Who is looking for cheap political advantage? Could it be . . . SATAN?

A couple of days ago, I posted about European witch trials. I congratulated us on taking those lessons to heart, on building standards of evidence into our legal system, which these days have us relying as much on physical evidence as eyewitness testimony.   

Except when we don't. The longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history took place only thirty years ago, and it was about – you guessed it – witches. More specifically, Satanic cults that were supposedly molesting, torturing, and sacrificing children in secret tunnels under their pre-school. This case was built entirely on the testimony of small children who had been coached and in some cases hypnotized to “recover” memories of events for which there was zero conclusive physical evidence. Noone was tortured, or lynched or burned, but several people spent time in jail and had their reputations ruined and their livelihoods destroyed.   

This case kicked off what was later called “the Satanic panic,” a series of accusations and court cases that burned ember-slow for about ten years, but never exploded into violence, like the witch trials. One probable reason for this is that the people who traveled the country trying to stir up the panic – the modern evangelical witch-hunters – never managed to inspire any patrons of sufficient social status, like King James from the documentary I mentioned yesterday. Unlike 9/11, which riled up the country (and the government) at every level, only scattered local authorities got involved.  Despite the media furor, the instigators remained a fringe group with fringe concerns.  I'd also like to give at least a little credit to Dana Carvey's Church Lady skits on Saturday Night Live.

Why are we so prone to these moral panics? This paper suggests that we have a multi-layered psychological system for avoiding disease (click the link for a diagram).  We have a specific emotion, disgust, devoted to avoiding contamination.  It's a visceral emotional response that bypasses critical thinking, as biologically important things tend to do.  However, this "behavioral immune system" is flexible; it also uses individual learning and even has cultural components.

There is also a positive feedback loop between culture and group hygiene by which cultural rules with real biological import (manners) can become subject to the symbolization principle we call ‘extension’. When a set of cultural rules becomes symbolic, they can extend beyond behaviour with direct relevance to biological pathogens. An obvious extension is from rules governing contact with biological parasites to rules governing contact with ‘social parasites’ (i.e. individuals that claim an unfair proportion of social resources). In this way, systems of manners can be extended to become systems of moral rules. Violators of rules for the apportionment of socially produced resources can then be labelled as disgusting, and sanctioned accordingly.

In the documentary Witches, Suzannah Lipscomb emphasized the concrete economic drain that old women put on the resources of a community, but old people also tend to look old and sick, and maybe smell a little funny, even when they are relatively healthy.  If old age and poverty can get you accused of devil worship, it's not a big hop from there to any action that your society deems "dirty."  And any time a positive feedback loop is involved, things can blow up.

There are always these potential bubbles of discontent forming.  We've got a situation going on in NC right now, where the legislature has decided that the easiest way to get social conservatives to the polls (and "reform" labor law) is to demonize transgender people, through bathrooms (ooo, dirty) and evidence-free accusations of sexual predation.  It's right out of the Satanic Panic playbook.  Fortunately, people are pushing back, with some success.

Facing a tight race against a Democratic challenger, Republican state Sen. Tamara Barringer on Tuesday became the first GOP legislator to call for House Bill 2 to be repealed.

So maybe this particular bubble will pop, and we can go back to demonizing Muslims, hipsters, and homeless people.