Trevor Hancock is a professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s school of public health and social policy
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defence, mused about what we know and don’t know. He suggested there are the ‘known unknowns’ – for example, we know we don’t know how life began – and the ‘unknown unknowns’ – the things we don’t even know we are ignorant about.
But he forgot one important category – the ignored knowns; the things we know but prefer to ignore. This is what Al Gore called the inconvenient truth and is the realm of the science denial industry. With the election of Donald Trump, who seems to make a habit of ignoring science, evidence and fact, we are entering an era of what Stephen Colbert called ‘truthiness’ back in 2005:
“Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. . . . Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’”
Recently I have taken to calling the application of deliberate ignorance in policy-making ‘ignore-ance’. While I briefly thought I had invented the term, a quick check on Google led me to a 1997 book by Elizabeth Ellsworth in which she defined ‘ignore-ance’ as “an active dynamic of negation, an active refusal of information”.
And just last week, Oxford Dictionaries selected ‘post-truth’ as their word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. This describes many of Trump’s assertions during the campaign – indeed, most of them, according to PolitiFact, “a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics”.
PolitiFact states that 15 percent of Donald Trump’s claims are true or mostly true, 15 percent are half true, and the remaining 70 percent range from mostly false to false (34 percent) and ‘pants on fire’ false (17 percent).
For comparison, 51 percent of Hillary Clinton’s claims were found to be true or mostly true, while only 10 percent were false and 2 percent were ‘pants on fire’ false. Barack Obama scored about the same, with 48 percent true or mostly true, 12 percent false and 2 percent ‘pants on fire’ false.
When someone who is both ignorant and determined to ignore evidence becomes the US President, we have a problem not only in the US but around the world. Trump’s over the top assertions of what is patently not true may seem bizarre, even humorous, but there is nothing funny about it. It’s not a cultural phenomenon to be observed and deplored, it’s a threat to democracy.
Prime examples of Trump’s combination of ignorance and ignore-ance include his declared intent to largely abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and to withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change. Crippling the EPA will not bode well for air and water quality, the control of toxic chemicals or many other aspects of environmental protection in the USA; worse, it may encourage other governments around the world to follow Trump’s lead.
Even more troubling is Trump’s denial of climate change, tweeting in 2012 that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But climate change is not a hoax, although it may be an inconvenient truth for the fossil fuel industry. If Trump succeeds in his expressed intent to withdraw from the Paris Accord, this will certainly cripple and may kill the agreement. Yet climate change has been identified by the World Health Organization and others as one of the major threats to health in the 21st century.
If Trump’s ignorance and ignore-ance sets us back in areas such as environmental protection and climate change, it will have significant implications for the health of millions of people, not only for the poor and the vulnerable in low and middle income countries, but also in the USA and other high income countries, in the decades ahead. Protecting our health means ensuring our governments not follow Trump’s lead.
Editor’s note: This blog was originally published as a regular column in the Times Colonist
Gordon Friesen
Dear Trevor,
I watched this campaign unfold in detail. I saw the claims and counter claims. I saw the fact-checking. the cries of “lie” and the silence passed over attenuating factors.
The truth “statistics” you cite are a most faithful reflection of the horrendous bias practiced against President-Elect Trump.
One simple example: Trump’s claim that “Hillary would abolish the Second Amendment”.
This is literally false, as neither the Democratic Party, nor Ms. Clinton have any stated policy to this effect, and they vociferously maintain the contrary.
However, the claim is also substantially true. Anybody who has followed this debate over the last twenty years or so knows this. Pretending otherwise is the same sort of willful ignorance that you denounce.
Simply put: Trump speaks in common language. Replete with hyperbole and exaggeration as we all do in our daily lives. Finding errors in normal talk is just like shooting fish in a barrel. The Clintons, on the other hand, will parse an answer all the way down to the level of “it depends on what the meaning of the word ^is^ is” (Yes, Bill really did say that !)
Similarly: Democrats will say they are attached to providing border security, but obviously they are not.
Trump says he will build a wall, ban Muslims etc. These things are sure to be modified en route. However, Trump is signalling (emphatically) that he WILL improve border security and he WILL pay more attention to the Islamist (not Islamic) threat. So he is signalling to us, in a substantially truthful fashion, what his intentions are.
The Democrats, on the other hand, lie straight up (while remaining literally truthful of course). And then see what they can get away with after the fact.
I prefer the Trump method.
Feel the Love
Gordon Friesen, Montreal
P.S. For all kinds of reasons the Climate Change industry is collapsing under its own weight. Once again, this is just something obvious we can all see. So we need some kind of rational policy that accepts this reality. Mr. Trump is merely facing facts, as you suggest we all should.