Who's Afraid...?

 

"Fear" by Jean-Baptist Greuze

Fear, says a John Cale lyric, is a man’s best friend. In certain situations it must be, or it would not have survived evolution’s editing.  Fear protects us from present danger by igniting the instantaneous flight or fight response.  When it wells up more slowly, it responds to unconscious perceptions related to hidden danger, or the near prospect of it: darkness and thrashing sounds, for example.

Fear can give us an adrenalin buzz, which seems to be why some people enjoy scary movies. But more generally, over time, fear is a distinctly unpleasant feeling.  It can be paralyzing, all-encompassing, stressful and painful.  We avoid fear whenever possible. One way of avoiding fear is by denying that there’s something to be afraid of.

 Denial in this sense, like fear, can also be a survival tool.  The most fearful thing in our lives is our death, and yet the possibility of death exists every moment we are alive.  We can most easily escape the paralysis or obsession of fear by ignoring this.  And we do, or we couldn’t function.  In this sense, it is healthy.  Carl Jung told an interviewer that among the old people who were his patients, the healthier ones simply didn’t think much about their impending deaths, and just got on with it.

 But when fear is a response to a threat distant in time and place, but still very real, it becomes more complicated and perhaps perverted.  The fear of a distant enemy can become disproportionate, and abstracted into prejudice against all outsiders, all others. 

Nagasaki 1945

 With the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945, each which wiped out a city and left lingering effects that slowly killed many more than died from the initial blast and fire, something awful entered civilized life. World War II itself saw the final erosion of the distinction between combatants and civilians in war, and massive airpower threatened sudden death to anyone, anywhere. 

 With thousands of guided missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads by the early 1960s, the world had firmly entered an age of permanent anxiety. Most everyone in the world, and civilization itself, could be destroyed in an hour, any hour of any day.  Life could be normal, and the next second plunged into the horrors imagined as hell.

 Such is the prehistory of the politics of our moment. Though for too many the horrors of war still exist, the interplay of fear and denial in individuals and groups now goes beyond just that situation. It applies as well to other cases of huge threats, including potential threats, which people are or believe themselves to be powerless to stop or prevent.

 What are the responses to danger and the fear it evokes?  To run away from it, if that is possible.  To fight it—that is, to address its effects, learn its causes and devise ways to end or neutralize them.  Or if the threat is not immediately visible or loudly audible, simply to deny there is anything to be afraid of.

 We all feel this impulse.  But today this denial has become a bonding mechanism in our politics.  Afraid of the effects of the climate crisis?  Deny that the climate crisis exists.  Afraid of the effects of Covid-19 and epidemics in general?  Deny that they exist, or are anything to be afraid of.  Facts to the contrary are just lies.

 Deny with another product of fear: anger.  Anger is one way humans channel the adrenalin of fear.  There are arguably other sources or kinds of anger.  But most can be traced back ultimately to fear.  And in many cases, there’s little distance between fear and anger.

 Anger is energizing.  It probably evolved to quickly hype the body’s forces to fight an imminent danger. These days, anger is a major means of political bonding.  As it grows in power, anger leads to a more general and undifferentiated hostility to everyone who doesn’t share it.  It occurs on both the so-called left and right. But it is especially important to those whose binding creed includes denial of the climate crisis, and of Covid.

 We do seem to be witnessing another case of what Eric Hoffer described in his 1951 book The True Believer as a mass movement: a cult grown large. He suggests that people who are disappointed in their lives, and may have real grievances and are the victims of real and widespread injustices, deal with their perceived powerlessness by banding together behind an authoritarian leader who purports to identify their enemies and promises to smite them, and to restore the world they expect and want.  You know, make America great again.

 While radio was the technological innovation that powered authoritarian leaders of the 1930s, social media and the Internet power group bonding behind a leader or symbol.  In order to be accepted by the group and to identify with it, there are articles of faith that must be repeated and even made more extreme.  Real grievances tend to get exaggerated or even falsified. Most importantly, the group also defines itself by the people they aren't--those who are defined as outside it, as part of the group that’s the real problem.  Individuals don’t matter—only group allegiances. Other considerations don't matter--only the attitudes that bind the group. Again, much of this is not restricted to so-called right wing groups.  But it is with these groups that denial as integral is most prominent.  (Similarly, they do use fear as a binding mechanism--often projecting threatening qualities onto the groups they define as enemies. Although not all their fears are without foundation, they tend to be twisted products of their continuously nurtured and never examined collective unconscious.)

Denying the climate crisis, denying the realities of Covid, with anger and hostility, are articles of their faith.  Now there’s a comparatively new wrinkle. The effects of anxiety over nuclear Armageddon, and the unconscious effects of our general daily denial of that danger, dominated the history of post-World War II generations. Now as the culture has largely forgotten the existence of nuclear weapons at the ready, or downgraded their power, elements of the political right are busily denying that Russia constitutes any threat at all.  As if they didn’t still have enough missiles pointed at the US with nuclear and thermonuclear bombs to devastate their lives in a moment. 

 In order for the political right to deny that there’s anything to be afraid of, the authority of those who say there is must be questioned and ultimately denied.  In the case of climate and the case of Covid, the authorities are scientists, their institutions, and the political institutions that support and listen to them. These political and cultural institutions are conveniently the same ones that are seen as enemies in general, and not without reason.  America’s educated elites that benefited from today’s economy have largely ignored the devastation suffered by others as a byproduct of that economy. 

 These institutions and elites make things worse by exploiting this anger and simultaneously by giving in to it.  For a crisis that might end the future of civilization and most forms of life currently on the planet, their response to climate distortion continues to be timid and—because of the economic powers and interests involved—dishonest.  In Covid, even the CDC is now supporting the fiction that this is just another respiratory disease on a par with flu, while evidence mounts of its major effects on the heart and on the brain in a significant number of patients. Denying Covid also denies future pandemics and epidemics, and weakens the institutions that could (or could have) addressed them.  Denial can kill, now and later.

 For some, denial and our temptations to denial are handy tools to ensure profits and not rock the boat that’s working for them.  For all of us, denial is convenient.  Nobody wants to think about this stuff. Some denial may also be necessary for our mental health.  But denial also raises anxiety because we all know what happens, sooner or later, when we act as if danger isn’t out there.  The irony is that our lives would be infused with so much more meaning if we just addressed ourselves as a whole society to the dangers we are right to fear.