Witch trials, 1692 to 2014

Megan McArdle, a Bloomberg columnist whose web articles would be must-reads if any were (as John Piper points out, only the Bible is a must-read), published an excellent piece Wednesday about the recent University of Virginia fraternity rape accusations.

Under the headline “Moral Panics Won’t End Campus Rape,” McArdle wrote, “the fraternity brothers say they knew within 24 hours that the Rolling Stone story was false. … Yet the brothers kept quiet because they thought that fighting the story in the news media ‘would only make things more difficult.’”

McArdle points out that “the attention focused on the fraternity was so intense that brothers living there had to move to a hotel. Even more troubling is the fact that the media broadcast these allegations widely, and for two weeks, opinion columns and Facebook exploded into a frenzy of condemnation. … At root is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s poor reporting, of course—the brothers say that she didn’t provide checkable details they could have used to refute the story, such as the date of the attack. But that doesn’t really explain the bricks [through the fraternity house’s windows]. How did things go so terribly wrong?”

McArdle’s answer: “We’ve been in the grip of a moral panic about campus rape.”

She defines moral panic as happening when “a community becomes hysterical about some problem—often, but not always, a real one—that becomes defined as an existential threat to public safety and moral order. In such a climate, questioning how big the threat actually is, or contesting any particular example, is not a matter of rational discussion, but of heresy. … Ludicrous and improbable stories suddenly become convincing, and it’s dangerous to question them, because why are you defending witches? Are YOU a witch?”

McArdle cites the alleged preschool abuse cases of the 1980s and 1990s, which became a media sensation after “presumably competent adults suddenly began to believe obvious confabulations by young children being incompetently interviewed, which ranged from unlikely in the extreme (a sexual assault that took place in a hot air balloon) to obviously physically impossible (children being driven through nonexistent underground tunnels beneath a school).”

I could write more about media dereliction of duty here, and praise Dorothy Rabinowitz, who blew the whistle on the preschool abuse moral panic, or Richard Bradley, who criticized the Rolling Stone rape story and for his troubles garnered accusations of “rape denial.” But here’s a larger point: Progressives like to think of societies “evolving” in ways that show we’re smarter than our ancestors. For example, think of the Thirty Years War, a religious conflict that devastated central Europe from 1618 to 1648, or the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693—but that was then and this is now.

Hmm. The 31-year ideological war that devastated Europe from 1914 to 1945 was far more deadly than its predecessor. Happily, we’ve stopped hanging witches, and during periodic moral panics we merely draw and quarter them through career-ending libel and maybe jail time, so I am grateful.