The Fearful Angels of Our Nature
Michael Shermer A review of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, by Barry Glassner. New York: Basic Books. 276 pp., $25.00 Long before he penned the book that justified laissez faire capitalism, Adam Smith became the first evolutionary psychologist when he observed that “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard.” Yet, by the time he published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Smith realized that human motives are not so pure: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard of their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities, but of their advantage.” Is our regard for others or for ourselves? Are we empathetic or egotistic? We are both, and in this observation lies a clue to why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. We see what happens to others, empathize with their pain, then turn to our own self interest in dreaded anticipation of the same disaster befalling us. The week I wrote this review the television news program 20/20 ran a story about kids who dropped heavy stones off freeway overpasses that smashed through car windows, killing or maiming the passengers within. The producers appealed to the fearful angels of our nature by introducing viewers to the hapless victims with mangled faces and shattered lives, evoking our empathy; they then engaged our self-love with the rhetorical question: “could this happen to you?” According to USC sociologist Barry Glassner, in this gutsy exposé of one of the most widespread delusions of our time—misplaced fear—the proper answer is “it is so unlikely that your time and energy would be better spent worrying about real dangers.” But such qualifications do not make for good television because they assuage our fears, and fear is one of the most important components in the reality-TV ratings’ formula. Glassner demonstrates with precision and clarity in this well-written compendium of what troubles Americans today, that we have built what he appropriately calls a “culture of fear.” Who created this culture? Ultimately we did, by buying into the rumors and hearsay that pass for factual data, but those factoids and reports had to come from somewhere. Follow the money, says Glassner. Who traffics in fear mongering? Politicians do when they win elections by grossly exaggerating (and sometimes outright lying about) crime and drug use percentages under their opponent’s watch. Advocacy groups profit (literally), since nothing drives fund raisers faster than expectation of doom (to be thwarted just in time if the donor’s contribution is beefy enough)—think of conservatives decrying the demise of the family or liberals proclaiming the destruction of the environment. Religions play on our fears by hyping up the doom and gloom of this world to make the next world seem all the more appealing. On May 17, 1999, an evangelical Christian friend of mine insisted that we are in the “end times” because the Bible prophesied an increase in immorality and malfeasance. Since everyone knows crime is an epidemic problem in America that worsens by the year (“just look at the recent Colorado shooting,” he enthused), the end is nigh. I remember the date because it was the same day the FBI released its findings that we are in the midst of the longest decline in crime rates since the bureau began collecting data in 1930. In other words, says Glassner, we are confronted with the paradox of being more fearful than we have ever been at the same time that things have never been so good. “Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story.” And as storytelling animals we spin some dramatic tales of calamity and misfortune. “In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier” yet the “majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth.” Ditto the economy, where “the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster.” In this century alone modern medicine and social hygiene practices and technologies have nearly doubled our life span and improved our health immeasurably, yet Glassner points out that if you tally up the reported disease statistics, out of 266 million Americans, 543 million of us are seriously ill! How can this be? As Benjamin Disraeli quipped: lies, damn lies, and statistics. We may be good storytellers, but we are lousy statisticians. Glassner shows, for example, that women in their 40s believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, but their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. He notes that some “feminists helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two of three teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men” when in reality it “is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked.” The bigger problem here is the law of large numbers, or as my friend Penn Jillette likes to say: “million to one odds happen eight times a day in New York.” In America, million to one odds happen 266 times a day, and of those the most sensational dozen make the evening news, especially if captured on video. Herein lies part of the problem. We are daily fed numbers we cannot comprehend about threats to our security we cannot tolerate. But better safe than sorry, right? Wrong, says Glassner. Pathological fear takes a dramatic toll on our psyches and wallets: “We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel—which is already safer than other means of transportation—safer still.” Of all the institutions feeding our fears, the media takes center stage for sensationalism (the adage is “if it bleeds, it leads”). Glassner cites an Emory University study showing that the leading cause of death in men, heart disease, received the same amount of coverage as the 11th-ranked vector—homicide. Not surprising, drug use, the lowest ranking risk factor associated with serious illness and death, received as much attention as the second-ranked risk factor, poor diet and lack of exercise. From 1990 to 1998, America’s murder rate decreased by 20 percent while the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased by an incredible 600 percent (and this doesn’t count O.J. stories). “The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes.” The long answer is in the details so well documented and presented in this important book, that has the courage to point out that Gulf War Syndrome is a chimera, that television does not cause violence, that Satanic cults are phantasmagorical, that most recovered memories of child abuse are nothing more than false memories planted by bad therapists, that silicon breast implants cause nothing more than metastatic litigation, and even that the drug war is ineffective and that the drug emperor has no clothes. Well, he doesn’t. He’s butt naked and it’s high time someone said it. So as the nation wrings its collective hands in despair over what to do about the Columbine High murders and its media-driven clones, we would be well-advised to remember the law of large numbers, our selective memory of the most egregious events, and that most of our fears are illusory—the vaporous product of a culture of fear of which we are both creators and victims.
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