The Culture of Fear

"A culture of fear can paralyze our ability to address systematically the evils of poverty, hunger, desperation, and violent aggression in our homes, on our streets, and across the globe, convincing many of us that all efforts are doomed to failure." -Margaret Miles

One of the privileges--and believe me, I know that it is a privilege--of having attended Harvard Divinity School is the ongoing connection that I have to Harvard University and to some of the amazing people there. Having never expected to have that connection to one of the world’s great universities, I have never taken it for granted. I continue to count among my personal blessings the access that I have to Harvard’s incredible resources: its library, its faculty, its alumni/ae benefits, and its continuing education offerings.

I try to take advantage of them whenever I can.

This past June I was reunited with one of my former professors at the Divinity School, Professor Margaret Miles, who in 1985 became the first woman to receive tenure at the Divinity School. (Bet you didn’t think it was that recent.) She was a wonderful lecturer. At the time of my studies, Prof. Miles was teaching a fascinating class on the History of Christian Thought, which I took and have benefited from ever since. Later, she went on to become Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and, I believe, President of that institution.

Prof. Miles was the featured speaker at this year’s Divinity School Alumni/ae Day celebration. In the midst of a raging gale, in a tent set up on the lawn of Andover Hall, she (perhaps appropriately) gave the address from which I have already read to you this morning ["Living Lovingly in a Culture of Fear"], and whose title I am partly stealing. I would happily just read her wonderful talk to you this morning, but since I can’t in good conscience do that, I want to highlight some of the things that she said. The talk was refreshingly optimistic about the possibilities of living and loving positively and of making a difference in the challenging times in which we live.

We know by now, or should, that the ultimate goal of terrorism is to create fear, even if the fear it creates is not completely rational. As long ago as 1986, Rushworth Kidder, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, said that "[Terrorism] consists of an attempt by the weak to gain dominion over the strong. And since its ultimate target is not the victim but the public at large, terrorists seek access to formal or informal channels of communication." The message that the terrorist hopes to communicate through those channels is, of course, fear.

The proliferation of the means of communication and especially the creation of the internet has suddenly made the terrorist’s job of communication a whole lot easier. As Margaret Miles said in her address last June, ". . . There is frequently little correlation between press attention to a danger and its statistical significance. Americans fear the wrong things. That is the point of a culture of fear. Unrealistic fears are substituted for realistic dangers so woven into the fabric of every day life that they appear intractable." Terrorists know this: why don’t we?

Miles points out that "new reasons to fear are constantly discovered. Remember Y2K? Killer bees, razor blades in Halloween candy, killer kids, road rage, anthrax, mad cow disease, computer viruses, homicide rates, and more recently, immigrants, bird flu, and even AIDS: all of these have now largely yielded front-page space to terrorism. . . .

"My point is not that there is no reason to fear," she said, "but that the culture of fear in which we live often takes our attentions and energies away from creatively addressing the problems of American society and the world, encouraging attitudes of helplessness--or worse, aggression."

How intentional is this, we might well ask, and who benefits from it? "The most obvious beneficiaries," Miles says, "are TV stations, news magazines, and news programs, advocacy groups selling memberships, lawyers selling class action lawsuits, and elected officials."

It should really come as no surprise to anyone that politicians and political parties are among the greatest beneficiaries of the culture of fear. Politicians will claim, and recently have claimed, that only they and their particular party can keep us truly safe and secure. Their thinly disguised intention is, of course, to remain in power by keeping the rest of us in a constant state of fear.

(Calling our response to terrorism a "war" is, I believe, just another not-so-accidentally calculated way to keep us all in a state of elevated fear. Meanwhile, we have a real war, but the extent to which it is actually part of a "war against terrorism" remains seriously in question. What seems to be beyond question is that it is creating new terrorists.)

Never mind that you are statistically astronomically more likely to die while driving your car to Market Basket than you are to die in a terrorist attack, or that most of the things you fear in this life are never going to happen. (Miles: Forty-two thousand people in the US died in automobile accidents in 2001. Only 3547 were killed world-wide that same year terrorist in attacks, 3000 of them on 9/11.)

Fear, it turns out, is good for consumption. We buy more, apparently, in the effort to stave it off. But fear isn’t good for us. As Miles says, "Fear is hard on bodies. Anxiety is the number 1 health problem in the country, leading to epidemic depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and prescription drug addiction."

Worse yet, she continues, fear causes violence:

Americans incarcerate at 14 times the rate of Japan, 8 times the rate of France, and 6 times the rate of Canada. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that executions in the United States rose from zero in 1969 to 98 in 1999. On the global level, evidence suggesting that counterterrorism activities provoke more terrorism has not been taken seriously, and many Americans have become willing to accept proposals for pre-emptive strikes. It is startling that the wealthiest society in the world does not feed its needy young, care for the old and the sick, and assist the poor to earn a living wage. In fact, collective neglect of those who are vulnerable is the norm.

Though it is probably true that much if not most of the world lives a lot closer to the edge than we do, the fact remains that life everywhere is inherently unsafe and insecure. Living is dangerous. None of us, as Woody Allen famously said, is going to get out alive. There are no guarantees that any of us will make it through another day, a fact recognized by the Bible’s claim that "Truly, we know not what a day will bring forth." Seemingly, this message should make us more compassionate toward our fellow travelers along the way. That it does not is probably a testament to the degree to which we are distracted by our fears.

A few years before World War II, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt made the famous statement that "You have nothing to fear but fear itself." I believe that those words are truer today than they have ever been. Fear, for all the reasons already mentioned, is not the answer. I happen to favor the response to terrorism given many years ago by a writer in the New Yorker: "a fully effective counter-measure is another, opposite state of mind--courage. . . . The challenge posed for us by terrorism is how, in the face of it, to remain true to our ideals. . . . The requirements of honor are that we value our ideals more highly than our own lives, and act accordingly."

Regrettably, and frighteningly, we have been allowing our fear to erode the very ideals we claim to uphold and even compromising our own civil rights.

I am reminded of Dawna Markova’s post 9/11 poem, and encouraged by it:

I will not die and unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I will choose to inhabit my days,
To allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my insignificance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

For Professor Miles, it is "living lovingly" which provides the surest response to the culture of fear in which we find ourselves, willingly or not, living. And she points out, hopefully, that many people are already doing it, offering examples of Harvard Divinity School graduates who are making a difference, though their work is usually not sensational enough to make the latest headlines. The choice to live lovingly is the heart of her message.

"To see love’s activity," she says, quoting her mentor, St. Augustine, "is to see God":

Love is not a state one falls into passively, as usually represented in American media. It is something we, as individuals and as a society, can actively make. We make love. Love is not, in the words of the twentieth century poet, e.e. cummings, "Words, words, as if all worlds were there." In short, love is not rhetoric, but what Pierre Bordieu called a "practice of everyday life."

The daily practice of love requires that we acknowledge that we live with our uncertainties rather than catering to them. As human beings with limited knowledge and perspectives, we are always uncertain, even about the most crucial matters. We do not know the generously responsible way to address particular situations. We always pursue the common good in the dark by faith, not knowing for sure what it looks like or feels like; sometimes we do not even recognize it when we see it. However, fear that we do not possess certain knowledge of the humanly good must not be allowed to prevent our passionate commitment to it.

I don’t know about you, but I do not consider myself a particularly courageous person, nor even, at times, a particularly loving one. But I truly believe that a courageous and loving response is what is required of each of us in the culture of fear in which we currently find ourselves living, and a refusal to give in to our baser instincts, or to be cowed by the statistically improbable possibility that we shall be victimized, or to give up our ideals, our hopes, and our dreams, or to be led against our better natures. A refusal, that is, to give in to our fears or to be manipulated by others because of them. A refusal to give up on a world which so desperately needs our time, talent and treasure. It is a hopeful sign that there are those out there already doing the important work that needs to be done.

Some years ago, an anonymous poet printed a little book of prayers entitled, Beyond our Fears. I want to close with one of them:

God of windows both lighted
and dark, look in on us who lie awake
with fears which seem only our own.
Lend us courage to look beyond ourselves,
and see that in our humanity
we are never alone.

Remind us by lighted windows
that human beings behind them
live darkly in need of love.

Stand with us
at this dark room’s window,
that it may not mirror our fear,
but make transparent to us
the truth of other lives
that our hearts are thus
strengthened to share.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading, from "Living Lovingly in a Culture of Fear" by Margaret Miles:

Several Western authors have suggested that human beings and societies are actually defined by their love or their fear. This is not a new claim. The fifth-century African, Augustine of Hippo, said, "If you wish to know who a person is, ask what she loves." Centuries later, Sigmund Freud suggested that to understand a person, one must ask what that person fears. Two thousand years before Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted that "fear itself" should be feared for its capacity to undermine human well-being, the author of the New Testament book of 1 John described the relationship of love and fear. "Perfect love," he said, "casts out fear" (1 John 4: 16). Interpreting this text for his congregation, Augustine of Hippo said that God is love and when we love generously, freely, without self-interest, we are God’s body in the world. But, the verse also implies that if love has the power to cast out fear, fear can also disable love.

In order to live lovingly, we must somehow refuse to live in fear in a culture that constantly confronts us with well publicized dangers. Of course, human beings have always had much to fear. Our vulnerable bodies are continually subject to disease and accident. But humans have not always lived in societies in which fear was actively cultivated.