Fear and contemporary history: a review essay.

A number of books in recent years, including an important new entry by Joanna Bourke, have pointed to significant changes in American and/or modern fears, in ways that cry out for historical assessment. The very bulk of the work, most of it launched before 9/11 though sometimes finetuned in the aftermath of this massive emotional spur, suggests that something new is going on--that is, that there is a significant shift underway in contemporary emotional history. A number of studies explicitly claim that fear has become the predominant emotion in contemporary life--and that this is a significant change. Yet relatively little of the recent scholarship is explicitly historical, and this essay, while lauding the scholarly trend itself, intends to suggest what a somewhat more rigorous historical approach might yield. (1)

It's worth remembering at the outset that a major historian dealt elaborately with fear a generation ago, and while his work focused on premodern centuries in Western Europe, he did have some suggestions about contemporary contrasts and echoes that might be recalled with profit. In several books, Jean Delumeau powerfully illuminated the role of fear in European Catholic societies from the early days of Christianity, though more particularly from the late Middle Ages, into the 18th century. (2) Fears of death and of damnation were powerful realities, used as disciplinary tools for children and adults alike. They added to other inescapable factors, like periodic famines or military depredations, to create a context of emotional anxiety. Widespread beliefs in witchcraft, alternatively combated and sanctioned by the Church, added to the climate, while also--through white magic or attacks on witches--suggesting some positive means of alleviating insecurity. Delumeau argued that cultural changes in the 17th and 18th century, that replaced religious fearfulness with a more positive vision of earthly progress, dramatically altered the traditional emotional climate. But he goes on to note, without exploring the topic elaborately, that fear would return in the 20th century, based now not on religion but on the realization of the unseen forces of deterioration and death that operated within the human body, now that degenerative disease began to replace contagion as the main source of mortality. Obviously, most current analysts would argue that contemporary fear has exceeded the bounds of new patterns of disease, but Delumeau's insights, and his sense of historical dynamic, remain relevant.

Some subsequent work might be used, for the United States at least, to modify Delumeau's findings in certain respects. A battle against religious fear was waged in the United States in the early 19th century, with the debates over original sin; and while mainstream Protestantism began vigorously to oppose the use of fear in childrearing, an ongoing Evangelical minority thought otherwise, complicating the emotional landscape in later American history. American Catholicism continued to preach fear until the reform era of the 1960s, when it did indeed definitively shift gears. (3) But it is also true that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, growing opposition to fear emerged, indeed a rising optimism that, in a well-ordered society, fear might be banished altogether.

Thus G.T.W. Patrick, in 1913:

  "Fear is the greatest source of human suffering. Until comparatively
  recent times nature has been something unknown and the unknown has
  been a constant source of terror. It is believed to be full of
  supernatural and possibly hostile agencies. Devils and demons and
  indignant deities, an angry and jealous God, possible future and
  retributive punishments, earthquakes and eclipses, all have
  contributed to make the life of man miserable. This burden of woe has
  now been lifted. Another view of nature now prevails. Man has cast off
  fear and finds himself master of nature and perhaps of all her forces,
  while in religion the gospel of love is casting out the dread monster
  of fear. But it is not alone fear of supernatural agencies that we
  have escaped, but also fear of political upheavals connected with
  despotic governments and social instability. Few of us appreciate the
  profound security that we now enjoy, security of life, property and
  reputation." (4)

While optimism of this extreme sort may have been shortlived, hit hard by the war that opened in the following year, it did not disappear. In behaviorist psychology, for example, with its claims that humankind possessed very few innate fears and that carefully organized childrearing could produce fear-free individuals, some of the same hopefulness resurfaced. The belief, or at least the hope, that modern life and fear could part company remained an important element in American culture, trumpeted further of course by FDR himself in his most memorable phrase.

Obviously, however, this strain in contemporary American or Western culture has been largely eclipsed in recent decades--though the prior existence of hopes for freedom from fear may have exaggerated contemporary response, both popular and scholarly, to the realization that fear is with us still. And the rediscovery of fear, though it embraces anxieties about death and degenerative disease, goes beyond Delumeau's suggested contemporary paradigm as well.

Several recent studies of fear rest primarily in the sphere of intellectual history or political philosophy. They are interesting as they add to the impression of a revived emotion, but they are somewhat peripheral to the understanding of fear as a wider social phenomenon. Thus Judith Shklar argues that liberalism has turned away from its resounding commitment to generalized statements of rights, and particularly natural rights, that come to be seen as unduly abstract, and toward a fearful defensive stance against the encroachments of arbitrary governments. This liberalism of fear involves a sense of political embattlement, rather than real emotion, but it does suggest how the vocabulary of fear is penetrating a growing range of discourse. (5)

In a more recent work still, Corey Robin picks up the argument about the political uses of fear, looking at American leadership rather generally, beyond purely liberal ranks. (6) He sees fear being employed in absence of any inspiring alternatives from any of the major political camps, at least in the United States. Corey devotes most of his book to the place of fear in Western political theory, from Hobbes onward, as a springboard for analysis of the use of fear in American race relations and labor disputes. He offers sweeping comments on why fear and anxiety have come to figure so prominently in American political messages from both left and right. He deals less with popular reception of these messages, but the impression is clear: fear from the top is being increasingly used to motivate political decisions, and the process is new--at least to this extent--and decidedly troubling. Robin certainly blasts conservatives who distract from real social problems by invocations of fear, but with Shklar he does not locate the approach with conservatism alone, but with a broader shift in the political process.

The main sociological entry in the new fear literature, and it is an important one, is the 1999 book by Gary Glassner, The Culture of Fear. Focused on the United States, and strongly implying without comparatively demonstrating that Americans have developed some unusual, and unusually counterproductive, fears, the book has two emphases. Both emphases suggest innovation in American fear patterns during the final two decades of the 20th century, but there is no explicit effort to establish a status quo ante historical baseline. Glassner first of all considers the causes of new fears, suggesting two possibilities--the apocalyptic sentiment that built up in advance of the new millennium and media manipulation--and largely eliminates the former. Media pandering becomes the key villain of the piece. The bulk of the book then turns to the targets of new fears and how needless and misplaced they are--at the same time accurately depicting the consequences of unwarranted fears in bad policies, excessive expense, and neglect of more legitimate issues and opportunities. This list here is considerable, and Glassner does a splendid job of contrasting fear-soaked perception and sober reality. Thus: Americans fear levels of crime that do not exist, even when actual crime rates are falling, because of media portrayals. They worry about child abduction (as Paula Fass has also noted) or teenage gambling when both are extremely rare, again because journalists so often tell them that youth are at far greater risk than adults realize. They are anxious about African American men fairly generally, again on the basis of exaggerated incidents and outright misperceptions. They make huge mistakes about the likelihood of certain feared diseases. (7)

Fear, here, is largely cognitive; Glassner does not spend much time on emotion as a construct. But however deeply emotional, the fear he describes adds up to a frankly incontrovertible pair of points: Americans have become wretched calculators of real risk because they are so often misled and manipulated by media and politicians who profit from their anxieties. And the mistakes are not harmless: they lead to acceptance of policies that are frequently as misdirected as the fears themselves--for example, withdrawing kids from public schools despite their normal and considerable safety. They lead also to great expense. And they lead quite generally to the widespread impression, particularly vivid when children are involved, that the environment has become steadily less safe in recent decades, compared to some largely mythologized past.

Glassner spends no time on the historical question of when this all began, and how great the change has been. He assumes Americans used to be more sensible, before the media developed their evil ways, but he's not interested in proving this explicitly. Nor, by the same token, does he really explore media change--why did the media somehow become more interested in scaring Americans and more able to do so? The neglect of historical issues actually raises questions about causation as well. Again, Glassner has done a splendid job, but there is clearly more to the story.

This approach is also characteristic of another important entry, by Frank Furedi. (8) Dealing with modern Western societies more generally, Furedi also posits a growing aversion to risk and a corresponding deterioration in moral climate. Again, fear-mongering media come in for heavy blame, and Fueredi coins the felicitous term, "fear entrepreneurs". Furedi goes a bit farther than Glassner in positing actual increases in health effects--for example, a growing rate of phobias--which is a truly important extension. Here too, however, there is a good bit of fogginess on the historical baseline: when and to what extent were phobias less common, and to what extent is the impression based on solid data rather than changes in diagnosis (themselves interesting, but rather a different matter)? Furedi also adds some interesting high-culture evidence, which Glassner does not treat: thus The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art mounts an exhibit on the "perils of modern living" while an Art Bienniel in France, more to the point, offers as its theme the "art of fear." There's a strong impression here of change--and certainly Furedi's work combined with others creates a powerful sense that something is happening with fear in recent decades--but exactly what, in terms of historical analysis, remains slightly elusive.

Which is why another, more recent book, though also launched before 9/11, is particularly interesting, because it does dip deeply into historical data and claims historicity directly. Joanna Bourke's study shares best of show with Glassner's work in the current fear parade. No question here of the main theme: fear has become "the most pervasive emotion of modern society." (ix) While the main emphasis is on all the terrifying events and developments of the 20th century--new killing techniques, nightmares and phobias, "treacherous bodies"--Bourke also cites interesting 19th-century fears, such as the literary fascination with being buried alive. Strong emphasis applies to changes in the fear of death. Bourke picks up the frequent lack of great concern about death expressed early in the 20th century (including the abrupt cessation of the burial-alive motif) and contrasts this with fears that have developed since, echoing Delumeau in citing the terror potential of unseen bacteria and degenerative processes. Disasters form a second, related theme, from massive theater fires in the early 20th century onward. Fears concerning children gain appropriate attention, from fear-wielding servants in the 19th century who used the emotion as a disciplinary technique to the growing worries about children's fears in the 1920s. Here, as with death, evidence comes from literary sources, prescriptive manuals, and (for the 20th century) the contributions of psychologists. The same package ushers in the discussion of nightmares and phobias, which thanks to psychology receive new, scientific attention from the late 19th century onward; the discussion of phobias encompases the various, often drastic treatments imposed, including lobotomies and electric shock treatments, as the 20th century unfolded.

The later portions of the book deal more with social expressions of fear. A fascinating chapter describes a British radio broadcast in 1926, which sowed wide panic over the possibility of invasion, and relates this to Orson Welles' later bombshell about Martian attack. Excellent chapters focus on the evolution of the interpretation of soldiers' fears during wars, with emphasis on the two World Wars; on British civilian experience in World War II (which of course was not always as fear-drenched as one might have expected); and on the development and maintenance of fears of nuclear conflict. Chapter 10 returns to more individual fears, of cancer and AIDs and the renewed experience of prolonged death. Both pollution and the new fears of crime from strangers draw comment. And the final chapter deals with the rising fears of terrorism and how they relate to the other fears discussed. (9)

This is a rich, provocative work, immensely erudite and drawing on materials from an impressive range of sources. There are, however, three issues, which in my view invite additional historical analysis. The first and most fundamental involves the nature and extent of change. Except to a small extent for death, there is no clear establishment of a baseline--presumably, some time in the mid-19th century--from which the evolution of 20th century fears can be traced. In several chapters, comment ranges widely from the later 19th through the mid-20th century. To be sure, it might be assumed that the obviously unprecedented experience of world war and nuclear threat require no explicit assessment of novelty; but on other fears--around children, for example, or phobias--one really does wonder about the extent to which modern society is really different from its predecessors. Of course there is distinctive commentary, thanks particularly to the rise of psychology, but the extent of experiential change is simply an unknown. Opportunities even to probe 19th century literary comment on nightmares or phobias are not taken. The result: an extremely persuasive case that change has occurred but some real fuzziness about the precise nature of the shift. After all, the proposition must be confronted: do not all societies fear, admittedly with changing specific targets: so what is provably different about the modern case?

The second issue involves causation. Bourke's study is cultural but without the cloying apparatus of postmodernism, so she does not indulge in the fashionable, but baffling, attack on the idea of seeking causes for change. But she doesn't provide much explicit analysis either. Again, the new nature of war undoubtedly helps explain new types and levels of fear. But Bourke invokes war late, seeing the emotional consequences in many ways as extensions of novel fears that had already developed in other arenas. To the extent that modern fears are different from those of the past, around children for example, or disease, why is this so? Bourke provides a great deal of food for thought, around new issues such as cancer and war, and around new perspectives such as psychology; but not, I think, totally satisfactory, focused answers.

And finally there's the question of geography. This is a comfortably Anglo-American book, moving easily from one side of the Atlantic to the other. With the obvious exception of civilians in wartime, there's no sense of any distinction between the two societies treated. But nor is there any systematic testing of comparative propositions. Here, it risks being churlish to ask for more than is provided. But we do emerge with a third question: is fear the dominant modern emotion around the world? In Western society primarily? In Anglo-American quarters as distinct from the rest of the Western world? These questions are deepened by another recent work, by Christophe Lambert, (10) that argues that fear has become an overriding political emotion in contemporary France. In his hands, this fear is more predictable than with Bourke: the French fear immigration, globalization, ageing, the panoply of forces that seem to threaten a cherished but now beleaguered way of life. But are there wider connections? The invitation to more explicit comparative analysis is both obvious and urgent--granting the difficulties of the task.

And a final, intriguing though often frustrating, recent entry. (11) Jackie Orr's book on panic refers to some of the same materials as does Bourke, though the focus is resolutely American: the early mention of an early 20th-century Chicago fire as an entry point to contemporary panic; extensive treatment of the Welles broadcast and the studies of ensuing fear; many references to the rise of scientific studies of trauma and panic--including many military research projects on psychosomatic disorders--here going well beyond Bourke in this important specific field. Add to this a number of highly personalized touches, reflecting the author's fascination with certain types of mental disorder, and with drug treatments such as Xanax, and a few literary productions by psychiatric patients, and again the result is a highly plausible sense of increasing panic in an undefined but presumably growing segment of the American population. Science to be sure invented new terms in the process, such as panic disorder (and Orr offers an important history here, complete with abundant references), but this intellectual shift was attached to a very real experiential change. And here the causation is quite clear: the psychic pressures of terrifying new technologies, particularly military technologies. A major segment of the book deals with nuclear testing and nuclear threats and the connections to studies and experiences of mental disorder.

Yet, even more than with Bourke, despite a clear historical interest and historical apparatus that among other things involves specific chapter-to-chapter chronologies, there's an acute sense of basic historical issues overlooked. What Orr covers is undeniable and important--but is it, cybertechnological causation aside, fundamentally new? Have contemporary fears merely used new stimuli to revive older basic fears that were once attached, say, to supernatural forces or (to reference the Great Fear of the French Revolution) evil landlords? What about the importance of hysteria in the 19th century (a malady which as Orr notes virtually ended in the 20th century and has been historically studied)? (12) Is the history of fear a history of fundamental change--which is what all the recent scholarship one way or another wishes to suggest--or a history of a psychosocial constant which however responds to new factors and emerges in new combinations? Either possibility is significant, but the distinction is vital as well, if we are truly to probe emotions history and through this to understand fundamental aspects of our own age.

In sum: anyone concerned with contemporary society or contemporary American society with some sense of historical perspective has to be deeply interested in the widespread impression that fear is becoming a newly-dominant emotion. Certainly, in a culture deeply devoted to emotional control in areas such as anger, grief or jealousy, fear seems to have escaped standard boundaries, which may well add to its inherently disturbing impact. But there is also, despite the volume of recent work, an invitation to further analysis: to discuss more precisely the process of change against a more definitely established historical baseline and against the proposition that all societies fear; to pursue a more clearly comparative approach, toward sorting out what if anything is American, vs. Western, vs. modern; and to deal more clearly with causation. (13) The division between scholars who attribute change simply to the media, and those who find new fear a response to more fundamental features of contemporary life, has to be mediated by more analytical studies. Quite possibly, media manipulation does increase but only because popular emotional culture has already changed in ways that increase susceptibility.

Finally, there is the question of consequences. Historical research on changes in emotional culture argues for three levels of results, in ascending order of complexity. I would contend that this typology can be applied to recent shifts in fear. First, new standards, and possibly new emotional experience, leads to changes in the way people evaluate their own and others' emotions. In this case, willingness to talk openly of fears, and hesitation to criticize the fears of others as excessive, have both measurably increased in the past half-century, with both personal and political consequences. Second, change should affect relevant policies: as at least suggestive evidence, the contrast between a presidential administration eager to urge that fear should be feared, and one insistent on developing color codes to signal how much fear should be generated, certainly warrants consideration. Media willingness to use fear openly, in contrast to advertising policies through the first two thirds of the 20th century that urged against evoking fear, is another change that both signals and promote a broader emotional evolution. This is the area as well where Glassner and other appropriately probe the policy distortions that result from heightened and arguably mistargeted fears. (14)

Then, as the third type of consequence, some changes in "actual" emotional experience should emerge--with an understanding the evidence here, in past and present alike, is particularly challenging. Not surprisingly, pinpointing change in this category has proved to be a tough assignment, though there are several approaches. Scholars who write about media vulnerability are sometimes a bit vague on how much actual emotion is aroused--as opposed to more purely cognitive confusion--but they imply some shift that then affects reactions. Those dealing with emotion and emotional disorder more directly, and particularly Bourke and Orr, make more explicit claims, though as noted the historical underpinnings need considerable work (including fuller use of established findings on premodern and even 19th-century experience) before we can be fully confident in the conclusions.

But it would be misleading to end on too doubting a note. Recent work is impressive, making an excellent case for significant changes in fear and fear's role from a number of standpoints. The scholarship points as well to the troubling features of these changes, in the quality of personal emotional life and in the impact on political and personal decisions. What also needs discussion, precisely because this scholarly surge is so persuasive, is whether there are possible remedies--whether media can be called to account, whether the fearful features of contemporary life can be somewhat tamed. Here too, in noting that what recent changes can also (in principle) be further changed or redirected, historians should participate in the discussion.

ENDNOTES

1. In interest of full disclosure, I also have a book on fear about to appear--American Fear: the causes and consequences of high anxiety--where I try to deal with some, though not all, of the issues raised in this essay.

2. The main studies are Jean Delumeau, Peche et la peur: la cuplabilisation en Occident entre XIIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1983)--translated as Sin and Fear (New York, 1991); and Peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siecles: une cite assiegee (Paris, 1978).

3. Timothy Kelly and Joseph Kelly, "American Catholics and the Discourse of Fear," in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998), 259-82.

4. G.T.W. Patrick, "The New Optimism," Popular Science Monthly 82 (May, 1913): 492-503; see also Basil King, The Conquest of Fear (New York, 1921). Cited in James Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death (Philadelphia, 1980), who properly notes the link between this new attack on fear and the belief that death could be relegated to old age.

5. Judith Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago, 1998).

6. Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York, 2004).

7. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York, 1999).

8. Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: risk-taking and the morality of low expectations (rev. ed., London, 2002).

9. Joanna Bourke, Fear: a cultural history (Emeryville, CA, 2006).

10. Christophe Lambert, La Societe de la peur (Paris, 2005).

11. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: a genealogy of panic disorder (Durham, NC, 2006).

12. Edward Shorter, "Paralysis: the rise and fall of a 'hysterical' symptom," in P. Stearns, ed., Expanding the Past (New York, 1988), 215-50.

13. The bulk of the references to fear as the dominant modern execution remain western at most, though there are casual global claims. But Muslim scholars, like Tariq Ramadan, have written about pervasive Islamic fear of attacks or belittlement (and of defensive Israel's fear as well). The issue of comparative geographical scope warrants attention, as well as more precisely the kinds and degrees of fear prevalent in different places.

14. Stearns, American Fear.