Moral Panic, Moral Imagination
It's become quite commonplace to charge those of us who challenge technology – specifically children's use of technology -- with fomenting some sort of "moral panic." To do so invokes a long history of opposition to television and rock-n-roll and video games and comic books, and posits that any complaints about cell phones and social media and “AI” are simply the latest manifestation of this kind of outrage -- an outrage that is grounded in cultural conservativism and un-grounded from science.
New media always generate a frenzied concern from certain corners – concerns that range from quiet handwringing to loud outrage; and importantly, if these concerns are unchecked – or so the story goes – they will extend beyond consternation and pearl-clutching and aim for outright censorship. The charge of "moral panic," therefore is meant to elicit its own sort of highly charged response: the need to thwart those critics and to label them as standing in the way of progress, science, and/or simply "fun".
It's been some fifty years now since the sociologist Stanley Cohen first used the phrase “moral panic” to describe a "condition, episode, person or group of persons [that] emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests" -- in his work specifically, the youth cultures in post-war Britain (even more specifically, the conflict between the mods and the rockers). According to Cohen, moral panics arise when a group's beliefs and practices are marked as deviant, and when the threat – whether real or perceived, literal or symbolic – the group allegedly poses to the social order gets magnified by the mass media. "Moral entrepreneurs" – clergy, politicians, “socially-accredited experts,” and “right-thinking people” – step up to man the “moral barricades,” as Cohen puts it: to diagnose the deviance and to draw the lines of normativity, sometimes to propose solutions, but mostly to pontificate.
There are many ways in which we can see these barricades built and torn down in the decades since Cohen’s work first appeared, as what constitutes “deviance” has, in many instances, has changed radically (as perhaps too has society’s tolerance for “folk devils.”) And there has been major upheaval as well in the main conduit, in Cohen’s formulation at least, for spreading moral panics: the mass media.
But that’s hardly stopped the phrase from being used to police boundaries – cultural, social, technological, political alike. To call something a "moral panic" remains a fairly common rhetorical move, one that serves to dismiss and delegitimate people's concerns, particularly about the ways in which the world around them might be changing. The phrase posits these concerns as hysterical – a panic. It conflates having a moral or ethical stance with being (politically, culturally) reactionary. And it implies that complainants are un- or even anti-scientific.
Ironically perhaps, this dismissive attitude seems to demand its own sort of compliance and complacency. "Don't worry," it tries to reassure everyone, even though, when you look around, there's a lot to be concerned about.
With apologies to Douglas Adams, there are reasons we might panic.
I do wonder what the pundits and posters who always shout “moral panic!” in response to any criticism of technology make of the moral campaign of Pope Leo XIV, who expressly chose that name to pay down a challenge to digital technology and “AI” and, importantly, to directly link his papacy to that of Leo XIII who “stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.”
I spent much of the week reading the Pope’s new, 40,000 word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (and assiduously avoiding any knee-jerk “takes” from those who can’t seem to handle the written word in any form longer than a tweet. This is why I am not on social media any more, incidentally. Reading and writing and thinking are too important – and life is too short – to waste words performing “intelligence” on the tech billionaires’ platforms. Do I sound panicky? I don't know...).
The history of the Catholic Church is long (and in plenty of ways, awful), but as Pope Leo narrates it, it’s a story of the institution ever moving towards a fuller recognition of social justice and human dignity – a move that he credits in part to the earlier Leo’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, “a milestone in the development of the Church’s social teaching,” that
“places the dignity of work and of workers at the forefront of its reflection; affirms the right to a fair wage for oneself and one’s family; recognizes that persons have a fundamental value that takes precedence over capital and profit; defends private property along with its indispensable societal role; esteems workers’ associations; and proposes forms of cooperation between the different components of society as an alternative to the mentality of class struggle.”
Human dignity – the word “dignity” appears over one hundred times in this latest encyclical – is undermined by the ongoing exploitations of capitalism; and it is increasingly threatened by the acceleration of technologies, particularly “AI” which
“promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, [but] frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work. As a result, contrary to the advertised benefits of AI, current approaches to technology can paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks. The need to keep up with the pace of technology can erode workers’ sense of agency and stifle the innovative abilities they are expected to bring to their work.”
With a remarkable apology for the Church’s role in colonialism, the Pope links the violence of slavery and human trafficking in the past to the violence of slavery and human trafficking today and the threats of new forms of slavery in the future – “a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation,” particularly as new technologies curb human freedoms, intellectually and bodily. “Without this ethical and humanizing reflection, the growing power of digital systems could lead us toward new atrocities that are no less shameful than those of the past that we now deplore, while we continue to present ourselves as ‘advanced’ and ‘civilized’ societies.”
To avoid this future – to avoid the reduction of everyone to objects, to eschew the tech industry’s valorization of efficiency and extraction, to end its demands to control all aspects of our lives – it is imperative that we build systems that are “centered on the human person and not solely on performance,” the Pope argues. He’s speaking here specifically of how we push back on automation and technology in the workplace, but I think this is absolutely relevant to education as well. Teachers’ working conditions are, as the union saying goes, students’ learning conditions; but I think we need to see students as doing work too – important intellectual work of their own, work that also matters for minds and souls and bodies and futures and freedom. Both teachers and students deserve dignity and care; both deserve systems that are human and humane; both deserve systems that are not mechanistic and exploitative as almost every single piece of education technology that’s flooded classrooms most certainly is.
And I’d add here too that students – children and adult students like – deserve systems that do not view them solely or even primarily as vulnerable and weaker beings in need of protection. When children are described as “precious treasure,” as the Magifica Humanitas does, it is too easy then to cast them as the objects of education and to deny their agency, their inquiry, their rights.
