Life As Hazard

Culture of Fear:  Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation
by Frank Furedi
(Cassell, London, 1997, 184 pages, $35)

At the end of the peaceful nineteenth century, Nietszche reacted by exalting the via periculoso, living dangerously.  At the end of the traumatic twentieth century, we observe a retreat to a life of quiescence.  Examples of the world seemingly out of control proliferate:  AIDS, pollution, African genocide, global warming, embryo destruction, sexual abuse, Mad Cow disease, Gulf War syndrome, urban violence, cancers, terrorism ... the list is so long it sometimes seems that every form of human activity nowadays brings with it dreadful risks, that life itself is toxic.

Insecurity haunts many minds.  People withdraw into condominiums where electronic gates keep others from entering, neighbourhoods without neighbours.  AIDS causes fear of intimacy.  Every intimate transaction may contaminate us -- true love comes and goes, but herpes is forever.  Precautionary measures are taken when embarking on any new enterprise.  Trust is replaced by "stranger danger".  Worse than stranger danger is the claim that most crimes are committed by someone close to you.  Some parents in the US buy teddy bears with hidden cameras to catch violent babysitters.

These are primarily worries in our minds;  reality isn't half as bad.  As a result of a failure of nerve, whole communities can be so consumed by anxieties that a kind of hypochondriac society comes into being, where fear is the dominant emotion, and risk avoidance the dominant mode of action.  We struggle to upgrade our status from victim to survivor, from being "at risk" to being "in recovery".

The writer Peter Kocan directed my attention to Frank Furedi's book Culture of Fear (1997) as a seminal work analysing this new "avoidance of risk" syndrome.  Furedi, a UK sociologist and former revolutionary Marxist, begins with the paradox that we have actually never been safer, healthier and wealthier, but never so worried about ourselves and the future.  Today's worries stem not from ignorance, as in the past, but from the explosion of knowledge, as in the field of reproductive technologies.  Our worries are, as Furedi shows, free-floating, and unfocused.  We feel vaguely and chronically in a state of anxiety, and cast around for dire forecasts, such as global warming, to attach our worries to.

We are experiencing today an epidemic not of diseases but of anxiety about them.  Furedi points out that "more and more social problems have become medicalised -- that is, recast as medical problems over which people have little or no control".  Abused people are told that this will be a determining factor for the rest of their lives from which they may never fully recover.  Bad behaviour is now converted into some identifiable medical syndrome, like attention deficit disorder:

Uncertainty about issues, an inability to make decisions or the disappointments associated with setbacks in life are now routinely diagnosed as symptoms of some kind of anxiety disorder.  Such a diagnosis helps make sense of the difficulty that people have in coping.  The generic condition of "can't cope" becomes naturalised.  From this perspective, the attempt to assume a degree of control of one's life becomes a pathetic gesture, for we need help and not independence.

These conditions are then treated by a legion of therapists, carers, counsellors and welfare workers, about whom Furedi comments:  "Although such experts always claim to “empower” their clients, their every action has the effect of reinforcing people's lack of confidence in themselves".

Fortunately, the world isn't as hazardous as it looks.  Lobby groups, NGOs and the media run scare campaigns in which they grossly exaggerate the possibility of coming catastrophes unless we align ourselves to their preferred position.  Those who constantly watch TV believe violence is much more common than it actually is.  We have seen a bombing or a kidnapping every night in Iraq for months now, but we are rarely given the more optimistic overall picture.

Furedi reveals that scare campaigns on matters such as toxic shock syndrome and low sperm counts were widely believed, but later studies countering these extreme claims were barely mentioned.  Mobile telephone use was linked to cancer and low sperm counts -- a double whammy -- in the absence of evidence for either claim.  The flesh-eating Ebola virus deaths in Zaire shocked the world, but many more people died of sleeping sickness and malaria in Zaire during the same period, which went unreported.

Social workers make exaggerated claims about abuse, such as that one in four women have been raped.  This is done by expanding definitions of what constitutes sexual abuse (flirting equals sexual harassment) or by trawling for victims.  Thus the absence of abuse in a particular place will be seen as evidence that the abuse is hidden and secretive, so more resources will be thrown in to ramp up the numbers.  As Furedi comments:  "The possibility that the low rate of detection corresponds to the actual incidence of child abuse is simply not entertained".

A vicious circle of false perceptions can set in -- we retreat to our homes and experience much of life through watching TV, which falsely reinforces the view that there's a big, bad world out there which we best avoid.  This is a closed-circuit life, where everything has got out of proportion.  There is little way left of evaluating reality, or even getting in contact with it.

We have been faced by a barrage of propaganda campaigns in Australia, the latest being on same sex marriages.  In each case, an attempt is made to stampede us into taking up positions against our better judgement.  If we object, we are accused of "moral panic" or "backlash".  The concept of "moral panic" was devised in the 1970s by the left-wing UK sociologist Stanley Cohen, and, though now discredited, is still widely used by progressives as a term of abuse.  They put up an unlikely notion (such that it's OK to create and destroy embryos at will or that Australians have recently committed genocide) and when we object, we are accused of "moral panic".

Furedi takes the view that both Right and Left are prone to panics on topics that they abhor, but go quiet when they agree:  "one person's panic is another one's rational reaction".  A crucial case in England was the Cleveland babies episode in 1987, where social workers removed over a hundred children from their parents, claiming on flimsy evidence they had been sexually abused.  The public protested vigorously against the social workers' actions, and an enquiry found their diagnoses wrong and returned almost all of the children.  As Furedi comments, the social workers said they were the victims of a "moral panic", but the children were plainly the real victims in this episode.

Having low expectations and taking constant insurance against risks not only diminishes community life, but involves high transactions costs.  Terrorism is an example -- enormous sums of unproductive money now have to be spent on making buildings, travel and public figures safe.  Rights-based liberalism adds to the problem -- when you venture outside your well-fortified home and slip while shopping at Coles, you get the urge to sue.  Obsession with precautionary measures ends up in a position of self-loathing -- humanity itself is seen as the all-polluting villain.

In life, accidents do happen, things go wrong, sicknesses occur, every day has its up and downs, so it's pointless to try to insulate ourselves beforehand against all ills.  We can't litigate to ensure happiness.  Some suffering and loss is inevitable, and it's best to come to terms with these experiences rather than to evade them at all costs.  This is not to say that the world is a "vale of tears" to which we should be resigned, but that we aren't fully in control of things.  As Professor Ken Minogue has pointed out:

The technological spirit challenges this position.  Instead of the acceptance preached by religion, it preaches resistance, defiance, problem solving.  Its message is:  Let us guarantee the security of all people:  food, medical help, shelter, consolation by counselling, compensatory payments whenever disaster strikes -- all of these things will save people from bad luck, even the bad luck of having a bad character.

Furedi provides a convincing analysis of the fearful, risk-avoiding syndrome, which he sees as pessimistic, cynical and misanthropic.  As a convert to classical liberalism, he objects to the coercive moralism of both the traditional Right and the trendy Left, both of which exhibit puritanical strains.  But he himself believes that death and suffering have "no intrinsic meaning".  As a result, he is against restraint and an excess of precautionary measures, and in favour of experiment, such as open-ended reproductive technology research.  We can agree with him that we should hold our nerve and go ahead and face modernity with equanimity.  But once we are immersed in it, perhaps we should exercise discrimination and not simply, as he seems to prefer, go along with every new enterprise.