A Philosophy of Fear

Lars Svendsen

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781861897862
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Surveillance cameras. Airport security lines. Barred store windows. We see manifestations of societal fears everyday, and daily news reports on the latest household danger or raised terror threat level continually stoke our sense of impending doom. In A Philosophy of Fear, Lars Svendsen now explores the underlying ideas and issues behind this powerful emotion, as he investigates how and why fear has insinuated itself into every aspect of modern life.
Svendsen delves into science, politics, sociology, and literature to explore the nature of fear. He examines the biology behind the emotion, from the neuroscience underlying our "fight or flight" instinct to how fear induces us to take irrational actions in our attempts to minimize risk. The book then turns to the political and social realms, investigating the role of fear in the philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes, the rise of the modern "risk society, " and how fear has eroded social trust. Entertainment such as the television show "Fear Factor, " competition in extreme sports, and the political use of fear in the ongoing "War on Terror" all come under Svendsen's probing gaze, as he investigates whether we can ever disentangle ourselves from the continual state of alarm that defines our age.
Svendsen ultimately argues for the possibility of a brighter, less fearful future that is marked by a triumph of humanist optimism. An incisive and thought-provoking meditation, A Philosophy of Fear pulls back the curtain that shrouds dangers imagined and real, forcing us to confront our fears and why we hold to them.

ONE
The Culture of Fear

Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it?
That’s what it is to be a slave.
The replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982)

Oh Baby, here comes the fear again.
The end is near again.
Pulp: ‘The Fear’, This is Hardcore (1998)

It has become something of an ordeal to get through security at an airport. It can fill you with nostalgia to think back to the time, only a few years ago, when you could more or less walk straight through, once you had emptied your pockets of coins and keys. When travelling, I often return on the same day, so I have no other luggage than a book or two and some papers in a bag. But I always have one object with me that is clearly considered a security risk: a lighter. So I have to take it out of my pocket, place it in a transparent plastic bag and send it through separately before I can take it out of the plastic bag once more and return it to my pocket. On longer trips, where you also need to have such things with you as toothpaste, deodorant and shampoo, everything that broadly can be classified as ‘fluids’ has to be packed in a transparent plastic bag that may not contain more than one litre, with no individual container exceeding 100 ml. Should you have a half-empty bottle of shampoo with you that can when full contain 150 ml of liquid, it must be left outside the security control. And you can of course forget everything about taking a bottle of water or wine with you.

These new regulations are the result of terrorist plans, which were discovered in London in autumn 2006, to use liquid explosives to blow up planes. The regulations – which restrict the freedom of millions of passengers every year – are, in other words, justified by a terror attack that did not take place. Passengers have, however, accepted this restriction of their freedom without any protests worth mentioning. The fear of terror functions here as a kind of trump card, one that wins over all other considerations.

This is just one example among many as to how fear is shaping our space of action. Fear would seem to have become all-embracing, in the sense that there is no longer any area of society left where a perspective of fear does not apply. Fear has become the emotion that controls the public, and a number of social scientists now claim that today’s society can best be described as a ‘culture of fear’.¹ Fear has become a culturally determined magnifying glass through which we consider the world.

In Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: ‘the world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man.’² Twisting Wittengenstein’s formulation a bit, we could write: the world of the secure man is different from that of the fearful man. Jean-Paul Sartre emphasizes this point: ‘An emotion totally changes the world.’³ The secure person lives in a reliable world – the word ‘secure’ means ‘untroubled by feelings of fear, doubt or vulnerability’ – while the insecure person lives in a world that at any time can turn against him, where the basis of existence at any time can be pulled out from under his feet. Dangers threaten us everywhere: in dark streets and inside our homes, with strangers and with those closest to us, in nature as well as in technology, inside our bodies as well as in external forces. There no longer seems to be anything that is really secure.

In fear we are met by something outside ourselves, and what we meet is a negation of what we want. We fear the important things in life being destroyed or taken away from us, such as our freedom, dignity, health, social status and – taken to its extreme – our lives. We fear not only for ourselves but also for others, and especially those dear to us. When any of this is threatened, fear is a normal reaction. We want to protect ourselves against such threats. For human life is frightening. As Montaigne says: ‘Our human frailty means that we have more to flee from than to strive for.’⁴ There appears to be something fundamental about fear, and it is scarcely a coincidence that fear is the first emotion to be mentioned in the Bible: when Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge and discovered that he was naked, fear preceded shame.⁵ We are born into the world naked and unarmed, and – compared to most other animals – remain in this defenceless state for the rest of our lives.

Even so, it is not evident that this is the most appropriate perspective on human life. It can be claimed that all awareness of – or obsession with – risk is a greater danger than all the risks that otherwise exist.⁶ My point is not that we live in a world without dangers. It would seem to be clear, for example, that global warming may have highly dramatic consequences for the entire planet. In most cities of a certain size one ought to avoid certain locations at certain times of the day or night because the danger of being assaulted is great. And one ought to look both ways before crossing the road. There are a range of phenomena we ought to fear. The problem is that we seem to see everything from a perspective of fear.

If we do a search through a British newspaper archive, we find a marked increase in the phrase ‘at risk’ over the last decade, from 2,037 occurrences in 1994 to 18,003 in 2000.⁷ In the Norwegian newspaper database a-text, we find a marked increase in the incidence of the Norwegian word for fear over the past decade, from 3,331 uses in 1996 to 5,883 in 2006.⁸ It is tempting to explain the increase by, among other things, the terror attacks of 9/11, but an interesting feature is that the increase started well before these attacks. Viewed thus, we can assert that the terror attacks not only increased the awareness of fear but also fitted into an already existing pattern – and that increase has continued to the present day. These figures indicate that the media are constantly reminding us about how ‘dangerous’ the world is – and not least how afraid we are of it.

The same picture is confirmed by a number of other surveys. For example, Norstat carried out a survey in 2005 for Siemens, which supplies safety equipment, in which 1,000 subjects were asked if, over recent years, they had become more afraid of experiencing various phenomena. The result was that 51% had become more afraid of experiencing violent crime, 47% traffic accidents, 36% acts of terror, 26% fires and 19% natural disasters.⁹ The increase, by the way, was larger for women than for men.

We believe that the earth, air and water are becoming increasingly polluted, that crime is constantly increasing, that our food is becoming increasingly full of harmful additives and pollutants. We imagine that we are becoming increasingly exposed to all types of dangers and that the dangers are becoming more frequent and more acute. In a survey in which people were asked to assess a wide range of 90 potentially dangerous activities or objects, from jogging and cosmetics to terrorism and vaccines, only 25 were thought to be decreasing in dangerousness, while no less than 62 were thought to be increasing in danger – and 13 of these markedly so.¹⁰ Most risk analysts would claim that the level of danger in most of the phenomena included in the survey has actually considerably declined. The results of this survey are by no means an anomaly – on the contrary, there is a prevalent perception among most people that we are exposed to greater risk today than previously, and that things will get even worse in the future.¹¹

Fear is also contagious. If someone becomes afraid of something, this fear has a tendency to spread to others, who in turn spread it further. This may occur even though there was initially no rational basis for the fear.¹² If many people fear something, we cannot deduce that this phenomenon actually is something to fear.

Risk awareness has even become fashionable: ‘paranoia chic’ is a new trend.¹³ Bullet-proof clothing with a fashionable cut is apparently very popular.¹⁴ In 2005–6 the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on the exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk, where all sorts of objects that can protect us in one way or another were displayed as examples of cutting-edge design. The exhibition catalogue states: ‘Today, the simple need of protection has mutated into the complex universe we call fashion.’¹⁵ The curator emphasized fear as a source of creativity: ‘Especially in everyday life, security is an industry in constant expansion, because, since there is no end to what could go wrong, there is also no end to the creative and commercial possibilities design can offer.’¹⁶ The moral of the exhibition is: ‘Good design, combined with good instinct, is our strongest assurance of progress toward a safer, more liveable world.’¹⁷ Fear has also become a theme in architecture, where an important element of the function of a building is to protect inhabitants and users against something threatening ‘out there’.¹⁸

We seem to be obsessed with every conceivable danger. Not only do we fear dangers; they are also good entertainment. One example is the British television series So You Think You’re Safe? The series deals with the hidden dangers of everyday life, and stresses all the accidents that can befall modern man in the course of a completely normal day. It is the perfect programme for the postmodern paranoiac. For a paranoiac with a hint of self-irony, I’m Afraid, You’re Afraid: 448 Things to Fear and Why (2000) can be recommended – a sort of mini-encyclopaedia of everything that is dangerous in everyday life.¹⁹ In recent years, a series of books have appeared that assert that various global disasters are imminent. Among the most popular are such books as Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and Eugene Linden’s The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations.²⁰ In addition, there are self-help books on what one ought to do when the disaster actually strikes, such as Matthew Stein’s When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival and Jack A. Spigarelli’s Crisis Preparedness Handbook: A Complete Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival.²¹ On the basis of these books, one is tempted to believe that the Apocalypse is just around the corner.

Fear is not least an important political resource for public authorities, political parties and pressure groups. In an age where the old ideologies no longer have such strong powers of motivation, fear becomes one of the most powerful agents in the political discourse. Fear paves the way for being able to communicate a message and it can be used to undermine one’s opponents and the imminent danger of their being in power. Discussions of modern politics or politicial candidates often just explore which risk ought to worry us most.

Here these political players exist in a perfect symbiosis with the mass media, since scaring people undoubtedly sells newspapers and attracts people to TV screens – it is for this reason that TV news and newspapers often seem to be in competition with each other to report the biggest scares. The entertainment industry has also joined in. A film like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) was embraced by many environmental activists because it had the ‘right’ message, despite the fact that from a scientific point of view it managed to get most things wrong concerning global warming, apart from the somewhat obvious fact that we are facing a serious environmental problem.

In The End is Nigh, a book about natural disasters, the geologist Henrik Svensen writes: ‘If we look at what lies ahead, natural disasters are going to become even more frequent. Man-made climate changes and global warming will lead to more extreme weather. Hurricanes can become more violent, landslides more frequent, inundations more destructive and periods of drought longer.’²² In the following sentences it is then stated that natural disasters can and will become worse, but there is a huge difference between stating a hypothetical possibility that something may happen and a certainty that it will actually do so. There is a shift between possibility and reality – and as long as one is in the realm of possibilities, all disasters are within reach.

Most things would, of course, indicate that climate changes really ought to worry us, but the same is hardly the case for the in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter One - The Culture of Fear
• Chapter Two - What is Fear?
• Chapter Three - Fear and Risk
• Chapter Four - The Attraction of Fear
• Chapter Five - Fear and Trust
• Chapter Six - The Politics of Fear
• Chapter Seven - Beyond Fear?
• References