Erik M. Conway screen grab from video on YouTube – Merchants of Doubt: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War – Earth101 (See this video on YouTube)
This Street Prophets Coffee Hour is brought to you by Professor Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Today’s article, Merchants of Doubt, is part 14 of 15 in a series about figuring out just what is going on in American politics. It will be about how we got to where we are now. And hopefully present a story of where we should be going. Along the way we will take a look at Russia, the U.S. 2016 Presidential election, Memes and Fiction, Network Propaganda, soft warfare, and cyberwarfare.
This is an Open Thread and all topics of conversation are welcome. What is for dinner? How are you doing? What is on your mind. If you are new to Street Prophets please introduce yourself below in a comment.
The 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, is an “how to text book” on soft warfare and propaganda. It tells the story on how ideology, a few motivated actors, and money can manipulate public opinion into rejecting science in order to sustain big business and free market fundamentalism.
Professor Naomi Oreskes during 2nd European TA conference in Berlin
The authors, Naomi Oreskes a professor of history and Erik Conway a climate scientist, each bring their own unique educational backgrounds to the book to report on what was done, how it was done, and why it was done.
Oreskes and Conway have been very active in the last eight years since the publication of their book, Merchants of Doubt in 2010 on the lecture circuit and they released a follow up book called, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, in 2014.
In addition a major documentary film was made by SONY Pictures Classics and directed by Robert Kenner about the book. It was released in 2014. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives the movie a review of 84% on the Tomatometer.
Conway and Oreskes are working on a new book called “The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea,” which will be published by Bloomsbury Press as soon as it is finished.
Beyond the fold are a number of videos that, for those that can view them, sum up nicely the major points of their book, Merchants of Doubt. And for those that can not view them on streaming video I will summarize their important points.
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In the Merchants of Doubt authors Oreskes and Conway tell the story of how four ideologically motivated individuals used their respected positions scientists in the cold war to undermine a significant percentage of the public’s trust in science.
Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, and Siegfried Fred Singer are the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. It is not an understatement to say that these four individuals are the bringers of Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. These four are the creators, promoters and merchants of the technology of doubt. (These four are singled out in book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.)
Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg, were all famous and respected scientists that worked on the American nuclear weapons program and on missile delivery systems. In 1984 they created the George C. Marshall Institute to defend Ronald Regan's Star Wars initiative. These three individuals turned their backs on the empirical truth of science in order to promote building weapons of mass destruction to contain and deter the Soviets.
Of note is Frederick Seitz in the 70s was working for the R J Reynolds tobacco company on grooming scientific witlessness to cast doubt on on the harmful nature of tobacco smoke. The key themes R J Reynolds promoted was insisting that the science was unsettled and it was premature to control tobacco use.
Siegfried Fred Singer, also a cold war physicist, joined the three above in the when their campaign of doubt enlarged from discrediting the evidence of harms of tobacco, the threat of nuclear winter, the reality of acid rain, the human causes of global warming and DDT to directly discrediting the environmental movement.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 these four individuals found themselves without a cause to fight for. So they re-purposed their focus on fighting government regulation.
The Playbook: From the YouTube video by Naomi Oreskes: "Climate change denial: Where do we go from here?" | Spring 2016 Wall Exchange
There was a commonality in their approach to creating doubt that Oreskes calls “the playbook.” No matter what the issue was the same formula was applied to create doubt.
Oreskes stresses in the video below that the effect of the doubt was to put in the public's mind that nothing needs to be done to address these issues. Nothing should be done.
For the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, as I have named them, “the ends justified the means.” Interwoven in their Neoliberal Ideology was the fundamental belief in the unfettered market place. And it was this idea that drove them to mount, what Oreskes calls, the biggest propaganda campaign ever mounted in the United States.
Below is a video that covers in detail the information presented above. I hope the reader is able to view it.
The review of the book Merchants of Doubt in The Guardian mentions the most alarming finding of the book. That this “playbook” is the cornerstone of the current Republican strategy to discredit the Environmental Movement. Here we are in 2018 and the Republicans are working to revise the historical contribution of Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring.
"Millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm," states one site set up by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "That person is Rachel Carson." Another site goes further: "Fifty million dead," while a third claims: "More deaths likely." Others compare Carson to Hitler or Stalin.
The Guardian Book Review: Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway
I would remind the reader of the methods of Soft Warfare Theory covered in part 13 of this series because the work of the “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” is an example of the success of applying the theory.
As an appraisal of Carson's achievements, this is a fairly shocking piece of revisionism and, as the authors of Merchants of Doubt make clear, it also is a false one. DDT was banned not just because it was accumulating in the food chain but because mosquitoes were developing resistance to it. The pesticide was losing its usefulness long before it was taken out of commercial production.
The Guardian Book Review: Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway
Also, I would like to mention Timothy Snyder's summary of the zeitgeist currently infecting the American psyche that was covered in part 3 of this series that Snyder calls “The Politics of Inevitability.” That being that the free market and technology will solve all our problems if it is unhampered by government regulation.
So why this hysterical vilification? Why these sudden denunciations of Carson? The answer – provided by Oreskes and Conway in this painstakingly assembled but nevertheless riveting piece of investigative reporting – is simple. The far right in America, in its quest to ensure the perpetuation of the free market, is now hell-bent on destroying the cause of environmentalism.
The Guardian Book Review: Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway
In closing I want to mention we have identified in this series the three major forces, see part 12, that the Republican Party has weaponized to achieve their goals: Promoters of White Nationalism, Weaponized Religion, and Politicized International and Domestic Businesses.
At the center of The 21st Century Axis of Evil’s is the Republican Party. Enabled by the big three: Promoters of White Nationalism, Weaponized Religion, and Politicized International and Domestic Businesses. This diagram is by no means exhaustive. If space permitted many more organizations and links could have been added. Click to Enlarge.
Next week this series will resume with a closer look at The 21st Century Axis of Evil and how we can create a defense against their cyber warfare, soft warfare, and propaganda.
Naomi Oreskes
Oreskes is author or co-author of over 200 scholarly and popular books, articles, and opinion pieces, including Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2014), Discerning Experts (University Chicago Press, 2019), Why Trust Science? (Princeton University Press, 2019), and Science on a Mission: American Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change, (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, was the subject of a documentary film of the same name produced by participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics, and has been translated into eight languages.
From Harvard University Department of the History of Science website: Naomi Oreskes.
Erik M. Conway
I’m a historian of science and technology living in Altadena, California. I completed a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, with a dissertation on the development of aircraft landing aids. I work as the historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of Caltech.
Most of my work since has been at the intersection of science and technology in the later 20th century, and mostly related to aerospace. My most recent book was Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars, published in 2015. I recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship with Naomi Oreskes.
From Erik M. Conway’s personal website: About Me
