Judgement days: moral attitudes in the wake of local disasters

The deaths and destruction stemming from a disaster are traumatic enough to implicate victims' beliefs not only about disasters themselves but also about other social and political concerns. In particular, disasters are associated with the scapegoating of out‐groups, suggesting that even deep‐rooted moral concerns may shift, at least temporarily, after disasters. This study uses exposure to local natural disaster fatalities to examine moral judgements regarding gays¹ in United States surveys from 1984–98. Survey respondents whose county has suffered a disaster feel appreciably more negatively towards gays, even though most of the disasters in this data set are relatively small and local. The increased antipathy towards gays dissipates within months, and is most marked among those who had, before the disaster, considered themselves more religious. These results raise the possibility that some groups, especially those already marginalised by society, may suffer in a backlash in the wake of a natural disaster.     

Scapegoating in the Wild: A Burkean Analysis of Two Outdoor Adventures Gone Wrong

Aron Ralston and Christopher McCandless, two outdoor adventurers, have captured the hearts of many American environmentalists. Each has attained the status of cultural icons and inspired books and films to recount their tales. While entertainment media have romanticized both individuals, news media are not as easy on one—McCandless is vilified while Ralston is valorized. When reporting these stories, news media outlets attempted to retell each story in a way that conforms to the dominant American ideology of wilderness, where “progress” is marked by control over nature—control that both Ralston and McCandless clearly unsettled. In addition, both committed many of the same errors in being underprepared. Despite these similarities, why are they each presented so differently in the news media? This paper offers a rhetorical analysis of newspaper articles on each story, where the phenomenon of scapegoating alienates McCandless, and the phenomenon of mortification purifies Ralston, restabilizing this American environmental ideology in both stories. In conclusion, I argue that the essential difference between these two stories is that they present two opposing ideals of a human–nature relationship, with Ralston's ideology including a space for technology and industrial knowledge, and thus construed as more appropriate than McCandless' ideology.