There is no doubt that we live in a culture of fear that is not just time-old fear of the future or the unknown. It also expresses a profound contempt for human beings and their ability to confront and overcome the problems they face. The media is saturated with headlines like ‘warning’, ‘alarm’, ‘concern’ and of course ‘fear’. We can actually measure this. These words are actually used more. Both left and right have developed various panic narratives, around environmental degradation on the one hand, say, or teenage criminals on the other hand.
These can have serious consequences, as saw in the 1990s with a spate of satanic child abuse scandals in both the UK and USA, when dozens of children were separated from their parents, on the basis of fantastical claims of ritual child abuse, claims which were wholly false. Nonetheless, the social workers concerned believed that the allegations were true. It is a chilling example of the grip the irrational can have over supposedly rational people operating within a supposedly rational bureaucracy.
The issue is not whether we face serious problems, it’s the supposed inability to overcome them or fear-mongering around possible solutions, like genetic engineering. It’s also about using fear to promote the interests of various interest groups in their prosecution of ideological struggles and both left and right are as bad as each other in using fear for instrumental ends. It's also about inflating the scale of problems - like the ever-expanding definitions of harms covered by terms like 'disability', 'bullying and harassment' - peddled by professional interest groups for the purposes of justifying their existence. Again, the point being made is not that there is no such thing (to take one example) as bullying and that it does not cause harm. It is the inflation of this term to cover any stressful relationship. Plenty more comparable examples may be found and this book is a very good survey of the forms fear narratives take.
While I sympathise with the author’s analysis, especially on the effect a culture of fear has on a society’s and on an individual’s ability to take risks and learn from mistakes, an essential prerequisite of both social and personal progress, I was left no clearer at the end of the book as to how we have managed to get where we are. He is too dismissive in my view of some of the explanations that to me seem entirely reasonable – like too high an expectation that risks can be eliminated rather than controlled.
I am also less than convinced that the culture of fear is as novel as he seems to suppose. We fear different things nowadays than we feared back in the 1930s but to read historian Richard Overy’s ‘Morbid Age’ or Arthur Hermann’s ‘The Idea of Decline in Western History’ is to learn that fear-mongering among the intellectuals of both left and right has a long pedigree.
Aside from that, not all of his examples support the argument. He is right to observe that many conservative groups saw the spread of HIV/AIDs in the 1980s as an opportunity to lobby governments to control private sexual conduct. But the Conservative government in the UK in the 1980s resisted this temptation. Its public health campaign stuck to prevention and promoted safe sexual conduct but made no effort to proscribe specific forms of conduct wholesale, like criminalizing all consensual homosexual sex. In doing this, it defied public opinion. Sometimes, politicians do the right thing.
Finally, we should remember that controlling risk is not in itself an ignoble enterprise. Occupations like construction and firefighting are so much safer than they used to be, precisely because risk has been successfully measured and controlled. Nonetheless, the deployment of fear as a political weapon to advance – no doubt sincerely held – ideological agendas is something to be deplored. There needs to be a measured discussion about the proper and proportionate response to the problems we face. Merely couching it in the language of fear is not to engage in this discussion in good faith but to wield a weapon to browbeat opponents into submission. The ideas in this book are worth knowing in order to promote a discussion that really needs to be had.
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Thomas Guminski
A must read for parents
Reviewed in the United States on 12 October 2009