Pious Frauds

How credentialled elites distort science on demand from their sponsors

This essay is published in Open magazine at https://openthemagazine.com/essay/pious-frauds/

Here are the first few paragraphs. I find the positioning of the West quite charming: they pretend to be the proud bearers of Science (capital S), rationality, and ‘evidence’. Not a shred of truth in this, of course, and they are past masters at fraud.

Pious Frauds

1843 magazine, part of the Economist group, published an article in August 2019 titled The original anti-vaxxers, in which it extolled Edward Jenner, supposedly the inventor of the technique of vaccination in 1796, and spoke about the resistance in certain quarters to vaccination, known as ‘anti-vaxxing’. In passing, it said the following:

‘In British-ruled India, the authorities were so hellbent on mass-vaccination that they resorted to fraud. When devout Hindus refused to be injected with cow products, the impasse was broken by the lucky discovery of an ancient Sanskrit text which showed that, incredibly, Hindu physicians had discovered vaccination centuries earlier. It was only after the vaccination campaign was safely under way that the truth was revealed: the “ancient” manuscript had been forged in a hotel room in Madras by the British Museum’s expert in Sanskrit. Can such a “pious fraud” be excused because ultimately it did good?’

The idea may have been to show that anti-vaxxing has a long history, but the paragraph reveals a whole lot more: the positioning of Hindus as not only the Other, but also ignorant, unscientific, and gullible; how easy it was for the ‘expert’ (note they needed just one!) in Sanskrit to fabricate a text that fooled an entire nation; and how there was this touching paternalistic concern for the welfare of their somewhat unwilling Indian subjects on the part of the kind imperial British.

If we were to stop deconstructing this pregnant paragraph for a minute, there is a meta-narrative as well: our instinct is to believe what’s said there, because it fits in with our prejudices. For example, the Nehruvian trope of ‘Scientific Temper’ that implies there was no science in India before ‘Enlightenment’ values arrived.

The reason why the grand term ‘Enlightenment’ may be less than meets the eye is that several of the stalwarts of that time, spoken of in hushed tones as high-watermarks in the evolution of human thought and ethics, turn out to have held the normal prejudices of their time. Yet, they have been put on pedestals; they deserve to be deconstructed in turn.

They were often racist imperialists. James Mill and John Stuart Mill wrote volumes damning Indians as inferior, justifying British rule in India. Jeremy Bentham invented the surveillance nightmare of the Panopticon, of which the Cellular Jail in the Andamans was an early implementation. Abolitionist William Wilberforce was a literalist Christian fundamentalist and a misogynist. At a time when casual racism is facing protests all over, it is not appropriate to give them a free pass.

What is more germane to the issue of fraud, though, is that the 1843 magazine paragraph is itself a complete fabrication. The meme ‘pious fraud’ was popularised by Dominik Wujastyk, a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

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