The Mechanics of Fear

Unwarranted and ultimately self-destructive fear is apparently a byproduct of a set of natural responses designed to help creatures like us avoid or escape from mortal danger. But the excesses of a glandular or pre-conscious response (disproportionate to the danger, or evoked mistakenly or falsely) become more consequential when culturally ossified or automated, and especially when linked to the power of machines, which multiply the human ability to damage and destroy to horrific proportions.

Historically this became apparent with the Great War of the early 20th century, when fear and hatred on societal levels supported warfare that otherwise made no sense, except for a few rulers, military leaders and those who made fortunes on armaments and other fuel for the fires of war. It was the nationalistic response to that war that inspired the coining of the term "brutalization" to describe a nation's psyche and behavior (in this case, France. Jay Winter wrote a very powerful and illuminating essay/review on civilian support for World War I and the subsequent disenchantment, in the Times Literary Supplement of June 16, 2006. ) Such fervor was not unprecedented--but the power of modern machinery to kill so many was new, and shocking.

That war was an enormous shock to European thought, and for awhile to political life. But the madness continued, resulting in another World War. And fear did not end with that armistice either--in fact, it got worse and even potentially more consequential. After the machinery of World War I killed a generation of young men, the even more destructive machinery of World War II was trained on civilians as well, and killed millions of them, climaxing with the death by blast, fire and radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by means of the atomic bomb.

But even that was not enough to inspire sanity's control over rampant, frenzied unreasonable and often artificially created fear. The atomic bomb that could kill a city was made larger, and multiplied. Then the hydrogen bomb multiplied that destructiveness geometrically, and a few nations made tens of thousands of them, aimed at each other, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

In a review of a new history of the cold war (in the New York Review of Books, 12/17/2009), Brian Urquhart writes:

“It is useless, though tempting, to speculate on who was the most responsible for the cold war and for the fantastic risk and expense it entailed. The paranoia of Stalin; the aggressive language of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism; the wild exaggerations and panicky assumptions, sometimes for short-term political objectives, that created dangerous reactions; the tendency, on both sides, to confuse military capacity with military intentions; the mutual ignorance and hostility that led to the most hazardous and expensive arms race in history—to none of these factors, or to the people involved in them, can be confidently assigned the entire blame for a phenomenon that held the world in dread and suspense for more than forty years. The contestants in the cold war, it now seems, were all caught up in a monstrous nuclear nightmare of fear, anger, suspicion, and irrationality that no leader seemed able to dispel.”

Later in the review he adds: “Thus, until quite recently, we lived in a time when many of the most powerful and brilliant people in the world spent their energy and talent, and huge sums of public money, on developing weapons that, if used, would have almost certainly destroyed orderly life on this planet. That it was impossible, for forty years, for the two superpowers to discuss this most lethal of threats to all life in a rational manner must rank, in retrospect at least, as the greatest foolishness and the greatest shared irresponsibility in history.”

Though he guesses that leaders early on realized that these nuclear weapons should never be used, and that common sense often prevailed over panic, that the human race got through the cold war was, Uurqhart writes, miraculous.

Now we face a crisis that is a threat to "orderly life on this planet" that is different in many ways, but is just as grave. To fail to address it would easily replace the cold war as "the greatest shared irresponsibility in history." But to address it requires even more unfamiliar ways of thinking as well as common sense, and above all, it requires urgent attention. Fear only gets in the way.

Two things happened during the Cold War. The consequences of nuclear war were so severe that the citizenry at large, at least in America, simply shut down emotionally and refused to face it. The prospect of societal self-destruction was too much to deal with, and it was largely absent from public dialogue. It wasn't dealt with consciously, though subconscious fears were alive, and were expressed in the arts, especially movies--from the bug-eyed monster and alien invasion flicks of the 50s to the nuclear dramas and satires of the 60s.

It could be argued that's happening again. With relentless and passionate Climate Crisis denial buttressing the tendency to avoid the paralyzing fear of a horrific future, emotions are driven underground, expressed not only in end-of-the-world cinema but in fashionable tales of zombies and vampires: the walking dead.

At the same time, fears and suspicions of the other side--more familiar feelings, perhaps more tangible--distracted society from even considering what needed to be done. Now that Americans and other westerners travel easily to Russia, and there is more access to all the cultures involved, it may seem inconceivable how monstrous stereotypes could inspire fear for so long a time. But they did. Though there were ups and downs, some of the same stereotypes from the 1950s were repeated in TV commercials in the 1980s.

The analogy to today's irrational fear of terrorism is not exact: the threat of nuclear annihilation was real, whereas the chances of anyone in America dying from a terrorist act is minuscule--crossing a small town street is statistically much more hazardous. But the grip of fear on our political life and national dialogue is just as obvious and disheartening. One failed and pretty sorry terrorist attempt on one airliner has once again thrown this country into panic, as predictably as a literal knee-jerk reaction.

So, for example, this story, which appeared in the Eureka, CA Times-Standard:

Suspicious device found on trail in Sequoia Park

A suspicious device reported to authorities Monday afternoon was destroyed by the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office bomb squad.

According to a press release from the Eureka Police Department, at about 2:21 p.m., EPD received a report of a suspicious device on a trail in Sequoia Park. An officer responded and found that the device was an archery arrow with a duct-taped cylinder attached to the arrowhead end of the arrow.

EPD requested the assistance of the explosive ordinance disposal experts from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office, who came to inspect the device. They responded with their EOD robot.
After inspecting the device, they subsequently destroyed it using the robot's water cannon.
”The device was obliterated but appeared to have been some type of foam rubber that had been wrapped in the duct tape, and not an explosive device,” said the release.

Several people in the immediate area of the device were evacuated from the area while the investigation was conducted. "

That foreign terrorists would train and dispatch an operative to blow up an unsuspecting hiker on a trail in this remote corner of the country, or that this financially strapped county would deploy a robot with a water cannon to douse an arrow with a bit of foam rubber stuck to it--all pretty laughable, though not quite on the Doctor Strangelove level. Except that it's indicative of what fear can do, and how it can absorb attention, short-circuit rational thought, and above all, distract from real threats.

Today there are still more than 20,000 nuclear devices in various stages of readiness in the world, including a thousand outside the direct control of the U.S. or Russia. And there is the ultimate time bomb churning away in our thin veil of atmosphere, a fire we are feeding every day, while we indulge in familiar fears and comforts. Our ability to destroy our world and ourselves thanks to our machines far outstrips our apparent ability to deal with those machines and the aspects of human nature--including the dynamics of groups and nations--that unleash our machines against us. If that remains so...the hand of evolution, having written, will move on--even if it will seem to us to move backward.