25 November 2021. Science | Lagos

How industry uses science to produce ignorance about business harm. Building Nigeria’s design sector.

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#1: How industry uses science to produce ignorance about business harm

The MIT Press Reader features a longish conversation between the historian of science Robert Proctor and the historian and philosopher Peter Galison on the way industry has manipulated science in the service of “the production of ignorance”—meaning the business strategies used to create doubt and confusion over science that might be bad for your business model.

The conversation is extracted from Science and the Production of Ignorance, edited by Janet Kourany and Martin Carrier.

It’s a long conversation, so I’m going to be able only to pull out some highlights here. In case it’s not obvious, ‘RP’ is Proctor and PG is Galison.

Proctor started researching this area in the 1970s, initially interested in the way the tobacco industry operated.

RP: I discovered there were about 1,500 trade associations whose business was just to protect a particular substance against claims it was causing harm. So there was the Asbestos Information Association defending asbestos, the Global Climate Coalition denying global warming, the Methyl Butyl Ether Task Force defending (guess what) — I’m talking about the late 1980s now — plus of course the Tobacco Institute defending tobacco... What I found remarkable about these trade associations was how they were using (or creating) science to create ignorance — partly by funding what I like to call “distraction science” or “red herring research.” Science was effectively being supported as part of an effort to disguise harms.

One of the most effective strategies was to “call for more research”:

RP: The call for more research was an effective legal-savvy form of denial, expressed in a manner that effectively captured the allegiance of universities (and the high rhetorical ground of open-mindedness) while retaining plausible deniability in court (“we never said cigarettes are safe!”).

Proctor has coined the term “agnotology”, which was new to me. But it describes the study of ignorance, and in particular those forms of ignorance actually produced by these frankly murky forms of science.

And the detail in the conversation on the myriad ways in which the tobacco industry used science to distract people from the dangers of tobacco is still breath-taking, even when we know all the things they did.

RP:Cigarette makers helped found the field of behavioral genetics; they funded leading scholars, like Hans Selye and Ancel Keys, publishing on the role of stress or cholesterol in causing heart disease. When people today think of heart disease as caused by stress or cholesterol, that is in no small part because cigarette makers encouraged this kind of research. Keywords here are corruption and monopoly (they tried to monopolize certain kinds of expertise), but also alternative causation and open controversy.

PG: You mean that the opposition in a sense would have to take a position of illiberalism? They would have to say, “We are against further research”?

RP: That’s right... Tobacco and other industries were able to use their support for science as a central pillar of their conspiracy, which was that we don’t really know whether cigarettes cause cancer. They were able to use the openness of the question and their support for research as a defense of their legal stance and propaganda position. So it’s a brilliant example of using the liberal rhetorics of science to defend what’s essentially a criminal enterprise: a conspiracy to hide the hazards of smoking.

Corruption is a strong word, but they’re effectively talking about here is the corruption of science. By funding research, the tobacco industry seemed open-minded, with, in effect, the endorsement of the academy, while public health advocates seemed closed-minded in contrast.

(Australian Council on Smoking & Health: Parody of the 1953 NYC meeting between the tobacco industry and PR group Hill & Knowlton. Source: University of Bath: Tobacco Tactics)

Of course, the template created by tobacco has been borrowed by others, as Galsion observes:

PG: It’s significant too that these techniques of ignorance production have multiplied over many different domains. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s (2011) “Merchants of Doubt” shows how these same techniques, and indeed same public relations firms, even many of the same prominent scientists, went on to argue that climate change was “doubtful” and in need of more research. Once again, an “openness” toward scientific research could, in the event, serve short-term industrial gain, block regulatory and political action, and scramble public debate, even when the science was clear.

RP: It’s really quite brilliant: If you don’t like the science that’s out there, create some of your own. And then claim “we need more research.” And then label your opposition as a bunch of close-minded fanatics. Later this became more subtle, with the industry claiming that knowledge of cigarettes causing cancer was “common knowledge,” and had been so for hundreds of years... The common knowledge defense is now deployed in every tobacco trial. So first they falsify science, now they falsify history.

One of the striking things about this production of ignorance is that it’s not produced by trying to influence the actual research, but by influencing, through funding, the selection of problems that were researched.

RP: What this means is that when you’re shining a light on something, almost everything else remains in the dark. And sometimes that darkness is deliberately kept dark; the darkness itself may be created, maintained, exaggerated, inflated, and reinforced... But darkness has many friends, and often deep pockets as well.

#2: Building Nigeria’s design sector

Nigeria’s burgeoning design scene is the subject of an interesting profile in Cultured magazine. As always, the buzz that’s happening now is based on deeper roots.

Nigerian design advocate Titi Ogufere founded the Interior Designers Association of Nigeria, the country’s first professional design organisation, in 2007. More recently, in 2019, she created Design Week Lagos, its first official celebration of national design work.

And now the country has got the official stamp of global recognition of its design scene, in the shape of a Netflix documentary, Made By Design, created by Ogufere and directed by Abiola Matesun, who was born in Lagos. It profiles a number of the country’s leading designers.

(Netflix show Made By Design. Image: Netflix.)

The country’s design tradition has deep roots to draw on:

(The) traditional art of the more than 300 tribes, including Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, etc., living on its land pre-English colonization and learned from their master artists, and the dedication to innovation found in a place where an extreme wealth gap means that 40 percent the country lives below the poverty line.

Many of the curent cohort of designers studied abroad and chose to come back to Nigeria to work. Nifemi Marcus-Bello, for example, studied product design in Leeds but moved his family back to Lagos when it might have been easier to stay in England. He’s assembling an open source database of Nigerian manufacturers that enables designers to make their products in Africa.

The profile of design has also benefited from some very visible public architecture: Lawson’s project to turn the abandoned former colonial prison into a worthwhile public space, now an exciting leisure destination.

Other high-profile projects have followed suit:

(A)rchitecture firm SI.SA is renovating the John K. Randle Community Center pool a few blocks away and expanding its program to include a library, green roof and museum dedicated to Yoruba culture. Its design is an example of the building vocabulary today’s Nigerian architects are exploring: as always, concrete structures (steel is an expensive commodity) but mixed with local clay and in the natural shades and geometric patterns found in traditional African art.

Titi Ogufere notes that the shift to this kind of cultural production is a slow process. As an independent country is still only 61 years old, and its economy was set up in the colonial pattern of exporting raw materials and importing goods.

But what’s striking about the story is the way the building blocks for a cultural sector have been in place—professional associations, to build networks, high profile events to build visibility, attracting expertise in to Lagos, investment in locations that tell a design story.

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