This one starts with a grad school story. I was in a Las Vegas, but not the one you’re thinking of.

Back in graduate school, I studied primarily Creative Writing, but I did have an extended flirtation with Composition-Rhetoric that helped shape my current professional life. I have my creative thesis, still, but there is a paper that I lost somewhere in the innumerable transfers between different computers that I still think about from time to time – one that traced a compelling correspondence between public health crises and times of increased censorship. This correspondence could be traced to certain neurological factors that recur across cultures, but are manifested differently in each one.

When I woke up this morning, I came to the conclusion that I would try – to the best of my abilities – to recreate this.

First, let’s define some basic ideas. There has been a tendency to define censorship as basically “any change that I dislike,” which is a useless definition – especially alongside the fact that depicting women in sensible clothing or people who aren’t white in nuanced roles gets defined by some as “political.” This is not what censorship is.

This book will be in my next round of book reviews. I was slightly disappointed with it, but the Propaganda model is very handy.

Censorship, properly and strictly speaking, is government prevention of the publication of material deemed subversive, offensive, or harmful. However, I think it is not terribly useful to link this solely with a government – it creates an ontological separation that’s not particularly useful. Let’s instead look at the Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, which is focused on the news media. According to this model, it is not content but actors – as in people taking actions – that are filtered:

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

This proposal means that the system doesn’t work by a top-down command of what is printed, but specifically by shaping the sort of people that act within it. Ergo, while the people who are involved in the process are behaving genuinely and in good faith, the system itself doesn’t.

This model – and the book it comes from – is extremely interesting. What I intend to do is propose that “censorship” as such is not simply government bans on particular subjects and phrasings, but specifically a sort of “propaganda by enforced absence.” While the propaganda model proposed by Chomsky and Herman is specifically about the communication of news media in liberal capitalist states in the twentieth century, this model of filtration – of messages shaped by controlling the conditions that they arise in – is useful for my purposes here. Censorship, however, has a more active component: you cannot have “self-censorship” without the threat of actual censorship, and for that you need a censor.

In short, it is a way to make people into the sort of communicative subjects who don’t need to be censored – first by actively censoring them, then by making them self-censor, by moving the interruption from the point of communication, then back to the point of composition, then to the point of conception. To borrow – and subsequently mutilate – a term from Burroughs, it’s the process of installing a cop in the head of the writer or artist.

Justice Potter Stewart — a man whose claim to fame is that he know pornography when he saw it. Presumably he saw it a lot.

Famously, though, what is censored is not usually defined as politically dangerous but as morally dangerous. What is censored is labeled obscene and perverse. The subject is something morally hazardous, not something that might lead to political awareness. This is despite there not being a real hard-and-fast definition for what is obscene or perverse, we are just supposed to – as Justice Potter Stewart said in Jacobellis v. Ohio “know it when [we] see it.”

So, we have an action (censorship) defined as “propaganda by enforced absence” and largely aimed at an undefined category (obscenity). This means anything considered obscene – from ankles to whatever it was being discussed on the Behind the Bastards episode “The Ballad of Eel Horse” – can be excised from public discourse, based on whether it is defined in opposition to current standards of morality and decency. However, this is never put to a popular vote – and even if it did, the results would be shaped largely by preexisting portrayals (I’m reminded of Umberto Eco’s 14th point in the essay “Ur-Fascism,” which he defined as “selective populism” – and defining expressions of queer identity as being not “family friendly” seems to be the definition of this).

Why do people react so strongly to “obscenity”?

There is a significant amount of evidence that the parts of the brain that respond to the thought of “immoral” acts also activate in response to the thought of “unhygienic” acts. This is becoming a fairly standard trope in some fields – consider “Infection, Incest, and Iniquity: Investigating the Neural Correlates of Disgust and Morality” by Borg, Lieberman, and Kiehl, and “Microbes, mating, and morality: Individual differences in three functional domains of disgust” by Tybur, Lieberman, and Griskevicius, and “Effects of subjective sexual arousal on sexual, pathogen, and moral disgust sensitivity in women and men” by Lee, Ambler, and Sagarin.

The upshot of these articles is as follows: there are parts of us that respond with disgust to certain stimuli (imagine someone sneezing in your mouth), and with sexual arousal to others (imagine whatever you want here, I don’t know your life), and sometimes the same stimuli activates both, so it sort of comes down to whatever reaction triggers first, unless the other one gets triggered much more strongly. I imagine that we could do a whole study and establish ranges of thresholds and standardized units for this sort of thing, but that’s someone else’s problem: I’ve got other interests here.

Francisco Goya’s depiction of a Witch’s Sabbath. Completely unclean: to be up to code, the black goat needs to be wearing a diaper.

Here’s the thing, though: disgust and morality are intertwined. This is especially true when you examine the Abrahamic religions. In the popular consciousness, this is largely bound up in the Jewish and Muslim practices of food preparation (which, while couched in theological terms, are not bad in terms of hygiene as understood by people living in the desert during those historical periods). It’s less strong in the Christian milieu, but it comes out in their fear-mongering about various heretical sects – whether the historical Gnostic groups, specifically the Phibionites, Ophites, and Sethians, as well as Early Modern screeds against witchcraft – while there are many metaphors of cleanliness, Christianity tends to place a much higher emphasis on the uncleanliness of their opponents.

We can also find this emphasis outside of the Abrahamic faiths. The Indigenous American sweat lodge, the widespread practice of circumcision, and widespread prohibitions and rules around contact with the dead. What is clear is that the major vehicles for establishing moral cleanliness throughout the world was also instrumental in establishing common rules about physical cleanliness.

The fact that the metaphor in the prior paragraph makes any sense is the point here. However, it goes beyond this. Consider, there are two arenas we’re looking at here: the physical and the moral. The way that human societies tend to evolve means that we consider these two things to be intertwined and interconnected. In many ways, as the same thing. Before the advent of modern medicine, this makes sense: catching typhus was probably some deity or spirit punishing you, so maybe you should do something to make up for it.

I know they look weird and creepy, but what you have to understand is that the plague doctor’s get-up is basically the medieval equivalent of a haz-mat suit. Based on the knowledge they had, they made the best effort they could. What you are looking at here is not superstition: it’s a wonder of science.

Now, this isn’t to downplay the scientific and proto-scientific reasoning of our ancestors: they knew that diseases tended to spread when they show up. The “miasma theory” wasn’t correct, but it did lead to quarantining and some early efforts in waste management. However, this had to contend with the religious explanation – so it became not the sin of the person suffering but a product of some collective sin. Someone did wrong, and now everyone would be punished.

This is leading up to my point: periods of public health crisis are connected to periods of heavy censorship and cultural conservatism. In short: moral panics tend to follow public health crises.

Let’s have a sidebar here: what is a moral panic?

Stanley Cohen, a Jewish-South African sociologist and criminologist, identified this phenomenon by spotting a recurring pattern in history. He labeled it a “moral panic” and identified five stages:

people within a population identify another group, an activity, condition, or group as a threat to society as a whole.
Media portrayals of this threat amplify it, increasing the apparent threat while also reducing it to a symbol. The people associated with this threat become perceived as powerful “folk devils” while everyone else is reduced to the status of a mere victim or victim-in-waiting.
The anxiety spreads, gripping more and more people.
The “elite” of society – including not just politicians but also the editors of news media and religious leaders – “analyze” and respond (often over-correcting) to this threat.
It disappears overnight and people forget about it almost immediately afterward.

Symbol of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded by Anthony Comstock and supported by the YMCA. The Comstock Laws referred to laws about sending obscene material through the mail.

The Salem Witch Trials happened the same year as a major outbreak of yellow fever in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that killed more than three thousand people. The Comstock Laws were signed into effect a short time after a Yellow Fever Outbreak killed 80,000 people in North America. The first Red Scare began during the Spanish Flu outbreak, which also shortly preceded Prohibition. The second Red Scare began during a polio outbreak. The Satanic Panic only really became widespread, I would argue, because it was contemporaneous with the AIDS outbreak. Each stage of this moral panic brought about explicit and implicit forms of censorship.

Of course, there is no doubt some element of apophenia here: there’s always a major epidemic somewhere, and there’s always a moral panic somewhere. How can we say there’s any kind of correlation, much less a causative link?

We can look at history, simply. Admittedly, for this, I’m going off of Wikipedia, but I’m noting 53 major plagues for the 19th century; for the period from 1900-1950, I’m noting 22. For the period from 1950-1980, I’m noting 11. For 1980-2021, I’m noting 82 (47 before 2010). Now, this disparity is most likely due to better record keeping, but what I’m trying to look at here is cultural response: the recorded ones are all that matter for these purposes.

The 19th century was basically a solid block of moral panics. Springheel Jack, Penny Dreadfuls, the invention of tablecloths because men might become aroused by the legs of the table – the Victorian period is, as Edgar mentioned, full of brainrot about almost everything.

But we can see an interesting trend: as the number of epidemics tails off, so – generally – do the number of major moral panics. We have the red scare, sure, and prohibition and the devil’s music, and filthy literature – but, generally speaking as the number of epidemics tapers off, the moral panics become fewer and slightly more grounded. A number of these moral panics – I’m thinking specifically about the red scare – were even explicitly manufactured. They function somewhat differently, due to being enshrined in the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda model.

Looking at the period between 1950 and 1980, and leaving aside holdovers from prior eras (the red scare, which was receiving pushback, and the devil’s music), we have only a small number: switchblades, the conflict between mods and rockers, hippies, and disco. For as insane as this thirty-year stretch was looking back on it, it may have been the most sane period in American history. Which isn’t praising that stretch of thirty years: it’s denigrating all of the rest of it.

Since 1980, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of moral panics and also an uptick in the number of epidemics. There’s even been a crossover between the two: moral panics about diseases (as we can see not just with AIDS, and the genocide-by-neglect committed by the Reagan Administration, but also Ebola), became more and more common during this period. One could say that this shift is due more to the expansion of the media apparatus (cable news came online in 1980), than the expansion in epidemics.

This is most likely true, but there was a need in place for the 24-hour news channels to exploit. There was a desire that was being fulfilled here, and I think that the existence of these epidemic events led to people desiring some narrative of punishment – if not from a deity, then from the universe itself. However, it is not and can not be defined as a punishment, no matter how much affective need people have for that: we are witnessing a phenomenon that simply happens and trying to read agency into it.

Now, I’ve been dancing around the current issue because I needed to get the stage set. The current pandemic and this phenomenon interfacing not just with publishers but with those things we call “platforms,” which are different from publishers.

At the moment, we have several moral panics going on. One of the quietest and most pervasive right now is the culture war over the rights of transgender people. This is driven in large part by the celebrity factor (J.K. Rowling feels entitled to your attention, after all,) and it needs to be resisted, but it honestly isn’t inventing a new bogeyman – it’s just casting a marginalized population as a dangerous elite, and trying to cut off their access to health care. It’s evil, and it’s banal – though the people driving it are largely exhibiting a certain irrational cognition that I’m going to have to write about in the future (notably, once someone falls to speaking, writing, or posting transphobic talking points, they largely never say, write, or post anything normal again in the future. Just look at the recent Dave Chappelle special, which pauses the comedy to sermonize about gender.

However, I think the most notable moral panics are the weird ones that become unmoored from reality.

There are two major, weird moral panics going on at the moment. The first is QAnon, which I’ve written about a bit, and is honestly taking up way too much air in the room. It’s the death throes of the old moral panic model best explained by the fact that it’s just a “greatest hits” of prior panics.

Moral panic as nostalgia: you have blood libel, stranger danger, the satanic panic, and the JFK assassination all reduced to a slurry and exuded as a kind of mass-produced brainrot paste. This is, clearly, the most dangerous one and has already driven violence in the real world. However, we’ve seen this before, and there are many intelligent people speaking and writing extensively about it and have done far more research than I have. I leave the Q-folk to their nightmares of adrenochrome, the messiest practical joke ever played by Hunter S. Thompson.

No, the more interesting one is found principally among younger people. I’m speaking here of the anti-libidinal reaction, of young people rejecting sexuality as a viable means of self-expression. What makes this interesting is that it largely works through the installation of the Burroughsian “cop in your head.” We see this in the “horny jail” meme, and the calls for the removal of kink from Gay Pride celebrations.

What we have here is a widespread acceptance of the explanation that disease transmission is caused by the interconnection of bodies, which merged with other things that were going on in the culture – older adolescents, quite rightly, expressing agency in their resistance to being sexualized, notably – and became a panicked rejection of sexuality (which is different from asexuality. The one is a cultural phenomenon, the other is an aspect of identity).

This particular moral panic has largely flown under the radar, because it looks quite different from prior moral panics: it’s not being propagated by an institutionalized media, but by “influencers” – people who have acquired a large amount of social capital in the gold rush for online clout. While largely “influencer” means a content creator who supports advertising, I’m using it in a more generalized sense as someone who acts as a node in a social network to which a great many unidirectional (parasocial) connections exist. These people, many of whom tend to have less influence offline than on, and are not supported by a traditional publisher, act as strange attractors in the development of culture, like a hidden celestial object bending the trajectory of a body in space. They are, largely, journalistically invisible but shape the conversation around them, either by creating or propagating memes.

Artist’s depiction of a supermassive black hole orbited by a star, taken from Science News. Attributed in the original to L. Calçada/ESO.

Because of this, the second step of Cohen’s Moral Panic process has become a cottage industry: instead of being created by a newsroom trying to fill up twenty-four hours of broadcast time, it’s fallen to individual people who can reach a similar number of people from consumer-grade electronics. I have no proof of this, but I would expect that there’s a certain chimeric quality to the outcome, as messages collide and intermix in the discourse soup that is social media.

This is a condition that can only arise because of the platform designation enjoyed by social media companies. Since they are not really liable for the things that are propagated on them, a much wider variety of discourse can occur. This also means that the individual psychology of the influencers has a much greater impact: indeed, it’s the whole point. People become influencers because their personalities make them more interesting to the public. They remain influencers by installing the cop in their head.

This is why I’m labeling it “the anti-libidinal reaction” rather than a “moral panic” because it isn’t exactly complete yet, and it’s unclear if it’s going to reach the fourth stage. It is possible that evangelical opportunists are already trying to make that happen (as can be seen in their manipulation of MasterCard, and the attempted sinking of OnlyFans as a platform.)

Still, it seems obvious that – with moralizing about catching the disease, resistance to measures against catching the disease, and the stress of isolation and vigilance – there are moral panics around the Covid pandemic, and almost more than dealing with the disease itself, navigating this crisis requires dealing with these moral panics, first and foremost. Recognizing that they are rooted in the fear of disease is the first step towards refocusing on dealing with the actual disease, which we desperately need to do.

Because we’re dropping the ball on this one and should really work on not doing that.

Quarantined in Horny Jail: on Metaphors of Disease