In 1973 the sociologist, Stanley Cohen, published an influential book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The latter involves triggering acute public anxiety through the exaggerated and distorted claims about some event, individuals or groups who are referred to as folk devils.
In 1973 the sociologist, Stanley Cohen, published an influential book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The latter involves triggering acute public anxiety through the exaggerated and distorted claims about some event, individuals or groups who are referred to as folk devils.
The purveyors of moral panic are usually powerful forces with privileged access to and control of the public sphere.
The problem with ‘moral entrepreneurs’, who induce moral panic, is not so much that they lie; it is that they are given to exaggeration and distortion.
They tap into residual “social anxieties, insecurities and fears” often in defence of undeclared special interests.
The anxiety being provoked in Grahamstown with the distorted accounts of the impact of the Superior Court Bill is a textbook case of moral panic.
First, in its response to my article the Grahamstown High Court Action Committee (GHCAC) claims that “no-one suggests that judicial independence is necessarily undermined by physical proximity.”
Strange because in its submission, the Rhodes University senior management claimed: Rhodes shares the view of the Grahamstown High Court Action Committee (GHCAC) expressed in their submission that ‘the spirit of judicial independence so fundamental to the Constitution is best ensured by physical separation… (and that) physical proximity may well undermine that independence.’
In case the campaigners missed my earlier argument, let me expatiate. In the UK, the Parliament, Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, the Royal Court of Justice (High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal), and the Supreme Court are all located within in the City of Westminster,a tiny borough of London!
Did this threaten the independence of the British judiciary? The exceptionalism being argued by the campaigners has little to do with logic or precedence.
Second, among the economic arguments advanced by the campaigners against having the seat of the new Eastern Cape General Division in Bhisho is their claim that “R5-million [was spent]upgrading the forensics unit at the Fort England Hospital.”
Rather than engage with my position that this does nothing to advance their cause they resort to claiming that there is no “forensic laboratory” only a “forensic unit.”
Tomayto, tomahto! Further, they argue that because Bhisho is a creation of apartheid is it unsuitable to host the seat of the ECGD. How this is an argument in favour of Grahamstown is a mystery?
Grahamstown is a product of settler-colonial dispossession and war crimes! Grahamstown flourished precisely because of the Grand Apartheid design.
So how is it a morally superior to Bhisho? Claims of poverty and unemployment are in the nature of moral panic.
We have heard of the loss of 400 jobs; from another source, the loss of “at least 200 secondary jobs from businesses that service the Court.”
The GHCAC claims that I “failed to deal with the consequences to Grahamstown of even 20 professionals selling up and relocating.”
We are told that “over and above [the]immediate structural relocations… is the yet more significant reduction in the number of attorneys and advocates in town.”
Who will feed the “dependents of the secretaries and messengers retrenched” or “the domestic servants laid off by relocating attorneys and advocates,” they asked?
Either the campaigners believe these strange claims or they think the rest of us are too dumb to know any different.
The claim that attorneys and advocates will relocate is strange. Grahamstown attorneys and advocates, like others across the country, regularly travel all over the country to represent clients in courts: from magistrate courts to the Constitutional Court.
So why would the seat of the new ECGD being in Bhisho provoke an exodus? The Bill specifically provides for a high court in Grahamstown, and the lowers courts will not suddenly disappear!
And where does the Bill speak of retrenchment of workers of the High Court? If as the GHCAC argued, the minister and “our present government” are not infallible and “are not above criticism.”
Neither are they. Democracy requires robust public debate. What it does not need is corrosive moral panic.
The post-1996 growth strategy has compounded history but so have subsisting power relations. So, where were the campaigners when farm workers and their families were being thrown off the land in this part of the Eastern Cape?
The ejected have gone on to swell the ranks of the poor and the unemployed in our townships. Those claiming they are acting in defence of the poor should live out Leonardo Buff’s injunction: that we do of justice what we formerly did out of charity.
It starts with an ethical commitment to equality and justice. Jimi Adesina is a professor of sociology at Rhodes University.
