Canonical Emergency Stories

• In Event: The Politics of Emergency

Abstract

From 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, there is abundant evidence that emergency politics violates democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms. Yet emergency politics sometimes does significant good, as in the opioid epidemic and Covid-19 pandemic. It is therefore hard to countenance doing away with it completely.
Given this mixed track record, how should we distinguish better from worse forms of emergency politics? Two possible answers come to mind: emergency politics is bad when it involves a “fake” emergency and good when it involves a “real” emergency, and bad when it is “top-down” and good when it is “bottom-up.” These distinctions offer some leverage but are less helpful than they appear. Harmful emergency politics sometimes emerges in response to very real emergencies (e.g. the Haiti earthquake); there are also legitimate debates about whether emergency politics is a constructive approach to urgent issues such as climate change. Likewise, some “top-down” emergency politics (e.g. emergency authorization for vaccines, changing the direction of highways to facilitate evacuations before hurricanes) seem salutary, while some “bottom-up” emergency politics (or emergency politics that are hard to characterize as top-down or bottom-up) are dangerous, e.g. populist moral panics about public libraries.
In this paper I offer another answer to the question of how to distinguish better from worse emergency politics. This answer turns on what I call "canonical emergency stories." These stories are canonical because, like fairy tales, they are well known and often repeated in different variations. They pertain to emergency because they serve to authorize, mobilize, justify, and request forbearance for what is widely recognized as paradigmatic emergency action. (This circularity is due to a “feedback loop” between canonical emergency stories and our broader concept of emergency.) I argue that canonical emergency stories are frequently invoked by a wide range of actors, including politicians, scientists, journalists, NGOs, activists, and ordinary people. While canonical stories are ubiquitous in political life, they are especially salient in emergencies and crises because, in Milton Friedman’s famous formulation, in these contexts people are more likely to use “ideas that are lying around.”
I offer readings and genealogies of five common canonical emergency stories. Three of these—the “ticking bomb,” the “drowning toddler,” and the “contagious pathogen”—I argue are "bad canonical emergency stories." I trace the ticking bomb story from Jeremy Bentham to post-9/11 debates about torture, the TV show 24, and current invocations in the context of climate change. I trace the drowning toddler story from Peter Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” through Live AID, Alan Kurdi, and current invocations in the context of Effective Altruism. I anticipate tracing the contagious pathogen story from Foucault through the literature on moral panics and social contagion to current invocations in the context of debates about gender identity.
Drawing on their content, genealogies, meanings, and past usages, I argue that when it is invoked analogically, the ticking bomb invites violations of justice-based norms, the drowning toddler invites violations of egalitarian norms, and the contagious pathogen invites violations of democratic norms. In addition to explaining why they are dangerous, I also explain the powerful draw of these stories.
In addition to these three bad canonical emergency stories, I also discuss two others that are more benign. One, “house on fire,” is indeterminate. It has been used in heterogeneous ways, some of which closely track other (bad) canonical emergency stories and some of which offer an alternative vision. In particular, unlike bad canonical emergency stories, house on fire has been used by climate activists to conjure, though the figure of fire-fighters, a group of skilled professionals and volunteers working together in an organized, loosely rule-bound way that is not clearly top-down or bottom-up to address an urgent problem.
The last canonical emergency story that I discuss, “emergency room,” does not invite violations of democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms, and is not indeterminate. To the contrary, as articulated by Atul Gawande and Elaine Scarry, it shows how emergency action is aided by compliance with rules and habits. But while it serves as a counterpoint to the ticking bomb, the emergency room story fails to do something that the ticking bomb and other canonical emergency stories accomplish: motivate or justify urgent action.
This analysis opens up several further lines of inquiry. One is that if canonical emergency stories shape our conception of “emergency,” then we need to look beyond the latter if we want better “ideas lying around” to motivate, authorize, justify, and request forbearance for urgent action. In particular, we need to look to altered forms of emergency politics and urgency without emergency.

Author

• Jennifer C. Rubenstein, University of Virginia