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Signs
of the Times, Part I: Postmodern Moral Panics and the Manufacture of
Virtue
E. R. E. Knutsson
August 12, 2009
It has been
suggested that we live in an era of
postmodern moral panics
— bouts of moral horror directed, inter alia, at contraventions of elite values
related to race, racism, and ethnic and gender identity politics.
Kenneth Thompson has pointed out the “increasing rapidity in
the succession of moral panics” and “the all-pervasive quality of panics that
distinguish the current era.” Amplifying and sensationalizing collective
anxieties, moral panics become a vehicle for the reassertion of consensual
societal values and moral boundaries in a de-traditionalized cultural climate —
a climate characterized by the politics of spectacle and simulation,
“manufactured uncertainties,” mediatized crises and unprecedented mass
migrations of non-Europeans.
In the course
of its historical evolution, as
Ingolfur Blühdorn has
pointed out, democracy seems to be moving away from the
theoretical ideal of rule of the people by the people. Throughout the West,
mainstream political parties struggle to hold back the tide of growing
disillusionment of electorates, reflecting a transnational, post-democratic
exhaustion of the emancipatory-progressive project, accompanied by a shift to
the politics of simulation.
Postmodernism
has, since its inception in the 1960s, been associated with the assumption of a
breakdown of the distinction between fact and fiction and the denial of an
extra-linguistic reality. The changed conditions of the 1980s, most visible in
the debates about race, gender and creed, the practice of multiculturalism, and
the fervor of political correctness, have — according to
Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung
— brought about a form of “emancipatory postmodernism,” intensifying
the urgency of moral conduct. Moral panic about racism has sometimes been
routinized and institutionalized into ongoing, long-lasting campaigns in an
attempt to reshape the entire normative, attitudinal, and axiological landscape,
leading to the construction of an entirely euphemistic, media-saturated society,
expurgated of every sort of “evil.” The final outcome is a hackneyed
world of surfaces ,— an
era marked by
sanitization of language,
“hate crime” laws,
a post-democratic
cult of minorities, and
mainstream “anti-Whiteism.”
The Media: Ritualized Manufacture of Moral Virtue
As
Nick Couldry points out, ever since information and communication
technologies such as television and computers were domesticated - that is,
“inserted into lasting positions within everyday routines” - the media have
taken their place “alongside other domestic technologies such as central heating
systems and the car … the dynamics of family life, education, etc.” Media
discourses tend to be highly ritualized, ideological, and fundamentally moral.
As Simon Cottle
observes,
the politics of race and racism have often been refracted and publicly enacted
“in dramatic, ritualized and performative ways.”
Performing Anti-Racism
According to
Roger Silverstone,
the world’s media are “an increasingly significant site for the construction of
a moral order.” The mass media are capable of
manufacturing consent,
enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them.
Media representations, thus, are not politically innocent or outside the action;
the daily infusion of journalism — delivered 24/7 into the fabric of everyday
existence via real-time modes of communication — often define the situation
influencing public behavior, thus often becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.
Simon Cottle
observes that “the media rarely contribute to an area of democratic engagement
and public deliberation but to a distorted realm of communication in which
propaganda and dominant views and values are disseminated largely unopposed.”
Media representations do not simply ”reflect” society but can play an active
part in constituting what the nature of that society is and in defining what its
future may be. As
John Fiske
notes in his article “Radical shopping in
The term media event is an indication that in a postmodern world we can no
longer rely on a stable relationship or clear distinction between a ‘real’ event
and its mediated representation. Consequently, we can no longer work with the
idea that the ‘real’ is more important, significant, or even ‘true’ than the
representation. A media event, then, is not a mere representation of what
happened, but it has its own reality, which gathers up into itself the reality
of the event that may or may not have preceded it.
The social
antagonism at the heart of “media events” and their captivating, sometimes
mesmerizing fascination for audiences seem to suggest that media spectacle is
becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society and
everyday life.
As
Fareed Zakaria observes, the immediacy of the images and the intensity
of the twenty-four-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hyperbole: ”Every
weather disturbance is ‘the storm of the century.’ Every bomb that explodes is
BREAKING NEWS.”
The Media: Constructing an “Us versus Them” Climate of Fear
Part of the
moral panic induced by the media is that issues are represented as extremes of
Good and Evil. Autonomous thought is decapitated by being reduced to a
Schmittian
concept of the political, gravitating towards
friend-enemy dichotomies.
As
Jean Baudrillard observed, the
world of the media is “sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium,” to “radical
antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis.”
Professor
Kevin MacDonald has drawn attention to Jewish aggressiveness,
psychological intensity
and
powerful influence
in the media. These qualities and traits —
lubricated with the “Puritan
moral intensity”
of previously dominant
intellectual elites in
America — may well have inspired or set off a chain reaction leaving a lasting
mark on the style
and noise level of journalism; e.g. in the widespread journalistic righteousness
and hectic aggressiveness, the "prophetic journalism" of passion, polemic, and
moral opinion — sometimes resembling the rule-bound sanctimony of the Pharisees.
As
Doug Underwood
has noted:
Many elements of the prophetic tradition — the spirit of righteousness, the
indignant moralism, the effort to maintain purity of values, the call for
spiritual and ethical renewal, the fierce sense of corruption abounding
everywhere — are as typically found in today’s best investigative reporters or
crusading editors as they were in the prophetic voices who tried to keep alive
Jewish faith and morality during the Israelite empire and the Jewish exile in
Babylon. The image of the investigative reporter as the heir of the prophetic
tradition is exemplified by
Underwood
describes the way in which “the prophets of the Bible loom behind the writing
that today we would call advocacy or adversarial journalism.” Although the
religious overtones may not always be evident in contemporary journalism, the
prophecy of moral indignation rings loudly. According to Underwood, the elements
of Jewish prophetic expression are most clearly evident in the “journalism
of outrage,” as modern investigative journalism has been
described. This strong tendency to claim the moral high ground has been one of
the key features of
Jewish intellectual and political movements, and a hallmark of moral panic:
[Moral panic]
is not about pluralism but about virtue. It is not
about doing the right thing, but doing the righteous thing. It is not about
public policy, but about setting affairs in order. It is about cleansing,
rectification. It is about holy war.
The intense
ingroup morality of activism makes the population susceptible to
vigilant campaigns,
endless processes of excommunication and never-ending cycles of
censorship initiatives from political claims-makers,
moral entrepreneurs
and inquisition-style
agencies of indoctrination and intimidation.
Moral crusades and ‘stigma contests’ are continually launched by the use of
highly emotive and rhetorical language, reflecting, as
John Fekete observes, “shifting or collapsing boundaries in the
meanings, values, codes, and institutions that make up our cultural world.”
In an age of
uncertainty, as
W. Hollway and T.
Jefferson emphasize, “discourses
that appear to promise a resolution to ambivalence by producing identifiable
victims and blameable villains are likely to figure prominently in the State’s
ceaseless attempts to impose social order.” Elite-manufactured panics can help
to divert attention from deepening crises — as a response to an “exhaustion” of
public consent to a crumbling civilization. While the impact of more short-term
panics is usually restricted to reaffirming moral boundaries, a series of panics
focused on the same threat over a long period of time can bring about
institutional change in the criminal justice system, the education system,
politics, etc. The consequences of the contemporary “moral administration” of
the public sphere is political correctness, orthodoxy and decorum. As John
Fekete points out: “Panic thinking makes panic politics, and panic politics have
panic implementation.”
Beginning in
January 1989,
Professor J. P. Rushton
was exposed to years of abuse, and to the threat of job loss and even criminal
incarceration after reading a paper at a science symposium in San Francisco:
According to John Fekete, Rushton examined social-science data related to social
behavior, physical characteristics, and numerous other traits, and concluded
that the data clustered in such a way that three different racial groups —
Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids — could be distinguished. He did not claim
that his hypotheses about the evolution of races could predict individual
variation or that they can serve as the basis for any social, legal, or
political policies that would single out members of a racial group for
discriminatory treatment. Nevertheless,
on February 2, 1989,
David Peterson,
former premier of Ontario, denounced Rushton’s work as ‘offensive to the way
Ontario thinks’ and demanded that he be fired.
Rushton was pilloried in the press, and linked by metaphor with
the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Anti-Christ. A month later, the
Rushton’s
department ordered that he be removed from direct contact with students, and
lecture only by videotape, and that students be permitted to watch the tape only
individually, under supervision at a location in the psychology department.
Similar
punitive trends and ostracism of non-conforming belief or behavior have also
been observed in the
campaign against Kevin MacDonald
by the
$PLC. As Professor MacDonald
reports:
Someone not connected to CSULB sent an email to the entire
Psychology Department—except me—asking why they allowed an
“anti-Semite” to teach there. The result was an uproar, with heated
exchanges on the faculty email list, a departmental meeting on what to do about
me and my work, and intense meetings of the departmental governing committee.
Cold shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my
office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.
Prof. MacDonald
has been listed as one
of the “13 worst people in
Zero tolerance is about enforcement. Often, its proponents pretend to be unaware
of the born-again authoritarianism that is concealed behind the moralistic
subject matter of zero tolerance.
They speak virtue, but they prepare to do vice.
Zero tolerance is the dark side of utopian absolutism; it is tyranny
militant, even if it views itself only in the mirror of its intentions, and not
pragmatically, in the mirror of its actions and their consequences.
A prime
example of moral panic is the
Matthew Shepard
case which led to years of moral angst in the media and pressure by
activist groups that ultimately resulted in the passage of
expanded “Hate Crime”
laws. Numerous songs have been written about the murder, as well as three
narrative movies and a documentary.
Simon Cottle
reports that the
Stephen Lawrence
case in Britain — principally played out and enacted
in the media — led to a “raft of wide-ranging, and consequential, legislative
reforms … aimed at, inter alia, changing policing practices, increasing ethnic
minority recruitment and instituting social reforms designed to tackle
‘institutional racism’ … within police services as well as over 44.000 separate
public institutions throughout British society.”
The ”self-immunizing techniques”
used by anti-racist elites and pro-immigration activists in their point-blank
refusal of any criticism of the ongoing suicidal project, are often rooted in
the stereotypically retold events of World War II, from whose ashes and ruins
the gospel of liberal immigration policy emerged - preached, wrapped and
marketed as moral penance. In both
Europe and America
the Holocaust can be seen as a central icon of victimology (often accompanied by
a correspondingly antagonistic demonology) and a powerful weapon of the forces
advocating — more or less implicitly
— the displacement of European-derived peoples.
In accordance
with this dualistic Good-versus-Evil
Weltanschauung, Hitler,
racists and the Holocaust become useful secular mental images of Satan, demons
and hell. The world is thus
perceived as a stage for a mythic “struggle between two forces … a
manifestation of good and evil locked in an archetypal battle that must be
re-fought and re-won.” In a society gradually becoming completely operational,
euphemistic and “hyperreal,”
the symbolic duality of Good and Evil undergoes a fundamental mutation: Good
becomes a utilitarian value judgement.
Exorcising
Negativity and Manufacturing Positivity
Steve Macek reminds us of
the fact that “the deviant, threatening, or troubling objects of a panic are
social constructions, produced by particular social agents in particular
contexts for specific purposes.” Quite often, the panic is aimed at eradicating
from public discourse negative portrayals of Blacks or other groups favored by
the postmodern elites. On July 8, 1996, the school board in
This taste for
banning all expressions of “heresy” and negativity is widespread. As noted in
Banned in the USA,
In July 1996, Superintendent Dr. Claire Brown, Jr., told eighty people at a
school board meeting that Huckleberry Finn would be dropped from the required
reading list at Upper Dublin (
In January
1998, the Pennsylvania NAACP added its voice to the debate over Huckleberry Finn
by passing a resolution calling on school districts to remove the book from
required reading lists, but not school or public libraries, because of its
offensive racial language. The NAACP said it would target school districts that
insist on having the book read aloud to students.
Baudrillard
warned against this kind of “uninterrupted production of positivity” in which
only positive statements are allowed: “Whereas negativity engenders crisis and
critique, hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe, for it is
incapable of distilling crisis and criticism in homeopathic doses. Any structure
that hunts down, expels or exorcizes its negative elements risks a catastrophe,”
says Baudrillard. The utopia of Human Rights “begins
in enthusiasm, but when the system truly arrives at the
point of the universal, to the point of saturation, it produces a terrible
reversion, and all the accidents we’re seeing now, in the form of virulence,
which has in a way replaced historical violence.”
Managing
Political Discourse: Toward the
Baudrillard
describes the transpolitical as “the passage from growth to
excrescence … from organic equilibria to cancerous metastases.”
The paradoxical outcome of
the late-modern “trans-political” situation —
in which everything becomes political as the political domain loses its
boundaries and distinctness — is a depoliticization of society. This is
sometimes called the third transformation of democracy (the second triggered the
transition from direct city-state democracy to modern, representative
nation-state democracy) — a move towards
presidentialized leader
democracy, in which electorates become merely “re-active” in
top-down political processes.
These top-down
processes define what the issues are and the limits of legitimate debate. Colin
Crouch
emphasizes
that Western societies “are increasingly moving towards the post-democratic
pole” as politics and government “are increasingly slipping back into the
control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic
times”:
[In post-democracy] public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle,
managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of persuasion,
and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of
citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the
signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is
really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites.
The result is
that many of the most important issues facing Western countries, such as the
wisdom and fairness of massive non-White immigration, are never debated by
political candidates or discussed in the mainstream media in a balanced,
intellectually honest, rational and informed manner.
Kevin
MacDonald
has emphasized
the genesis of “soft totalitarian” regimes, i.e. regimes “maintained less by
brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated, and massively
effective campaign to contain political and cultural activity within very narrow
boundaries.”
The regime is maintained by a consensus that has become part of the furniture of
life, repeated endlessly in the major media and reassuringly affirmed by
wise-looking professors at prestigious universities. To dissent from this
consensus removes one from the mainstream and stigmatizes one as immoral and
quite possibly suffering from a psychiatric disorder. … [D]emocracy is
identified not with the power of the people to pursue their perceived interests.
Rather, government is to be the province of morally and intellectually superior
elites who have no commitment to the ethnic interests of the European majority;
and in an Orwellian turn, democracy is defined as guaranteeing that majorities
will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a
decline in their own power.
The aim of
this totalitarian tendency, says
Zygmunt Bauman,
“is not so much to stop individuals from thinking — since that would be
impossible even by the most fanatical of standards; but to make that thinking
impotent, irrelevant and of no consequence for the success or failure of power.”
Giorgio Agamben
has noted that “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been
replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the
normal technique of government.” Global risks produce authoritarian “failed
states” — even in the West, as the state structure in what
Ulrich Beck
has termed “world risk society” bear signs of post-democratic authoritarianism.
In the 1990s,
Heribert Prantl observed a “new policy of a strong state”:
Politics is in the process of developing a new state. In the security state of
the year 2000, the point will no longer be to prosecute crimes and prevent
concrete dangers, but instead to avoid even conceivable risks.
In this state, therefore, every individual citizen will be viewed and
treated as a risk factor. Such a
state, which conceives of itself as a risk-avoidance organization, will permit
fewer and fewer freedoms to the people. … The people in such a state will at
first believe they are in a well-patrolled holiday resort, and will not notice
until it is too late that this is a posh prison.
As Beck
points
out, risk society is a catastrophic society —
characterized by a stream of emergencies — in
which fear
“determines the attitude towards life”:
Security is
displacing freedom and equality from the highest position on the scale of
values. The result is a tightening of laws, a seemingly rational
‘totalitarianism of defence against threats’.
The ‘fear business’ will profit from the general loss of nerve.
The suspicious and suspect citizen must be grateful when he is scanned,
photographed, searched and interrogated ‘for his own safety’. Security is
becoming a profitable public and private sector consumer good like water and
electricity.
The Media:
Producing Generalized Fear and Anxiety
Brian Massumi
has emphasized low-level fear — “naturalized fear … the discomfiting affective
Muzak” — as the organizing concept or trademark of contemporary
Far from living in less moral times, we now live in a more demanding moral
climate. When I was a boy in the fifties, child abuse, the sexual division of
labour, violence against women, paedophilia and environmental awareness, to name
but a few, were undiscussed and largely unrecognised. Our moral repertoire has
expanded enormously.
What we are
dealing with in the everyday, mediatized techno-cinema world is the “game of
affect-by-design”, or, in
Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s words, reality-by-design: “Technoscience and new
mediated digital ecologies make futures without loyalty to any past(s), all
while charging themselves on the affects of histories.”
The shaping of
perception becomes a shaping of reality. As Prof. Fekete observes, panic shapes
“an anxiety-ridden world of meanings and values. ...
Anxiety information today travels at electronic speeds
— what
Marshall McLuhan
once called the speed of angels — and creates instantaneous communication
and community. A community of electronic panic: our special gift to the
millennium.” As summarized by
Elayne Rapping,
the general mass media message usually fits into a
ritualized, formulaic panic design:
The world is out of control; we are at the mercy of irrational forces, of
deranged, sex- and drug-crazed criminals, of heroes and leaders who are
degenerate, corrupt, and powerless against their own inner demons and outer
temptations — Call the police!
Next: Signs of the Times, Part II: Post-Democracy in the Age of Simulation
E.
R. E.
Knutsson
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-SignsI.html
