Ignorance & Censorship | Philosophy Tube

[Music] hello i'm abigail welcome to philosophytube i've got a bit of a special treat for you this month athena the goddess of wisdom got in touch with me turns out she's a huge fan of the show and she offered to let me use her magical library to research today's episode this room actually contains all the knowledge in the universe she's got everything secrets of quantum physics the truth about atlantis a list of all of my romantic failures in alphabetical order there's just one problem today's episode isn't about knowledge it's about ignorance the study of ignorance

is a relatively new and cutting-edge field in philosophy it actually has its own name agnotology it comes from the ancient greek words agnosis and logos which translate into english as martin from year nine oh sorry it's romantic failures again anyway ignorance is a pretty broad topic it touches on all sorts of things like privacy deliberately keeping other people ignorant of something justice is justice blind politics how do we deal with things like misinformation and public ignorance it also comes into play in mathematics when we think about uncertainty and probability although we won't be talking about

those today because i only know three things about mathematics one i'm not very good at it and b i'm also not very good at it we'll also be looking at censorship including a real example that affected my life in a major way and which raises perhaps the most pressing question of all they say that people are afraid of what they don't understand but what if some people don't want to understand [Music] you might be surprised to hear that some philosophers thought a little bit of ignorance can be a good thing john rawls was a very

well respected american philosopher of justice and he thought that society should be a cooperative system based on rules but that prompts the question how do we decide on the rules left to their own devices people will come up with rules that benefit them but screw over everybody else so how do we make sure they decide on good ones the solution he said was a veil of ignorance a just society could be designed by a committee of people who do not know what position they will occupy in that society so we take a bunch of people

and we erase their memories so they don't know anything about the world or themselves they're allowed to know what kind of human beings there are and what sorts of things we need and enjoy but other than that nothing and this group of people behind the veil of ignorance they will choose the rules they're allowed to know everything they need to do their jobs but absolutely nothing else about the world or humanity so it's kind of like going to cambridge the idea is that if you don't know whether you're going to be the president or an

unemployed single mum you'll design a society where unemployed single moms can do okay because once you come out from behind the veil of ignorance that might be you of course in real life it's not possible to do this rose's thought experiment belongs to the kind of philosophy we call ideal theory that's why we think about what might happen under ideal circumstances and see if it tells us anything interesting about the actual circumstances rose's thought experiment is an example of how ignorance marks out the boundaries of a discussion we ignore that is we remain ignorant of

everything that is deemed not relevant so knowledge and ignorance are two sides of the same coin in rosie's case the committee's ignorance of their self-interest structures their knowledge of justice and there are real life justice systems that work a little bit like this juries might be told to ignore certain evidence in a trial for instance you might have racked up thousands of pounds in library fines by checking out weird cat girl mangas and not returning them but you're on trial for the much lesser crime of murder so the jury will remain blessedly ignorant of that

this is a key point in agnotology so it's worth making sure that you understand ignorance isn't just the blank waiting to be filled in ignorance gives knowledge its structure if you're very clever and you've watched my last episode on ideology you might remember the idea that political ideologies are defined just as much by what they don't say as what they do say the notes that aren't being played it's the same kind of thing ignorance is not a motionless state it is an active accomplishment requiring ever vigilant understanding of what not to know so here's something

cool what if we take this idea that ignorance gives knowledge its structure and we turn it back on john rawls himself he's deliberately remaining ignorant of the actual state of justice in the world to think about what things would be like in ideal circumstances because that's what ideal theory does but what if ideal theory isn't the right way to do it the philosopher charles mills criticized this move saying that remaining ignorant of society's problems is hardly likely to generate good solutions and may in fact be why those problems continue if you put ignorance in you'll

surely get ignorance out in particular mills highlights that rawls doesn't really mention racial injustice all that much which is a pretty big oversight for a philosopher of justice to make a political philosophy thriving for 30 years that makes next to no mention of the centrality of racial injustice to the basic structure of the united states and assumes instead that it will be more theoretically appropriate to start from the ideal theory assumption that society is the product of a mutually agreed on non-exploitative enterprise to divide benefits and burdens in an equitable way this is somehow going

to illuminate the distinctive moral problems of a society based on exploitative white settlement one does not confront a history of racial domination by ignoring it since to ignore it is just to incorporate it through silence into the conceptual apparatus whose genealogy would typically ensure that it is structured so as to take the white experience as normative normative there means giving values it comes from the ancient greek word nomos which translates into english as jennifer from second year of university sorry this keeps happening when mills and other philosophers talk about taking the white experience as normative

they mean that there are certain things that white people remain ignorant of mills talks about white ignorance capital w capital i and i bet that some people will hear that term and they'll go because we're used to thinking of ignorance as a bad thing ignorant is an insult right well that's not necessarily how philosophers use it an example of white ignorance might be i don't know what it's like to be racially profiled by the police for instance that's not something i can know when we white people try to design neutral ideal systems that use ignorance

to set the boundary of what's relevant we of course use our own ignorance to set that boundary so the neutral ideal system ends up reflecting the viewpoints of the white designers ignorance in ignorance this is another key point in agonology ignorance isn't just a natural thing that happens it's created and reinforced by society so what if instead of pretending that it's not there we try to figure out why people become ignorant in the first place philosophers sometimes distinguish between passive ignorance and active ignorance passive ignorance is when you just don't know something like i don't

really know all that much about owls no offense there's just some things i don't need to know active ignorance is when you go out of your way to make sure that you don't know something to ignore it because you need to not know and that's where things get interesting for instance i am not at time of recording a vegetarian maybe i will be someday i have tried a few times and if i'm honest it made me pretty miserable but i am aware because i have vegetarian and vegan friends that if i were to really look

into what factory farming is like it's possible that would make me even more miserable than not eating meat would and so i don't look into it in order to avoid being miserable i deliberately remain ignorant and most of the time i don't even think about that ignorance i'm deliberately ignorant of my deliberate ignorance this is an example of what philosopher jennifer foster calls doxastic anxiety that's anxiety about forming beliefs i don't want to believe that eating meat is wrong so i remain deliberately ignorant of anything that might change my mind comes from the ancient greek

word doxa which translates into english as rebecca from that one nightclub in essex there's a subtle point here which you might disagree with which is that believing or not believing something can be a moral matter in other words morality isn't just about your actions eating meat or not there are moral ways to think as well you can be doxastically cowardly or doxastically brave and you might be like whoa that sounds like some thought crime 1984 surely i can believe whatever i like surely it's my actions that count and it is certainly a step away from

john rawls who thought that justice was basically about the distribution of stuff and opportunities but that depends on your view of morality if you think that morality is just about the consequences of your actions then yeah okay but in recent years philosophers have started talking about having the right intellectual virtues if i get to heaven someday and my old philosophy teacher's there and he says so how do you think that went i'll have to say well mr baker i don't think i tried my best when it came to the question of whether or not it's

right to eat meat i dodged the question is that on its own grounds for not getting into heaven is there a certain point at which denial itself becomes morally wrong well maybe to answer that one we could look at a real life example [Music] riddle me that and riddle me this what kind of death is born in bliss riddle me further if you're such a bright spark what kind of light keeps you in the dark tobacco companies in the early 20th century were living large but by the 1950s the evidence was trickling in that smoking

is incredibly bad for you and big tobacco had a big problem how do we keep people ignorant or at least ignorant enough that they'll keep smoking by the way occasionally on this show i use smoking and fire as metaphors for fascism but in this episode i am talking about literal tobacco companies and they came up with a very villainous solution you start off by saying this evidence looks pretty serious so we are going to fund a whole bunch of medical research to figure out whether our product really does cause lung cancer we are going to

pay for it out of our own pockets because that's how much we care and then you set up a study looking into whether anything other than smoking causes cancer like air pollution or dust mites or fatty foods it doesn't matter does jazz cause cancer i don't know here's a million dollars to find out your study obviously comes to the conclusion we can't know for sure because cancer does have complex causes and one scientific study is never going to be 100 you don't actually have to come down either way so long as you conclude by saying

these results demonstrate the need for further research and that is now your headline more research needed into cigarettes cancer link say scientists everybody who smokes will read that and go ah a perfect excuse to not think about whether or not this is killing me i will indulge my doxastic anxiety and remain in the dark pass me a light this is fully evil genius level evil because let's not forget cigarettes are addictive and they kill millions of people every year and genius because you don't have to be evil to go along with it you can hire

honest scientists to investigate the legit question of whether air pollution causes lung cancer you can hire honest editors and graphic designers to print your findings in a nice glossy magazine and distribute it you can rely on honest journalists to report both sides if you just paid people to lie then they'd have to be as villainous as you but you don't even have to do that you just have to ask the right questions and you can use this playbook for anything why stop at cigarettes do it for opioid painkillers as well do it for lead paint

asbestos cfcs beryllium do it for political stuff do it for gun crime do it for debt build up in the financial system do it for police racism do it for terrorism studies do it for trans health care just so long as the debate never stops and the matter is never settled as one cigarette company executive put it doubt is our product and if the balance of the evidence does start to tip against you you've got one more trick up your sleeve pretend like it's old news like yeah everybody knows that cigarettes cause lung cancer we

certainly never denied that our product is about rebellion and choice and freedom everybody knows that it's addictive and then it kills you and if everybody knows it well there's no need to keep bringing it up did the owners of cigarette companies really believe that their product was safe do they still maybe some people are genuinely cynical and don't care what happens to the rest of the world but i think that for a lot of us for certain topics the doxastic anxiety is just too great we'll take any excuse to not think about it even if

it means death ignorance is bliss [Music] riddle me square or riddle me round what kind of explosion makes no sound in 1942 the united states had a problem they were working on a project a very special kind of project coordinated from manhattan trying to build a very special kind of bomb but they weren't the only ones across the atlantic and nazi germany hitler's scientists were racing to do the exact same thing so the american plans had to be kept secret as a matter of global security people needed to be ignorant when it comes to classified

secrets there's two kinds the first is stuff like the troops will land at dawn it's very simple so it's easy to leak but it's got a limited shelf life after dawn tomorrow it's not really going to matter if everyone knows and it's also not really something that you could figure out unless somebody tells you compare that to the second type of secret something like how to build a nuclear bomb now that is very complicated so it's harder to leak but it doesn't have a shelf life you've got to keep it secret forever and this is

the really dangerous part it's something that your enemies could in theory figure out on their own if they've got the resources and the scientists and the labs and the time they could learn your secrets by going the long way round and that means that if you're trying to keep this secret you also have to keep all the research you did to get there secret as well the americans didn't just classify the final design they had to classify all the little steps they did to get to it like how to enrich uranium and even basic principles

of atomic physics that they discovered because if you know that then you can start to join the dots the nazis spent ages fiddling on with heavy water trying to use as a neutron moderator meanwhile the americans were like actually graphite works much better but the truth can be explosive so keep it silent keeping a lot of information secret like that is very difficult it's very expensive it's very inefficient and the more secrets the government keeps the more heavy-handed they have to be about protecting them and this is not a problem that has gone away certain

parts of the us and uk governments are right now toying with the idea of removing public funding from schools and universities that teach divisive woke concepts the plan is that legislators want to keep people ignorant of ideas that they believe are harmful or extreme that there are some ideas that must just be ruled out as illegitimate not even worth hearing because hearing them might threaten the existence of a system in which any ideas are expressible now that on its own isn't a particularly new concern though of course the devil is in who chooses the ideas

that are too dangerous to hear and which ideas will they choose for our philosophical purposes today though there's two things we could note firstly divisive woke concepts are much more like that second kind of secret because people could figure them out on their own let's take communism for example since i assume that's going to be on the list you could ban every copy of the communist manifesto you could ban everyone from reading karl marx but if you just like work in a pub and have your eyes open you can see that society is divided into

different classes of people based on their relationship to owning stuff and society is generally structured around satisfying the desires of the owner class rather than the working class even if you wouldn't use that language the marxism is already inside of you and you can't stop that even if your grandkids are working on mars in the elon musk salt mines in 100 years with no karl marx anywhere on the planet there'll still be nothing stopping them going hang on a minute well this is and because they are like that second kind of secret if you want

to keep people ignorant you can't just ban a few books you're going to have to get seriously repressive secondly it's interesting that these legislators claim the concepts themselves are divisive the civil rights organizer kwame chure was often accused of being divisive and he said well no i'm not i'm just drawing people's attention to divisions that already exist inequality and injustice are real what you're doing is just ordering us all to ignore them if you think back to what we learned earlier on about ignorance marking out the boundaries of a discussion we can see how a

philosopher like charles mills might interpret this not just as an attempt to keep the public ignorant but an attempt to build white ignorance specifically into the structure of society and if you want a real life example of something like that happening with very serious consequences then i've got one for you riddle me shameful or riddle me proud what is the number of silence out loud riddle me mad or riddle me sane what kind of love does not speak its name this is a real newspaper article it's from the telegraph from a couple of weeks ago

and as soon as i saw it i knew that i had to talk about it on the show because it's a perfect case study of everything we've learned today it's by a british journalist called victoria lambert and it's titled we need to talk about sex education and it's pretty standard hashtag content you know she's saying that the sex ed she got in school wasn't very good it didn't teach her about consent and parents should tell their kids about that pretty standard mainstream feminist stuff and it's got some interviews with other white cisgender journalists who all

agree what caught my eye was two of those other interviews one with a guy called alex denny who said lgbt sex ed was completely absent from my all-boys school and another with a guy called jack ria who is himself a gay man who also said he wasn't given any gay sex ed and what nobody mentions is that until relatively recently lgbt sex ed in britain was illegal in the uk we used to have this thing called section 28. it was a law that was passed by the thatcher government in 1988 which made it illegal for

any local authority to a intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality and b promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship so first things first the text of the law is obviously explicitly homophobic it contains the central claim of homophobia which is that gay relationships are not as good as straight ones earlier on we learned the concept of white ignorance capital w capital i similarly we might talk about straight ignorance or cisgender ignorance and those two can be built into the law

there were huge protests a group called the lesbian avengers abseiled into the house of lords to disrupt the session and they invaded the bbc news studio during the live broadcast of the six o'clock news but the bill passed and this was the law until 2003 when david cameron became prime minister he apologized for section 28 despite having been a big supporter of it and to be fair even if you like david cameron you've got to admit it's a bit rich to be taking lessons on sexual ethics from a man who a pig the law itself

was in parliamentary language it was really vague and unclear but it had strong effects because it made people scared or it gave them an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway the idea was that you couldn't promote homosexuality to children but in practice that meant that we weren't allowed to know about it at all so lgbt books were taken off the shelves of local libraries some theater companies were denied arts council funding if they were too gay some films weren't allowed to be shown in schools or in council venues it had a big

silencing effect that went way beyond what the actual text of the law required even in private schools and even after it was repealed i remember when i was a kid and my school taught us about sex they said now then boys when you go to bed with a woman or a man the penis is inserted into the vagina thusly now go get them and that was it that was what we were told and then 20 school kids were like how thorn she's talking about you is your like that was it section 28 was supported by

a lot of british newspapers including the telegraph section 28 is an example of what philosopher miranda fricker calls hermeneutical injustice hermeneutical means to do with interpreting it comes from the ancient greek word hermeneuticos which translates into english as three of my previous girlfriends turned out to be lesbians and i still didn't realize i was trans a hermeneutical injustice is when someone gets denied the knowledge they need to understand and take control of their life and they are denied it because they are a member of a certain group an example that frica gives is a conservative

lady who experienced postnatal depression but who'd never been told that that was a thing that term wasn't always around if you experienced anxiety or depression after having a child people used to just say that you're a bad mother and this lady describes the first time she heard that term used at a feminist workshop in that one 45-minute period i realized that what i'd been blaming myself for and what my husband had blamed me for wasn't my personal deficiency it was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing isolation that realization was one of

those moments that makes you a feminist forever something that might be worth noting is this woman describes that moment not as being taught that she's a victim or divisive woke grievance studies or anything like that she describes it as liberating not divisive but uniting section 28 didn't mention transgender people at all but this was a time in which a lot of straight cis people were ignorant of the fact that being gay and being trans are two totally different things so it put the kibosh on us as well my school just did not tell me that

being trans was a thing i did not knowingly meet another trans person until i was already an adult i remember the first time i did i met this girl at my uni and i said hey dude and she said i'm actually a woman i'm a trans woman and i said what's that and she told me and i was like oh that's gear how might my life have been different if somebody had just told me when i was a kid that's years of my life i've wasted in ignorance that i can never get back and you

can go mad thinking about that sort of thing i made it in the end you've got to play the hand you dealt but i didn't know and i didn't know that i needed to know i was ignorant firstly because that ignorance was deliberately built into the structure of the society i was born in and secondly for a while i was too doxastically anxious to really sit down and think about it and that is agnotology and maybe that's why socrates was the wisest man in athens because he said i know that i know nothing [Music] that

much [Music] that i was watching it's the end of the world illuminati is coming gather the boys and girls and watches it all and girls they clutching it all they pearls [Music] that's why we sitting on the wrong track back it's okay to be rich my mama always told me i was destined for greatness but my mama also she told me to take care of the kids and everybody around the world that can't fight foreign [Music] some of y'all [Music] that much some of y'all don't answer that call [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music]

don't listen [Music] you