A Culture of Fear   

A short animated cartoon that's going around on the internet shows a witch sitting beside a large cauldron. Her familiar cat watches as the witch stirs the brew. She adds some ingredients and stirs it some more. She grabs a bat out of the air and adds it to the potion, stirring, stirring. Then a butterfly flutters into the scene. It too goes into the brew. She stirs some more, lifts the ladle to smell the concoction, then holds it out to the cat to taste. The cat licks the ladle and turns into a rat. The witch picks up by its tail and drops into the cauldron. Large letters come on the screen saying, "Don't trust anyone this Halloween."
 
This cartoon reflects one strand of contemporary popular sentiment — very little is really safe. Danger lurks at every corner. The wise person is constantly alert. It matters little that we don't really know what to be alert for. The Justice Department tells us to be wary, but can't tell us what to watch for (just anything suspicious), so if we are to take the warnings seriously, we'll probably have to fall back on stereotypes (what we call racial profiling today). Fear of Russians and East Germans has been replaced by fear of Arabs and Chinese, but those folks are just the latest, the most recent examples in a long line of identified groups who have embodied dread for the rest of us.
 
The phenomenon isn't new. In his film Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore described the relationship between violence, especially violence involving guns, and our national culture of fear. He went to great lengths to show that while Canada has a very high rate of gun ownership, it has a very low rate of violent crime. The United States, on the other hand, has a high rate of gun ownership and a high rate of violent crime The difference between Canadians and Americans on this score seems to be a combination of fear of the unknown and lack of trust in the beneficence of the community and the good will of our neighbor.
Moore drew from the writing of Barry Glassner, a sociologist at USC whose book, A Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, lays the blame for our violence and our high level of fearfulness on the media. The twenty-four hour recycling of news stories, the endless repetition of images of destruction, the tendency to raise any shocking incident to the status of a national emergency, all lead us to think that the world is deteriorating all about us and we can't do anything to stop it.
 
Glassner demonstrates that the stuff of headlines is often a singular example that is contradicted by national trends. The crime rate is actually decreasing, but the reportage of crime is going up. Drug use is declining, but we are told constantly that our society is in ever greater peril from the use of drugs. In the entire history of commercial aviation, fewer people have died in airplane crashes than die in a single year in automobile accidents. Yet it is airplanes we fear to ride in, not cars, and every new airplane crash is treated as though it were a sign of increasing danger in the skies. At the time the book was written, only five people had died anywhere in the United States from causes that might be described as Road Rage, yet the idea of Road Rage has spawned endless commentary which heightened our level of dread.
 
Glassner argues that politicians and the creators of advertizing have learned how to reap benefit from keeping us in a continuous state of anxiety. And indeed, there does seem to be an emotional link between consumerism and fear. If things are out of control, we are likely to do things we can control. If the state of the world makes us feel helpless, we are likely to spend money to do something that gives us a feeling of accomplishment. A cartoon in this week's New Yorker shows a woman telling her friend, "I may not be able to save the world, but I can redecorate my bathroom." When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
 
And who of us doubts that the color coded security alerts coming from the Justice Department have the effect of making us more concerned for maintaining a high level of security in this country, an end that some would say serves the incumbent administration's hopes for re-election. John Kerry, of course, has found a way to use the same fear to his advantage, by coming out strongly against uninspected shipping containers and airline luggage.
 
But I think Glassner is wrong in placing the blame on the media the politicos. These folks use human dread to their advantage, I grant you, but they are simply tapping into ancient human fears, fears that have nothing to do with the contemporary scene. We may no longer fear the wild beast in the night (although countless horror movies show that that fear is not buried very deep), but we do carry around lots of surrogates. Raymond Carver's poem shows us how convoluted our fears can become ("Fear that what I love will prove lethal to the ones I love...Fear of being late and fear of arriving before anyone else.") But he also gets to the bottom of the whole question with his repeated line, "Fear of death."
 
Actually, we all know that eventually we must die. That's a certainty. What we don't know is how or when. We find ourselves living in a curious state of tension, fearing what we know must come to all. The dilemma is as old as human consciousness, which TS Eliot tried to convey with his line, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." I was surprised to find out that the phrase is not Biblical. It certainly has that ring. Fear of death, is our ancient birthright. We deal with it by plastering it over with lesser fears: that I won't be liked, that I will make a mistake, that I'll appear the fool, that I won't make enough money, that I'll suffer some overwhelming loss. In great part, our worries and fears turn on questions of risk and convenience rather than on questions of life and death. These are the fears that the advertisers have learned to appeal to. This panoply of fears may be one of the costs of living in a civilized society. We acquire socially induced neuroses in exchange for the comforts of social intercourse and the safety of gathering in large numbers. Ultimately or anxiety is not due to a local or cultural condition, but to the human condition in disguise. Which is what the great religions have all developed ways to help us through.

The first answer I get from people when I ask how they deal with fear and anxiety is usually, I try to keep busy. Some have confessed to me that they use alcohol to keep their terrors at bay. By keeping busy or by drinking heavily, we can avoid having to think. And by avoiding thought, we can avoid dealing with our dread. It's like whistling a happy tune — we get to deceive ourselves and forget that we are afraid for a few minutes. But those are human responses, not religious responses. They are responses that simply mask the problem. They don't help us deal with it in the long run.
 
Eliot, who started life as a Unitarian, found a need to seek an older tradition, a religion which acknowledged the inability of human beings to overcome our fears and our malaise by ourselves. He became an Anglican and rejected the Midwestern humanism of his early years. He found solace in the love and forgiveness of Christ. Not being able to carry his load alone, he sought a stronger companion on his way to help him with his load. Let go and let God. But that's just one form of religious response.
 
Buddhism teaches that we must deal with the human condition, which the Buddha defined as suffering, by learning to control desire. This does not mean, I hasten to add, settling for a Ford instead of a Lincoln, but ceasing from desiring worldly fame, fortune, and security. Especially security. One well know Buddhist teaching tale speaks of a woman who comes to the Buddha carrying her dead child. She asked Gautama to restore her child to life. He responds that he can only do so if she can bring him a bowl of water from a house in which no one has ever died. The woman visits every house in the village asking if anyone has ever died there. At each house she is told that, indeed, the house has been the scene of death. At length, she understands, death is inevitable and can't be escaped. She returns to the Buddha and thanks him for his gentle teaching.
 
Buddhism asks that we stop wanting the things we are afraid of losing or of never having, that we learn that it isn't really about us. However, when our own world seems to be at stake, it's very hard not to think that it is about us. So Buddhism also teaches compassion, for ourselves in our weakness, and for all others who are caught up in the paradox we call life. We are asked to do for ourselves what Eliot is asking Christ to do. However, Buddhism also provides a long line of teachers, know as Bodhisattvas, who have learned enlightenment and an end to the cycle of rebirth but have refused to enter into nothingness and instead have returned to life on earth to continue the teaching. So even though there is no divine presence to call on, there may well be someone nearby who will gently remind us that we are not alone and that our situation is not unique.
 
Judaism has a complicated response to human fears. In the Psalms, we find detailed and anguished recitals of wrongs suffered, insults endured, wickedness sustained. Yet each Psalm includes a turn, a rather sudden change of voice and attitude, in which the writer, having spelled out his anguish, finds that his relationship with God has renewed. The Prophets, on the other hand, for the most part speak to prosperous and the powerful about the unkept promise to succor the poor, the orphaned, the downtrodden, the widowed, and the alien. The Psalmists seem most concerned with vindication, while the Prophets were concerned with justice. They called Israel to task for backsliding from their duties of reverence and compassion. And they called on God to mend society. In time, however, the Jews came to understand that God had placed that responsibility on their shoulders, that it was their task to mend the world, a responsibility that is known as Tikkun Ha-Olam. Israel was to be the Light unto the Nations, the one to show the way, to call all other nations into accord with the laws of justice and mercy. The Jews found that being God's chosen people was an awesome burden.
 
These are just three of many possible religious responses to our ultimate fear. And what could we say the Unitarian Universalist reaction might be? When we can put our busyness aside and allow our fears to surface, we do have our own religious approach. UUs are not much for looking for protection from some other source, especially a supernatural source. Even when we believe in God or a higher power (and many of us do), we look to that power to change us rather than to change the world. As I survey the writings of UUs around the country who have shared their thoughts, what I find is a strong emphasis on the idea of mastering our fears not by shoving them aside, not by creating barriers to protect ourselves, but by locating the place in ourselves where the fear resides and, like the boy in the story, summoning the will to carry on, to stand tall and carry the fear with us consciously until such time as it no longer has the power to diminish us. In effect, we try to discover the places in ourselves that are vulnerable to manipulation by the marketing experts and the spin doctors, and by bringing them to the surface we deny them power.
 
I love the theory. But I think it's something we have to work hard to grow into, and I'll tell you why. There's a reason Eliot turned to a source beyond himself in spite of his Unitarian upbringing, after all. That existential dread and all its little imps and dreadlings are pretty strong stuff.
 
Looking at my own life, I can recall only a couple of times when I was able to move into my fear and find a resolution. The most striking example was a couple of days before I was scheduled for surgery to remove the cancer on the side of my head. Getting ready for surgery involves a great number of tasks, lots of lists, tests, papers, and appointments — lots of ways to keep busy. There's all the stuff you have to do to get your body ready and the system ready, and then there's the stuff you have to do to get yourself ready. In order to prepare myself emotionally, I had to stop all the busyness and get away alone for a while. I went to IHOP, of all places, sat down at a table, ordered a carafe of coffee, and wrote in my journal for a couple of hours. I wrote about my anxieties and discovered, to my surprise, that I was most concerned, not with dying, but with disfigurement and loss of capacity.
 
Dying didn't bother me very much, because I was pretty sure I wouldn't be aware of it if it happened. Over would be over. What did bother me was the notion that I would have to pass the rest of my life with only one ear — and even that wasn't as great a poser for me as the possibility of facial paralysis, which the informed consent literature warned about, or brain damage while under anaesthetic. Each of those possibilities did feel like a form of living death to me, such a complete change in my understanding of myself that I dreaded considering it. I had to take each possibility apart, examine it, dig down to the feelings, and ask myself whether I could endure having to live like that. I had to name my inner dragons. It wasn't easy and it wasn't fun. I had to consider some pretty dire alterations in my identity. Several times I got up from the table and started to walk out and leave the problems behind.
 
But I kept coming back to the uncomfortable stuff. Eventually the uncomfortable became familiar. I could go to it without anxiety. I remember concluding, after looking hard at all those possibilities, "OK, that's who I'll be from now on." It was like stepping through a door into a new, brightly lighted room. And so I'm grateful to Kathleen Norris for reminding us that fear excites our attention and helps us become aware of other possibilities, maybe even of the presence of the divine in our lives. I felt as though I had entered a new reality, because I had taken the time to acknowledge my fears.
 
Which isn't to say that I wasn't delighted and relieved when I woke in recovery to find that I could speak, that my facial muscles were mostly under my control, and that I could understand the recovery nurse's questions and respond to them. And then I went home and fell into a sub-clinical depression that lasted almost two years, which I take as evidence that, while I may have come to terms with my change in identity intellectually, the emotional resolution was still incomplete. — This is why I think we have to work some in order to grow into our theory of coping with fear. The limbic system has many layers and it will make its impulses known. Overcome fear with resolution, will ya? says our reptilian brain. Deny me my fight or flight? I'll show you, I'll shut you down!

What enabled me to pull out of my depression was the care and attention of several clergy friends, who kept reminding me of who I was beneath the clouds, taking on the role of the gentle teacher who reminded me that I was not alone. Because of that experience, I have added an element to the prevailing UU theory of coping: We need community. Like the folks at AA meetings, we rely on the group to pull us through when we question our own strength. The group doesn't need to act for us, it just needs to be there to remind us that we have the resources to overcome our sorrows, to help us recall that others have been this way before and have recovered, and to show us the way back to vitality.
 
So, how do we cope with the culture of fear? I guess we start by realizing that our fears are internal rather than external, then when we feel one of them tugging at our consciousness, we stop and ask ourselves, why am I feeling like this? (Stopping to ask that question can be very difficult when our response has been some sort of reflexive behavior.) It may even be enough to be able to say, I'm afraid. Having named our emotional state, we acquire a degree of control of it, and we begin to see new possibilities. We open ourselves to growth and change. And then we go on with life, carrying our fear in our awareness until it has ceased to pull. And we keep strong our connections with family, friends, and church, because they care and they carry us.