Frank Furedi: The Market in Fear
... In one sense, competing claims about what to fear is not a phenomenon unique to current times. During the Cold War, ideological conflicts were often conducted through the medium of fear. While some politicians argued for expanding arms expenditure by raising alarm about the threat of communism, others demanded disarmament and appealed to the public's fear of nuclear weapons. However, the promotion of competing alarmist claims is very different to the situation in the past.
Fear has lost its relationship to experience. When confronted with a specific threat such as the plague or an act of war, fear can serve as an emotion that guides us in a sensible direction. However, when fear is promoted as promiscuously as it is today, it breeds an unfocused sense of anxiety that can attach itself to anything. In such circumstances fear can disorient and distract us from our very own experiences. That is why fear has acquired connotations that are entirely negative.
It is worth recalling that, historically, fear did not always have negative connotations. The sixteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes regarded fear as essential for the realisation of the individual and of a civilised society. For Hobbes and others, fear constituted a dimension of a reasonable response to new events. Nor does fear always signify a negative emotional response. As late as the nineteenth century, the sentiment of fear was frequently associated with an expression of 'respect' and 'reverence' or 'veneration'. From this standpoint, the act of 'fearing the Lord' could have connotations that were culturally valued and affirmed. Today, by contrast, the act of fearing God is far less consistent with cultural norms. One important reason for this shift is that fearing has tended to become disassociated from any positive attributes.
One of the distinguishing features of fear today is that it appears to have an independent existence. It is frequently cited as a problem that exists in its own right, disassociated from any specific object. Classically, societies associate fear with a clearly formulated threat - the fear of plague or the fear of hunger. In such formulations, the threat was defined as the object of such fears: the problem was death, illness or hunger. Today, we frequently represent the act of fearing as a threat itself. A striking illustration of this development is the fear of crime. Today, fear of crime is conceptualised as a serious problem that is to some extent distinct from the problem of crime. That is why politicians and police forces often appear to be more concerned about reducing the public's fear of crime than reducing crime itself.
Yet the emergence of the fear of crime as a problem in its own right cannot be understood as simply a response to the breakdown of law and order. It is important to note that fear as a discrete stand-alone problem is not confined to the problem of crime. The fear of terrorism is also treated as a problem that is independent of, and distinct from, the actual physical threat faced by people in society. That is why so many of the measures undertaken in the name of fighting terrorism are actually oriented towards managing the public's fear of this phenomenon.
The generalised fear about the health effects of mobile phones has been interpreted as a risk in itself. In Britain, the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones, which was set up in 1999 by the then health minister Tessa Jowell, concluded that public anxiety itself could lead to ill health. The report of this committee noted that such anxieties 'can in themselves affect' the public's wellbeing. In the same way, anxiety about health risks is now considered to be a material consideration in determining planning application. Fear is treated as an independent variable by public bodies.
The legal system has also internalised this trend. In the USA, there is a discernible tendency on the part of courts to compensate fear, even in the absence of a perceptible physical threat. This marks an important departure from the practices of the past, when 'fright' - a reaction to an actual event - was compensated. Now, the fear that something negative could happen is also seen as grounds for making a claim. For example, it has been argued that people who feel anxious about their health because an incinerator is to be sited near their homes ought to be compensated....