It has become common to hear that any decision on any matter of any importance should be based on “evidence”. This idea, constantly repeated for several years like a mantra or an incantation, takes it for granted that knowledge is always better than ignorance, even when it calls into question the most socially anchored beliefs. However, far from always encouraging the production of knowledge, many organizations and social actors work actively to block the production or circulation of knowledge that risks calling into question their convictions or their social legitimacy.
There are several maneuvers intended to maintain this ignorance: not to search, to block access to the data, to remain silent, to create a diversion, to criticize the “methodology”, to suspect the “hidden motivations” of the researchers, to question their credibility, or invoke “ethics” again. It is on this last strategy that I will focus here.
At the service of ignorance
The very vague and elastic content of the term “ethics” indeed allows a strategic use of this notion in terms of the production of ignorance. An example from Quebec is illuminating in this regard. In February 2017, journalist Marie-Ève Tremblay wanted to “test the tolerance of students towards certain sensitive subjects”, as reported by UQAM News February 13, 2017. To do this, the journalist printed “two cartoonish posters and posted them on the university bulletin boards”. The two posters “contained non-nuanced remarks likely to offend certain sensitivities” in order to “verify the state of freedom of expression at the university”.
One poster “addressed themes specific to the identity right and nationalism”, while the other promoted far left ideas and “called for understanding with regard to acts of anti-gentrification vandalism clerks in businesses in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Saint-Henri districts”. The journalist’s hypothesis was that since student activists at UQAM were mainly left-wing and extreme left-wing, posters considered to be “right-wing” would be quickly attacked – which was indeed the case – whereas, as expected likewise, “posters featuring anti-gentrification vandalism” would elicit “no reaction.”
Things could have stopped there, but that was without taking into account that a professor from UQAM, Anik Meunier, from the Department of Didactics, had participated in this “experiment” by commenting on what was probably going to happen. Very upset to have been thus somehow trapped by the little stratagem of the Radio-Canada journalist, certain activists, rather shrewd strategists, then had the brilliant idea of saying to themselves that the professor having intervened in the report had thus participated in an “experiment” and should therefore, according to the ethical standards in force in universities, have first obtained from UQAM a certificate confirming the legitimacy of this “research”!
One can think that a person with a good knowledge of these finicky procedures that fit into a document of about 200 pages would have laughed at such a student requirement and would have recalled the strict definition of “research project”. But that would be to forget that the heads of these institutional ethics committees do not all necessarily have the appropriate knowledge and above all the judgment necessary to avoid strategic uses of “ethics”.
And so it happened that this complaint was taken seriously by the head of the Committee and that the professor was summoned to explain why she had not taken this step, which is essential to any truly “ethical” research. It was then necessary to explain to this character that he had not carefully read the famous policy on the ethics of research and that he was in fact only the useful idiot – as Lenin said! — of a few activists who wanted to make a professor pay for the fact that they had been framed and had thus clearly demonstrated their lack of respect for the ideas they disliked.
As I said, ethics is obviously not the only issue, and the strategies aimed at preventing the production, or at erasing from the social space, knowledge judged by certain groups as cumbersome or destabilizing for their ideological or other convictions are numerous and can affect all fields of knowledge. Even art is no exception: we will remember the aberrant case of Facebook having “erased” Courbet’s famous painting, The origin of the worldon the pretext that it was “indecent”.
Faced with these often sneaky attacks, but sometimes also steeped in good moral intentions, it may be useful to learn to decode them for what they are, namely obstacles to the production of knowledge. Valid knowledge, even painful to hear, should never be erased behind variable geometry morals and the particular and self-proclaimed interests of various social groups who want to impose their vision of the world, even at the cost of lies and mental restrictions.
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