What’s normal now (5)…Turning science into ignorance
and “illegals” into offense
Torrey
Orton
Feb.3,
2014
Blurring
boundaries with intent
I’m reading for the
first time a book called Agnotology –
The making and unmaking of ignorance (2009) which is a collection of
reflections on how ignorance is the boundary of knowledge. It includes some
treatment of how the boundaries of ignorance are maintained by the
satisfactions of current knowledges. Esoteric? Only until I read the chapter on
how in the early 1950’s in the US Big Tobacco, with the active collusion of PR
major Hill Knowlton, set about defeating good science and pursued it
successfully for 60 years to this date. A recent stage in debasing the science
of smoking-induced cancer is presenting the industry as “responsible
manufacturers of a risky product”. A satisfactory knowledge is profit
producing. There are some others like self-esteem enhancing and identity
supporting ones.
The flow on from this PR
learning process, driven by the need to protect pre-existing knowledge and
interests from threatening truths, can be seen in the debasing of science in
the climate wars. If the government can call victimising of refugees a “war”
and struggles about class (income imbalance) and consciousness (history) wars,
then climate war is a no brainer. “War” is a condition which removes the right
to any other conditions, the condition which smooths all kinds of legal-ethical-conceptual
tangles. ‘War’ has history as a promotional threat of preference in the US –
see the 1960’s war on poverty and the 1980’s war on drugs (the latter lead by a
“drug czar”) for historical instances. Only the war on poverty made some
headway, while the war on drugs amplified the depth and spread of drugs into a
multi-national crisis.
A low grade but high
impact variation on this theme is the “illegal boat people” meme which has been
imposed / plastered on the ignorant public with special energy since the Howard
government’s SEIV-X campaign at the turn of the election in October, 2001.
Demonising
sticks, mud clings and the past catches up with you
This piece of clearly
intentional deception has created a mud which sticks to refugees these days, to
the tune of 60% of our citizenry agreeing “illegals” are not dealt with harshly
enough by the government of this day…as if they were some kind of bikie gang or
alcohol-fuelled one-punch mongrels who should be punished into submission to
normal behaviour routines…a policy unlikely to succeed as others have noted in
those spheres. Repetition of “illegal” eventually produced an unquestioned
label in the minds of the unaffected public – a label for something to be
avoided, a reverse brand, so to speak as we can now see building up with the
war on “illegal bikie gangs” (Campbell Newman at the borders of Queensland turning
back the bikies??)!!
The “illegal” boat
people meme may also give the offense-can-only- be-taken crowd (summarised in ON OFFENCE
- THE POLITICS OF
INDIGNATION by Richard King; Scribe, 2013) something
to think about. If you give offense to the defenceless by berating, debasing, and
denying their humanity and that adds to their defencelessness, have you given
offense which they could just not take by choice? I suspect so. Work on anger
and male rage / violence would suggest otherwise, too.
An
observation about how long term vilification effects shared truth
It will take years to
recover the moral ground that has been eroded by these years of inhumanity to
the defenceless. Much the same can be expected for the recovery from years of
deriding the only form of empirical knowledge we can have agreed
confidence in – natural science. Of course, the recovery may not happen and the
defenceless parts of the world which have been injured may slide slowly out of
sight, their after images lingering on the wings of the latest political spins.
Do I hear ‘responsible providers of end of life services’ for instance, which
are offered by the privatised health and incarceration industries which manage
our prisons and refugee holding pens now (Serco, etc.)?
