Relax, it's just a moral panic.

 Well... maybe two.

I'm feeling rather optimistic today. And when I tell you why, at first you're going to think I'm crazy. But then (hopefully) you'll see what I mean. 

For the past 14 months or more, the nation and the world have been in the grips of not one, but two moral panics. And as I look back at previous moral panics, I can't say that I see any time before when there have been two going at the same time. 

The first panic is COVID-19 which, make no mistake, is first and foremost a moral panic. I'm not denying that there is a public health aspect to it, but the way the pandemic has played out in both the press and politics has been to assign good and bad labels based not on health outcomes, but on which playbook they choose to follow. Put more clearly: what's "good" and what's "bad" were both decided before anyone determined what worked. 

That's how you end up with California and Florida having similar COVID-19 case rates, but the former is praised for its (good) lockdown and closure policies and Florida is scorned for its (bad) reopening policies. I'm not saying that Florida made the right call and California made the wrong call. Both states are outliers in their respective categories of states that enacted either mild or strict restrictions in response to COVID-19. I'm saying that a moral panic is the only way to explain such a counterintuitive disbursement of accolades and demerits. It could go the other way and still be a moral panic, but I don't see how it can possibly go this way and not be.

Another sign that COVID-19 is a moral panic are the trappings. Whether or not masks are effective against viral spread when weighed against their downsides is still a very open question. I'm sorry if you think the science is settled, the scientists continuing to research and publish papers on the matter very much disagree with you. Yet masks have become a glaring focal point in the pandemic with most states issuing mandates and babies—who the CDC recommends do not wear a mask due to suffocation risk—being kicked off of airplanes (i.e. viral hotboxes) for the sin of not wearing the magic cloth. 

This isn't even to mention the videos we've all by now seen of pro-maskers violating every standard of social distancing, including taking off their own masks, to yell at and otherwise accost people not wearing masks.

The second panic is more straightforwardly moral. This panic has many names—BLM, Critical Race Theory, social justice, anti-racism, cancel culture, wokism—but it's all the same panic. Some of the names have been around awhile, but the preaching only reached panic as of late. As with COVID-19, any good moral panic has some elements rooted in real events. No one but strawmen deny that the effects of past racial injustices can still be felt in ways today. Where this becomes a moral panic is when that reality becomes the only acceptable explanation for all the bad things. 

The nationwide riots in response to the death of George Floyd, and now Duante Wright, are only the most visible and jarring aspect of this panic. But it is where the two panics collide causing strange hypocrisies amongst the moral that would be funny if they didn't also hold so much authority. To be fair, there is a strange sort of consistency in the way the collision is sorted. Racism is always ranked as the worst evil over COVID-19. This leads to the condemnation of lockdown protests, wherein protesters drive past the courthouse or city hall in their cars, as a possible source of spread, whereas BLM/Antifa protests, which manifest as shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, are praised.

Never mind that the virus, if it does so, can kill in a matter of days, while systemic racism and the nebulous negative health affects associated with it seem to primarily steal away twilight years. Even if one accepts that worse COVID-19 outcomes for Black persons is the result of systemic racism, it hardly seems that protests are going to affect that on a timescale that makes the risk of catching the bug in a crowd acceptable. 

So, how is that I can feel optimistic about two moral panics at once? Well, if I'm right (and I believe I am), thank goodness that's all that it is. Moral panics burn out. Even without a reference for two panics converging, instinct tells me that their combined heat will burn them out faster. Contrast that to Satanic Panic, which lingered throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s. 

Also, isn't it nicer to think that the upheaval of the moment is due to insane moralists flipping their feces rather than believing the world is secretly run by a cabal of child-murdering occultists? Don't get me wrong. I still think unprincipled men can do evil things while harboring the best of intentions. I count the present curtailment of basic liberties and the blind eye toward wanton criminality among such evils. But at least there's hope of the actors seeing the error of their ways. No such hope exists when the bad actors are deliberately bad. 

As a final note, I suspect many people who do believe Satanists are calling the shots are, in a strange way, seeking comfort themselves. If they are my age or older, Satanic Panic is a much more familiar panic to grapple with. Virology and epidemiology are serious disciplines, and critical race theory is impossible to understand by design. Reaching back for a golden-oldie panic is a convenient mental shortcut that makes them feel like they can understand things again.