I first came across
this book by Barry Glassner while visiting friends and noted it
down as one to order on Kindle.
When I finally got my e-copy, I was a bit disappointed to note that
it was written in 1999. While it has an introduction and new final chapter
written in 2010, the bulk of the book and most of the examples come from the
time before 9/11, when it seemed fear ramped up a few notches. Still the
principles in the book hold true and even provide a reminder that the voices of
fear were loud and clear in the 80s and 90s as well, as well as providing
examples that are no longer hot topics.
While Glassner appears to fall on the liberal side of
the political scale, he is not afraid to call both liberals and conservatives to
task for engaging in fearmongering. The book makes its point well, if not too well, giving each example a well-documented chapter.
In his book, Glassner seeks to
answer the question: “Why are Americans
so fearful lately, and why are our fears so often misplaced?”
According to Glassner,
“The short answer … is that immense power
and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with
symbolic substitutes.”
Fear can be used to
arouse voters, attract donations, raise ratings, and sell products or laws that
would protect us all the while making some people rich.
“Every society has an almost infinite quantity
of potential dangers from which to choose. … Dangers get selected for special
emphasis . . . either because they
offend the basic moral principles of the society or because they enable
criticism of disliked groups and institutions.”
One
of Glassner’s main points is that the media or other elements will project fear of one thing because we are
afraid or unable to talk about the real issue – something we do not want to or
cannot face. The media love crime
stories that enable them to cover a “phenomenon
they are having trouble covering in its own right.”
“Consider, for example, the panic over violence against
children. By failing to provide adequate education, nutrition, housing,
parenting, medical services, and child care over the past couple of decades we
have done the nation’s children immense harm. Yet we project our guilt onto a
cavalcade of bogey people—pedophile preschool teachers, preteen mass murderers,”
Glassner
spends chapter after chapter dealing with
“trumped up scares”, pseudo-dangers, which function as sleight of hand does
for a magician to misdirect our attention from something else that is going on.
Examples include
- The Halloween Candy scare which
swept the nation in the 60s and 70s. A serious study done of every reported
case from 1958 showed no serious injuries or deaths, only 2 cases perpetrated
by family members trying to cover up crimes or accidents caused within the
family and not by strangers. [Real
danger: much greater incidence of violence against children from within the
home, not from strangers.]
- Road Rage – 1998, LA Times declared that
the Pacific NW was “plagued by a rise in road rage” but eventually the same
article reveals that there had only been 5 cases in 5 years. Still as the topic
du jour spread in the news, police, authorities were more likely to call things
“road rage” than they would have in the past. [Real
problems: overcrowded highways. Superabundance of guns. Unable to face those
head on, so narrow it down to people in cars with guns.]
- Political correctness. “So rather than engage in honest debate
with campus liberals and progressives, conservatives labeled them “politically
correct.”
- Granny Dumping – “Like other scares about maltreatment of
the elderly, the granny dumping scare played off the younger generations’ guilt
while letting the individual reader or viewer off the hook by focusing on
particularly evil people.”
- Crack Kids, a scare which never materialized. In fact, studies showed crack children did very well if they had good
nutrition and environments. Those who didn’t performed comparably to other
children raised in poverty. “Crack babies in fact served as screens on which
the American public could displace its worries about the youngest generation as
a whole—fears that the young, having been cheated and neglected, would become
‘an unmanageable multitude’ or ‘a lost generation,’ We focused on the crack
baby crisis because, unlike our deeper fears, the crack baby crisis was
contained. It existed only in other people’s neighborhoods, and it could be
solved if only pregnant women would keep away from crack.”
- War on Drugs (declared the nation’s greatest crisis by George Bush, Sr.).
Crack cocaine “the most addictive drug known to man... an epidemic ...”
o
In the 1870s
in San Francisco, 20,000 Chinese laborers were put out of work after the completion
of the transcontinental railroad. Facing a recession, society focused attention
on the dangers of the “opium dens” to provide an excuse to deny Chinese
immigrants jobs.
o
Similarly in the 1980s –“as poverty, homelessness, and
associated urban ills increased noticeably, Presidents Reagan and Bush, along
with much of the electorate, sidestepped the suffering of millions of their
fellow citizens who had been harmed by policies favoring the wealthy. Rather
than face up to their own culpability, they blamed a drug. “Crack is
responsible.”
- Metaphorical
Illnesses – provide an opportunity to criticize powerful societal institutions.
o
Gulf-war
syndrome; supposedly caused by a mysterious microbe soldiers brought back, ”Gulf War Syndrome provided an occasion
for criticizing the Pentagon—something that none of the main participants in
the war had much motivation to do about the war itself.” GWS led people to get
medical tests rather than psychological counseling “even when their stories
make clear that anxiety, fear, and anger are among their symptoms”.
o
Cancer
caused by faulty breast implants – “implants represent the literal embodiment of male oppression.”
Science eventually disproved the claims but Billions were paid out in
settlements. Doctors were paid big money
to testify in court cases.
Statistics
Producers
of TV newsmagazines routinely let emotional accounts trump objective
information. These can then be augmented by statistics that concentrate on percentages
instead of real numbers, which can easily trick the listener.
“When a problem is said to have multiplied it is a good idea
to ask, ‘From what size to what size?’ When advocacy groups use surveys to draw
attention to their causes the reported change…is often from small to slightly
less small.” Glassner cites
an article about the rise of anti-Semitism on campus which was said to have “more than doubled”. If you read
closely, you find that that it went from 54 incidents to 114 incidents –
Double, yes, but hardly a huge amount considering there are 3,600 colleges and
universities in the US.
Even stories that are debunked as false can come back years later.
“A scare can continue long after its
rightful expiration date so long as it has two things going for it: it has to
tap into current cultural anxieties, and it has to have media-savvy advocates
behind it.”
It helps if you can find
a celebrity victim who can become a pseudo expert.
“The success of a scare depends
not only on how well it is expressed but also, as I have tried to suggest, on
how well it expresses deeper cultural anxieties”
Facts are not important when the scare SOUNDS like a logical thing.
Take for example “Teenage Motherhood” as a harbinger of societal decline. (Ignore
the facts that “The teenage birth
rate reached its highest level in the 1950s, not the current era. Indeed,
between 1991 and 1996 the rate declined by nearly 12 percent.”)
The facts show little difference
in outcomes (criminality, dropout rates, drug use) between children of teenage
mothers and children of older mothers when
you factor in their socioeconomic circumstances. “The age at which a woman gives birth appears to be far less
consequential for how her child turns out than are factors such as her level of
income and education, and whether she suffered physical and emotional abuse in
her own youth”
Fears in society can feed off of each other.
“Even as feminists disparage large classes of men, they
themselves are a staple of fear mongering by conservatives.” Liberals fears
feed Conservative fears which feed Liberal fears.
The cost of
dealing with false fears can vastly outweigh what it would cost to deal with real
problems. Attention to Road Rage took money and energy away from the very
real problem of drunk drivers during the 90s.
The media like to report on Air
Safety issues, which have a stellar record in the US. But they ignore things
like work place safety, even though “more than 5,000 Americans died in work-related fatalities each year.
Almost 7 million suffered injuries.”
Why? Because
“news is what happens to editors” and editors fly a lot. So we have weekly
scare stories about Air Safety and none about workplace injuries. So long
before 9/11 Bill Clinton signed a $1 billion bill for airport security.
Without realizing it, our society
pays a “fear tax” and willingly takes on new costs and limits to our freedom to
assuage our fears.
--------------------------------
The
10th anniversary edition of the book has a Final Chapter, written after 9/11
In
the original edition, Glassner had posited that it would take an external
“Pearl Harbor” type event to draw our attention away from the imaginary “puffed
up” fears of the 90s. And then 9/11
happened and his hypothesis was proved somewhat true. The old narrative of the
“sick society” with a lack of heroes, and the decline of American society, was
no longer a useful one. “That narrative is incompatible with another that came
to the fore after the terrorist attacks. The new narrative was about national
unity, villains from foreign lands, and the greatness of American society. One
result of this new narrative was a shift in the putative dangerousness of
certain categories of people and behaviors.”
9/11
led to the use of apocalyptic language: “war on terror”, Weapons of Mass
destruction. Color-coded terror levels always in view (and upgraded based on
information not available to the public but cited as ‘credible and reliable
sources”).
And ten years later, we find ourselves in a world where “the demand for security is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for
which there is no rational counterargument.” (Josef
Joffe, editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, in an op-ed in the Washington
Post)
So
what is the counterpoint to fear?
Glassner does not provide one. Scripture, however, encourages us not to be
caught up in the fears of the world and to counter fear with Faith and Hope.
Isaiah 8:12 “Do not call conspiracy everything this
people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it.”
Psalm 91: 1-6 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most
High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I
will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I
trust.”Surely
he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence.He
will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his
faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.You
will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the
darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.
