistemic closure”, which stresses that the will to be stupid is, fundamentally, a fear of empathy, of feeling too connected to other people. It is, at base, a *moral* problem, not an epistemic one.

If the analysis of the manufacturing of ignorance were a field of study, the investigation of the sociology of mainstream economics would be a part of it.

@ 40:

A screw and a screwdriver aren’t the same thing,
But drinking the latter may lead to the former.

;)

Deleted. Jack, I tolerate this kind of thing on my blog, but I’ve asked you several times not to post it on CT. From now, on any comments from you place here will be deleted – JQ

Previous commenters have wrestled with the sincerity of the producers of various denialist faiths. It’s far simpler to consider the consumers, who are seldom so scrupulous. Creationists continue to claim the second law of thermodynamics as proof of evolution’s impossibility even though FAQ’s on creationist websites caution against that argument.

The relevant ugly neologism in this case is Anosognosia, which covers Alzheimer’s and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Put simply, your condition blinds you to your ignorance. Unfortunately, this is more like a universal condition than a rare degenerative disorder.

In the presidential election of 1964, Johnson won by a landslide over Goldwater. The diehards sported bumperstickers reading “26 million people can’t be wrong”, implying that a much larger number must be.

It’s difficult to argue with people for whom logic is just an old tool rusting in the bottom of the box.

Doctor Science @64: thank you for calling my attention to slacktivist’s work. Brilliant stuff which really helped me to understand why the dupes are so eager to be duped. (That has always been the part that dumbfounded me- the motives, generally pecuniary, of the people pulling their strings have always been obvious.)

An interesting suggestion, but seems undersubstantiated as it relates to CC.

Yeah, I agree. Race has a lot to do with views on labor, the extent of economic inequality, the welfare state, the GWOT, the War on Some Drugs (the renaming of hemp is particularly revealing), police power issues in general, and several other issues, but relatively little to do with climate change.

It’s important (and deeply tangled up in class which is also important), but it’s overly reductive to view *everything* through its lens.

Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven

The operational difference between BS and agnotology

I think that the main reason to view this Oregon Petition, and similar such phenomena we see from the Right, as BS rather than “agnotology”, some supposed propensity for ignorance as an end in itself, is that the former explanation is simply more likely to be an accurate assessment. I honestly don’t understand how this propensity for ignorance works, why anyone would have it, etc.; while BS is the water we all swim in.
But mileage may vary on that impression. It is just an impression.

But I also think that explaining the Right’s anti-scientific stance as BS, rather than agnotology, makes the phenomenon, whatever causal explanation is accepted, tractable. There really is nothing therapeutic to be done for a lust for ignorance, either for the spouters of its doctrines, or their listeners and followers, who must also be presumed to have this lust for ignorance. But, you know, if their hold on their followers is not a problem, if these people do not threaten the hold of what we project as “right reason” over majority opinion, then why bother thinking about them, as BSers or agnotologues? If these folks do present a threat, we need an approach to meeting that threat, and I submit that viewing them as agnotologues is supremely unhelpful.

Pointing out that their doctrines are contrary to accepted science, or any other variety of received wisdom, is simply playing into their hands. They’ve already discounted that objection, and pointing out that they are mavericks challenging the conventional wsidom is simply helping them with their PR. The defenders of the conventional wisdom have always denounced those who challenged it as ignorantist upstarts, people who had no respect for the established modes of thought, which lead to the established conclusions of the conventional wisdom. Of course, usually the conventional wisdom is absolutely right. It wouldn’t have achieved that status of universal acceptance unless it mostly worked. But history plays this trick on us, that insofar as it is the record of human progress, it turns on episodes that end up proving the conventional wisdom to have been wrong, and upstart, once heterodox and “unscientific”, opinions, to have been right.

If you have spent any time arguing with actual US rightists lately, you may well, as I have, found yourself confronted with exactly this rhetorical ploy. “Why is it that you supposed progressives are so unwilling to go along with, say, calling a constitutional convention? Why won’t you at least entertain the idea that maybe a system of divided sovereignty is not only what the Founders intended, but would work to defend against the sort of governmental overreach you claim to be concerned over? Why can’t you let alternate theories to Darwin’s about how life originated and developed, be at least put in fornt of schoolchildren ofr their consideration? Why can’t you admit into the forum of public debate, on equal footing with the defenders of orthodoxy, scientists, even if there are only a dozen of them right now, who question this dogma of AGW? At the outset, it was only one scientist, Einstein, who challenged the conventional wisdom of Newtonian mechanics. Why won’t you let the debate begin?”

You see, if you attack them as motivated by a lust for ignorance, you are forced into a situation in which they are saying the same thing about you. Agnotology as an explanation for behavior is, I’m afraid, already their theory about you. They got there first, they have trademark rights. You may not be convinced by their view of your position, and neither its similarity to what you think of them, nor the fact that they got there first, in any way helps their claim to your assent. But it does give all those people without parti pris, all those people in the middle whom we all must be concerned about slipping over to the Dark Side, some reason to see you as on at least equal footing as them, if not their inferior imitators. Again, if these people without parti pris don’t matter, why bother worrying about the behavior of the Rightists?

This makes sense in moral terms as well. The choice between portraying one’s antagonists as agnotologists, as oposed to BSers, is also a choice between seeing them as knaves, as opposed to fools. Now, my preference for portraying these people as BSers, fools, does not really let them off the hook morally. If you presume to set your opinions forth in public as the truth, you have a fundamental duty to care about the truth status of those opinions, and act accordingly, a duty that BSers ignore. Ignoring this duty fouls the waters of public discourse, as they have done. But they do not intend harm, in my view, they do not set out in an evil plot to destroy science, or right opinion.

To reject my view of them as fools, and start with the premise that they are evil, inevitably leads to Apocalyptic thinking. Follow that line, and the failure of AGW to carry all before it in public debate, can only be the handiwork of this diabolical force, agnotology, and the hold it has on the purveyors of anti-science, and their followers.

I think it much more sensible to see in the failure of AGW to carry all before it, and to have already dictated a wise and prudent course of cutting back on greenouse gasses, no more or less than the operation of the universal folly that we see every day. We and don’t have to project some new construct such as agnotology to explain it. There is more of PT Barnum than Beelzebub in the anti-science hucksters of the Right. No one ever went broke underestimating the American public, and where, as in delaying action on AGW, there is money to be made, hucksters and opportunists will not be lacking to fill the “need”. It’s surprising the hucksters aren’t doing even better than they are.

Our side will either win the argument in time to avoid climate catastrophe, or we won’t. We win the argument when the undecideds start to laugh at the hucksters. Maybe that will take too long, because it does involve getting these people to admit that they were fools for listening to the hucksters. But at least that muddle-through approach might work. Telling people that they are evil, that they are burdened, not just with the folly that the wisest of us possess in great quantities, but that they flirted with the Right out of an evil hatred of knowledge, has no chance of working.

The one thing that everybody knows is that they do not intend evil. The real trick is getting them to own their folly before its consequences overwhelm us all.

” until Manzi’s takedown of Levin, I’m not aware of anyone on the conservative side of politics who has criticised the petition. On the contrary…”

It seems Mr.Quiggin’s reading on the conservative side is somewhat lacking in bandwidth-
Taki’s Magazine has long protested neocon hostility to science-based policy , and questioned the Oregon petition’s scientific bona fides in thus 2008 essay:
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/climate_of_here/

Do let our sainted editor know if Pat is not your favorite weatherman.

“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science.[!!] Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”
That’s what is considered to be by many the most important philosophical essay in the past 50 years. It’s Quine, and it’s quackery.

Which is more important, the merits of the argument or the qualifications of the arguer? By the latter, which is the standard used to disqualify many/most of the Petition Signers, you would be disqualified as commenter on either the petition or the issue of AGW itself.
It has already been shown that the researchers were caught red-handed falsifying data and espousing the process of falsification. Quid Pro Quo has supplanted Moral Principle when it comes to research on occasion too numerous to mention – who funds the research, and what is at stake? In the case of GW, ALleGOREy stands to make 12-figure sums. With those kinds of payoffs, available to large corporations, is it any wonder the entire exercise has become an extortion racket? Somehow, we undereducated lot are supposed to parrot paid-for “researchers” and “experts” and maintain the disconnect. The real issue is pollution – pollution caused by the same corporations owned by the Al Gores and other pseudo-lefties and righties of the world who needed a diversion from the cleanup mandate which is conveniently being ignored in favor of a new derivative trading scheme which will pass on the cost to the public.
This is not a Red vs. Blue issue. To think as such is to play into the hands of the Change agents who wish to cloud the issue and steer (castrate) the debate toward a solution beneficial to Corporate-state Elites who only lip-serve their superficial Ideological loyalties. There is only one party, and that is the hierarchy of insiders who rig every game in town.

I think one challenge we have down here in the state of Georgia–the heart of Red America isn’t really the group think self insulation of conservative [sic] academics/think tanks/talking heads… but the impacts on everyday voters. When talking one on one with voters I find a total inability to deal with and face up to the propaganda.

Republican voters–at least many of them– truly refuse to want to deal with you if you are willing to actually take the time and respectfully take down each on of their talking points. They will turn to the “I just don’t believe that.”

It make me think of what Simon Blackburn said in his book Turth. “Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb.” I don’t think we can defuse the time bomb via more and more examples and “fact checking” as conservatives don’t care. I think the challenge we face is out organizing them and reaching the disaffected population that that watches fox news nor cares to. Granted this might be a far greater challenge. Sigh…

“I must admit I’d never heard of Taki’s magazine, and the piece cited is excellent.”

Russell was at, Tah Dah! Techcentralstation of greatly loved (erm?) memory and moved over to Takimag as did one or two others.

It make me think of what Simon Blackburn said in his book Turth. “Someone sitting on a completely unreasonable belief is sitting on a time bomb.”

But if one uses logic as a tool to be used as needed and not otherwise, what counts as an “unreasonable” belief?

It has already been shown that the researchers were caught red-handed falsifying data and espousing the process of falsification.

Liar. Boring liar, since this stupid lie has been debunked many, many times.

Thanks for demonstrating the point of the original post so clearly though.

@97: But extreme animal-rights stances like PETA’s are controversial *within* the left. They aren’t litmus tests for the whole side of the political spectrum or its major political movements the way abortion or AGW or freshwater econ are.

(Strictly speaking, animal rights is a set of value judgments, but to the extent that its agenda is advanced by misinformation, that would qualify — if the misinformation was adopted, repeated, and defended by a large majority of leftists, which it is not.)

Meanwhile Melanie Phillips is a guest speaker at the AEI (ignorance central) promoting her new book (rant) The World Turned Upside Down.