East Of Eden And The Annus Horribilis
As an Aristotelian, as I've said here, my job is to look for causes. The project I don't seem able to put down for the time being is to look for the causes of 2020, one of the chief features of which was the COVID crisis and what I think is an associated moral panic, which appears to me to far outwigh the actual medical issues of the disease. The last clear moral panic, as far as I can see, was the Day Care Satanism panic of the 1980s, most clearly exemplified by the McMartin Preschool case in the Los Angeles area. I was prompted by an offhand remark in a recent TV special on the case that moral panics reflect underlying social tensions, and in that case, the real issue was changes in family life and child care caused by wives and mothers working outside the home. (Although this had become acceptable following World War II, it wasn't until the stagflation and fuel crises of the 1970s that it became economically much more essential.) Then, for reasons I can'...