#robert proctor

Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. It was coined in 1995 by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor, and linguist Iain Boal. The word is based on the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, “not knowing” (cf. Attic Greek ἄγνωτος “unknown”), and -λογία, -logia.

"...ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate."

Agnotología, o cómo crear ignorancia de forma deliberada

RPA communiqués appealed to the notion of a new, specifically “völkisches[racial] conscience,” the growing strength of which, they claimed, could be measured in terms of rising numbers of sterilizations and declining numbers of abortions. Yet the specter of racial crisis remained ever present, a fact largely blamed on the continuing influence of the churches. The uncompromising Gross cast the issue in the starkest possible terms, as a battle between the forces of enlightenment and those of “darkness,” referring in one context to the need to combat the “obscurationist tactics” (Verdunklungsmanöver) used by the “shadowy figures” (Dunkelmänner). Building this new conscience entailed banishing all traces of “exaggerated humanity” or “false pity” just as it did rejecting any concession to liberal, reactionary, or confessional worldviews. Such statements lend support to Robert Proctor’s argument concerning the Nazis’ intention to recast relations between those responsible for formulating race hygiene doctrine and the German public. While Peter Fritzsche has argued that “the most basic continuity between Weimar and Nazi policy lies in the assumption that human material could and should be molded,” Edward Ross Dickinson stresses the radical nature of the break that occurred in 1933. Among other things, this meant the closing down of that space that, during the Weimar period, allowed heterogeneous views to coexist, including those associated with figures like Hirschfeld. Enlightenment was no longer conceived of as something arrived at on one’s own but as something imposed from above by the state. Perhaps this development may best be characterized as the expression of a form of “enlightened totalitarianism”: a regime carrying to its most radical conclusion that distinctively modern conception of human and social engineering that Detlev Peukert refers to as Machbarkeitswahn (“dream [or, more literally, mania] of perfectibility”).

The doubts that crept into late Weimar discussions concerning the enlightenment film proved temporary. Under the Nazis, this genre experienced a dramatic revival. Indeed, as Robert Proctor has provocatively suggested in his study of the Nazi campaign against smoking, the term Aufklärung may have been invoked more during the Nazi era than at any other time in German history. Curt Thomalla played a key role in this following his appointment to a post within Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, where he was charged with overseeing propaganda in the fields of public health, welfare, and population policy. This position afforded him great latitude in advancing what he called the regime’s “biological revolution.” His writings of this period repeatedly evoke his wartime experiences in drawing connections between the suggestive treatment of the war neurotic and the suggestive influencing of the populace. The hybrid formula used in his film False Shame proved highly influential in the Nazi era. It may be seen as one of the precursors of the notorious I Accuse (1941), whose didactic content—the tragic but ultimately “merciful” choice of euthanasia for those classified as “incurable”—is embedded within a highly melodramatic feature narrative.

The man who studies the spread of ignorance