Recent Roads To Ruin?

Does the NHS count, John? Serfdom would be the first step on the road to Ruin.

You could probably find some good freak-outs related to unisex college dorms. In general, people love to see rules for college students as microcosms of vast social issues, don’t they?

Water fluoridation.

What springs to my mind is Abbie Hoffman going to jail for wearing an American flag shirt, and the animus against men with long hair. If nothing else, it’s interesting how a guy with shoulder length hair wearing a flag shirt is now most likely to be a solid good ol’ boy and not an evil hippie.

Banning fox hunting?

Foxhunting – I remember feeling strongly about this, but I no longer know why.

I also suspect one way to discover such issues is to look at which issues other nations find inexplicably fascinating now – from the synchronic to the diachronic.

Sorry, that should read “abolishing” not “avoiding”the death penalty.

In the case of shop hours in Australia, it was as much the retail union (where once, long ago, I was a member) as anyone else that was objecting with shopping hour deregulation.

As mentioned above, gay parenting in general is a good one, with case studies demonstrating outcomes.

As per the pill, and the entrance of large numbers of women into the education system and the workforce.

UK’s interwar Prayer Book Debate?
On the other hand, because I’m a social historian, I tend to look at this sort of thing and try and find ways in which it was actually important, even though we’ve kind of forgotten why. For example, that time when Brian Rix got punched by a policeman in the 1950s, and helped (along with the case of the Thurso Boy) to kick off the 1960 Royal Commission on Policing. Me, I think that these were symptoms of a changing attitude to the liberty of the subject and to the limits of acceptable violence.

Perhaps the whole “sexting” issue, with threats of criminalization of sending a naughty pic (possibly of one’s own person) via cellphone/mobile device..It snared US Congressman Anthony Weiner. And a recent survey showed this to be pretty much a tempest in a teapot… see http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/05/oukin-uk-sexting-idUKTRE7B41JB20111205

And my own state of Georgia finally approved the Sunday sales of alcohol (beer, wine, spirits), after years of suggestions that it would make us less godly and cause big increases in drunken driving. It didn’t. In fact, counties that didn’t permit alcohol sales that have now allowed it (the recent Recession has made even the Baptists look at revenue..) discovered no real impact, and often fewer drunk drivers.
see http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/mar/18/georgia-state-senators/lawmakers-claim-sunday-alcohol-sales-proves-flawed/

The burkha.

Satanic Ritual Abuse panic? Prosecuting people for crimes that were impossible and for which there was no evidence? I guess that would have been serious if it were true.

I’ve recently seen these minor policies being mentionened as potential civilization enders:
1. switching from the word ‘christmas’ to the word ‘x-mas’
2. not serving children any meat for lunch in school on mondays

The “whole language” approach to reading instruction in schools. A sort of “reform” (away from rote memorization) which, we were told, was Satan’s attack against the righteous use of purely phonics-based approaches. (Every good teacher, of course, knows you have to use some of both approaches.)

The incredible health dangers of people sleeping in groups in public parks.

I guess the hard part is “Now-forgotten moral panics *in the face of social reforms enacted* in, say, the last 75 years?” As I understand the phrase “moral panic,” the default style of moral panic in the U.S. during my lifetime hasn’t been in response to some enacted policy. It’s been in response to some cultural event (D&D! Violent video games! Rock & roll music with naughty words! Rap music with *really* naughty words! A whole generation killed by lawn darts! Bart Simpson is disrepsectful! Nekkid boy-butts on NYPD Blue! Sexting with *exceptionally* naughty words! Internet porn! Internet gambling! Cartoon characters in cigarette ads! Alcoholic drinks that taste like candy! those gross little candy strips that somehow people believed might be LSD!) that then often prompt a demand for a policy response.

Wearing your pants too low.

“Happy Holidays”. The menace of Political Correctness Gone Mad in general. Further in that vein, the business-destroying tyranny of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

On a more local scale, most NIMBY zoning freakouts and fights over neighborhood covenants. An objection to anything whatsoever can be couched in terms of the danger to property values.

I think what most of the seemingly ridiculous modern cases have in common is that some people in the society see their values as generally losing ground, and they pick a particular development that, for them, crosses some kind of last-straw threshold as the place to make a stand. One more nail in the coffin, but this time we’ll fight back.

Is that what was also happening in the older examples? I know people regularly freaked out about anything that seemed to indicate men’s loss of control over women, no matter how minor, but on the face of it it can be hard to identify what the larger trend was in some of these examples.

the animus against men with long hair

“And we wave to the people who frown
At our hair as we ride into town”
– Bonzo Dog Band, “The bride stripped bare by Batchelors”

I first heard that a few years ago, and had a definite pang of nostalgia. It was so easy to look “alternative” back then! And normal people actually cared! Admittedly, in Britain normal people rarely cared enough to beat you up (a la Alice’s Restaurant*), which would be harder to get warm and fuzzy over.

Chris – what bothers me is the process whereby we lost the rhino whips but ended up with FIT, ANPR, post-charge questioning etc: less violence, more control. (Better than more of both, admittedly.)

*The film

You mean that this isn’t reflective of broader trends? I find such a notion disappointing.

Giving the vote to 18-year-olds?

Doesn’t Muslim stuff fail as a source of fleeting moral panic just because it’s been such a historically long-standing source of moral panic? When GWB said that we needed to have a crusade, it wasn’t like he made up the word.

The Dungeons and Dragons thing seems surprisingly persistent if you think about it. But Rona Jaffe’s novel wasn’t about Satanism. That was some completely different worry.

And Casual Fridays.

(Married) women working.

What’s striking about this example is its persistence throughout much of the 20th century. (Remember the furor over Murphy Brown?) And it’s arguably still with us today, in debates about child care.

The replacement of rotaries (roundabouts) with normal traffic lights.

In certain communities, the teaching of folktales from around the world.

Crimes of Today: Looking and Reading (at anything to do with children or bomb-making) (even if the same material is freely available in libraries/on-line)

Plenty of sad middle-aged men and deluded Moslem youths in clink for ‘looking’ and ‘reading’.

(Married) women working.

What’s striking about this example is its persistence throughout much of the 20th century.

I don’t think this quite works – married women working may not have destroyed society but it was unarguably a big deal (like birth control, etc).

A few more:
Married women not taking their husbands’ names.
People being legally allowed to convert to Christianity (or atheism) from Islam.
The Salic Law.
Abolition of the right to silence.

Tesco supermarkets. The building of a rather small local supermarket caused huge, sustained local protest.

Gypsies/Travellers. (Dale Farm, for example).

Mothers breast-feeding in public.

Expanding on bianca @52, all sorts of changes in literature and history curricula to include non-DWMs.

Slavoj Žižek.

Is the Gay Mafia still getting any traction?

Expanding on bianca @52, all sorts of changes in literature and history curricula to include non-DWMs.

Definitely. For the shear discrepancy between the amount public hand wringing and pearl clutching vs the actual impact, the Canon Wars are hard to beat.

Then there’s a whole slew of stuff related to homosexuality: permitting gay people to adopt, permitting teachers to mention homosexuality in sex education, and so on.

In the US, I believe the first major homosexuality flashpoint (of the era in which being gay was still stigmatized, but wouldn’t get you thrown in jail or the loony bin) was the notion that school districts shouldn’t instantly fire a teacher upon discovering he/she was homosexual.

Being able to borrow from the Social Security trust fund to pay current expenses, and lower the deficits.
Don Levit

@72: those nibbly fish are very popular in the UK right now. There’s not so much a moral panic, as speculation as to low long it’ll be before there’s an epidemic of a disease transmitted by nibbbly fish (the practise having a certain similarity to intravenous drug addicts sharing needles…)

We have few tablets dating to 2800 BCE, but your point stands, people were surely saying things like, “You kids get out of my palm orchard!”

We do have tablets that old. One about that old that I once saw on display at the Beinecke rare book and manuscript library at Yale was a Sumerian tablet that was a letter from a father to his son that went like this (paraphrased from memory): I worked my fingers to the bone to send you to school in the city to become a scribe and make something of yourself and yet I hear that all you are doing is hanging out with those no good friends of yours and drinking and gambling and whoring.

How about “costume malfunctions”?

Children not standing up when the teacher enters. Any type of head garment.

Over-the-counter birth control is an obvious one: zomg, rapists will buy it for their victims! Women smoking, and cigarette companies marketing to women. The bikini, the miniskirt. Sex education. Planned Parenthood specifically and birth control/abortion generally. Welfare queens and the “undeserving” poor. Marijuana as a “gateway drug.” Anti-drug education in schools (“just say no!”). Childhood obesity and obesity generally. “Death panels.” Purity balls, “secondary virgins” and the like. Definitely single-sex bathrooms. Teh Internets Are Full of Pedophiles. No tolerance rules for things like kid short stories about violence or remarks like “I’m gonna kill you if you do that again” in schools.

Anything that’s only recently put in statistics and therefore lends itself easily to: when we were young there was less of that anything.

No evidence, that is, that this is an urgent social matter that needs remedying. I’m sure it happens, here and there, but to the best of my knowledge, the very small number of women in western countries who wear burkhas overwhelmingly choose to do so for reasons that are similar to the reasons the moral panickers had for wearing a mohawk in 1978: because it upsets the squares.

Secondhand smoke.

Allowing euthanasia will lead to geronticide.

uninsured Americans receive subsidized care at the ER (via higher rates for all of us who are insured to cover the costs of caring for the uninsured)

Tangentially — in my experience a lot of tea partiers were fumingly angry to learn that people can visit the ER without ever paying for it. It wasn’t that they wanted the person to die in the streets; they wanted the person to have to make a payment plan with the ER and pay up after the fact. Variants of “take it out of their welfare money” were the most common response I experienced.

The entire tea party is one big happy restless nonstop moral panic, though I’m not sure if “I have to suffer / used to have to suffer to get this, so you ought to have to suffer for it just as much” ever goes out of style long enough to be forgotten.

“Tangentially—in my experience a lot of tea partiers were fumingly angry to learn that people can visit the ER without ever paying for it.”

Anybody who ends up paying for something without getting it is going to be inclined, all things being equal, to be irritated with the people who are getting it without paying for it. I don’t think this really qualifies as a “moral panic”.

There was one here a year or two ago in Utah that had to do with high school girls wearing multi-colored plastic bracelets. They supposedly meant how many times she had had sex, or how many drugs she had taken, or (when boys started wearing them) the girls gave them to the boys they slept with, or took drugs with, or both. Anyway, they meant something.

The V-chip

they pick a particular development that, for them, crosses some kind of last-straw threshold as the place to make a stand. One more nail in the coffin, but this time we’ll fight back.

Block that metaphor!

Tattoos and body piercing. When these practices increased in the 90’s it was fairly common to see news reports and articles talking about the problems that people could have if they engaged in these practices (e.g. not getting hired for a job, people thinking they were criminals). Now tattoos and body piercing are mostly mundane. It wouldn’t be too surprising to find a high level corporate lawyer with a completely tattooed arm or who puts in a nose or eyebrow ring when they are no longer at work. If you want to freak people out you have to go for a much more extreme form of body modification.

Side note: One thing that’s interesting about the moral panic about long haired men in the 50’s and 60’s is how ahistorical it was. Before the early 19th century, long hair was very common among men for a long historical period (see for example Ben Franklin and various other founding fathers).

animal-human hybrids. steroids.

Selling beer and wine in supermarkets (currently being discussed in Ontario)
Child actors in plays
Boxing Day sales (once a major kerfuffle in Ontario)
Making people pay for plastic bags in shops
Motorcycle helmets
Fluoridated water
Teaching children cursive handwriting
Whether restaurants have to notify customers they are being served microwaved food
Dollar coins, metric system (US)
Two-dollar bills (US and western Canada)
Decimal currency (UK)
Alcopops
Malt liquor (US–fear of European-type alcohol level beers being marketed to poor people)

“Papal Agression” – AKA the move by the RCC to install a hierarchy in Britain in the mid C19th. That was going to bring the world falling down.

Also (insert new media here) is corrupting youth, either because it’s intrisically awful or because it’s so addictive they steal to get it. Penny dreadfuls, the interwar cinema, American comics, video nasties: you name it, it’s eventually been a source of nostalgia for respectable 60somethings.

Comic books and their alleged potential for deleterious impact on the nation’s youth, thus the Comic Code Authority. The horror.

The now emerging issue of correctly dating Assyrian clay tablets?

Some of the above strike me as not so much causing moral panic at the time but in retrospect unethical and/or immoral.

An example, not from my gen-x lifetime, is the married women and working thing; one of my favourite women in science (Ruby Payne-Scott) experienced this and we are all diminished for it. But was this some kind of economic policy (eg:jobs for returned veterans) or a moral policy?

With hindsight, some panics like “stranger danger” shone the spotlight in exactly the wrong place.

Some of the panics have staying power – I’m guessing the “long hair” comments were from those who were young adults in the 60s and 70s; I was beaten up for having long hair (ie: gay) in front of my girlfriend in the 80s. I’m sure it still happens.

Some were about things that (again, from my gen-x perspective) largely just got absorbed into everyday living – from what I’ve read about the early days of Television, it was either going to save us or destroy us…

Girls becoming more successful than boys in schools.

The mythical Discipline List (hereafter, simply DL), which cited such barbarisms as littering and chewing gum in class as discipline problems faced by schoolteachers in 1940s America. Interestingly, and speaking to Professor Holbo’s point about “anxiety” in his introductory posts, the Yale professor (Barry O’Neill) who in the 1990s got to the bottom of the fraud, used the word “anxiety” to describe an effect or intended effect of the bogus DL, fabricated in the 1980s by a Dallas businessman. Incidentally, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell alludes to the DL in No Country for Old Men as an example of the country going down the tubes (Bell also says things are pretty much toast when folks quit saying “Yes, maam” and “No, maam.”)
Signs and wonders.

More here:
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/school.asp

I read one or two items scattered through this list and think “Actually that was a pretty bad change.” Not so much the individual expression ones (tattoos and correctly-dated assyrian tablets are fine) as the ever-creeping infiltration of markets further into our lives. Drip drip drip.

Then there was that time they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Grade “inflation”.

The decline of civilization began when people no longer had to memorize (as my mother had to) “The Assyrian came like a wolf on the fold.” (She liked reciting that line, I have no idea why, and then would laugh and laugh, so I’ve always liked it.) At about this time, Oxford was no longer requiring Latin for admission. I now use that line about the Assyrian wolf when teaching Greek anapests. And my students laugh and laugh, and learn their anapests, so civilization is hanging on by a thin reed. Or a robust one. Laughter.

protest signs. (Apparently shift plus enter equals submit? Sorries for the double-post.)

All those people who double-post their blog comments.

PJW@121:

Falwal vs. the Teletubies was just a symptom of millennial gay panic. Which itself will be just a footnote referring to the weird old days when people actually believed in static sexual orientation.

For some reason, I always remember the line as “the Assyrian came down with a cough and a cold….”

Oh man, I forgot the coolest moral panic!

Remember the controversy over eating potatoes way back when? The King had to eat ’em and say um um um, do I ever luuuuurrrrrvve POTATOES!

Steroids in professional sports.

Filthy Fifteen, and earlier, miscegenation – still gets some people worked up across the planet or at least overly curious.

Got to say. Some of these seem like too much of a fuss when you’re far removed from them, but the Tesco example or fear and loathing of multinationals seem to me totally valid and worthy of support. These two have very real effects on people’s lives.

Also, wouldn’t most parents not want their children to celebrate and participate in violence and war – even those who do not think that playing violent video games would lead their children into violent crime?

Some of us in the business think BT Openreach (the bit that owns the copper access network and, importantly, the right-of-way and the civil engineering works) ought to be back in the public sector like Network Rail.

Anyway, Crichel Down. There’s a buke called The Collapse of British Democracy from the mid 70s that literally argues that THE END TIMES ARE UPON US because some Labour councillors weren’t surcharged for something or other although the law creating that hadn’t been passed yet.

Many of these are just sub-categories of “teenagers having different tastes than their parents and grandparents.” I think it was P. J. O’Rourke who said that if teenagers started a fad of standing around with their hands in their pockets, it would lead to a national panic.

In my high school (in the mid-60s) a girl was expelled for wearing a “granny dress” and you could be disciplined for wearing blue jeans to school. John F. Kennedy was criticized for not wearing a top hat at his inauguration.

Clothing is always good for a cheap moral panic. “Kids these days!”

I read one or two items scattered through this list and think “Actually that was a pretty bad change. Not so much the individual expression ones (tattoos and correctly-dated assyrian tablets are fine) as the ever-creeping infiltration of markets further into our lives. Drip drip drip.

Me too. But that’s inevitable with this kind of thing, and it doesn’t exclude them from consideration. These are the cases where your values, or mine, are the ones eroding away, and we latch on some particular symptom to moral-panic about.

Young people today, with their mullets and their violent sports…

“First the [Nika] rebels revolutionized the style of wearing their hair. For they had it cut differently from the rest of the Romans…clipping the hair short on the front of the head down to the temples, and letting it hang down in great length and disorder in the back, as the Massageti do. This weird combination they called the Hun haircut.”
— Procopius

I tried to get Radio 4 to do a “Things We Forgot To Remember” episode on Crichel Down, back when I could call (some of) the shots. They didn’t bite.

The current conventional wisdom is that anyone who provides—gasp!—PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE they have naughty bits will never hold a job in the next 50 years.

I think an underlying worry here is that almost nobody will hold a job, and the few who manage to get them will be a superhuman elite who have run an arduous gantlet of arbitrary rejection. Refuse to hire people who put naughty pictures of themselves on the Internet? Sure, why not; it may make no sense, but it’s another way to cut down the stack of 10,000 resumes. Of course, in the absence of data, it’s like Pascal’s wager; you have no confidence that the crucial dealbreaker won’t be something else, or even the opposite.

And that first bit was re Ajay’s #146, natch.

Matt McIrvin @#150: This reminds me of Ricky Gervais in The Office: the hiring manager throwing half of a pile of applications into the bin unread to avoid hiring unlucky people.

I can’t hear calls for the re-nationalisation of British Telecom.

I think it was on the Guardian letters page recently that I saw someone explaining knowledgeably that, while renationalisation of this or that privatised industry might seem like a good idea (indeed, in some ways he, the writer, would support it), unfortunately it just wasn’t a realistic idea. After all, the government couldn’t just go around seizing private property!

So perhaps that’s why nobody’s calling for the renationalisation of British Telecom – people have forgotten that it’s even possible.

Never mind whether or not Kennedy wore a top hat, who cares about that. Have none of you noticed that the impudent charlatan – horror of horrors – failed to put on a wig?

ku-ku-ka-chu!

Northern Rock hasn’t been nationalised, it’s been taken into public ownership. RBS is different again – I think the most anyone will admit to is that the government owns a majority share of it. The idea that the government might actually say “hey, we own this bank! our bank! Government Bank! National Bank! Say hello to the National Banking Service!”… I’m not sure anyone even suggested that, even under Labour.

perhaps that’s why nobody’s calling for the renationalisation of British Telecom – people have forgotten that it’s even possible.

And thus, Orwell-style, the effects of privatisation (and non-nationalisation, e.g. of banks) can’t really be thought catastrophic. My #21 was not entirely in jest. See also https://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/06/land-of-unequal-opportunity/#comment-395509:

For this current generation of young people and for the generations that come after it the idea of social mobility will be a quaint relic of a bygone age

The idea that the government might actually say “hey, we own this bank! our bank! Government Bank! National Bank! Say hello to the National Banking Service!”… I’m not sure anyone even suggested that, even under Labour.

This is essentially what the Post Office is: a government-owned national banking service that will give you a credit card, lend you a mortgage, give you a current account, savings account, ISA, etc.

Subliminal advertising. I particularly liked the old skulls in the ice cube in whiskey riff.

Mind you, it’s getting pretty pervasive if not persuasive these days.

Blipverts! How would you capture in fiction these days literally killer advertising concepts?

Also, on the whole Assyrian tablets dating controversy, I bow to the experts here. But I agree with the commentators agreeing with me that it does highlight that the whole “O tempora o mores” boogie has been going on like forever. And yet here we still are.

The Daylight Saving Time example is an interesting one, in that there’s at least some evidence that DST doesn’t do any good as advertised and in fact does harm, so it may well be a stupid idea, even a deadly one (from car accidents around switchover time).

Yet it is obviously not the downfall of civilization, and many discussions of it don’t even get to the point of understanding of how it is supposed to work, or raise ill-informed objections such as “how can you pass a law to alter a universal constant of nature?” So one gets into the uncomfortable position of having to partially defend it in order to attack it properly.

In the US, I don’t think it’s a dirty word, yet. We had people warning of socialist nationalization when the government took over General Motors, even though GM was failing at the time, and the whole point was to get it working again as a private company (which was done with remarkable success).

No, you are right of course, I was referring only to the change of tone in my own country.

Yeah, on closer inspection that’s right – it’s a sellthrough from Bank of Ireland (so are the mortgages). I know there were plans for Post Office current accounts a couple of years ago but I am not sure they went through.

Phil @162, that’s what I was getting at with ‘part-nationalisiation’, ‘quasi-nationalisation’ or being substantially in public ownership would have been better. Chris Williams, okay it gets talked about but not seriously by either of the main parties.

Using the Internet to listen to music or watch movies without paying for them.

#177, never mind metric — the bigger issue is Trudeau mandating French on cereal boxes, thus unconsciously brainwashing our children at breakfast. Maudit francais!