William Hunter, the British doctor who developed the theory, used it to attack conservative dentistry that was done mainly in the United States. Hence more research was done on it in the US and more opposition to it was expressed there. Although it ended up being wrong, oral sepsis theory helped draw attention to oral hygiene and gum disease and improved restorative techniques. Dussault and Sheiham conclude “In the end, the example of oral sepsis shows that even an unfounded theory can produce beneficial results.”[9]
This is not unusual in science. The most important theories are the ones that stimulate productive research, and many theories that do this are later shown to be false. Oral sepsis theory also illustrates that theories can be adopted or adapted to serve the needs of those who use them.
SLAPPs
In West Virginia in the 1970s, farmer Rick Webb made a complaint to the US Environmental Protection Agency about pollution of a river by a coal company. The company responded by suing Webb for defamation, asking for $200,000. In 1983, a number of residents in a small town in Colorado signed a formal petition for a referendum to stop conversion of some farmland for residential development. Four of those who signed the petition were sued by the developer for “an undetermined amount.”
Two academics at the University of Denver, Penelope Canan and George Pring, became aware of an epidemic of legal actions of this sort. The basic pattern was for a company to use the courts to intimidate citizens who were simply exercising their constitutional right to petition the government. The actions for defamation, conspiracy, judicial process abuse and other legal claims had little chance of success and hardly ever succeeded when they did go to court, but that didn’t matter. They often were quite successful in scaring citizens, many of whom backed off from their activities.
Canan and Pring carried out extensive studies of this development. They dubbed these suits Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation or SLAPPs.[10] The basic concept was that the law was being used to quell free speech. The idea of SLAPPs caught on very quickly. There were many articles in law journals, some of them proposing slightly different definitions than Canan and Pring’s. More importantly, the idea of SLAPPs was immensely helpful to the citizens who were being sued. It helped them understand what was happening and to formulate a better informed response. Canan and Pring used their knowledge and contacts to mobilise opposition to SLAPPs around the US, including laws against them passed in a number of states.
It is possible to quibble with the definition of a SLAPP, to debate whether particular types of cases fit the model and to question the usual strategies used against them, such as the countersuit or SLAPP-back. Potential complexities abound. Nevertheless, the basic idea of a SLAPP is simple and captures enough of people’s experience to be extremely useful. The acronym SLAPP is brilliant and seems to have helped a lot.
Strategy against nuclear power
In Australia, the peak years of debate over nuclear power were 1975-1984. Much of the debate focused on uranium mining, since Australia has large deposits of uranium and plans for nuclear power plants had never progressed very far.
In 1983, four of us in Friends of the Earth Canberra decided to write an article about strategy against nuclear power.[11] We planned our article as an analysis of the deep-rooted driving forces behind the nuclear fuel cycle followed by an assessment of various strategies in the light of our analysis. We had lots of debates about “driving forces” and eventually ended up concentrating on four: the state, capitalism, patriarchy and the division of labour. The strategies we examined were lobbying, participating in environmental inquiries, working through the trade union movement, working through the parliamentary system and grassroots mobilisation. We concluded that grassroots mobilisation — including such things as leaflets, talks, petitions, marches, promoting nuclear-free zones, and civil disobedience — offered the best prospects for challenging the social structures behind nuclear power.
We sent a draft of our article to quite a few people in the antinuclear movement, asking them for comments. This was revealing. Quite a number of them said they agreed with our conclusions but disagreed with certain parts of our analysis — but each person had a different disagreement with the analysis.
When we wrote the paper, we imagined that the analysis and the conclusions were logically linked together. But the responses suggested something else, namely that the same strategy could be justified by a range of different analyses. It almost seemed that the analysis didn’t matter all that much: the key thing was the strategy.
We wrote our paper in the usual fashion, putting the analysis first and then using the analysis as a means of assessing strategy. Yet if readers disagreed with the analysis, the risk was that they wouldn’t persevere to the section on strategy.
This experience got me thinking about the connection between theory and practice. Our discussion of theories of the state, capitalism, patriarchy and so forth was presented in simple terms, without much elaboration, and in close connection with a practical analysis of the development of nuclear power. If our down-to-earth discussion of theory was contentious for activists, what about the jargon-filled treatments in scholarly books and journals? I knew the answer to that question. They are almost totally irrelevant for activists. Most sophisticated theory is too complex, too qualified and too remote from applications to be of much practical use. The only exceptions are when there is a simple version.
Theories of technology
Many people used to think that technology is always a good thing. The development of nuclear weapons undermined that view. On the other hand, a few people think technology is generally bad, but this view is hard to justify when thinking of hoes or hearing aids.
The most common view is that technology is neutral and so can be used for good or bad. This is called the use-abuse model. The idea is that technology can be used (for good purposes) or abused (for bad purposes). Another common idea about technology is that it has a momentum of its own: once a technology such as the car or the telephone gets started, it can’t be stopped. This is called technological determinism.
Social analysts who focus on technology rejected all these ideas long ago. In university classes where I work, we spend lots of time explaining why technology is not neutral and why technological determinism is wrong. Currently, a favourite view among scholars in the field is constructivism. In this model, technologies are the outcome of diverse social processes, including world views, prior technologies, organisational structures, social class, etc. There is no inevitability. Neutrality is an irrelevant concept. Instead, individual technologies have to be studied in the context of the circumstances in which they are conceived, developed, opposed, altered, instituted and superseded.
There are some highly sophisticated analyses of technology available. But there is a big problem. The more sophisticated theories don’t provide a simple way of thinking about technology. Admittedly, some scholars can become accustomed to thinking in terms of actor-networks in which people, platypuses and paint brushes are all equivalent “actors” in an undifferentiated struggle to get their way. But this seems suited mainly for scholarly analyses, not for practical dealings with technology.
9
Gilles Dussault and Aubrey Sheiham, “Medical theories and professional development: the theory of focal sepsis and dentistry in early twentieth century Britain,”
10
George W. Pring and Penelope Canan,
11
The article appeared as a booklet in January 1984. An abridged version was published as Friends of the Earth (Canberra), “Strategy against nuclear power,”