Posted by Jay Livingston
Sociologist Peter Berger is hauling out the strategy he used when he hired himself out to Big Tobacco. His role then in Tobacco’s fight against regulation and other anti-smoking measures wasn’t to defend smoking as virtuous or healthful. Instead, he was paid to discredit anti-smoking sentiment and organizations. Berger’s tactic for this purpose was basically name calling combined with accusations that even if true were irrelevant.
This time, in a longish (2400 word) article at The American Interest, he’s speaking up for the people who bring us sugar water. Or to be scrupulously accurate, he’s trying to discredit the anti-obesity, anti-diabetes forces trying reduce the amount of the stuff that people drink.
As I said, it’s a page form the same playbook he used when he was working for the folks who bring us cigarettes. He refers to the “vehement passion” of the anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, and he exaggerates their goals (while showing off his erudition):
I suggested that it was in an age-old tradition of the quest of immortality, first described in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic.He also accuses them or their supporters of venal motives.
Successful morally inspired movements typically ally themselves with powerful groups motivated by very hard material interests.This from someone who was being paid by a multi-billion dollar industry to further their material interests. This irony is apparently lost on Berger, who, interestingly, does not even hint that he got penny from Tobacco. Maybe he forgot.
In going after the movement to improve public health, his number one target is Mayor Bloomberg and the proposed ban on the sale of huge-sized sugar-water drinks in theaters, restaurants, and other public places.
Again, Berger is not arguing that obesity is good for you. Instead, he dusts off the old “immortality” barb – equating a desire to reduce diabetes and other illnesses with the vain and impossible goal of immortality. Berger does not tell us how he managed to discover this immortality fantasy in the minds of others, a deep motivation the anti-obesity people are themselves are unaware of. He just makes it the title of his article (“Mayor Bloomberg and the Quest of Immortality”) and asserts it a few times. We have to take it on faith.
Berger makes the same arguments he used against anti-smoking campaigns:
- The anti-obesity forces will be moralistic (Berger refers to them with religion-based words like crusaders, litany, preaching).
- They are elitist. Not only do they see their own lifestyle choices as virtuous, but they try to impose these on the working class.
- They ally themselves with people whose material interests are served by anti-obesity or with (shudder) bureaucrats.
- They are European, un-American.
Then there is the “slippery slope” argument – the scare tactic of exaggeration and false equivalency.I cannot say whether Bloomberg’s quasi-European lifestyle has anything to do with his idea of New York City as a quasi-European welfare state.*
There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little. [Emphasis by Berger.]Yes, you read that correctly. If you can’t buy a 30-oz. cup of sugar-water and instead have to buy two 15-ounce cups, the Saudi police are just around the corner.
I wonder what Berger and libertarians in general were saying back when the good-health forces were trying to get lead removed from gasoline and paint. Could you pretty much do a find-and-replace for the current article, just as that article is a find-and-replace version of his tobacco work?**
UPDATE: Baptiste Coulmont tweets a link to a 2006 article (here) by a French sociologist, Robert Castel, which uncannily echoes Berger’s arguments. Castel uses the same vocabulary of religion in mocking the anti-smokers, and he attributes to them the same desire for immortality.
Le fumeur d'hier comme le fumeur d'aujourd'hui transgresse le seul sacré que nous soyons désormais capables de reconnaître, le culte du corps, de sa santé, de sa longévité, sur lequel s'est finalement rabattu le désir d'éternité. [emphasis added]He likens anti-smoking policies to Islamic authoritarianism:
ce mélange d'autoritarisme bien-pensant, de suffisance pseudo-savante et de bonne conscience sécuritaire qui caractérise souvent les ayatollahs de la santé. [emphasis added]And he sees the same slippery slope.
L'interdit du tabac n'est pas la dernière des prohibitions que l'on nous prépare.The major difference from Berger is that, as far as I know, Castel was not being paid by Gauloises.
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*By the way, if you’re looking for an example of paralipsis or apophasis, look no further than that sentence.
** For more on Berger and Tobacco, see Aaron Swartz’s article (here). (HT: Andrew Gelman). And yes, this is the same Peter Berger that sociologists of a certain age may remember as the author of that staple of Soc 101, Invitation to Sociology, and also as co-author of The Social Construction of Reality.
Robert Proctor's recent Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition" discusses Berger for a few pages within the context of a 40-page chapter "Penetrating the universities."
ReplyDeleteI think there is some grist for the sociology mill.
Andrew Gelman has an article in the forthcoming issue of Change on statisticians who did paid consultant work for the cigarette companies. He cites Proctor's book. There's a pdf of the paper here.
ReplyDeleteBy odd coincidence, here's how Andrew heard about Bob's book, which was invaluable when I as writing this, and in part led to this talk @ UCSF.
ReplyDeleteThe sociology mentions came from looking at social networks, relationships among various groups of people, thinktanks, funders, etc.
I read Andrew's blog, but not always the comments, so I missed that you were the source. I guess it's not surprising that the anti-science smoking deniers are also the anti-science climate deniers, though maybe it is surprising that so many of them are still around.
ReplyDeleteIt is not so much that the old smoking deniers are still around, but the following sequence:
ReplyDelete1) Tobacco companies transition over time from using trade associations or obvious entities like Council for Tobacco Research ... To using thinktanks that could seem independent.
2) The "Fake science,..." document dug out 40-50 thinktanks tobacco funding 1991-2001, mostly from Philip Morris, some from RJ Reynolds. The PM guy Roy Marden kindly had yearly reports that summarized. RJR was less organized, or we don't have the documents or I just couldn't find them. There were more thinktanks, but I mostly checked one that also do climate to some extent.
3) Some of the same people did smoking early and then got involved with climate, as per Oreskes/Conway Merchants of Doubt.
4) But I think that this is more attributable to social/organizational effects:
A) Hill codified the doubt creation strategy for the tobacco companies in 1953.
B) by the 1990s , the tobacco companies were using policy thinktanks,
C) The tactics became institutional knowledge, and were employed in other domains, including climate. Bob's book had a page he called the tobacco play book. I did a version where I changed some of the specifics to do climate. Very good fit.
D) the thinktanks form a tight social network that compete for funds but often cooperate and help each other out. The funders (of these) also form a tight network, especially the family foundations that coordinate through Philanthropy Roundtable.
Then add tobacco and for a while Excon Mobil Foundation.
E) the actual visible spokespeople mostly differ between tobacco and clImate, with a few exceptions who do both, like Steve Milloy. But the tactics have been institutionalized via some thinktanks.
Thanks for the lucid summary. Nice to know that my playbook metaphor was also used by the people who actually know about what was going on.
ReplyDeletePlay books work. John Hill's was "good."
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, (from Brandt's The Cigarette Century), Hill had in the late 1940s quit smoking for health reasons.
Statistical doubt creation was natural for smoking.
In climate, there were many physics arguments, but those easily ran afoul of basic physics. The statistucs arguments came in with the attack on the hockey stick, especially with the 2006 wegman report, with statics fakery that worked with the public.
The climate equivalent of the Dec 1953 tobacco meeting (where the playbook started) was a 1998 meeting of the Global Climate Science Communications Team at the Anerican Petroleum Institute offices. With folks like Steve Milloy of TASSC, etc, it is unsurprising that it's playbook is recognizable (and still being executed.)