[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] The fright of our lives

[Terry W. Colvin]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1411595,00.html


The fright of our lives
Terrorism, nuclear bombs, paedophiles ... in Fear, Joanna Bourke argues we
should assess risks, not quiver before them

Peter Preston
Sunday February 13, 2005

Observer

Fear: A Cultural History
by Joanna Bourke
Virago £25, pp512
When, through a lifetime, are human beings free from fear? Only, perhaps,
when they're fresh from the womb. Only through the few short years of
childhood before the media and the experts and the politicians clutter their
innocence with threats, real or imagined. Then, too soon, such innocence is
lost. Then, willy-nilly, they count the zero sum of all fears every waking
moment.

Well, it's a theory, sympathetically reprised here by Professor Bourke and
in no sense outlandish. Fear is good, up to a point. Fear is one great spur
to creativity. Fear involves consequences that help order society. Fear
walks with us along many of the defining tracks of civilisation. Fear is the
permanent partner of love. But we do not instinctively sense any benignity
to it. We shiver in alarm, sink into phobias, writhe in savage anxiety day
after day. Often, our world seems to close in around us, on the brink of
ending with every new TV bulletin as street violence rockets or illegal
immigrants drain the NHS dry. A 24-hour binge of imagined mayhem.

For fear, at its core, is the prospect of death, a glimpse of the unknown
and unknowable that may also be the last thing we see. Shall we hold our
children again? Will they come home from school safely? What lurks out in
the darkness? Is that the pain of cancer gnawing inside us? Fear is a
driving emotion.

So fear rules and it is not altogether OK. Joanna Bourke, graceful, shrewd,
brilliantly compendious in research, has written a history as topical as
your morning newspaper and as relevant as the Home Secretary's last dodgy
announcement in the Commons. Time and again, putting American and British
experiences together, she raises a wry, cool eyebrow at the hyperbole of
hysteria. She assesses risk rather than quavers before it. She puts fear in
its proper place - as part of our pattern of life.

Two kinds of delirium resonate most strongly through these pages. One,
naturally and insistently, is terror in the wake of 9/11, which, in turn,
didn't fly out of a clear blue sky. Years before 2001, Bourke argues,
looking back, you could gather the portents. That 1990 headline in the
National Review warning 'The Muslims Are Coming! The Muslims Are Coming!'.
John L Esposito declaring in 1992 that the 'Green Menace [of Islam] will
replace the Red Menace of World Communism'. The stage was set for fresh
horrors and the media were all on message.

The first President Bush, come 1990, was hailing 'the age of the terrorist'.
The second President Bush, come 2002, was looking at anthrax spore scares
and opining that 'anyone that evil cannot be American'. And here, dropping
pat into place, was David Balkin's article, 'Time to Excise This Cancer of
Terrorism', with its modest warning that 'every psycho malcontent in the
Arab world wants a piece of us ... they are schizophrenic cavemen with
21st-century capacities'. Cue Hollywood, working 24 hours a day on assault
and battery. Open the gates at Guantanamo Bay. Vote Arnie for governor.

Yet just 17 people were killed inside America by terrorists between 1980 and
1985, barely more than in a single freeway pile-up. Contrast that, Bourke
notes, with the New York Times printing an average of four stories about
terrorism every publishing day. (All the news that chills, we print.)
Outside the US between 1989 and 1992, only 34 Americans died, but more than
1,300 books were classified under 'terrorism' or 'terrorists' in US
libraries. CIA estimates of 'terrorist incidents' had long since doubled by
the simple expedient of recording hoaxes and unsourced threats.

Of course, everything can be turned into questions of fact. 9/11 was fact,
but so were the relatively puny statistics of threat that surrounded it.
Saddam Hussein was fact, but so were the empty arsenals which his WMDs never
filled. Bourke wants us to keep our balance, to see fear for what it is. She
recalls the furore over Orson Welles and his radio War of the Worlds. She
looks askance at the wilder shores of al-Qaeda. She remembers much of the
Cold War for its empty inanities. She scorns a fear of crime which makes us
lock our doors after dusk and sit in front of a TV purveying ever more
frightening tales of law and disorder.

And, in particular, she holds up for inspection those prophets of science
whose wisdom flakes as time goes by, the curse, if you will, of the expert
witness.

Stack up some of that expertise across the decades. Rape? Take Susan
Brownmiller, in 1975, asserting that 'early man's discovery that his
genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the
most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire
and the first crude stone axe'. Bourke raises her coolest eyebrow. This is
'clearly nonsense': it 'ignores the complexity of culture and ideology'.

Equally frail, maybe, is the panic over child sex abuse. Just look (another
arched eyebrow) at the morass of supposedly relevant figures on offer. Was
the total of English and Welsh victims 3,500 a year as the 21st century
began - or 72,600? Was the American total in the Seventies some 4,300 cases
at most, or 44,700 or 210,000, as other surveys claimed? At any rate,
'whether represented as a apathetic specimen of a man [Fifties], sex fiend
[Seventies] or serial paedophile [Eighties], the shadowy figure of the child
abuser was portrayed as unstoppable, incapable of treatment and worthy only
of prison'.

Consider groups such as Greenpeace, generating 'enormous mistrust and alarm
about big business and science, but failing to muster a vast band willing
actively to support their activities'. See how 'toxins must be flushed from
the system' as 'fears of premature ageing take the place reserved for fears
of premature burial'. Think how society has succumbed to psychology, so that
crime no longer 'happens' but is always 'happening' and to be raped means
becoming a 'rape victim'.

Do not, though, get the impression that Bourke is merely intent on a
shibboleth search-and-destroy mission. She is bent on analysis, not polemic;
she relishes connections, not annihilation. Who do we blame for our crushing
burden of fear? Editors may wince as they see what a 'story' consists of.
Are politicians fear-mongers or victims themselves? Why does Hollywood wax
so fat on catastrophe? Is the thrill of fear somehow akin to the thrill of
sex?

This is a journey full of wit and scholarship, an enthralling read that
makes you inspect your own psyche and a global warning. Turn inwards and you
may never be quite so afraid again.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Leslie Ellen Jones, Ph.D.
Jack of All Trades and Doctor of Folklore


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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