The pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby

Welcome to the era of the post-moral panic

In our morally unanchored society, elite fearmongers prefer to use so-called science rather than moralism to reshape our behaviour.

by Brendan O’Neill 

One question we should ask ourselves is whether it’s possible to have a moral panic at a time when there is no moral consensus. At a time when traditional values are going down the toilet, and when traditional morality no longer holds sway, is it possible to have a panic about ‘folk devils’ who allegedly pose a threat to the moral fabric?

I don’t think it is. Because in order to have a proper moral panic, you need to have some proper morality. You need to have a generally agreed-upon set of moral values that people can be accused of transgressing. And we just don’t have that today. In our era of moral relativism, it is actually increasingly difficult to have an old-fashioned moral panic.

That might sound like good news. No one is really in favour of moral panics, except maybe the Daily Mail. But the tragedy is that moral panics have been replaced by something even worse – by panics underpinned by science rather than by morality. And these new, post-moral panics are having a seriously detrimental impact on society.

What we have seen over the past few years is a massive rupture between panic and morality, a massive dissociation of the politics of fear from any system of moral meaning. These days, panics are not motored by moral sensibilities – they’re motored by scientific claims or health advice or what are presented to us as objective facts.

Consider the panics about young people. In the past, there were moral panics about young people drinking too much, fornicating and being generally depraved. These randy, alcoholic youth were accused of sinning against the natural moral order.

Today, there are still panics about young people’s behaviour, but they’re presented as health advice. So young people are warned off underage sex and sex outside of a committed relationship through adverts telling them they will get chlamydia or gonorrhoea. They’re warned off boozing with graphic photographs of what too much drink might do to their livers.

A society that has no clear moral line on marriage or sex or hedonism is forced to fall back on a grisly, bovine form of moral pressure. Incapable of telling young people what is right and what is wrong, our society prefers to spread panic about physical decay and physical ailments. It appeals to us to modify our behaviour, not in the name of morality and decency, but in the name of protecting our own livers and genitalia from disease.

Often, what we have today is the rehabilitation of old forms of moral disgust in a new pseudo-scientific language. So one of the most unhinged panics of modern times – the panic about the so-called obesity epidemic – is really just the resurrection of the sins of gluttony and sloth. But because society lacks the moral resources to lecture people about being gluttonous and slothful, which would involve making moral judgements and behaving with explicit superiority, it instead spreads all sorts of nonsense about Body Mass Index, calorie counting, and so on.

Even the moral panic about football hooligans, one of the great mad panics of the 1970s and 1980s, has been put through the de-moralisation process and turned into a pseudo-scientific issue. So recently, Cardiff University published a report arguing that gatherings of 70,000 or more football fans are a threat to the environment. Apparently such gatherings leave an eco-footprint 3,000 times the size of the pitch at Wembley. This eco-unfriendly mass of people leaves behind it 37 tonnes of glass and eight tonnes of paper.

It reveals a lot about the moral disarray of today’s cultural elite that even one of their favourite, easiest moral panics, even their disgust with working-class football fans, now has to be swaddled in a kind of neutral academic lingo.

The rise and rise of these post-moral panics has led to some extraordinary double standards in the arena of the politics of fear. Because the new post-moral panic-mongers are often the people who are most sniffy about old-fashioned moral panics promoted by the likes of the Daily Mail.

So the broadsheet journalists who criticise right-wing tabloids and politicians for spreading panic about terrorism are the same ones who argue that actually global warming is going to burn us all to death and it’s all the fault of unthinking people taking too many cheap flights. The people who argue that the working classes are making themselves sick by eating Turkey Twizzlers are the same ones who balk when the Daily Mail says that chavs undermine moral decency.

This double standard was really brought home at the end of October. After the Lib-Con government published its report on the August rioting in England, which revealed that 42 per cent of the rioters had received free school meals, some clever members of the Twitterati started tweeting: ‘Oh I bet I know what the Daily Mail’s headline will be. It will be “Free School Meals Cause Riots”.’ Hilarious, right? But what these Twits forgot is that actually that panic has already been done. Over the past few years, respectable publications like the Times Higher Education have published articles with headlines like ‘Unhealthy school dinners linked to anti-social behaviour’, a fancier way of saying ‘School meals cause rioting’.

So the moralists at the Daily Mail can be slated for even thinking about pursuing a panic that had already been done by others, in post-moral, respectable language, of course. Today, there is no real constituency for traditionalist moral panics – it’s the new post-moral, pseudo-scientific panics that make a big impact.

The post-moral panic-mongers have developed their own language to try to distinguish themselves from their forebears. So where they accuse right-wingers of ‘playing the fear card’, they claim that they are simply trying to ‘raise awareness’. They’re always ‘raising awareness’, whether it’s about the imminent collapse of the biosphere or the gastronomical depravity of the working classes. Where they accuse old-style moral panickers of using shame and stigma, they claim only to be interested in ‘modifying behaviour’. Through such terminology, they seek to make their own playing of the fear card and their moral fury with the little people appear good, decent, driven by expertise rather than moral judgementalism.

There is one really key difference between old moral panics and the new post-moral panics. Where the old moral panics were attempts to express or enforce an already-existing moral outlook, the new post-moral panics are a substitute for any coherent moral outlook. Today, fear is used not as a complement to morality but as a stand-in for morality. We have a situation today where society tries to reconstruct something approaching a moral outlook through fearmongering. This is quite new, and it is giving rise to a situation where basically we haveconstant panic – one fleeting scare after another, as our superiors try to magic up some behavioural norms and behavioural barriers in our morally bereft society.

As to what impact post-moral panics have on the public – it is a bit weird and contradictory. On one hand, precisely because the new fearmongering is detached from any bigger moral picture it doesn’t have the purchase that the old moral panics had. It doesn’t connect with the public in the same way. The politics of fear is no longer experienced collectively, as it was when we were all told to be scared of the prospect of Hell, but rather is experienced in a super-individuated way, as people are encouraged to panic about their own livers or hearts or waistlines. But on the other hand, because there are so many post-moral panics, there is a cumulative effect. The fleeting scares build on each other to create a kind of free-floating sense of unease and dread – and often unease and dread about the most mundane things, such as eating and socialising and having half a glass of wine.

Even the moralistic panic-merchants of old never achieved something as destructive as what we have today, courtesy of the pseudo-scientific scaremongering lobby: a kind of everyday, run-of-the-mill doom.