I was relatively green as a writer back then, but in two years, I’ve seen the need for only two minor corrections to my post for Halloween 2005—and one of those was before Reflections on Playboy was a month old. I hope you find it very scary sexy, kids.
But whatever you might do to get scared this Halloween, kids, don’t frighten yourself into a moral panic. The best part of the intellectual dimension of Playboy’s legacy will surely be a tendency to resist moral panic. But at the time I write this, not one single post at the official Playboy Blog mentions moral panic at all. Through Google, I found precisely one comment on the subject—and that was me under a pseudonym. You’re welcome, salaried keepers of the Playboy legacy.
Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” [not work-safe; online transcription not yet complete] of the 1960s predates the sociological term “moral panic” (coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, the year I was born). But as a phenomenon, moral panic goes at least as far back as circa 428 B.C.: the date of the first production of the Greek tragedy Hippolytus (stress the second syllable, so that it almost rhymes with “hippopotamus”), by Euripides. Since Euripides must have seen self-righteousness around him to be inspired to write it, and since Plato was born around the same time as the first production, we know we can’t blame Platonism—for example—for self-righteousness in general. Since Euripides lived in a polytheistic society, we can’t honestly scapegoat monotheism, as the Sam Harris types do. Blaming either of them for a perennial human tendency is—guess what?—just another moral panic.
By the way, whether you leave a comment at the 2005 post or this one, I’ll read it promptly through my automated email notification and publish it. Note also that a Blogger.com account is completely optional—even if you want to leave a URL with your name. After all, there’s nothing scarier than giving up a little of your privacy forever, kids! Ah-ooo, or whatever a vampire is supposed to say, I guess.Labels: ArtPic, Lib, MorPa, OthBlo, Sc
Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 6:11 PM
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