Current debates in the US about the risks of climate change boil down to a struggle between two warring camps: those who argue that our current course is fine, and those who insist that we are in a moment of crisis. But a third stance seeks to split the difference. “We cannot afford to be complacent, but there is no need to panic,” wrote Lloyd Dumas, a professor of public policy and political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, in 2006. “We still have the time to take a measured approach, to roll up our sleeves and build the political will to take sensible, pragmatic actions that will make global warming a problem of the past, rather than a threat to our future.”1
Dumas’s language about charting a course between complacency and panic appears in many other areas of risk management, from environmental science to epidemiology. For example, Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis, told the California State Assembly Select Committee on Water Consumption and Alternative Sources that when it comes to climate change, “we need to always be between complacency and panic. Either extreme isn’t right, and either extreme doesn’t help us to address real problems, but being in the middle allows us to attack problems rationally and determine the best solutions.”2 In April 2017 Northeastern University convened a symposium entitled “Between Complacency and Panic: Legal, Ethical, and Policy Responses to Emerging Infectious Diseases.” The following year, global health specialists Lawrence Gostin and Katharina Ó Cathaoir cautioned that nations’ tendency to continually “lurch” or “careen” between complacency and panic stymied efforts to manage global pandemics.3
The rhetoric of moderation seems to have acquired a special power in specialists’ discussions of how to manage the risks of events like climate change, water management, and global pandemics. Such rhetoric portrays an in-between course of action as pragmatic, sensible, rational, and stable. But where did the frequently used phrase about complacency and panic come from? How did it acquire value to technical specialists in such diverse fields? Although it is difficult to trace the lineage of individual uses of the phrase, we can trace a broader ancestral story, one that begins with efforts by US civil defense officials to manage public anxieties during the early Cold War.
Origins of the phrase
During the 1950s, officials in the Eisenhower administration sought to manage public anxiety about the risks of nuclear war, nuclear waste, and radioactive fallout (see figure 1). Drawing on social-scientific research about the psychological consequences of extreme emotional states, the administration established what historian Guy Oakes has called a “comprehensive system of emotion management.”4 Civil defense authorities arrived at two conclusions about the risks of emotional extremes: one, that unmitigated public hysteria would undermine citizens’ capacity to act reasonably in the event of an attack, and two, that excessive complacency about the possibility of a Soviet attack would undermine the public’s incentive to monitor and respond to emerging Soviet threats. Either emotional extreme could jeopardize the integrity of US institutions. As President Dwight Eisenhower himself warned while giving remarks at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the US Chamber of Commerce in April 1954, “We must, of course, prevent ourselves always from overexaggerating danger, just as we refuse to become complacent because of our historical position of geographic isolation.”5
A civil defense advertisement from the early 1950s urges citizens to learn how to protect themselves from nuclear fallout. (Courtesy of the Michigan Civil Defense Museum.)
A civil defense advertisement from the early 1950s urges citizens to learn how to protect themselves from nuclear fallout. (Courtesy of the Michigan Civil Defense Museum.)
Many scientists agreed that extreme emotional states posed a serious challenge to national preparedness, and they occasionally incorporated the administration’s middle-road logic into their own assessments of emergent risks. Beginning in the mid 1950s, Herman Kalckar, a biochemist at Johns Hopkins University, advocated for measuring the amount of strontium-90 transmitted to the human population by nuclear testing. He recognized that any resulting knowledge of radioactive contamination could cause a massive public outcry. In a 2 August 1958 article for Nature, he wrote that experts had an obligation to convey knowledge “to the public without interpretations which might give rise to either complacency or fear, but rather in a spirit that would encourage sober, continued, active concern.”
Around the same time, Roger Revelle, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and chair of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation, released a report on whether nuclear waste posed a hazard to the world’s oceans. Intimately familiar with the public’s apparent tendency to misinterpret scientific information about the risks of nuclear waste, Revelle argued that “our present knowledge should be sufficient to dispel much of the over-confidence [in nuclear technology] on the one hand and much of the fear [of it] on the other.”6 Along similar lines, Dwight Chapman, chair of the psychology department at Vassar College, wrote in 1953 that the task of protecting the American public was possible “only if people in time of a disaster are neither too paralyzed nor too frenzied to carry out the necessary activities.”7
Such examples show that scientists and policymakers were building a strategy of nuclear governance premised on mediating between complacency and panic (see figure 2). Their statements of moderation served as convenient heuristics to induce desired levels of vigilance, prudence, judiciousness, emotional maturity, and informed judgment in the general public. To inform the public without creating either excessive complacency or alarm was to, in effect, manage the inherent dilemmas and insecurities of a modern state.8 But could those rhetorical standards be adapted and applied to other political challenges?
A 15 November 1957 editorial from the Paris News in Paris, Texas, advocates moderation when considering nuclear war. (Courtesy of the Paris News.)
A 15 November 1957 editorial from the Paris News in Paris, Texas, advocates moderation when considering nuclear war. (Courtesy of the Paris News.)
The phrase in changing times
As citizens began to learn of scientists’ close alignment with national security interests during the 1950s and 1960s, many started to question scientists’ commitment to the well-being of humanity. The bomb had inaugurated a new age of anxiety, so what other technologies resided in the shadows, waiting to destroy the human race? Members of the ascendant US counterculture protested universities’ roles as agents of destruction in Vietnam and highlighted the potentially undemocratic implications of too much collusion between experts and their patrons. Meanwhile, many students challenged the pro-moderation assumptions guiding national affairs. After all, how responsible were appeals to a moderation that seemed to support the status quo and the so-called military–industrial complex?
Critics of the alliance between science and government were not wrong. Universities did collude with the government to maintain their commitments in Vietnam, especially regarding the use of the herbicide Agent Orange. And federal agencies did keep secrets about the health effects of radioactivity, including concealing the government’s role in conducting human radiation experiments during and after World War II. As details of those collaborations and cover-ups emerged, administrators of the US’s most elite scientific institutions grew increasingly concerned about their declining credibility. “Scientists cannot expect to live in a world in which they are universally loved and admired. But the change in climate from that of a decade ago has been drastic,” observed Philip Abelson, editor of Science and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington,9 in the early 1970s.
Distrust of US institutions increased as the public became more concerned about the deterioration of the natural environment. To defend the role and credibility of high-level scientists in navigating such debates, prominent representatives once again reached for the language of moderation. In 1973, for instance, Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and Alexander Zucker, physicist and chair of the Environmental Studies Board of the NAS and the National Academy of Engineering, published a brief article in the proceedings of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Entitled “Between complacency and panic,” the article declared the importance of developing “generalized approaches to the problems of the environment” that could accommodate the interests of private industry and of environmentalists.10
Did scientists know all the answers? Absolutely not, and scientists like Abelson, Handler, and Zucker acknowledged as much. But they were concerned about the potential long-term consequences of the US becoming distrustful of expert knowledge, and they worried that the public was increasingly unable to distinguish genuine experts from charlatans. They believed there was room for genuine disagreement about the direction of US society but did not want the substance of those disagreements to evaporate in a heated maelstrom of public paranoia and hyperbole. It was crucial, Handler and Zucker argued, to identify and interrogate genuine problems confronting humankind without abandoning the ethics of moderation that had guided decision making in previous decades.
US postage stamps from 1970 reflected the growing power of the environmental movement. (Via Wikimedia Commons, PD-USGov.)
US postage stamps from 1970 reflected the growing power of the environmental movement. (Via Wikimedia Commons, PD-USGov.)
Policymakers also seemed eager to prove their bona fides as stalwart defenders of moderation by capitalizing on growing public support for environmental protections (see figure 3). Even those who opposed environmental regulation adopted familiar-sounding language about action without panic. President Richard Nixon, for example, spoke in 1973 about what he called an environmental awakening:
Some people have moved from complacency to the opposite extreme of alarmism, suggesting that our pollution problems were hopeless and predicting impending ecological disaster….
I reject this doomsday mentality, and I hope the Congress will also reject it. I believe that we can meet our environmental challenges without turning our back on progress….
I believe there is always a sensible middle ground between the Cassandras and the Pollyannas. We must take our stand upon that ground.11
Behind the scenes, however, Nixon had become increasingly hostile to environmental interests since his reelection in 1972. But his speech shows that by the 1970s, the language about a path “between complacency and panic” had found its way into the increasingly polarized world of environmental politics. Nixon’s use of the language of moderation shows how it could suit a wide range of interests. Nixon, like Abelson, Handler, and Zucker, understood that appeals to such language signified proper stewardship of the nation. Those who proclaimed themselves stalwart advocates of moderation seemed to understand its political significance in times of instability.
The power of a call for moderation would endure, and it would be adapted to new risk landscapes and new political challenges. And there was perhaps no greater political and scientific challenge than one that began to appear on the national agenda in the 1970s: climate change.
New applications
The week of 7–11 July 1977 was a busy one for geophysicist Frank Press (see figure 4), director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Jimmy Carter. On 7 July, he wrote a memo to the president declaring that the threat of climate change was real and urgent and that if the US did not make significant changes to national energy policy, it could induce large-scale catastrophic changes to global agricultural output, economic markets, and migration patterns. After consulting with his colleagues and high-level executives in the administration, Press had concluded that those risks required serious political consideration. The challenge was to integrate climate into national planning and to determine whether the threat level was high enough to justify a national or global response. Although climate change could be catastrophic if left unchecked, Press and others reasoned that there was enough time over the next decade to engineer a scientific consensus that would justify a more substantive response. In his memo to the president, he advocated for a policy that was “neither complacent nor panicky.”12
Geophysicist Frank Press served as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Jimmy Carter. (Courtesy of the American Geophysical Union and AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Photograph by Ivan Massar; © Massar Studios.)
Geophysicist Frank Press served as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Jimmy Carter. (Courtesy of the American Geophysical Union and AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Photograph by Ivan Massar; © Massar Studios.)
Press understood that the phrase had long been engineered to manage two things: public perceptions of risk and public expectations that the government could address complex challenges in the near term. He and many others were skeptical that immediate action to curb reliance on fossil fuels would be possible, and the administration’s approach to climate governance was often to simply continue funding for scientific research. “Neither complacent nor panicky” was the rhetorical equivalent of a stopgap measure, a way to buy time until more meaningful solutions could be devised or until greater scientific certainty could be achieved about the effects of climate change.
The scientific community was already conducting a campaign to do those two things. The basis of Press’s cautionary memo to the president was a report released under the auspices of the NAS entitled Energy and Climate. The report, compiled by a panel chaired by Revelle, was as much about communicating technical knowledge as about public relations. The NAS convened a press conference when Energy and Climate was released in July 1977. Building on the report’s argument that the document should “lead neither to panic nor to complacency,” high-level NAS officials Abelson and Thomas Malone used the metaphor of a yellow stoplight, an image that, in their minds, encapsulated the importance of caution.
The summer of 1977 was crucial in the history of US climate politics. Despite increasing pressure from Congress to quickly develop a national climate program, the Carter administration appeared uninterested in managing the negative consequences of climate change in the near term. The administration’s alternative position was that carefully laying the groundwork for a long-term research strategy was both politically prudent and scientifically justified, and that the nature of climate change itself required a long-term management strategy rather than immediate policy action.
The vast majority of scientists and policymakers believed that countering climate change was different from managing the risks of an immediate crisis like a polluted river or an oil spill; it needed, in officials’ estimations, to be treated with a more delicate, steady hand. Society was not moving quickly in the direction that many would have preferred, but that did not mean movement was not taking place. The government was interested in continued research to evaluate the risks, but it was not willing to make large-scale, immediate decisions about climate change given the potential ramifications that immediately abandoning fossil fuels would have for the global market system. Portraying the administration’s guiding principle as a flashing yellow light was meant to convey the virtue of caution.
The pro-caution message trickled down quickly into other agencies. “The general scientific opinion is that our understanding of climate and climate variability is far too meager to warrant serious pronouncement. The important task at present is rather to give an accurate picture of what we know and what we don’t know, and to develop a program for advancing our knowledge,” cautioned Patsy Mink, assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.13
Although most observers were unaware of the tangled history of the phrase “between complacency and panic,” the message was clear to experts and policymakers: Watch out, but don’t despair. Monitor the situation, but don’t run headfirst into action. Slight variations on the rhetorical motif also began to appear in various forums. “Being alert is wise,” eminent climatologist Helmut Landsberg wrote in 1979 in a draft policy paper for an energy working group at the University of Maryland, but “being alarmist is foolish.”14 Along similar lines, planners for a fall 1978 climate symposium in Aspen, Colorado, wrote that “the first goal” of their meeting would be “to focus on steps needed to raise the public consciousness of the problem in a way that is not alarmist, but still appropriately urgent.”15 For many, practicing a state of vigilance was the most responsible path forward. That approach accommodated scientists’ desire to increase scientific knowledge while providing policymakers the space to devise a long-term strategy.
The same rhetoric appeared again and again in other scientific and government publications. “The picture [of climate change] here may not be a gloomy one, but complacency would be ill-advised,” noted a 1979 workshop report from the Department of Energy.16 The decision to privilege caution was clearly not rooted in ignorance or disinterest in the implications of climate change. It stemmed instead from the habits of thought that had defined experts’ ideas about their roles in managing complex problems since the 1950s. Officials were, quite simply, using the rhetorical tactics passed down from one generation to the next, one political challenge to another.
Employing such reasoning was not necessarily a rational decision or an ethically sound one. Some analysts in and outside the administration believed that a moderate pathway constituted a breach of responsibility to the welfare of future generations who would have to live with the effects of present decisions. Precisely because climate change differed in kind from a polluted river or an oil spill, more proactive policies were required. Waiting too long, a vocal minority of scientists and advocates argued, would invariably make the problem harder to solve.
In the meantime, many institutions grew increasingly interested in the social, political, and economic effects of climate change during the 1970s; those organizations included the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study, the MITRE Corp, DOE, Friends of the Earth, the US Council on Environmental Quality, and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Many specialists began to organize around a common belief that robust interdisciplinary research would be necessary to tackle the immense dilemmas associated with global warming.17
The realization of those broader and deeply salient agendas, however, would have to wait for another day. The overriding ethos of the late 1970s and early 1980s was to maintain a posture of tempered engagement calibrated to steer society between the extremes of complacency and panic, in the expectation that science would soon produce answers.
Enduring legacy of the phrase
The most curious element of those numerous expressions of caution is their subliminal nature. They appeared in reports but were rarely highlighted. They appeared in correspondence but were rarely explained or elaborated on. Yellow-light metaphors were used to guide the public’s understanding of climate risk but failed often to make national headlines. The phrases that appear ubiquitous in the historical record also remain hidden and undervalued in histories of science and politics.
When asked about the origins of his own knowledge of the phrase, for instance, Lund responded with a tone of mild bemusement: “[I] may have picked up the phrase carelessly from someone else, or it might be originated independently in my mind.” His response is understandable. After all, scientists do not learn such phrases formally in school, nor do they appear to learn them formally from advisers or colleagues. Perhaps they acquire them in the marketplace of ideas or, as Lund suggested, in the course of interacting with their colleagues.
The significance of Lund’s reflection is not that he used the phrase without knowing its origin story. It’s that the phrase itself has acquired meaning independent of any obvious history. Changes in scientific rhetoric are not as splashy or newsworthy as the discovery of a new phenomenon or the establishment of a new scientific theory, and the stories of such changes can often be discounted as tangential meta-history that merely swims along on the currents of real history. But perhaps there is room to ask why the language of caution was deemed responsible by scientists and policymakers in nuclear, environmental, and climate debates. It is also worth asking now whether rhetorical strategies designed during the early years of the Cold War are suited to humankind’s efforts to manage our contemporary challenges.
REFERENCES
Gabriel Henderson is an associate historian at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland.
