American Fear

The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135916459
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Americans have become excessively fearful, and manipulation through fear has become a significant problem in American society, with real impact on policy. By using data from 9/11, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the exploration of recent fear, but also by developing a historical perspective, the book shows how and why distinctive American fears have emerged over the past several decades.

I

Establishing the Cause for Fear Excess

1

INTRODUCING FEAR

This is a book about American experiences of fear, arguing that national reactions to the dread emotion, both in personal and in public life, have exhibited crucial distinctive features in recent decades. Americans collectively, in other words, show some different responses to broadly comparable fear situations than do counterparts elsewhere. It is also a book about changes in American approaches to fear that have made many Americans more vulnerable to anxieties about fear and have encouraged more agencies to play on these anxieties than was true in the national past. These are big claims, hard to prove fully, but important to consider as we examine one of the dominant emotions in contemporary American public life.

Fear is not, of course, an endlessly variable emotion. Virtually anyone can be made to experience fear. Many societies have demonstrated proclivities to fear—one need only think of the “great fear” that swept over the French countryside in 1789, when peasants believed reports that landlords were about to rob them of their livelihood and reacted violently in response. Or the British fear of invasion by Napoleon that prompted postings of guards to monitor the English Channel, not only at the time, but for decades thereafter in what was clearly an irrational extension of initial emotional response. Contemporary examples abound. In talking about American fear, then, and about the emergence of contemporary versions of American fear, we are not arguing that Americans or their society are entirely unique. At most, current national experience suggests some loading to one end of a normal continuum. The Japanese, with an inevitably low crime-rate, are inordinately afraid of crime and respond with exaggeration (and often, a mistrust of foreigners) when cases do come to light. Chinese citizens take precautions against SARS, for example, in covering light switches with plastic, even though the disease has lapsed.

One of the book’s arguments, in fact, though we won’t belabor these comparisons, is the broad similarity between the contemporary United States and recurrent situations in societies past where fear overcame reason. Many traditional societies, for example, experienced colonial rule as a loss of control—understandably enough—and responded with periodic great fears. In India, rumors of British use of beef or pork fat to grease bullets—though inaccurate—triggered a major panic in the mid1850s. Rumors of British-caused animal disease spread fear again in the 1890s. The United States, though a modern, noncolonial society, has its own fears of loss of control—to foreign threats, but also to a national government many Americans have come to mistrust. Rumors operate in this context as well, though we’ll see that contemporary media often serve a rumorlike role as well. The result is recognizable historically—one of several episodes of a society open to periodic deep fears—but surprising in terms of the American self-image of modern rationality and emotional cool.

Fear is a variable social emotion—often contagious, often affecting group behavior and social policy—but it is often an individual experience. Individuals also encounter fear differently, depending, of course, on the provocation but also on individual temperament. No social generalizations can omit the personal variable. Stephen Crane’s great book on the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, dealt with individuals who had more trouble living up to certain ideals of fear containment than did some of their colleagues. In dealing with contemporary America, we must not discount the many people who handle fear fairly calmly, who display great courage either because of their stolidity or (in another definition of courage) who manage to override real fear when it comes to a crunch. There is no American fear experience that supersedes personality variables. And even people who display considerable fear when presented with remote threats, can rally with real bravery when an actual challenge emerges—another, situational complexity on top of sheer personality. Further, there are doubtless subgroup cultures regarding fear, in what is after all a very diverse society—and we will certainly have to consider some group reactions, including gender reactions, that have long played a role in promoting different formulations where fear is involved.

It’s vital to be clear here. This book does not discount the many Americans who continue to display many forms of courage, including, of course, the military personnel and other frontline people most commonly praised for bravery, but also many others who display courage in other ways—including protesting military action at real threat to their social respectability and personal freedom. We are not even arguing that there are fewer courageous Americans than in the past—though we will note some interesting changes in the ways certain agencies, like the military, handle fear. We do contend, however, that there are also either more fearful Americans than there once were, or that their voices are louder or more sought after and publicly authorized—or both. The point about subcultures and great personality differences remains, along with the insistence on continuing courage in American life; but there is still a collective set of standards and reactions that deserves attention and that does reflect both a certain distinctiveness and some real change from the past.

The book will develop three main strands of recent American fear, showing how they increasingly coalesce from the cold war onward. The first involves a serious reevaluation of personal fear and also the risk, especially but not exclusively in childhood, under the aegis of watchful psychologists and other new-style experts eager to protect innocents from a potentially overwhelming emotion. The second deals with media uses and promotions of fear. The third strand highlights collective reactions to danger, and particularly to foreign threat. Here we deal both with a growing desire for assured safety, for protection against risk—demonstrated among other ways in a distinctive panoply of warnings and precautions—and with notable anxieties about menace from foreign people and foreign places. These strands all developed in a society that was in many ways unprecedentedly secure, with declining rates of disease, with growing assurance against premature mortality. They developed, in other words, in ways that were not entirely rational, save insofar as they reflected a lack of normal experience with fear-inducing situations, an inexperience that could help explain why fear, when actually encountered, was both unfamiliar and deeply resented. The reactions, whether rational or not, were deeply meaningful. Around the three main strands—the approaches to the emotion itself, the media components, and the new trends in collective response—we must also deal with controlled fear in American entertainment—with the titillation of ever-more-daring amusement park rides, ever-more graphic—movies and games, that allow people to display courage in essentially controlled environments; and with health and death fears, and changing patterns of disease and degeneration, that may have promoted anxiety despite the statistical gains in mortality and morbidity. This is an expansive loom, but the threads do interweave and, in the process, explain both widespread American reactions and the temptation to manipulate these reactions among various groups of experts and officials.

A MODEST APPETIZER: THE STRANGE CAREER OF CURIOUS GEORGE

The main strands of this study involve synthesizing the strong American responses to real or imagined foreign threats, beginning with the Red Scare of the 1920s and extending obviously to the cold war and the war on terrorism when it became clear that an isolationist stance provided inadequate protection. We pick up the contemporary aspects of this theme in the following chapter, to begin the difficult task of determining whether any unusual features were involved or whether we’re simply dealing with logical responses to growing global involvement in an obviously messy world. The other strands are less familiar, involving the concomitant reconsideration of fear and risk in other contexts and the role of media guidance in emotional life. Here too, ensuing chapters will provide further analysis. But we begin with a vignette that indicates the strong forces of change involved in this aspect of American emotional standards and that suggests, as well, the potential relationship between personal, even seemingly trivial, changes in the culture of fear and ultimate public response.

Curious George, a reasonably popular book series for young children that began in the late 1940s, was written by immigrants from Germany (H. A. Rey and his wife Margret). The initial stories involve George, an irrepressible monkey, getting into all sorts of terrifying situations: he’s kidnapped, jailed in a dark prison infested with mice, trapped in a helium balloon, falls off a skyscraper and breaks a leg (“he got what he deserved,” a callous bystander remarks) amid other mishaps, all of which he manages to endure with reasonably good spirits after initial fear. The Reys, Jewish refugees (H. A. Rey himself was a German army veteran from World War I), began their writing in Europe and reflected a European sense that children could be exposed to frightening images without damage to their psyches, indeed perhaps with some benefit in terms of thinking about how they would handle fear in real life. But while the initial books in the series sold well enough to maintain publisher interest, the tone was antithetical to the changing culture developing for young American children—where, according to adults at least, fear-producing situations should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible. This impulse had already been amply displayed from the 1930s onward, in the Disney-ed dilutions of traditional folk tales like Cinderella (where the evil stepsisters originally suffered brutal physical punishments), and now it applied to the curious monkey. By the fourth book in the series, issued in 1952, George no longer gets into scary adventures, and he’s surrounded by loving, supportive human beings who carefully supervise his activities so that he won’t encounter trouble. By the fifth book in the series, the Reys actually yielded to psychological and pediatric experts on the publisher’s staff, which further reduced the opportunity for any emotionally challenging adventure. George himself becomes anxious, eager to stay around home for the sake of safety. (Also, the vocabulary was dumbed down, in response to findings that children were not capable of handling many words, but that’s another story.) When anything untoward does occur, George becomes immediately frightened and vows never to court danger again. As his surrogate human father figure intones, “I was scared, and you must have been scared too. I know you will not want to fly a kite again for a long, long time.” Fear still occurs, but obviously it is now irredeemably bad, and sensible people (and humanoid monkeys) will avoid its risk at all costs. And children, as personified by George, are themselves easily frightened, deserving all possible reassurance and protection instead of nonchalance (the dominant motif in the original books of the series) or injunctions toward courage. Fear will occur in childhood—the last George book was designed to reassure children facing hospitalization—but it should be minimized as much as possible, surrounded by maximum reassurance and support—a set of lessons that might teach some children that the emotion was not only unpleasant but undeserved, and that sources of fear should be removed or punished.¹

This new attitude not only differed from traditional European norms but also, as we will see, from earlier American standards as well, where presenting fear situations to children, and particularly to boys, was regarded as normal, character-building fare. The change in approach—which did not, of course, eliminate actual fear in childhood, but rather affected reactions to it by children themselves and by surrounding adults—was based on every good intention, founded on a new idea that children were too fragile to handle fear or to be urged to do so.

OPTIONS FOR FEAR

As we will see in discussing this transition more fully, the new expertise did not exactly deal with long-term consequences of the new approach to fear in terms of adult reactions to the emotion. The proximate goal was protection of children’s psyches. Reigning experts did believe that careful guidance of childhood emotions would produce well-balanced adults, free from the traumas and “festering” caused by poor socialization earlier on. In that vein, they might well believe that handling fear would improve with new-style childhood nurturance, and the argument might well make sense. Certainly, as again we’ll discuss more fully later, stories of fear-soaked childhoods, in which children were not only not sheltered from fear, but exposed to direct uses of fear in discipline, easily induce horrified reactions according to contemporary standards; the resultant adults must have been basket cases.

But what if this calculation is wrong, that at least somewhat more open exposure to fear in childhood actually prepares less frenzied adult response; and that cushioning in the modern American manner—granted all sorts of deliberate and accidental deviations from the norms—makes people less able to cope, more resentful when confronted with fear-inducing situations? A key question, impossible to answer with absolute certainty, but essential to explore as part of the contemporary American fear equation. And not only children are involved; so are their parents, taught to be terribly anxious, fearful even, when thinking about threats not only to their children’s security, but also to their presumed emotional fragility. Soccer moms, it turns out, at least if the 2004 election is any guide, can easily be converted to fearful moms, and the historical shifts in emotional signals may have a lot to do with the conversion. The argument here, on the burdens of overprotectiveness, applies both to the results of socialization and to new tensions on the part of the socializers themselves.

PROBING THE CAUSES OF DISTINCTIVENESS AND CHANGE: BEHAVIORAL HISTORY AND EMOTIONS RESEARCH

While the principal focus of this book is on fear, as an urgent American policy and personal issue, the treatment also serves as an example of behavioral history.² The book argues, in other words, that significant (and probably distinctive) national reactions can be fully understood only through historical analysis. They do not constitute perpetual, inevitable, or purely natural reactions, even given the magnitude of current threats such as terrorism. They emerge from changes, in this case beginning to develop early in the twentieth century when fear itself came up as a new topic and, simultaneously, the nation encountered novel and uncharted foreign entanglements. As the discipline that most explicitly assesses change, while trying to deal with causes and attendant continuities, history has to play a growing role in explaining ourselves to ourselves. Contemporary fear, in my judgment, can illustrate the strengths of this new/old analytical approach superbly.

Not surprisingly, indeed very desirably, fear is beginning to attract various kinds of analysis. Interestingly, a huge surge in emotions research over the past two decades did not highlight fear—there was more interest in anger, seen to be an American problem, or emotions that directly affected family life, like gratitude or lack thereof.³ While fear drew a bit of attention from the budding field of emotions history, here too it was not a major focus and the work that was done was not directly applied to contemporary public life.⁴ From this more public vantage point, a prescient book argued, in 1999, that American fears were heavily misdirected, an argument we will pick up (and credit) at various points in the following pages.⁵ More recently, post–September 11, the political manipulation of fear—or the political advantages of fear, from those who almost welcomed this new emotional focus as an antidote to the selfish materialism of the 1990s—has drawn comment.⁶ Much of this work is useful, in highlighting the Bush administration’s zeal to promote and capitalize on fear, but it generally lacks a wider perspective or any particular focus on more general perceptions and experiences of fear. One book, by political scientist Corey Robin, features a discussion of the role of fear in selective Western political theory, from Hobbes onward, as a springboard for analysis of the use of fear in American race relations and labor disputes, with more sweeping comments on why fear or anxiety have come to figur...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I ESTABLISHING THE CAUSE FOR FEAR EXCESS
• PART II CAUSES AND CONTEXTS
• PART III THE DECISIVE CHANGES: REDEFINING FEAR AND RISK IN LIFE AND IN MEDIA
• PART IV THE EXHAUSTION OF WAR
• PART V CONSEQUENCES AND REMEDIES
• Endnotes
• Index