Offline: Difficult truths about a post-truth world

Abstract

In 2012, I took a train to Brussels to attend a meeting on harm reduction. The invitation came from Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser to José Manuel Barroso (then President of the European Commission). The organiser of the meeting was a communications agency called SciCom. The gathering included people I knew and respected (such as Michel Kazatchkine), as well as some of the scientific glitterati of European policy making—Helmut Greim (Chair of the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks) and Jim Bridges (Chair of the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks). I hoped I might learn a little about European health policy. But the meeting ended and I heard nothing more. Until last week. At our Global Health Lab, which The Lancet holds jointly with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Mark Petticrew, Director of the Public Health Research Consortium at the School, discussed how the tobacco and alcohol industries distort health policy by claiming that expertise and evidence are just other forms of bias. His prize exhibit of the post-truth world was the Brussels Declaration. This document, published in February this year, purported to set out “ethics and principles to inform work at the boundaries of science, society, and policy”. In one recommendation, the Declaration stated that, “Scientists need to recognise that they are advocates with vested interests too—in their case, in their own science.” In another recommendation—“Industry is an investor in knowledge generation and science and has every right to have its voice heard”—the Declaration went on: “Nevertheless, industry is too often perceived as suffering from fatal conflicts of interest and its views are therefore dismissed. In fact, commercial conflicts of interest are fairly easy to deal with if they are properly declared and the relationship between the science and the marketing made explicit. Ideological, personal, or academic conflicts of interest, on the other hand, are much harder to detect or deal with.” The message of the Brussels Declaration was clear: there is no truth, it's all too complex, everybody is conflicted, and experts are more conflicted than most. The Declaration included a photograph of those of us who met in Brussels in 2012 (together with a quote from me). Those who attended five consultations organised by SciCom are listed. They include four employees of British American Tobacco—its Chief Scientific Officer, Group Scientific Director, Head of Biosciences, and International Scientific Affairs Manager (two had their photographs included in the Declaration). This document, whose intention seems to be to undermine the value of science in policy making, was created with the input of industries that are anathema to health. And by listing those of us who (in good faith) attended their consultations, the Declaration suggests that we supported it—a clear manipulation of the truth. Jonathan Breckon heads the Alliance for Useful Evidence. He argued that we should embrace the growing mood of anti-expertise. Experts are “flawed human beings”. To be sure, don't stop being empirical. But get better at dealing with subjective evidence, engage new audiences, and work to create a more deliberative democracy. The problem of post-truth is not evidence. It is power. Our democracy isn't working. We should welcome those whose views make us feel uncomfortable. Jennifer Hudson is a political scientist at University College London. Misinformation is not only about false or inaccurate information, deliberately intended to deceive. It is about confidently held false beliefs. There is nothing new here. Manipulation of public attitudes is all around us. Charities that want you to donate money to their cause will use images to persuade you to do so. If you see a sad child in an advertisement, 77% of people will give money. A happy child elicits only a 52% response. Emotion gets our attention. Facts are not value free. Pity, empathy, anger, guilt, hope, repulsion. We are frequently presented with facts and truths in ways designed to elicit certain actions. The post-truth world of today is only a hyperversion of what we have been living with for some time. Global health should “embrace the trend and play the emotional game”. I'm not so sure. Instead, Mark Petticrew urged our recommitment to independence, objectivity, science, and peer review. Truths are contested and contextual. But a rigorous quest for fact is all that separates us from chaos and damnation.