THE METHOD OF LIES VERSUS THE METHOD OF TRUTH J. Lincoln Simon Journalists tell us again and again that journalists strive for an objective account of events and trends. Factual truth is their highest professional ideal, they assert. Of course they and the public recognize that humans inevitably fall short of ideals. But journalists certainly are entitled to profess the faith of truth even though they cannot always achieve the truth. It is shocking, then, to find eminent journals stating with pride a very different professional credo: the truth should be ignored and falsity should be endorsed for the sake of other goals. One justification given is that the other goals are believed to be more important than the truth - much as psychoanalysis in the Western world, and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union were believed to be too important to be evaluated by ordinary scientific tests of validity. Another justification is that human beings will be induced by the truth to act in anti- social ways. The context of this unusual journalistic credo is environmental activism, some of whose practitioners share this credo of zealous well-meaning dishonesty with the journalists. Let's call this theory of social improvement the method of lies, to be compared to the traditional (ideal) method of truth. The Oakland Tribune published an editorial on January 28, 1996, ironically entitled "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella," commenting on a book I edited, The State of Humanity. The editorial suggested that false warnings of environmental doom should be promulgated and true descriptions of improving material conditions should be suppressed. The editorial began by reporting some of the book's heartening findings. But the newspaper then continued: "Enough of Simon. Now turn to the newspaper." There followed a litany of horrible facts including "mass graves in Bosnia," African HIV epidemics and famines, the killing of Chinese infants, Chechnya massacres, and "Children all over the world... being sexually exploited." What is the connection between these two apparently- unconnected themes - a) improving material trends, and b) various social ills? Apparently the newspaper believes that if the public learns about the improving trends in material conditions, people will grow complacent and cease struggling to make social conditions better. The implicit theory is that false assertions about negative trends will mobilize people to address problems with greater efforts. The newspaper went on to say, "Perhaps the more realistic point of view is that because so many of us read Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' and Nevil Shute's 'On the Beach' and took them seriously, we worked hard to avoid the catastrophes that threatened us" in past decades. But Rachel Carson's book was fiction posing as documentary science. Furthermore, her warnings that birds were disappearing in the Northeast, and that soon the spring would be "silent" of their calls, were not supported by statistical evidence of that time. And since then, according to remarkably good Audubon Society data, the numbers of birds in the majority of endangered species have been increasing, while the total numbers of birds also have increased. But the Oakland Tribune has an answer to this: "We'll opt for optimism from time to time, but we're not ready yet to discard pessimism as a way to bring about change that could make us genuinely optimistic one day." This says plainly that the paper condones false propaganda in the service of what it considers to be valuable goals. Or to put it differently, the end justifies the means. Other reviewers agree. From The Economist of London: He [Simon] is right to argue that people are too ready to believe doomsayers, but [he] fails to recognise that gloom has its uses. Dire warnings have averted disasters. Food productivity rose in the 1970s partly because fear of famine spurred governments to subsidize agricultural research. Similarly, fear of global warming is now encouraging research into ways of reduc- ing the cost of clean fuels. If human progress is inevitable, that may be because humans are always worrying about what might go wrong. A qualification is needed. Nothing said here criticizes honest warnings of danger. An influential physicist provocatively asked, at a conference about the same book: "Have not the doomsayers helped produce a better environment?" I answered: Those who warn against [real] trouble help us and deserve our thanks even if the warning is wrong - as long as the person raising the alarm is not willfully ignorant or dishonest. But some forecasts of danger are knowingly exaggerated or false. Stanford atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider says: On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but -- which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do this we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. (italics added) And consider the self-confessed lies told by the Club of Rome in connection with the doomsdaying book The Limits to Growth, which sold an amazing 4 or 9 million copies in 29 languages. Within four years of publication the book was disavowed by its very own sponsors, the Club of Rome. The Club said that the conclusions of that book are not true and that the Club purposely misled the public in order to "awaken" public concern. That is, just four years after the foofaraw created by the book's 1972 publication and huge circulation, the Club of Rome "reversed its position" and "came out for more growth." But this about-face got relatively little attention, even though it was written up in such places as Time and the New York Times. The explanation of this reversal, as reported in Time, is a masterpiece of face-saving double talk. The Club's founder, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei, says that Limits was intended to jolt people from the comfortable idea that present growth trends could continue indefinitely. That done, he says, the Club could then seek ways to close the widening gap between rich and poor nations - inequities that, if they continue, could all too easily lead to famine, pollution and war. The Club's startling shift, Peccei says, is thus not so much a turnabout as part of an evolving strategy. In other words, the Club of Rome sponsored and disseminated untruths in an attempt to scare us. Having scared many people with these lies, the Club can now tell people the real truth. Even aside from the fact that the contrived-pessimism strategy suggested by the Oakland Tribune violates the most basic ethical principles of a moral society, and the ethical tenets of journalism, it also is risky. If the facts do not constrain what one says, what process will ensure that the propaganda is "enlightened" rather than the sort that Joseph Goebbels purveyed? Who will be the judge of whose lies are to be accepted? The sincerity of the propagandist is no protection; some of the worst excesses in history were engineered by persons motivated by zealous belief. And a public-opinion battle between competing sets of lies, or even with truth as a competitor, hardly qualifies as a reasonable test. The espousers of this credo do not seem abashed when their attention is drawn to it. That is not surprising. Nor is it amazing that journalists are not impressed by the bad prediction records of the leading doomsayer gurus, or the good prediction records of their opponents. What is surprising, and even more shocking to me than the existence of a journalistic credo of false propaganda in the service of environmental ends, is that no one I tell about this seems outraged. And there is no medium in which to protest this credo and its practice. The Oakland Tribune nobly printed a response by me saying some of what is said here, but that is most unusual. And competitor newspapers and magazines will not publish op-ed pieces saying what is said here (as will be proven by the fact that this article will not appear in any of the nation's major newspapers, to which I'll sequentially send it.) Can we be sure that the standard journalistic credo of truth is "better"? Admittedly, I have no data to prove that the truth is the better policy in the long run; this proposition has never been subjected to rigorous study. Even in the absence of evidence, however, I continue to believe that professing the truth is humanity's best hope. And I hope that on a second thought the editorial writers of the Economist and Oakland Tribune and their colleagues elsewhere will come to agree. J. Lincoln Simon teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. His The Ultimate Resource 2 will be published in November by Princeton University Press. Phone 301-951-0922, fax 301-951-8468 110 Primrose St. Chevy Chase, Md. 20815 page 1 articl96 truthjrn August 29, 1996