Climate Change, Moral Panics and Civilization

Amanda Rohloff, André Saramago, André Saramago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781136741272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

In recent years, interest in climate change has rapidly increased in the social sciences and yet there is still relatively little published material in the field that seeks to understand the development of climate change as a perceived social problem. This book contributes to filling this gap by theoretically linking the study of the historical development of social perceptions about 'nature' and climate change with the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and the study of moral panics.

By focusing sociological theory on climate change, this book situates the issue within the broader context of the development of ecological civilizing processes and comes to conceive of contemporary campaigns surrounding climate change as instances of moral panics/civilizing offensives with both civilizing and decivilizing effects. In the process, the author not only proposes a new approach to moral panics research, but makes a fundamental contribution to the development of figuration sociology and the understanding of how climate change has developed as a social problem, with significant implications regarding how to improve the efficacy of climate change campaigns.

This highly innovative study should be of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of sociology, environment and sustainability, media studies and political science.

1

Introduction

Introduction

This book explores two main areas of research: (1) the relationship between moral panic and figurational sociology and (2) the development of climate change as a social problem. Its central aims are to question how and to what extent moral panic remains a useful concept in the social sciences, and if so in what formulation, and to understand how climate change has come to be perceived as a social problem. The book does this by combining the concept of moral panic with concepts from figurational sociology and applying these to the empirical analysis of the development of climate change perceptions. These three fields of research have never been combined before (aside from in my own research¹).

Initially, this research developed out of an interest in using the example of climate change to develop the concepts of moral panic and civilization; I started with concepts, with a theoretical-conceptual framework, and then looked for an empirical example. Climate change was chosen for several reasons: at the time, very little sociological research had been undertaken on it; it was (and still is) a highly topical example; it was a contemporary example in that it was current; it did not seem like a perfect fit to the concepts of moral panic and decivilization; and it challenged many of the assumptions associated with the concepts and was therefore a strong ‘test’ of them.

Gradually, as the research process developed, I came to be increasingly interested in the topic of climate change for its own sake, not just for its role as a research tool to develop concepts. And so, the focus shifted to exploring not just how the perception of climate change as a problem developed (providing new insights to research on climate change) but also how this perception might, and perhaps how it ought to, develop in the future. This then led to a desire to develop research-informed recommendations that could have implications for climate change policy, campaigns, media, and so on.

This brings us to my central research problem and research questions. But before I introduce them, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of the concepts of this book: climate change, moral panic, and civilization.

Climate change

The prospect of global climate change, as influenced by anthropogenic processes, has come to be viewed by some as an increasingly prominent ‘social problem’. Climate change is a ‘natural’ ongoing process, with or without the involvement of humans, and the greenhouse effect is necessary to sustain present life on the planet. However, research undertaken in the various sciences of climate change has demonstrated how the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions (including, but not limited to, CO₂) corresponds to increasing overall global temperatures and has projected that these global temperatures will continue to increase, with devastating consequences for various forms of life on earth.²

While the science of global climate change has been developing since before the twentieth century (Weart, [2003] 2008), it is only comparatively recently that the topic has come to be increasingly commonplace in the ‘public sphere’. The last few decades, in particular, have witnessed an increase in attention to the topic, with an acceleration of ‘popular’ interest. Following a series of extreme weather events in 2005, with associated media coverage (see Lever-Tracy, 2008), 2006 saw the release of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006), presented by Al Gore, which sought to educate the public about ‘global warming’ and engender a sense of urgency to address the ‘climate crisis’. Numerous popular books, guides, teaching resources, reality TV shows, movies, and other documentaries have since emerged. ‘Global warming’ clothing, Live Earth concerts, amongst other developments, all suggest that anthropogenic climate change has become at least a popular (though at times contested) social problem.³ This research seeks to explore how such developments have occurred and what implications they have for dealing with climate change.

This research employs a long-term approach to understanding the development of climate change as a perceived social problem. It explores how different processes – natural processes, intentional campaigns and interventions, and wider social processes – may influence understandings about anthropogenic climate change and, potentially, changes in nature-society relations. Primarily, this research brings together the concept of moral panic with Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes to explore how and to what extent understandings about and the governance of climate change have developed.

Moral panic

The development of climate change as a perceived social problem provides an interesting case with which to ‘test’ and ‘develop’ the concept of moral panic for it does not fit neatly with the original understanding of the concept. The term ‘moral panic’ was first taken up by Jock Young (1971) and then more fully developed by Stanley Cohen (1972) in his famous study on the ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’.⁴ This original, or ‘classic’, conceptualization of moral panic describes a particular type of overreaction to a perceived social problem. As Cohen famously describes it,

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.

(Cohen, [1972] 2002, p. 1)

Despite Cohen’s groundbreaking study (see also Critcher, 2003; Goode & Ben-Yehuda, [1994] 2009; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978; Thompson, 1998), there have been several criticisms of moral panic research, with some authors rejecting the concept altogether (for example, Hunt, 1999; Moore & Ungar, 2001; Valverde, 2000; Watney, [1987] 1997). Criticisms include the normativity of the concept (the reaction to the perceived social problem is presumed to be irrational and innately misguided; see Hunt, 1999; Moore & Valverde, 2000); the short-term focus of much moral panic research (it has tended to focus on the processes involved within the ‘panic’, without exploring how these relate to wider, long-term social processes; see Rohloff & Wright, 2010; Watney, [1987] 1997); problems of determinism and agency; and the relative lack of theoretical-conceptual development, of continually engaging the concept with developments in social theory⁵ (for example, see Hier, 2008; Rohloff & Wright, 2010). In response to some of these criticisms, increasing attention is being given to the theoretical and methodological development of the moral panic concept, with many publications discussing the concept and its adequacy (for example, see Altheide, 2009; Critcher, 2008a, 2009; David, Rohloff, Petley, & Hughes, 2011; Garland, 2008; Hier, 2008, 2011; Jenkins, 2009; Rohloff, 2008, 2011; Rohloff & Wright, 2010; Young, 2009).

One way in which some authors are seeking to develop moral panic is through the utilization of the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. Put simply, this involves exploring how governance (i.e. practices of government or regulation) is thought about and how it develops. It incorporates both governance of the self and governance of the other (Dean, [1999] 2010). In this respect, it is similar to Elias’s self-constraint and external constraint (except that, for Elias, there is a long-term shift towards increasing self-constraint relative to external constraint). Sean Hier has incorporated governmentality into his reformulation of moral panic; he conceptualizes moralization as a ‘dialectic that counterposes individualizing discourses (which call on people to take personal responsibility to manage risk, e.g. drinking responsibly) against collectivizing discourses (which represent more broadly harms to be avoided, e.g. the drunk driver)’ (Hier, 2008, p. 174). He argues that during moral panics, this dialectic shifts more towards collectivizing discourses, where the focus is on the governance of the (harmful) other. This concept of governmentality, and how it relates to moral panic and civilizing processes, will be further discussed in Chapter 3.

Drawing from Eliasian and other approaches, an additional aim of this research is to contribute to these debates with a reformulation of the moral panic concept. It is anticipated that, by applying the concept of moral panic to the example of climate change (a social problem that does not fit neatly with many of the assumptions of the original understanding of the moral panic concept), in combination with the original utilization of Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes, I will develop a reformulation of the moral panic concept, one that begins to address many of the problems and disputes within moral panic research. Some of these disputes include whether moral panics require folk devils, the relationship between panic and denial, the criterion of disproportionality, the extent to which moral panics contribute to deviancy amplification and secondary deviance, and the notion of ‘good’ (as opposed to ‘bad’) moral panics. These will all be explored and developed throughout this book, with the aim of developing a new approach to moral panic research, one that is relevant to empirical examples across time and space.

Civilization

In On the Process of Civilisation (formerly titled in English The Civilizing Process) ([1939] 2012), Elias explores ‘civilization’ in two very different ways. First, he explores the development of the normative concept of ‘civilization’: the process whereby one group of people come to see themselves as more ‘civilized’ than another group of people, thereby legitimizing these self-identified ‘civilized’ people to establish asymmetrical power relations with those deemed ‘uncivilized’. Indeed, the first part of Elias’s book is devoted to the ‘sociogenesis’, or development, of the normative concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ in everyday language:

when one examines what the general function of the concept of civilisation really is…one starts with a very simple discovery: this concept expresses the self-consciousness of the West…It sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones. By this term Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world, and much more.

(Elias, [1939] 2012, p. 15)

While Elias did not want to use the term ‘civilizing process’ to refer to progress, he did seek to understand how the concept of ‘civilization’ in its everyday usage had attained these connotations of ‘progress’ and ‘self-betterment’ (as opposed to the ‘uncivilized’ and the ‘barbaric’).⁶

In contrast to the former normative, everyday understanding of ‘civilization’, Elias sought to develop a second, more technical and sociological understanding of ‘civilization’. And so after having explored the normative terms of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’, he goes on to provide empirical examples and analyses that feed into his technical concept of civilization. In his examination of the development of Western European societies since the Middle Ages, he develops his ‘central theory’⁷ of civilizing processes by empirically exploring the interrelationship between long-term changes in standards of behaviour and long-term changes in state formation and other wider processes.

‘Elias’s intention is to show by the examination of empirical evidence how, factually, standards of behaviour and psychological make-up have changed in European society since the Middle Ages, and then to explain why this has happened’ (Mennell, [1989] 1998, p. 30). Psychological make-up is often referred to as ‘habitus’, and it essentially means ‘that level of personality characteristics which individuals share in common with fellow members of their social groups’. So, examining manners and etiquette books (and other texts) provides a window into social habitus and its long-term transformation. From examining these texts, Elias discovers long-term changes in codes of mannerly behaviour, where manners from the medieval period were comparatively ‘simple, naïve and undifferentiated’ compared with today. Then, during the Renaissance period, ‘with the structural transformation of society, with the new pattern of relationships, a change slowly comes about: the compulsion to check one’s behaviour increases’ (Elias, cited in Mennell, [1989] 1998 p. 42). By the eighteenth century, many ‘bad’ manners that were discussed in previous centuries were now absent from etiquette books; these proscriptions no longer needed to be mentioned as they were now internalized within people’s personality make-up. This ‘movement towards many things no longer being spoken about ran in conjunction with a movement towards moving many of the same things behind the scenes of social life’ (Mennell, [1989] 1998, p. 43). These changes were accompanied by changes in emotions associated with these behaviours, with advancing feelings of shame and repugnance towards bodily functions.

These long-term changes are described by Elias as relating to the balance between external restraint (control by others) and self-restraint (internalized self-control); he argues that there is an overall shift in the balance towards increasing self-restraint. And he adds that the ‘super-ego’, the inner self that forbids people to do certain things, regulates relations with others via an internalized individual self-control (Mennell, [1989] 1998, p. 105). As Elias puts it,

the displeasure towards such conduct which is thus aroused by the adult finally arises through habit, without having been induced by [the present action of] another person…Since the pressure of coercion of individual adults is allied to the pressure of example of the whole surrounding world, most children as they grow up, forget or repress relative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 On climate change, ‘nature’, and the ‘environment’
• 3 Theories of social processes and social change
• 4 On Methodology
• 5 Historical analysis (part one): climate change and ecological civilizing processes
• 6 Historical analysis (part two): climate change and moral panics
• 7 Moral panics as civilizing and decivilizing processes: a comparative analysis
• 8 Conclusion
• Index