Some of the brightest and most dynamic people in Western society make a living from counterknowledge. It takes a talented entrepreneur to make a profit from false information, to package it so skil-fully that questions about truthfulness and accuracy either never arise or are successfully brushed aside. These counterknowledge entrepreneurs may or may not believe their own claims, but the successful ones all have an instinctive understanding of how social epidemics work. They are not just salesmen: they are what Malcolm Gladwell calls ‘connectors’, ‘people with a special gift for bringing the world together’.1
Connectors make friends and business contacts across a wide range of subcultures and niches. They can efficiently spread a message–a health fad or a conspiracy theory–to charities, government, schools, specialist websites and, above all, the mainstream media. If the counterknowledge entrepreneur is lucky, word of mouth takes over and provides free publicity. Imitators jump on the bandwagon. When this happens, the distinction between producers and consumers of the product begins to blur. Counterknowledge becomes an industry in the broadest sense of the word; it affects not only people’s finances and careers but also their personal lives, since access to supposedly secret information can shape the way they think about themselves.
In this chapter, I look at three examples of the counterknowledge industry at work. The first is a specific product: a DVD and book package called The Secret, which offers a recipe for achieving material wealth just by thinking about it. The Secret became an overnight sensation after it was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey in 2007.2 It is what you might call hit-and-run counterknowledge: a single fad that will presumably run its course in a year or two. The second example is the mini-empire of the London-based nutritionist Patrick Holford. This is not hit-and-run counterknowledge. Over the past few years, Holford’s products and services have become deeply embedded in British society; he is a connector par excellence whose controversial nutritional advice reaches a huge tranche of the public. The third is Gavin Menzies’s bogus history book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (or The Year China Discovered America, for the US market), the creation of which offers us a glimpse into the international counterknowledge industry in full swing.
The Secret was the brainchild of Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television producer who claims to have stumbled across the ‘law of attraction’. This ‘law’, a version of which was proposed by the self-help author William Walker Atkinson as early as 1906, states that the universe matches situations to your thoughts. ‘Like attracts like’, so if you imagine a new car, or a new house, or a pay rise, you will get it. On the other hand, if you imagine disaster–bereavement, a burglary, a cancer diagnosis–then that misfortune will materialize. However, once you master the formula, you will find out that the universe is a conveyor belt of presents.
According to the publishers’ synopsis, ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries. A number of the exceptional people who discovered its power went on to become regarded as the greatest human beings who ever lived. Among them: Plato, Leonardo, Galileo and Einstein. Now “the secret” is being shared with the world. Beautiful in its simplicity, and mind-dazzling in its ability to really work, The Secret reveals the mystery of the hidden potential within us all. By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, the riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be the masters of their own lives.’3
The formula can be summed up in three words: Ask, Believe, Receive. No one knows why it works, we are told, but it may have something to do with quantum physics. At any rate, The Secret completely overturns our understanding of cause and effect.
As Byrne explains, choosing an example of particular interest to her target audience, food is not responsible for putting on weight, it is the thought that food puts on weight that actually piles on the pounds. ‘If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to your picture of you in your perfect body,’ she advises.4 And, as your waist size drops, your bank account will fatten. ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,’ confides Byrne.5
By the summer of 2007 there were 5 million copies of The Secret in print and nearly as many DVDs had been sold–and this despite generally dreadful reviews pointing out the obvious: that the law of attraction is a figment of Byrne’s imagination. Newsweek described her message as ethically ‘deplorable’ because it implied that even the victims of ethnic cleansing were responsible for their fate. The magazine quoted Professor John Norcross, a psychologist at the University of Scranton, as saying that The Secret fell into the 10 per cent of self-help films and books that were actually dangerous. (In the film, a woman claims to have cured her own cancer by using its techniques.)6
Unfortunately, the book also falls into the category of titles known in the publishing industry as ‘review-proof’–that is, their following is so strong that no number of bad reviews will dent sales. (The same was true of The Da Vinci Code, which is badly written even by the standards of airport fiction.) By the time the sniffy reviews of The Secret appeared, the critics’ judgement was irrelevant, because, as many commentators observed, word of mouth had taken over.
But what does ‘word of mouth’ actually mean in this context? The genesis of The Secret can be traced back to 2004, when Rhonda Byrne was feeling depressed as a result of the death of her father and problems with an Australian TV series she was working on. Her daughter gave her a copy of The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles, first published in 1910. Wattles was one of a number of turn-of-the-century shysters who claimed to have discovered inexplicable laws of the universe that guaranteed financial success to anyone with a sufficiently optimistic mindset. He was a creature of the cultic milieu; but Byrne was impressed, and says his book stimulated her to recognize the ‘law of attraction’ in the writings of many of today’s self-help gurus.
Byrne flew around America interviewing and flattering twenty-two best-selling authors for the television film that became The Secret DVD. And it was one of these authors whose publisher persuaded Byrne’s publisher, Judith Curr of Simon & Schuster’s imprint Atria Books, that the DVD should have an accompanying book. This was duly written, but advertised only within the DVD itself.
The strategy would not have worked, however, if the DVD had not already become a word-of-mouth success, thanks to Byrne’s crafty choice of established gurus as interviewees. By recruiting the support of some of America’s most relentless self-publicists, Byrne formed a network of formidable connectors. As Curr told Book Business magazine, ‘We looked at all the teachers [showcased in the book] and added up all the books they had sold collectively, which comes to about 400 million copies. So we knew there were 22 people who would probably be talking an awful lot about this book.’7
One of these, Jack Canfield, is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, whose 115 titles have sold tens of millions of copies. After he started plugging The Secret on his website, the DVD and book entered the territory known as brand hijacking. As Curr explains: ‘Brand hijacking is where the public says, “Just move out of the way. We want this, and we’re going to buy it.”’ New Age centres arranged screenings of the film. Larry King interviewed several Secret participants–fawningly, critics said. Finally, Oprah Winfrey took up the title and announced that she had been living according to the law of attractions all her life without realizing it.
The story of The Secret will ring bells with anyone who has read The Tipping Point. Rhonda Byrne and her colleagues succeeded in turning a marketing campaign into a social epidemic. There is nothing magical about this phenomenon; as Malcolm Gladwell showed, the tipping point can work just as well for the manufacturers of suede shoes as for New Age gurus unlocking the secrets of the universe. Most of the time it does not work; plenty of authors selling a message just as preposterous as Byrne’s have tried and failed to harness the power of word of mouth.
Byrne was lucky. Even so, the success of The Secret does illustrate an important affinity between counterknowledge and social epidemics. People who think they have been entrusted with a big secret feel empowered by this knowledge. If they know the ‘truth’ about 9/11, or the ‘real’ cause of cancer, or the law of attraction, then they possess information that can change the world. Although the business of world transformation may have to be left to others, they can at least score points at a dinner party. Meanwhile, if the ‘message’ is sufficiently exciting, their friends will want some of this power for themselves. So they make for the nearest bookshop or health store to hijack the brand.
When we see this happening, it is always worth asking: why is this information secret? Has it been rejected by the guardians of orthodoxy because its implications threaten their own power, or because it is untrue? In the case of The Secret, one could hardly ask for a clearer example of counterknowledge. The promise of instant wealth has been a leitmotif of snake-oil merchants down the centuries. And Byrne is not the first ‘teacher’ to present it in a supernatural context; her law of attractions is a non-Christian alternative to the ‘health and wealth’ movement among Pentecostal Christians, which preaches that Jesus will reward believers with houses, jobs, cars and relationships. (To be fair, many Pentecostals deplore this Christian counterknowledge, also known as the ‘prosperity Gospel’, which has a huge following among churchgoers in West Africa.8)
The Secret brings together several streams of counterknowledge. Many of the twenty-two gurus featured in the DVD have spread false information or bear the hallmarks of the counterknowledge entrepreneur, such as questionable academic qualifications. ‘Dr’ John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, holds degrees in ‘Creative Intelligence’ from the Maharishi European Research University; his PhD is from Columbia Pacific University, later shut down by the state of California for being a degree mill. ‘Dr’ Joe Vitale was a follower of the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh before leaving to create something called ‘hypnotic marketing’, in which he offers a PhD;9 his own doctorate in ‘Metaphysical Science’ comes from the University of Metaphysics, which provides online tuition in, among other things, metaphysical tongue-control technique.10 Dr John Demartini practises chiropractic, a medical therapy rooted in pseudoscience. Esther Hicks, a New Age author, channels a group of disembodied entities known collectively as ‘Abraham’; she and her husband Jerry were in the original Secret DVD but had themselves cut out of the ‘improved’ version after an argument about their share of the proceeds.11
For those of the twenty-two ‘teachers’ who had not already made a fortune out of their products, The Secret has offered a fast track from the cultic milieu to the mainstream; from one copy of their book in a New Age bookstore in West Hollywood to a pile on a table at Barnes and Noble. The book and DVD may turn out to be a nine-day wonder, but counterknowledge entrepreneurs are determined to exploit its potential.
Three of the authors, Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield and the Rev ‘Dr’ Michael Beckwith (his doctorate comes from the United Church of Religious Science), have teamed up to form the Science of Getting Rich programme, offering books, DVDs and courses. ‘You’ve seen the Movie. Now Live the Philosophy and Claim the Wealth the Universe Has Always Had Waiting for You,’ they say. ‘Let me be very candid with you,’ adds Proctor. ‘While many people have recently been jumping on the Law of Attraction Bandwagon, what I am about to share with you is the material at the very core of my success teachings…Just ONE LISTEN of these CDs can change everything for you.’12
By people jumping on the bandwagon, he presumably means Esther and Jerry Hicks, who claim to be the true authors of the Law of Attraction as transmitted by the ‘infinite intelligence of Abraham’. Their decision to opt out of The Secret turned out to be a smart one, since in March 2007 their quite separate book The Law of Attraction reached number two on the New York Times best-seller list. ‘You know how an icebreaker is a clumsy vessel designed to break ice?’ Jerry (a former circus acrobat) told Robert Chalmers of the Independent. ‘I see The Secret as the icebreaker for the Law of Attraction, which we’ve been teaching for 20 years. We’re cruising behind in our yacht, comfortably.’13
Or, to adapt the metaphor, The Secret sailed along a river of counterknowledge until it reached the open sea of the mass market. Along the way, it stopped to pick up permatanned motivational speakers, New Age channellers, reverends from unknown denominations and practitioners of junk medicine. These entrepreneurs each had their own followers, whom they were able to point in the direction of The Secret.
Crucially, however, the product was presented in a way that enabled it to move beyond these core followers. Its packaging conjured up images of secret documents waiting to be unsealed; hundreds of thousands of people bought the DVD or book because the cover looked intriguing–and reminded them of The Da Vinci Code. Like Dan Brown, Rhonda Byrne added a dose of Gnostic mystery to a tired format. Counterknowledge is often at its most potent when it ties together genres and/or conspiracy theories in unexpected combinations.
On the other hand, however many copies it sells, The Secret’s appeal will always be limited, by the sheer absurdity of its claims. From the moment it entered the best-seller lists, the book was mocked. Saturday Night Live did a skit on it, while plenty of commentators suggested that the fad was being driven by brainwashed Hollywood celebrities and trailer trash (‘Secretrons’, one critic called them). We might be alarmed that crude counterknowledge could carve out a mass audience almost overnight; but at least there was a healthy backlash.
Far more worrying is a branch of the counterknowledge industry whose connections to the cultic milieu are less immediately obvious, and which feeds off large institutions that lend it credibility–in sociological terms, that reinforce its plausibility structure.
Patrick Holford is Britain’s most influential nutritionist despite the fact that (as we saw in the previous chapter) he has no academic qualifications in this field. He is also one of Britain’s most influential propagators of potentially dangerous counterknowledge. That does not mean that, by definition, he is a liar or a fraud; it means that he disseminates information that is untrue or that is unsupported by evidence. He certainly seems to believe his own bullshit. The problem is that so do countless thousands of other people.
One could easily devote a whole book to the dubious claims in Holford’s oeuvre, so let me confine myself to three specimen charges.
First, Holford circulates misleading information about autism to the parents of children affected by this often devastating developmental disorder. Holford is a supporter of Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose claim that the MMR vaccine triggers autism is unsupported by a single peer-reviewed study; in 2007, he gathered signatures for a petition to stop Wakefield being struck off by the General Medical Council.14 Holford thinks that MMR may be ‘the last straw’ that causes autism in susceptible children. He also cites a ‘recent review of all the available evidence’ that concludes that Wakefield’s thesis has not been refuted (which it has); the footnote for this ‘review’ directs the reader to the website of the charity Food for the Brain (CEO: P. Holford), where it is available only to paid subscribers.
In the section of his website devoted to the causes of autism, Holford writes: ‘As with many conditions, there is debate as to whether autism is inherited or caused by something like diet or environment.’ This is grossly misleading. The scientific literature shows clearly that, in over 90 per cent of cases, autism is genetic.15 Holford does not tell parents this, either on his website or on that of Food for the Brain. The latter provides an ‘action plan’ for parents of autism sufferers which involves giving the children enormous quantities of vitamins and other diet supplements. For more help in ‘overcoming autism’–a dubious choice of words, given that autism is incurable and does not go into remission–parents are recommended to visit the Brain Bio Center (Director: P. Holford), whose promotional literature says that ‘over several months, most patients spend between £600 and £1,100 on consultations and tests, plus between £2 to £3 per day for supplements’.16
Second, Holford has promoted and sold an electronic pendant called a QLink, which is supposed to protect against radiation from mobile phones and laptop computers. As he explains on the manufacturer’s website: ‘The scientific proof is deeply impressive…This revolutionary pendant provides continuous support against electromagnetic radiation via a microchip which resonates at the same frequencies as the body’s own energetic field.’17 Dr Ben Goldacre of the Guardian’s Bad Science column saw that Holford was selling QLinks through his Health Products for Life catalogue, and decided to examine one closely by taking it apart.
There was no microchip. Goldacre contacted the inventors of the QLink. ‘They informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a New Age crystal pendant.’ Goldacre estimates that the key component of the QLink costs £0.005 to manufacture; Holford was charging £69.99 per pendant.18
Third, and most disturbingly, Holford is sceptical not only about MMR but also about the value of vaccination in general. He writes: ‘The alternatives to vaccination are to ensure that you or your child has a fighting fit immune system. There is no better way to confer immunity to an infant than breast feeding and, once weaned, ensuring an optimal intake of immune-boosting nutrients. Vitamin A, for example, offers protection against measles and probably polio.’19
The suggestion that breastfeeding and vitamins are an alternative to immunization is dangerous nonsense. The NHS website for Great Ormond Street Hospital says that no measure, such as breastfeeding or an organic diet, provides better protection against serious illnesses than orthodox vaccination.20 UNICEF estimated in 2003 that vaccines against measles and influenza could save half a million lives in Africa every year.21
Holford goes on to say: ‘Although less well researched, you may wish to investigate homoeopathic immunisations. In one study 18,000 children were successfully protected against meningitis with a homoeopathic remedy, without a single side-effect.’22 He does not name the study; but, since homeopathic remedies contain no active ingredients, it is impossible that any such ‘immunization’ could protect a child against meningitis. Again, the NHS Great Ormond Street website says there is ‘no evidence that any homeopathic remedy prevents those illnesses against which we vaccinate’. Incidentally, many homeopaths draw the line at these dangerous ‘immunizations’; Holford’s support for them is scandalous–and worrying, since he is extremely well established in the media and the world of CAM.
Holford’s best-selling book is The Optimum Nutrition Bible, whose publishers, Piatkus, report that it has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. However, a revised and updated edition, The New Optimum Nutrition Bible (2005), has attracted a great deal of unwelcome publicity for him, since it contains the statement that ‘AZT, the first prescribable anti-HIV drug, is potentially harmful, and proving less effective than Vitamin C’.23 Holford does not say in what respect it is ‘less effective’, but no study comparing the effects of AZT and vitamin C on humans has ever been carried out. Holford repeated this claim on a tour of South Africa in 2007. Ben Goldacre commented: ‘I must say I find Holford’s claims quite extraordinary in a country with 5 million HIV positive, who have only recently managed to wrestle antiretroviral medication from an HIV denialist government obsessed with using nutritional cures instead.’24
Holford is also the author of Say No to Heart Disease (1998), 100 Per Cent Health (1999), Say No to Cancer (1999), Six Weeks to Superhealth (2000) and The Alzheimer’s Prevention Plan (2005). Each of these titles reeks of counterknowledge. People who suffer from cancer or heart problems are not ill because they have failed to say ‘no’ to the disease (the only possible exception being people who have contracted lung cancer through smoking). To imply that chronic illness is the sufferer’s fault is cruel and wrong. It is also one of the hallmarks of the quack. There is no such thing as 100 per cent health or superhealth, and the idea that a complete physical transformation can be attained in six weeks merely compounds the nonsense. Alzheimer’s is not yet a preventable disease and even to hint as much is also cruel.
In addition to his best-selling books, Holford offers a dizzying range of products and services through his website. For example, for £49.98 Health Products for Life will conduct a ‘hair mineral analysis check’: ‘your hair can reveal much about your inner health,’ it explains.25 No, it can’t, says the American Medical Association, which ‘opposes chemical analysis of the hair as a determinant for the need for medical therapy and supports informing the American public and appropriate government agencies of this unproven practice and its potential for healthcare fraud’.26
Holford also outlines ‘five easy steps you can take now to say no to cancer’. Every one of them involves paying money to P. Holford or one of his business associates:
Holford also explains why his programme is so effective: it cuts out the chemicals that he is ‘absolutely convinced’ are the main cause of cancer. ‘Prior to the 1940s these chemicals didn’t exist, which may be one reason your grandparents and great grandparents didn’t die from breast and prostate cancer,’ he says, thereby managing to combine pseudoscience and pseudohistory in one sentence.27
Where The Secret offered a short cut to semi-respectability for snake-oil merchants, Patrick Holford’s mini-empire provides opportunities for extensive and subtle interaction between the cultic milieu and the mainstream. For instance, Holford makes extensive use of a website called NaturalMatters.net in order to spread his message; it was on this site that he defended Andrew Wakefield and asked for signatures in his support. NaturalMatters describes itself as ‘the UK’s only natural living resource’. It is certainly a resource for the nuttiest elements in complementary and alternative medicine. To pick just one example, it offers a directory of ‘colour therapists’ who ‘use a range of techniques which may include eating foods of a certain colour and drinking water that has been bathed in a certain colour’.28
By using NaturalMatters to disseminate his message and products, Holford speaks directly to other counterknowledge entrepreneurs in the world of CAM and taps into their markets. It makes perfect sense for him to do so: if you are selling useless quack trinkets such as the QLink, or making medically dubious claims for vitamin supplements, then NaturalMatters offers a ready-made directory of gullible potential customers.
Significantly, however, Holford’s contact with the cultic milieu is not confined to run-of-the-mill health faddists. In May 2007, Andy Lewis posted an article about Holford on his Quackometer website, which monitors internet quackery. He noted that Holford’s campaigns against psychiatric drugs, his emphasis on vitamins, and his reliance on questionnaires to diagnose illness were all reminiscent of Dianetics, the ‘science’ invented by the founder of the Church of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard:
Patrick [like Hubbard] started out studying psychology, and also quickly became interested in how nutrition could help solve mental health problems. This conviction led Holford to set up his own Institute where he could train his followers and also set up his vitamin supplement businesses. L. Ron Hubbard also got into the supplement business too, selling his own multivitamin which he called Dianazene, a mixture of iron and Vitamin C and large quantities of niacin. This concoction was supposed to drive out radiation from bodies and cure cancer. (The Cold War was setting in, and radiation was the scare; now we have mobile phones and Wi-Fi.) Hubbard used the technique of a questionnaire to diagnose ‘problems’ that Dianetics could cure, an approach that survives as a major recruiting tool today for Scientologists. Patrick is also keen on the use of questionnaires to diagnose mental health problems and the required vitamin regime to solve problems on sites like Food for the Brain and its daughter site, the Brain Bio Center…
Patrick has not set up a religion, but he does write books with titles like Food Is Better Medicine than Drugs, Optimum Nutrition for the Mind and Mental Illness–Not All in the Mind. He goes into schools to improve IQ, rid children of mental health issues through providing allergy testing and food supplements, and betrays his dislike of mental health professionals by describing medication as ‘mental straitjackets’ in his emails to parents. Where Patrick differs most markedly is that he does not tell his followers that psychiatrists are aliens that were present at the dawn of time and have piloted space ships throughout the cosmos to destroy our souls. At least, I can’t find reference to this on his website.29
Moreover, although Holford is not a follower of Hubbard, he is associated with Scientologists. He sits on the advisory board of Safe Harbor, a non-profit corporation that recommends ‘non-drug alternatives for mental health’.30 Safe Harbor denies any formal connection with Scientology, but it has been accused of acting as a front organization for the church, and its founder, Dan Stradford, is a Scientologist.31 Holford has also been given a ‘human rights award’ by the Citizens’ Commission for Human Rights, founded by the Church of Scientology to campaign vehemently–indeed, hysterically–against the psychiatric profession.32
Why would Holford be given an award by Scientologists? Not simply because he shares their hostility to the ‘psychiatric-pharmaceutical alliance’, one suspects, but also because he has access to such a wide audience. He frequently appears on television, and in July 2007 was the subject of a segment on Tonight with Trevor McDonald in which his Food for the Brain charity was shown testing its nutritional theories on children at Chineham Park Primary School in Basingstoke. The school professed itself delighted with the results of taking pupils off junk food; but serious questions have been raised about the sloppy methodology of the experiment.33 It seems surprising that a figure as controversial as Patrick Holford should have been allowed to use primary school children as subjects of a ‘project’–the word ‘experiment’ was carefully avoided–however beneficial the results.
Holford’s involvement with tertiary education is more formal. At the heart of his mini-empire lies the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION), which he founded in 1984 and which has trained around half of all the people in Britain describing themselves as nutritionists (which anyone can). The ION is an independent educational trust which offers students a three-year nutritional therapist’s diploma course, billed as ‘the longest established and most well regarded nutritional training course in Europe, if not the world’. For the 2007–8 first-year studies, the fee was £3,090, plus the joining fee of £260 payable by all students enrolling on an ION course.34
Still, maybe the expense is worth it, for graduates of the course receive both an Institute of Nutrition diploma (DipION) and a foundation science degree (FdSc) validated by the University of Bedfordshire, whose logo adorns the ION website. The ION qualification can be topped up by one year of study at the university (two years part-time) to become a BSc (Hons).
Or, to put it the other way round, a publicly funded university is accrediting courses from an institute run by a nutritionist with no university qualification in the subject who supports bogus immunizations against meningitis, sells bogus electrical trinkets, and thinks AZT is ‘less effective’ than vitamin C. ‘How on earth can an outfit like this be accredited by a university?’ asks Professor David Colquhoun of University College London. ‘What on earth is the University of Bedfordshire thinking of?’35
But surely there is no great mystery here. The relationship between the institute and the university suits both parties. The university does not teach the first two years of its BSc in nutrition (that is, the FdSc course): Holford’s institute does so on its behalf. No wonder the university website gives prospective students the telephone number of the ION: that is where their course starts. ‘The DipION/FdSc is validated by the British Association of Nutritional Therapists (BANT) and meets BANT’s stringent requirements for certification of nutritional therapists,’ says the university.36 That sounds reassuring, though students might be less confident if they knew that nobody on BANT’s governing council has a qualification higher than a BSc, and four out of the ten do not have any relevant academic qualifications at all.37
Holford, meanwhile, although he has no academic qualification higher than a BSc in psychology, has been made a visiting professor of nutrition and psychology at the University of Teesside. Holford took up this appointment in late 2007. He is attached to the university’s Cactus Clinic, whose publicity material says that it uses the technique of hair analysis to identify ‘biochemical imbalances’ in children suffering from attention deficit disorder.38 Food for the Brain lists the University of Teesside as one of its donors.39
Meanwhile, the relationship between Holford’s Institute for Optimum Nutrition and the University of Bedfordshire, however, has many parallels in the counterknowledge industry. An entrepreneur with a ready-made following offers a product to a business with a huge and hungry customer base. This big player–a university, a publisher, a national chain of pharmacies or a newspaper–realizes that the entrepreneur is driving a fashion that has seized the public imagination; the entrepreneur is keen to exploit the marketing tools and distribution channels of big business. So a (perfectly legal) deal is struck.
In most respects, this deal is identical to any commercial agreement between an independent producer and a wholesaler. The difference is that a disseminator of counterknowledge is dealing in untrue information; he or she is a quack, like Patrick Holford, or a pseudohistorian, like Graham Hancock, or a conspiracy theorist, like the makers of Loose Change. The interesting question is: do the big businesses realize this?
Answering this question is easier than trying to work out whether disseminators of counterknowledge believe their own bullshit. In most cases, the businesses must know. And if they do not, it is because they have not done their homework. Enter the name ‘Patrick Holford’ into a search engine and you immediately find several websites dedicated to exposing his junk science. The University of Bedfordshire cannot be unaware of the controversies surrounding Holford, yet it continues to shunt prospective students towards the Institute for Optimum Nutrition.
Likewise, Boots the Chemists employs enough scientists to know that homeopathy is the purest quackery. Yet it continues to sell an enormous range of homeopathic remedies, some of them under its own brand. Anyone who complains about this is told by the customer service department: ‘Boots prides itself on offering customers choice and, whilst some people may not believe in the products, a large number of our customers continue to find homoeopathy products beneficial for them.’ As Andy Lewis of the Quackometer website points out, ‘some people’ in this case includes the whole of medical science.
Boots also reminds critics that the government’s own regulatory body regards homeopathic products as safe. Hardly surprising, says Lewis, since the pills are made of sugar: ‘If they were dangerous, that would be as much of a miracle as if they worked. What is dangerous is Boots giving these pills an endorsement that may discourage people from seeking proper care.’40 Boots’s trade in sugar pills also raises questions about the standard of its in-store pharmacists, some of whom may not know precisely what they are selling. In June 2007, I visited the five branches of Boots nearest my home in west London and asked the (fully qualified) pharmacist whether the homeopathic remedies on sale were actually placebos. One pharmacist said yes; two fudged the issue; two told me firmly that the ‘medicine’, consisting of sugar pills, was more effective than placebos, and genuinely seemed to believe this erroneous claim. In short, pharmacists trained by Britain’s leading firm of chemists were dispensing counterknowledge.
The situation in Boots, where homeopathic voodoo is on sale next to real medicine, is mirrored in branches of Waterstone’s, Borders and WH Smith, where pseudoscience and pseudohistory are available adjacent to, or mixed up with, real science and history. When this is pointed out to booksellers, they invariably blame the publishing houses. And they have a point. There is no excuse for WH Smith stocking 9/11 Revealed by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan, a crude far-left polemic published by Constable Robinson that repeats all the Loose Change myths and worse; but, for the most part, publishers have played a more active role than bookstores in opening the flood-gates of counterknowledge. The decision to buy in a particular title is often taken hastily; the decision to commission it is taken very carefully by editors who then shape the manuscript according to the requirements of the market, and the media.
A disturbing example of the interaction between a bogus historian and a major publisher was uncovered in 2006 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV documentary series Four Corners. In an episode entitled ‘Junk History’, Four Corners investigated the writing of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies, which has sold a million copies in over 100 countries. Purchasers include 13,000 ‘followers’ who subscribe to a monthly newsletter available from Menzies’s website, a Chinese version of which was launched in 2006.
As we saw in a previous chapter, Menzies, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, believes that Chinese mariners discovered Greenland, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand in the early fifteenth century. This is a controversial thesis, to put it mildly. Shortly after its publication, detailed scholarly refutations of 1421 were posted all over the internet on websites such as 1421exposed.com.
But to what extent was 1421 really his book? Luigi Bonomi, Menzies’s literary agent, admitted on camera that his client was ‘not a natural writer’, so he rewrote sample chapters from the book himself before sending it out to publishers. Menzies and Bonomi then booked a room at the Royal Geographical Society to announce the ‘discovery’ of the Chinese voyages to Australia, Brazil, and so forth. ‘It was a public relations exercise on my part, to hopefully create a lot of controversy and sell literary rights,’ Menzies told Four Corners.41
Bonomi had another trick up his sleeve. He secured the services of Midas Public Relations, probably Britain’s leading PR agency for the publishing industry. The documentary quoted Steven Williams of Midas: ‘In Luigi’s opinion, it was a bit of a no-hoper as a manuscript and no publisher would touch it. So he had the bright idea of asking us if we could fly a flag and get a story in a national newspaper that would put his theory in the public domain.’ The London Daily Telegraph (for which I write) duly obliged with an article announcing that ‘history books in 23 countries may need to be rewritten in the light of new evidence that Chinese explorers had discovered most parts of the world by the mid-15th century’.42 (Needless to say, no history books have been rewritten, except possibly in China.)
The resulting publicity, says Williams, was ‘certainly one of the biggest stories that we’ve ever handled as a PR agency. It was just unbelievable.’ Bonomi sent out copies of the Telegraph article and all the follow-up reports to major publishers. Ten directors of Bantam Press, a division of Transworld, part of Random House, met Gavin Menzies in their boardroom. Sally Gaminara, publisher of Transworld, says she ‘wanted to make sure we bought the book before he gave his talk, because if all the other publishers were there they’d all immediately rush to buy the book and the price would go up’.43 So she offered Bonomini £500,000 for the world rights and he accepted.
Then the production process began in earnest. According to Menzies, Transworld assigned as many as 130 people to work on 1421, including Neil Hanson, an experienced ghostwriter. But, as Four Corners noted, ‘strangely, none of the professionals at Transworld who prepared the manuscript for publication was asked to test the theory behind the book’.
Why? ‘It’s very hard to prove that something is or is not correct,’ says Gaminara. ‘I mean, we do have to rely on our authors. We simply don’t have the time. We work flat out publishing the books, bringing them to press, marketing them, publicizing them, selling them–we can’t possibly go through all our books and check every single one of them out for accuracy.’44
Maybe so; but is it too much to expect the publisher of the book’s US edition to check the accuracy of its five-word subtitle? 1421 was not ‘The Year China Discovered America’, for one very simple reason: China didn’t discover America.