The Culture of Fear: Book review

The Culture of Fear: 

Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: 

Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, & So Much More

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.] 

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• 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. 

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The 10^th 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.