{"id":5656,"date":"2020-12-23T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T22:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/?p=5656"},"modified":"2020-12-23T18:01:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T22:01:00","slug":"a-genealogy-of-alarm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/","title":{"rendered":"A Genealogy of Alarm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Remember how bad the environment was?<\/p>\n

The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and other environmental organizations likewise understood that their memberships would swell in the face of dramatic bad news. To broadcast reassuring, upbeat stories of environmental progress \u2014 of which there could have been plenty after 1970 \u2014 would have been to diminish the sense of crisis on which they thrived They had an incentive to encourage the idea that they stood as guardians of a natural world under threat from the forces of rapacity and greed. In their search for new recruits and political influence, they had an equally obvious incentive to exaggerate the danger posed by each new problem.<\/p>\n

Also contributing to the growing mood of environmental alarm was the spread of counterculture values in the 196s and 1970s. American mainstream culture valued material comfort and was phenomenally successful in achieving it. The counterculture, by contrast, stressed simplicity, warned against hubris, and relished the humbling of the mighty. . . Environmental and counterculture rhetoric sometimes echoed Puritan jeremiads, sermons rebuking a society that had turned away from virtue in a sinful quest for wealth. Where once vengeance would have come from an angry God, now it would come from an overstressed natural world. (Patrick Allitt, A Climate of Crisis<\/a> [2014], 6-7)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or what do you remember about safe spaces<\/a> (from 2015)?<\/p>\n

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments \u201ctroubling\u201d or \u201ctriggering,\u201d a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and \u201csexual assault peer educator\u201d who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall \u2014 it was packed \u2014 but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. \u201cI was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,\u201d Ms. Hall said.<\/p>\n

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being \u201cbombarded\u201d by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. . . .<\/p>\n

The theory that vulnerable students should be guaranteed psychological security has roots in a body of legal thought elaborated in the 1980s and 1990s and still read today. Feminist and anti-racist legal scholars argued that the First Amendment should not safeguard language that inflicted emotional injury through racist or sexist stigmatization. One scholar, Mari J. Matsuda, was particularly insistent that college students not be subjected to \u201cthe violence of the word\u201d because many of them \u201care away from home for the first time and at a vulnerable stage of psychological development.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Safetyism<\/a> was inevitable, right?<\/p>\n

Safetyism is a disposition that has been gaining strength for decades and is having a triumphal moment just now because of the virus. Public health, one of many institutions that speak on behalf of safety, has claimed authority to sweep aside whole domains of human activity as reckless, and therefore illegitimate.<\/p>\n

I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit. . . .<\/p>\n

the upshot of the pattern is that the voices of the safety-industrial complex seem to defer automatically to the arbiters of high-prestige opinion, who are fully invested these days in political warfare against an avatar of evil, and against the half of the population who voted for him. They seem less concerned with the health of the whole populace than with drawing boundaries between the good people and the bad people, along lines that are by now all too familiar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you think that people have implicit biases or that w(orld)-(vie)ws actually determine the way we interpret the world around us, then it might be worth considering the prejudices bound up with an old and current alarm and panic over a virus. <\/p>\n

Image<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and other environmental organizations likewise understood that their memberships would swell in the face of dramatic bad news. To broadcast reassuring, upbeat stories of environmental progress \u2014 of which there could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2170,"featured_media":5658,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[277,36,276],"tags":[6943,220,6663,6940,4542,6937],"class_list":["post-5656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gullibility","category-moralism","category-u-s-politics","tag-alarmism","tag-climate-change","tag-covid-19","tag-environmentalism","tag-safe-spaces","tag-safetyism"],"yoast_head":"\nA Genealogy of Alarm<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Genealogy of Alarm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Putting the Protest in Protestant\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/519\/2020\/12\/GettyImages-1217469114-e1589538597564.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"440\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"D. G. Hart\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"D. G. Hart\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/\",\"name\":\"A Genealogy of Alarm\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/a3f06ea0a83ba126d13acf6fd7526d24\"},\"description\":\"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"A Genealogy of Alarm\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/\",\"name\":\"Putting the Protest in Protestant\",\"description\":\"Love is not the same as nice.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/a3f06ea0a83ba126d13acf6fd7526d24\",\"name\":\"D. G. Hart\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8d201b68465df37f9e15daeaae5452b6?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8d201b68465df37f9e15daeaae5452b6?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"D. G. Hart\"},\"description\":\"D. G. Hart lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann, and their two cats, Isabelle and Cordelia, where he teaches history at Hillsdale College. Hart used to be an East-Coast snob (though he still roots for the Phillies) but while living in a small mid-western town he has learned that life exists outside the Northeast Corridor. He is currently completing a global history of Calvinism and plans to write books on H. L. Mencken and American religion, and on Roman Catholicism and American conservatism.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/author\/dghart\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"A Genealogy of Alarm","description":"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"A Genealogy of Alarm","og_description":"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/","og_site_name":"Putting the Protest in Protestant","article_published_time":"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00","og_image":[{"width":768,"height":440,"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/519\/2020\/12\/GettyImages-1217469114-e1589538597564.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"D. G. Hart","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"D. G. Hart","Est. reading time":"4 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/","name":"A Genealogy of Alarm","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#website"},"datePublished":"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00","dateModified":"2020-12-23T22:01:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/a3f06ea0a83ba126d13acf6fd7526d24"},"description":"Remember how bad the environment was? The leaders of the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon \/Society, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Earth,","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/2020\/12\/a-genealogy-of-alarm\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"A Genealogy of Alarm"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/","name":"Putting the Protest in Protestant","description":"Love is not the same as nice.","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/a3f06ea0a83ba126d13acf6fd7526d24","name":"D. G. Hart","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8d201b68465df37f9e15daeaae5452b6?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8d201b68465df37f9e15daeaae5452b6?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"D. G. Hart"},"description":"D. G. Hart lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann, and their two cats, Isabelle and Cordelia, where he teaches history at Hillsdale College. Hart used to be an East-Coast snob (though he still roots for the Phillies) but while living in a small mid-western town he has learned that life exists outside the Northeast Corridor. He is currently completing a global history of Calvinism and plans to write books on H. L. Mencken and American religion, and on Roman Catholicism and American conservatism.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/author\/dghart\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2170"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/protestprotest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}