John Nordin
We seem to live awash in information, overwhelmed by it. Endless channels of cable, more and more AM and FM stations and, of course, the ever-expanding Internet. Yet, there are some things we don’t permit ourselves to know, or, in some cases, are legally inhibited from easily knowing.
Just this week, after a four-year struggle, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, succeeded in prohibiting the National Science Foundation from funding research on the topic of political science other than that for national security. He was joined by co-sponsors John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska).
Why? It’s not immediately clear; comments on the above-linked article at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and at Coburn’s own website don’t explain his reasoning. Apparently $7 million of the $10 million in appropriations money affected by this will simply be transferred to the National Cancer Institute. There is speculation that because much of this research is about elections and elected officials that some don’t want the scrutiny.
There are other areas of forbidden knowledge.
Health care effectiveness research
Remember death panels? This was the fictitious idea that the government was going to review the cases of elderly patients and decide when to stop giving them medical care. The fear of this lives on, as the comment section on this article advocating a renewed look at effective health care shows.
The real issue wasn’t about pulling the plug on individual patients, it was about researching ways to make health care more effective. Not research done by “government bureaucrats,” but research funded by the federal government and done by scientists who publish it and have it reviewed by other scientists.
This became forbidden knowledge because research into the effectiveness of various treatments was banned by Congress. In a lengthy article, Philip Longman lays out the absurd waste in our health care system, quoting researchers from Dartmouth that perhaps one third of our health expenses are counterproductive.
A commitment to go after and reduce that wasted expenditure could keep health care costs from rising faster than the economy is growing, and that could solve most of our budget deficit problems.
Yet the Republicans, who almost have a patent on the phrase “waste, fraud and abuse,” insisted on banning this research as part of the maneuvering over Obamacare. Why? Because, according to Longman, the drug and medical equipment lobbies knew research like this was likely to impact their business.
It’s embedded in the Republican psyche to cut spending but when that means cutting profits, it causes a conflict. You can see this conflict in action at a Heritage Foundation article on this topic. The article twists and turns trying to have it both ways: supporting finding the waste but opposing using this information to actually cut expenses.
Yet again, the capture of our government to big business is costing you dearly.
Gun violence research
For 17 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were banned from researching gun violence and its impacts. Research was focusing on the risk factors for gun violence until the NRA lobbied successfully in 1996 for the ban. Obama overturned it recently, but we have lost many years of work that could have been done. One of the sponsors of the ban, Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, has since changed his mind and written in favor of more research.
The way to avoid any sort of ban on guns or to blunt any serious move to restrict all gun owners must depend on being able to identify risk factors and focus restrictions and law enforcement on the minority of people who cannot be trusted with firearms. But that was forbidden knowledge.
It’s not censorship
To say that knowledge is forbidden, is not the same thing as saying it is censored. No private individual would have gone to jail for researching these questions. The government didn’t actively try to suppress work in these areas. But the federal government is a significant source of funding for research, and when that source of funds is stopped it makes such information much harder to obtain. Moreover, governments don’t only fund research, they also collect and make available massive data sets that no private organization could assemble.
Forbidden knowledge is about those things we choose not to know. Families, small groups or organization do it too: They can have some glaring fact, obvious to outsiders, that no one denies, but no one talks about either.
The actual Middle East
An example of things we don’t want to know, but no one is censoring, is Al-Jazeera. No law prevents it from appearing on U.S. cable systems, but it is effectively banned, appearing only a tiny fraction of U.S. homes. Al-Jazeera has plans to get around that by their recent purchase of Current TV.
Al-Jazeera is just a small symptom of a larger category of forbidden knowledge. We seldom see pictures of the developed Middle East of skyscrapers, sophisticated businesses and modern homes. Instead, we see deserts and camels and various tribal customs offered for our amusement.
You will have noticed that all the examples listed so far were due to the work of conservatives. But forbidden knowledge is not exclusively on the right. There are issues that liberals will not touch, such as the rates of crime among various ethnic groups, abuse by unions or systemic oppression of lower-class whites.
Change is painful, and psychologically painful. To admit we were wrong about something significant isn’t just about changing one little fact in our heads. It might involve reorienting our whole approach to some issue or some group of people. Humans seem to have an ability to deny what is in plain sight.
Or at least pass laws to make it harder for others to see it.