The Unknowers

How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World

Linsey McGoey

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781780326382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Deliberate ignorance has been known as the 'Ostrich Instruction' in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people's lives? Does the idea that knowledge is power still apply in today's post-truth world? A bold, wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ignorance and power in the modern age, from debates over colonial power and economic rent-seeking in the 18th and 19th centuries to the legal defences of today, The Unknowers shows that strategic ignorance has not only long been an inherent part of modern power and big business, but also that true power lies in the ability to convince others of where the boundary between ignorance and knowledge lies.

CHAPTER 1

NARROW HISTORY

They had seen it in their nightmares: the possibility of the inferno that came true, the premonition of a fire killing their neighbours and family members. Over 70 boys, girls, women and men died in the fire at London’s Grenfell Tower on June 14, 2017.

The Grenfell residents had seen smoke before.

In May 2013, they noticed it spilling from the sockets of different appliances, their fridges, televisions and laptops damaged by a series of ominous electrical surges.

‘We had numerous power surges in the space of a minute, and in that process my computer and monitor literally exploded, with smoke seeping out from the back,’ one resident wrote at the time.¹

Residents had raised concerns over fire risks as far back as 2004. Those who clamoured the loudest for Grenfell’s management to address their fears were treated the harshest. When he wrote a series of blogs expressing his concerns over fire risks, one resident was threatened with legal action. In July 2013, Kensington and Chelsea Council sent a letter directing him to remove the blog or face legal implications for his ‘defamatory’ posts.²

The blog stayed up, and three years later, in 2016, a grimly prescient post foretold the coming disaster: ‘It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord.’³

Six months later, Grenfell Tower was engulfed in flames. In the weeks following, residents, journalists and activists wrote scores of articles dissecting the origins of the tragedy. One article used particularly apt wording stating that Grenfell resulted from many things: cost-cutting; greed; apathy towards the lives of others. But most of all it stemmed from the ‘wilful ignorance of experts’ who were determined not to perceive or resolve the peril that residents knew they were facing.⁴

CREDIBILITY DEFICITS

The Grenfell tragedy is a stark reminder of the ways people are judged to be inferior knowers. Grenfell residents knew their lives were at risk, but their lack of political clout or social status made them easy to ignore. They were subjected to a specific form of dismissal so widespread that it often happens without comment or rebuke – the presumption that someone lacks the knowledge to pass authoritative judgement about a given situation. In this case, Grenfell residents were deemed incapable of judging their own safety. They were presumed to be ignorant, a presumption that underscores a terrible irony. Grenfell did result from ignorance, but not from the residents. Rather, the will to ignorance was mastered by expert authorities who wielded the power to dismiss residents’ concerns.

The Grenfell tragedy illuminates the persistence of something the philosopher Miranda Fricker describes as ‘testimonial injustice,’ the tendency for some individuals to experience credibility deficits – the undervaluing of a person’s ability to understand or prescribe a sound course of action in a given situation. Fricker contrasts the notion of credibility deficit with credibility excess, the tendency to be perceived as especially intelligent or authoritative even if one has no right to be judged so.⁵

Often, credibility deficits are rooted in blatant stereotypes, such as negative perceptions of another person’s intelligence or aptitude based on skin colour, gender or accent. The opposite instinct is also true. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, many of us have assumed someone must be a source of authority on a topic because they sound and look so: the expensively dressed middle-aged man who commands more respect than his counterpart with a working-class accent.

One of the clearest examples of testimonial injustice occurs whenever a person or a group of people is denied recognition and reparation for past injustices until someone who is not among or descended from the injured party admits that the abuse took place. Those who have first-hand experience of suffering or who grew up in families where accounts of violence were passed down are treated as incapable of giving a definitive understanding of the injustice. Often, the ill-treatment their families suffered only becomes real to a larger majority when a member of the majority admits that abuse occurred. And yet typically, members of the majority often benefit from persistent ignorance of the injustice in question, and for this reason undeniable abuse is somehow denied for decades, even centuries, and when it’s finally recognized by a wider public, people suggest it happened so long ago that to speak of it is counter-productive.

A further illustration can be taken from the lethal policies carried out against native groups in Canada during the colonial period and beyond. In 2013, James Daschuk, a little-known assistant professor of health studies at the University of Regina, published a book called Clearing the Plains that detailed the severity of Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples. It became a surprise success: a bestseller read widely by the Canadian general public, reviewed in leading national newspapers, and awarded the most esteemed book prize in Canada, a Governor General’s award.

Daschuk’s book challenged conventional understandings of why people from indigenous communities died in much greater numbers than neighbouring settler communities after the establishment of the Canadian dominion in 1867. He documents a turning point in government policy: the appointment of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and the individual most responsible, Daschuk and others argue, for the forced starvation campaigns that led many First Nations to die when the Canadian government wilfully breached treaties by refusing to deliver food to starving groups in the prairies. Macdonald also oversaw the establishment of residential schools, where at least 6000 children died – this number is only an estimate because Canadian authorities chose to stop counting the dead in 1920.⁶

‘The first question one might ask is, why is this history so unknown?’ political theorist Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair writes in a review of Daschuk’s book. ‘The documentation is clearly there, and First Nations historians have been relaying stories of starvation, legal impositions, and resistance for decades.’⁷

Ignorance of the past is compounded by the chequered education even the most highly educated Canadians receive. ‘First Nations people know this story,’ Daschuk said during a public talk in Ottawa. ‘But what I’m really surprised about is that white Canadians haven’t heard this story, because it’s not taught in schools.’⁸

First Nations accounts have been dismissed as a sort of non-knowledge, an interpretation of the past that was never acknowledged as the past until Daschuk, a white scholar, testified to the truthfulness of their accounts. Although the injured group’s version proves accurate in the end, the fact that it takes a dominant and often oppressive group to confirm that it took place only underscores the pernicious relationship of inequality that endures – and at times is even magnified – through attempts to redress injustice.

The brutality of Canada’s starvation of indigenous groups is both known and unknown. Historians and media columnists often admit that treaties were illegally breached, but the involvement of national icons such as Macdonald is skirted over.

Jeffrey Simpson, a columnist for the nation’s most eminent newspaper, the Globe and Mail, has dismissed recent criticism of Macdonald’s legacy as ‘presentism,’ the application of moral standards to a historical period where they were absent. He argues that presentism ‘always deforms history because it reads back today’s mores and beliefs and assumptions into a time in which we did not live.’⁹

There is nothing particularly surprising about Simpson’s viewpoint – it is widely shared. But what would be wrong is to assume it is grounded in a command of historical knowledge when really it is grounded in a command of historical ignorance. For Simpson to stand his ground about Macdonald, he needs to resist rather than to pursue knowledge that could undermine his understanding of the past. By using the word ‘presentism,’ for example, he implies that moral outrage over the treatment of native groups was absent in Macdonald’s day.

But that is not the case. In Canada, ambivalence over the righteousness of Macdonald’s treatment of native groups was evident in popular newspapers. An 1888 cartoon in Grip, a Canadian satire magazine, shows Macdonald huddled with Edgar Dewdney, Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Territories. ‘Indians starving?’ Macdonald asks. ‘Oh well,’ he answers himself. ‘They’re not “friends of Dewdney,” you know. I’ll see that you don’t come to want, though, Mr. Contractor.’¹⁰

And long before Macdonald was ever in power in Canada, there was loud debate among European philosophes over the ethical treatment of earlier inhabitants of conquered lands.

Writing in the 1740s, Montesquieu was one of the earliest enlightenment thinkers to publicly consider whether the ‘new’ world’s indigenous inhabitants should be treated as sovereign equals. Listening to stories of indigenous people from European missionaries, Montesquieu’s answer is a self-satisfied hedge: ‘All countries have a law of nations,’ he writes in Spirit of the Laws, ‘not excepting the Iroquois themselves, though they devour their prisoners: for they send and receive ambassadors, and understand the rights of war and peace. The mischief is that their law of nations is not founded on true principles.’ This self-serving equivocality has characterized European debate over the rights of indigenous peoples for over four centuries.

It is inaccurate to suggest that concern over indigenous rights is merely a recent phenomenon, but many people, including celebrated scholars, do still argue this position. What renders their view of the past compelling is not the scope of their gaze but the convenience of their narrowness. To maintain that narrowness, believers must choose not to explore or admit facts that could destabilize a narrative they wish to see as inalterable. They must become masters of the unknown.

AGNOTOLOGY AND ITS LIMITS

The fact that dominant histories of the past tend to be selectively narrow, that the powerful often ‘unknow’ uncomfortable truths, is a reason to be cautious about recent mainst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Praise
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Power to Ignore
• 1 Narrow History
• 2 Seeing Ignorance Differently
• 3 Elite Agnotologists
• 4 The Murdoch Strategy
• 5 Suspicious Attention
• 6 Know-It-All Epistocrats
• 7 Conflict Blindness
• 8 Masters of Industry, Masters of Ignorance
• 9 The Ostrich Instruction
• 10 Good Experts
• 11 The Pretence of Ignorance
• Conclusion: The Great Enlargement
• Notes
• Index