2020: The Year Of Moral Panic

Last week, my wife and I warched an episode of the Crimes That Changed Us series on Investigation Discovery on the McMartin preschool case. This was a bizarre, years-long rehearsal of allegations against a Manhattan Beach, CA day care that involved sex abuse of toddlers, a bad clown in a secret underground room, and Satanic sacrifices on the altar of an Episcopal church. None of this could be proven in court, and after two hung juries, the prosecution eventually got tired and dropped all charges

The narrator of the episode said the McMartin case was an example of "moral panic". My wife suggested that the current COVID crisis seems like a moral panic as well. I wasn't sure, but the idea was tantalizing enough that I decided to do some research on the web the next day.

Moral panics are normally the province of sociology. What I've found is that much of the academic discussion is limited by the current Overton window, and academics will be likely to accept COVID restrictions as entirely reasonable. I don't agree, and naturally, I won't find conventional discussion necessarily insightful or helpful. But, with reservations, I find the YouTube discussion above is at least a good general introduction to the subject. Other web discussins, like Wikipedia, nevertheless do seem to provide a consensus outline of what a moral panic is:

A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".

In recent centuries the mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests".

Earlier examples of moral panics would include the Salem witch trials and Prohibition. Some discussions trace the incidence of moral panics to the need to resolve an underlying social tension. Prohibition, for instance, has been traced to tensions over immigration, particularly Catholics, who routinely consume wine and other alcohol, whereas nativist Protestants were often teetotal. The narrator of the TV special above traced the McMartin case to bourgeois discomfort over the rising trend of families where both parents have jobs and the resulting need to place children in day care. Both suggestions seem reasonable, and I'll discuss this in tomorrow's post.

So a key first element of a moral panic is a set of conditions that makes a threat to overall social order credible -- and this threat is often identified with a group. What this group is in the case of COVID is also worth separate discussion, although one key factor is that mass media and moral enforcers have emphasized, from the start of the panic, that China, although empirically the place where the COVID virus somehow escaped, is most assuredly not the threat. Odd, no?

The next element of such a panic is "moral entrepreneurs", individuals who become clearly identified with the issue, and who work in concert with, the mass media to articulate the threat in its early phases. In the McMartin case, the key entrepreneur was Judy Johnson, a Manhattan Beach, CA mother who alleged that her toddler son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by a McMartin teacher. As the case developed, Ms Johnson turned out to be mentally unstable, and the charges likely were motivated by the custody battle, but they were enough to incite panic given the underlying social tensions that media and other entrepreneurs could exploit opportunistically. (Ms Johnson subsequently was foud dead at age 42 of alcoholic liver diease in the course of the panic.)

Other moral entrepreneurs emerged, including Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner, who secured grand jurty indictments against every school employee, and Kee MacFarlane, a psychologist who conducted highly questionable interviews with the toddlers, promptng them to confirm stories of secret tunnels, flying witches, children being flushed down toilets, and animals being slaughtered on the altar of a local church.

This leads to another feature of moral panics, that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. In recent times, the disproportion can be overcome by professional credentials among the moral entrepreneurs. In the McMartin case, the bizarre accusations and unbelievable overall narrative were supported by credientialed experts, including a district attorney backed up by professional psychologists and medical doctors.

The life of the McMartin scandal was relatively brief. I think the factors behind this included limited potential gain for the entrepreneurs -- Ms Johnson turned out to be too sick to continue in her campaign -- and other actors were driven by some combination of narcissism and fairly limited prospects for professional advancement, which proved not to be attainable given their overall poor performance in the courtroom.

In addition, the McMartin case proved to be limited in geographic scope, with fairly limited implications for overall social control on the part of the moral enforcers. People still needed day care, so imposing some form of radical control over it was not a realistic goal. Prohibition, on the othr hand, had a much wider scope, though it failed, first practically and soon enough legislatively, because too many people wanted to drink legallly.

Several discussions of moral panics I've found do suggest they have a life cycle, with a "morning after" phase. I'll conside this in subsequent posts as well.