Too many teardrops

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Theodore Dalrymple

1 September 2007

True grief is often swamped by the mawkishness of strangers

The emotional life of which this unutterable kitsch is a manifestation is intense but profoundly shallow, if shallowness can be profound; an emotional life that is given to great whirling gusts of sentiment, but that is lacking constancy, direction or control, and is therefore potentially dangerous. It is the emotional life of people who lack purpose or meaning, and try to find it in the pseudo-communion of the football match or other tribal events.

But what of the meaning of the murder itself, rather than the response to it? Was it simply an isolated horrible event, such as occurs by chance in any large-scale society, or was it indicative of something rotten?

The answer given falls into two main categories: moral panic and complacency. The person given to moral panic sees the whole of society through the lens of an isolated event, believing it to be typical and representative when in fact it is rare, of a type no more frequent than it has ever been; the complacent person, on the other hand, persuades himself that an event that is in fact emblematic of a deep social current or malaise is no more than an isolated and essentially meaningless happenstance.

The person who panics is, typically, a person lower in the social scale than the person who is complacent; that is because his social and economic position is more precarious and because he lives in closer proximity, socially and often geographically, to the kind of event in question than the complacent person, who is often better educated, better paid and more intellectually inclined. The former thinks concretely, the latter abstractly. Confronted by a piece of the rawest reality, the former grows angry or despairing that things have never been so bad, while the latter retreats behind statistics to prove that ’twas ever thus, and therefore is nothing to worry about.