On moral panic and the Doomsday Clock

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, Stuff regional papers and Stuff.co.nz, February 5.)

There are two types of panic. There’s ordinary, everyday panic, and then there’s moral panic.

The first is the type that happens when you look out the window of your plane while flying at 30,000 feet and notice the wing has fallen off.

With this type of panic you either quickly recover once the danger has passed, or you face a genuine risk of death. If the wing of your plane has fallen off, it’s likely to be the latter.

The other type of panic, moral panic, is a socio-political phenomenon. It’s defined as a contagious fear that some hazard threatens social wellbeing.

A textbook example was the prohibition movement, which succeeded in having alcohol made illegal in the United States in 1920 and came very close to achieving the same result here. In fact moral panic over alcohol has never completely subsided and is complemented today by rising apprehension – encouraged by finger-wagging academics – over the food we eat.

A more recent moral panic involved fears of satanic sexual abuse in the 1990s, for which Christchurch childcare worker Peter Ellis paid the price with his liberty. Some people may even recall an outbreak of anxiety over the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which was suspected of messing with kids’ heads and promoting witchcraft.

No one ever died as a result of moral panic, to my knowledge, but it tends to stick around a bit longer than the type that occurs when a wing falls off.

One moral panic has been with us since 1947. That’s when a bunch of American scientists, concerned at the development of nuclear weapons, created something called the Doomsday Clock.

The Doomsday Clock is a metaphorical representation of how close humanity is thought to be to annihilation. In 1947 the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight, that being the hypothetical hour when the world would end.

Over the decades, the minute hand has moved back and forth in response to the supposed threat of nuclear war. In 1953, at the height of the Cold War, it was set at two minutes to midnight. A learned professor gloomily pronounced that with a few more swings of the pendulum, atomic explosions would strike midnight for Western Civilisation.

Well, we’re now one-fifth of the way through the 21^st century, and although the scientists keep adjusting the clock every January, I’m not sure that people take much notice anymore. This may be due to the fact that we’re all still here.

The truth is that the Doomsday Clock was never an objective scientific measurement, though its creators wanted us – indeed still want us – to think it is.

It was more a political device than a scientific one, intended to serve as a warning of what might happen if the White House or the Kremlin got trigger-happy.  But the people who occupied the White House and the Kremlin, for all their huffing and bluffing, were just as frightened of mutually assured annihilation as the rest of us, and always pulled back from the brink.

The Bureau of Atomic Scientists, which determines the clock’s setting, still insists nuclear war is a global threat, but it has struggled to sound convincing in recent years.

It’s true that the threat is still with us, but these days the most likely aggressor is not one of the great powers but the rogue state controlled by the unpredictable Kim Jong-un, and any nuclear conflict, horrific though the prospect is, is more likely to be containable rather than global in scale. (That's assuming Kim Jong-un is mad enough to use nuclear weapons. It's far more likely that he will use North Korea's nuclear capability to gain diplomatic leverage.) 

That’s okay though, because climate change – arguably the mother of all moral panics – has provided the keepers of the clock with another putative global threat to dramatise.

Accordingly, the minute hand has been moving steadily closer to midnight since 2007, when climate change first entered the scientists’ calculations. We were then said to be five minutes from global catastrophe, and in 2015 the ominously ticking hand advanced to 11.57pm.

We’re now told we’re just 100 seconds from midnight – the closest the world has yet come, if the Doomsday Clock people are to be believed, to the Apocalypse.

This theatrical announcement was given heft by a ceremony in Washington DC attended by several sainted figures of the global political elite, including United Nations human rights luminary Mary Robinson, former UN chief Ban-Ki Moon and former California governor Jerry Brown, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party.

Their involvement confirmed that while the Doomsday Clock purports to be based on science, it’s heavily overlaid with politics – which means that while we shouldn't disregard it altogether, it should be treated with much the same cautious scepticism as any other political exercise.

Does this mean we shouldn’t be concerned about climate change? Not at all. It would be silly and dangerous not to keep an open mind about climate change and its possible causes, and take sensible steps to mitigate it.

But we are entitled to be suspicious of what appear to be arbitrary determinations, often wrapped in statements that are more emotive than scientific, about the imminence of global catastrophe.

One function of moral panics, after all, is to convince people of the urgent need for political, economic or societal change which they might otherwise resist. There’s an old political axiom that you should never waste a good crisis.

Fortunately, age is a helpful antidote. The older you get, the more moral panics you’ve seen come and go.

The dirty face of dairying

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, October 13.)


I CAN think of much more despicable people than the Crafar family of dairying infamy. The names of Clayton Weatherston, Graeme Burton and William Bell come to mind.

But if you were to compile a Hall of Shame listing people who had behaved appallingly without actually committing criminal offences, the names of Allan, Frank and Beth Crafar would surely be close to the top.

The Crafars are the dirty face of dairying. They are a blight on the dairying industry in the same way that paedophile priests are a blight on the Catholic Church and cops who rape are a blight on the police.

There are lots of dirty dairy farmers who don’t seem to care too much where their effluent goes, but the Crafars took it to a new level, and compounded the offence by allowing their livestock to suffer. Even dirty farmers would have balked at that.

Dairy farmers who are meticulous both about controlling pollution and caring for their animals – and there are plenty of them – would have been horrified.

The rampant growth of the dairy industry has triggered an economic boom, but in other respects it has been a catastrophe. Much of it has been driven by greed and disregard for environmental consequences, especially in regions unsuited to dairying.

The Crafars seem to have surfed the boom with very little thought about where it might lead. They just wanted more land and more cows – more! more! more! – and were prepared to mortgage themselves to the eyeballs, presumably in the expectation that milk prices would stay high forever.

They are by no means the only greedy, industrial-scale dairy farmers, but they certainly made themselves the most visible. In the end they created a monster that they couldn’t control.

I have heard apologists for the Crafars saying they have been unfairly scapegoated and demonised. The word bullshit – a highly appropriate epithet in this case – comes to mind.

The Crafars were greedy, and to make matters worse they don’t appear to be very bright. That’s a lethal combination.

* * *

THE TERM “moral panic” was coined by British sociologists in the early 1970s to describe the public reaction when something, or someone, threatens prevailing social or cultural values.

In New Zealand the term has become a catchcry of the Left, which uses it – usually with a tone of intellectual superiority – in an attempt to invalidate any concerns that are seen as reflecting the conservative values of the middle classes.

Public concern about violent crime? Moral panic, the lefties sniff derisively.

Public concern about family breakdown? Moral panic.

Public concern about P and other forms of drug abuse? Moral panic.

Public concern about boy racers and tagging? Ditto. And so on.

It’s a crafty way to dismiss legitimate concerns about anti-social behaviour. “Moral panic” conjures up an image of nervous, fretful fuddy-duddies getting their knickers in a twist unnecessarily.

Invariably, it involves issues that the vile capitalist news media are accused of blowing out of proportion in order to protect their class interests.

The irony is that the Left is very adept at whipping up moral panics of its own, when it suits. But of course it would never use the term.

The Left would never admit, for example, that the climate change scare, with its dire warnings of global apocalypse unless we all revert to a subsistence lifestyle, is moral panic on a grand scale; or that the repeal of Section 59 of the Crimes Act was the result of a moral panic, assiduously whipped up by the Left, which associated an occasional parental smack with gross violence against children.

Then there’s the furore over alcohol abuse, as a result of which the vast majority of New Zealanders who drink responsibly are likely to be penalised because of the behaviour of a minority who can’t; and the determined campaign to regulate the advertising and sale of supposedly unhealthy food and drink. Classic moral panics, both.

The Left would have us believe it’s a moral panic if it involves protecting the interests of the majority, but not if it involves a sanctimonious elite trying to bully and frighten others into living according to their dictates. Don’t be fooled.

* * *

WHO IS this mysterious person named Te Puni Corkery, whom prime minister John Key mentioned while discussing taxpayer funding for Maori TV’s bid to screen the Rugby World Cup?

I can only conclude it must be the little-known, part-Maori half-brother of Pam, the former Alliance MP. Clearly, this is a family whose political influence runs deep.

Are there any other Corkerys lurking in the corridors of power? To use Felicity Ferret’s famous line, I think we should be told.