Notes from the Frontline: A Student Organizer Encounters Moral Panic

The views expressed in this essay are my own, and may not represent other organizations I lead. I reproduce the substantive content of an essay I wrote for an elective module at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Part 1: A Theoretical Perspective

In 1844, Karl Marx observed that the state is based on “the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin.” After so many years, this has proven to still be exceptionally prescient today, within the context of neoliberal Singapore riddled with contradictions that have come to define its material realities. Local author Amanda Lee Koe best captures this tension in the title of her first book, “Ministry of Moral Panic” – an apt reflection for a country whose self-proclaimed “pragmatic” government has accorded itself the role of intervening clumsily in “contentious issues” in the name of keeping the peace.

Marx’s quote offers two ways of understanding these moral panics that keep recurring even recently in Singapore. Accordingly, we can see moral panics as claims that some disliked particular interest threatens the universal interest and an appeal to the State and its associated public institutions to forcefully intervene to neutralize the supposed threat. These are calls to expand the jurisdiction of the State from its standard role in governing public life to incorporate additional regulation and control over private life too, on the basis that some disliked private lives threaten our shared public life. By extension, this “civil life” Marx mentions refers to all public life existing outside of, and independently from, State control. Of course, this in no way grants it immunity from State encroachment – moral panics begin with some sectors of the public sphere calling for the State to weaken other sectors of the public sphere, often by restricting organized efforts in civil society seeking to protect these targetted segments.

I am a student of public policy by personal choice, and a community organizer by necessity of my material circumstances. The work of organizing communities towards collective action, by definition, inhabits the realm of “civil life”. I see much of my work as borne out of the life-or-death consequences that certain normative choices made in our public life impose coercively and nonconsensually on communities inhabiting the margins of the margins. The result is that some private lives, and our access to free, fair, and full participation in public life, are encroached upon. By contrast, those not on the margins are free to enjoy their private life in pursuit of their own particular interests, and can freely participate in public life and define the “universal interest” in their image – and conversely, define marginalized particular interests as contrary to this universal interest. I had to enter the public sphere and actively participate as an organizer at the point when these consequences make it disproportionately costly to secure the preconditions of my own survival in my private life.

Perhaps, as Teo Youyenn puts it, “this is what inequality looks like”: the moral panic assumes the instrumental function of defining, enforcing, and (fiercely) preserving inequalities by assigning new roles and scripts to us as social actors – those situated at the centre of power assume the role of the encroacher, that which is not encroachable, and those of us on the margins are assigned the role of the encroached, that which is encroachable. It is not merely the State which, as Max Weber suggests, claims a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” on its own residents. The proposers and seconders of moral panic assume this role for themselves and go on to re-position it as an obligatory duty. Invoking Elizabeth Anderson’s “Private Government”, dictatorship is no longer the preserve of governments, but is exercisable by some individuals or groups over others, and the choice of the State of whose interests will be upheld at whose expense is an expression of the pattern of power relations within that society for which the State is merely an assentor confirming what already is happening anyway.

The vocabulary of encroachment inevitably carries with it the concept of the territory and territorialization which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce in their work “A Thousand Plateaus”. C?meron Crain writes of this concept that "the territory itself is structured by some kind of nomos—custom, habit—where this is defined by forms of behavior and their function within the territory. Importantly, the territory has an outside. It must have an outside, and there must be a way out of it." The function of the moral panic is that of the social-cartographer: the act of drawing the lines between which practices are “inside” and which are “outside”. Persons and lives marked as deviant by the moral panic are assigned to the outside; ergo, the margins. When a moral panic emerges, the “territorial” space defined as outside, deviant, marginal, encroachable, becomes ripe for further intensified encroachment. The already-very-small-space (as Minister Josephine Teo invokes) is made even smaller, even more outside, further from both the State as seat-of-formal-power and non-marginalized “mainstream society” as the site-of-informal-power.

I very intentionally opted for the imagery of the “frontline” in the title of this essay, in an allusion to territorial boundaries – ironically, boundaries whose purpose of existing is precisely to be disrespected with impunity. The operative term here is “with impunity”: the State’s role in a moral panic is to allocate impunities and liabilities differentiatedly, and its statutory actions are an instrument for communicating “which side” the powers-that-be will or will not stand with, or for. The frontline is often discursively-articulated as a faultline in the public imaginations of the Singaporean State – and in that way, becomes “their business too”, something to be regulated and policed by them, on fears that the faultline will tear society apart and hence become detrimental to the “universal interest” in public life, and in all private lives. This is constructed to encompass those of us on the margins too, as Antonio Gramsci warns: the Singaporean State suggests it is in our own best interests as marginalized groups to accept these encroachments in our lives, on the basis that if the faultline erupts, the fallout will hurt us even more than the supposedly-minor inconveniences we have to put up with to avert that even-deadlier fallout. Thus, we are asked – even pleaded with – to willingly buy into the hegemony as good-for-us-too.

If this logic is taken to its logical conclusion, our refusal to accept the encroachments on our lives becomes a threat to “the public order and interest”, because it would follow that we are knowingly abetting a fallout that hurts everyone. A self-fulfilling prophesy, then; it becomes legitimized fair-game to regard and treat the civil society actors who stand with the margins as literal “public enemies” rightly deserving State reprisal. I hear chilling echoes of Sara Ahmed’s reminder that “when you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.”

Part 2: A Practical Perspective

The second and more contemporary reason I opted to use “frontline” in the title is that we are currently in the epicentre of a crisis of confidence unfolding in real time in our University with the dismissal of Dr Jeremy Fernando. As Co-Founder and Co-President of Students for a Safer NUS (safeNUS), my wonderful 43-member committee has been tirelessly coordinating our community response to the case. We, too, know what it looks like on the frontline. This is an issue that requires broad-based solidarity and whole-of-University, if not whole-of-Singapore, cooperation because sexual violence in all its forms is a systemic issue requiring systemic solutions. Our committee released a statement that has since received 18 signatories from fellow student groups, with even more who wanted to sign if their staff advisors had permitted.

One of our key requests called for a shift away from approaching such cases as "sexual misconduct" towards approaching them as "sexual violence". Both concepts imply violation, but who or what is being violated differs. Sexual misconduct centres the violation of a code of conduct; sexual violence centres the violation of a human being. With misconduct (paraphraseable as “wrongdoing”), the response is penalty – in this case, dismissal. With violence (paraphraseable as “causing harm”), the response is to repair the harm done to the survivors and the community and facilitate collective healing.

We do not respond to a stabbing incident solely by punishing the stabber without also tending to the wound. No matter the penalty, the injury is still there and requires attention. We may agree that such acts are wrong. But an act does not become wrong simply because it breaks a rule; the act becomes wrong because someone was hurt by its commission! Why is this distinction crucial and not just semantics? Any student of public policy will know this: how we define a problem determines how we respond to the problem. There are material differences in consequence – especially for survivors – that arise from how we respond. Furthermore, narratives of wrongness are at play, and these contain a potent ingredient for the conversion of a focusing event that invites possibilities for policy change and a thirst for transformative responses into a moral panic that instead invites retributive outrage and a thirst for punitive responses.

In this case, a moral panic did indeed erupt from the public, and the framing of the problem as misconduct had a part to play in shaping its discourse. In sharp contrast to the position Students for a Safer NUS has articulated, we witness comments on social media focusing squarely on the case as a moral problem rather than a systemic problem. These commenters instead ask questions like “what values are NUS teaching its students” or “why did NUS not do background checks to screen out staff with immoral values”. But these questions both miss the point completely and derail community responses that ought to be trauma-informed, survivor/victim-centric, and focused on healing, restoration, and transformation of the underlying relations of power that reproduce the practices that harm our members of our communities. Instead, the focus is misdirected to centre the perpetrator’s moral status, and erroneous expectation is placed on institutions to “safeguard our morals” while victims are relegated to incidental characters in this dramatis personae.

In assigning “threat” status to a human actor – be it the perpetrator for flouting rules, or specific players in the institution for “allowing this to happen” – the moral panic performs its function of discarding systemic critique in favour of personalizing and individualizing blame. These processes should be contextualized in relation to contradictions surrounding the position of the public University within neoliberal Singapore. It takes a community-led, community-centric approach involving co-creation with us community stakeholders – safeNUS included – to contest this neoliberal grip and constructively interrupt the cycle of moral panics in NUS and Singapore.

References

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Anderson, Elizabeth. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Awang, Nabilah. “Student-Run Group Calls for Greater Transparency in NUS' Handling of Sexual Misconduct Case against Former Lecturer.” TODAYonline, October 19, 2020. https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/student-run-group-calls-nus-be-more-transparent-about-handling-sexual-misconduct-case.

Crain, C?meron. “What Is a Territory?” The Mantle, July 22, 2013. https://www.themantle.com/philosophy/what-territory.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Fe?lix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004.

Fisher, Mark. “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” openDemocracy, November 24, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 2008.

Marx, Karl. “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” August 7, 1844. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/08/07.htm.

Monod, Sarah Wright. Making Sense of Moral Panics: a Framework for Research. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Peschel, Sabine. “Why Singaporean Author Amanda Lee Koe Writes from the Fringe.” Deutsche Welle, July 17, 2017. https://www.dw.com/en/why-singaporean-author-amanda-lee-koe-writes-from-the-fringe/a-39702594.

Tai, Janice. “You Don't Need Much Space to Have Sex: Josephine Teo on 'No Flat, No Child' Belief.” The Straits Times, October 12, 2016. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ministers-rejoinder-to-no-flat-no-child-belief.

Teo, Youyenn. This Is What Inequality Looks Like. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2019.

Yap, Eng Chew. “Letter of the Week: NUS Needs to Clear the Air about Sacked Don's Actions.” The Straits Times, October 23, 2020. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/forum/letter-of-the-week-nus-needs-to-clear-the-air-about-sacked-dons-actions.