chapter 1
Panic A Guide to the Uses of Fear
[W]e are only episodic conductors of meaning, essentially. We form a mass, living most of the time in a state of panic or haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning. —Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
“Moral panic” can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill-defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive measures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigilance, violent purges.1 Witch hunts are classic examples of moral panics in small, tribal, or agrarian communities. McCarthyism is the obvious example of a moral panic fueled by the mass media and tethered to repressive governance.2 The manner in which moral panics operate is the stuff of both archaic and postmodern social forms. Moral panics bear some similarity to what anthropologists used to call “social revitalization movements”: they represent more or less deliberate attempts to reconstruct social relations in the face of some real or perceived threat or against some condition of moral decline and social disrepair.3 Central to the logic of moral panic is the machinery of taboo: nothing, it would seem, incites fear and loathing, and initiates collective censure, more rapidly than the commission of acts deemed forbidden, unclean, or sacrilegious.4 Another item from the anthropological curio cabinet seems germane: scapegoating is implicit in the full spectrum of panic’s forms.5 Sometimes the person designated as the scapegoat is said to embody the moral threat in some intrinsic fashion. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theories 23