a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The New Internationalist, a fine Canada-based progressive monthly magazine run by a worker’s co-operative, announced in its December issue that it would focus next month on the “murky world of corporate lobbying” As a preview, it reported that Exxon-Mobil has pumped $19 million into “promoting skepticism about global warming in order to water down any legislation on carbon emissions.” At the same time, “a group of banks, headed by Goldman Sachs” has been promoting skepticism about economic analyses used to support regulation of derivatives trading, one of the most potent contributors to the global crisis of 2008.

Nothing is new, as I was saying in my last post, about corporations (and governments) using propaganda science to buy infuence or to buy –even more than just influence– politicians. But there is something new, I think, in the technique of “promoting skepticism.” And that is that it isn’t skepticism that is being promoted.

Skepticism has a long and distinguished history. The ancient Greek philosophers and rhetoricians called skeptikoi developed teaching methods for questioning received ideas and “inert knowledge.” Influenced by Socrates, they were against dogmatism, particularly among the Stoics, whom they considered both ethical and cosmological dogmatists. Gradually, skepticism became more metaphysical. The later followers of Phyrros of Elis disciplined themselves to question all claims made for absolute truth, hoping to find what they called ataxaria (peace of mind) amongst the clash of absolutist claims by accepting none. In the pre-Renaissance ages of religious absolutism in the West, pyhrronists were sometimes agnostics, sometimes more like the Islamic theologians who followed the 11th century Al-Ghazali, casting aside all beliefs until they could assure themselves of their own. Descartes, making “thought experiments” about existing claims to truth, was hoping to find, eventually, a sure foundation or principle for truthful thinking. Among scientists, skepticism usually functions more methodologically, as part of the scientific method: all evidence needs to be questioned as a theory is slowly built up and then skeptically tested against all new evidence. In this sense, you cannot be a scientist without being a skeptic. It took the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded in 1988, nearly twenty years of skeptically reviewing scientific reports and peer-reviewed studies before they were ready to offer an assessment of global warming and the human contribution to it that was beyond skepticism — although their work was and still is open to discussion as new date develops.

But “promoting skepticism” in the contemporary manner is quite another matter than all this history. It is not promoting questioning or fostering methodological rigor. It is an attack strategy disguising a raw pursuit of self-interest and a fixed ideology. It has nothing to do with truth, but is a key weapon in what General David Petraeus has called in another context–with no disguise and no pretense to being scientific– a “war of perceptions.”

It is not surprising that it would be a general writing in the 2006 US Counterinsurgency Manual and not a CEO writing in a press release from whom we would hear candidly about the “war of perceptions.” Further on in December’s The New Internationalist, I read an interview with John Pilger, a British journalist and documentary film-maker who is soon to release a film called The War You Don’t See. The news media –not just the media of the Murdoch empire, but “the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC”—have promoted the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by under-reporting opposition to the wars and by reporting the wars as the war-makers want them to be seen, Pilger says. A monitoring outfit in Berlin, Media Tenor, has calculated that only 3% of the BBC’s coverage before the Iraq invasion was devoted to anti-war voices. And this at a moment when the largest anti-war demonstrations in history were filling the streets of all the European capitals and many American cities. Among the British, 77% of the citizens opposed the invasion. Reasonable skepticism abounded about the way the invasion was being justified: about both the claim that Iraq was hiding “weapons of mass destruction” and about the “just war” arguments using this claim. It was a moment of intense and very important democratic debate; because of the internet, a global democratic debate.

As the war unfolded, the majority of media news outlets signed up –whether knowingly or not–for the project General David Petraeus, now the American commander in Afghanistan, had initiated. The General had asserted that persuading the public that you are winning a war is as important as striving to win it, maintaining military superiority. So the media should be conscripts in the real war effort, this “war of perception.” Their patriotic and “national security” role was to subdue skeptical readers and viewers–the enemy at home, the skeptical American public.

Similarly, the corporations “promoting skepticism” about climate science are not promoting skepticism, they are –conscripting the media to their goal —promoting anti-skepticism in order to win their war of perception. Even those in the media who do not join the fight contribute by unthinkingly presenting the opponents of climate change science as “climate change skeptics” when there is not an ounce of skepticism among these warriors. (Even scientists fighting against pseudo-scientists call their opponents skeptics; see http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Guide_to_Skepticism.pdf)
What actually ends up being promoted, very successfully, is cynicism.

By this, I do not mean the way of life of another ancient school of philosophers, the kunikoi or cynics. This school has very few contemporary inheritors, although it had many in the Hellenistic world, so tumultuous with war and uncertainty, and many among the early Christians. Cynics pledged themselves to a life of constant physical and mental discipline designed to reject all social conventions and all received ethical ideas about how money or fame or power lead to happiness. Greed, pursuit of fame, and ruling over others lead only to suffering and unhappiness, their creed said, because true happiness comes from leading a life of virtue, a simple, natural life. They were Gandhians (without his sexual asceticism), “back to nature” people, “small is beautiful” folks. (Some modern historians see a cynic strand in the life and thought of Jesus, who grew up near a center of cynicism in Gadara, a town near Nazareth.) Only in the late 18th century did “cynicism” begin to shift into meaning its opposite: a kind of scornful or contemptuous negativity, obstructionism, and suspicion or distrust of other people’s motives, professions, and beliefs. Or science. That is the kind of cynicism that is being promoted now.

The flip side, or the grandiose side, of general negativity and distrust of other people is the notion that you can create a reality –a perception of reality—that will overwhelm other people’s sense of reality and their common sense. You can create a virtual reality and inspire a desire to live in that virtual reality by appealing to people’s desires for money, fame, and power. Having technologies for the creation of the virtual reality is a big help, as is an advanced “science” of public relations or of spinning the common world.

Creating a virtual reality is not creating propaganda of the old-fashioned sort that used to be called “information policy.” After WWII, the US had information agencies to reach over the heads of governments and, via the radio, capture “the hearts and minds of people.” The Voice of America reached outward. But there was not a formalized system of information agencies for domestic consumption. The news media had not really begun their shift away from the “fourth estate” ideals of earlier times. when journalists were admired for their Edward R. Murrowesque independence or their tell-it-like-it-is war dispatches. Once upon a time, the news came relatively unencumbered by commentary, and editorializing was for the editorial pages. I remember very vividly, for example, the first TV airing of a presidential debate, which was in September of 1960. The fourth estate’s new technology put John Kennedy and Richard Nixon right into American living rooms –or in those living rooms where there were TVs. Without benefit of pundits and talking heads and spinmeisters to tell us what to think, we watched the candidates debate four times.

The issues were many and complex, but the whole nation was particularly galvanized by the exchange on the burning foreign policy question of the day: what should America do if China actually invaded Taiwan as it had threatened to do while bombing the little islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Kennedy was full of concern that the Us had fallen behind in its Cold War with the Soviets and the spectre of Communism. But, in an era of “deterrence,” Richard Nixon shocked everyone when he argued for using nuclear weapons against China!

What a different world it was in 1960, which I can illustrate from my memory. The principal of my junior high school, who was of the now rare opinion that the central job of schools is to educate for citizenship, was so amazed to learn that a nuclear war was being considered in Washington that he arranged for the Debate Club to consider the matter at an assembly of the whole school. My team, which took John Kennedy’s side in opposing the use of nuclear weapons, spent most of the next week in the library –released from several classes a day to do so, at our request. Our Latin teacher was assigned the task of teaching both teams how to use the library to research the history of Mao’s China, the history of atomic and nuclear weapons, the history of the Cold War. One day, she took the opportunity, too, for an informal lesson over lunch on Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book so huge that it occupied most of my Christmas holiday after the election was over –and the sane man had won by a narrow margin of the popular vote.

1960 is not paradise lost. But thinking back on it –and on life in a small, segregated, unsophisticated Delaware town –it is striking to consider the country’s civic life then and now. Everyone was much less elaborately “informed,” but much more accustomed to serious public debate; not posturing, not wars of perception. At the end of a decade so often portrayed as deeply conservative and conformist, there was a great deal of healthy skepticism.

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