Beware of Manufactured Fears

By James Grant on December 22, 2009 7:44 AM

Plane crashes, road rage, child abductions, unwed mothers, teenage promiscuity and more.

When USC sociologist Barry Glassner looked at the American decade of the 1990s, he saw a society reeling from one scare to another — and usually for no reason.

The truth, as Glassner pointed out, is that American children are more likely to be struck and killed by lightning than shot in school by alienated teenagers or “taken out” by terrorists. Despite occasional catastrophic failures, air travel is still far less risky than automobile travel. And most unwed mothers are simply members of the underclass — not part of a liberal conspiracy against the institution of marriage.

“[In the 1990s] police and reporters had warned of disparate new categories of creeps out to get us — home invasion robbers, carjackers, child nabbers, deranged postal workers,” Glassner wrote. “In just about every contemporary American scare, rather than confront disturbing shortcomings in society, the public discussion centers on disturbed individuals.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Glassner writes in the new edition of The Culture of Fear, the basic narrative of fear in America quickly shifted from “there are monsters among us” to “foreign terrorists want to destroy us.”

“In the first weeks after 9/11, the homegrown scares of the previous three decades about crime, teenagers, drugs, metaphorical illnesses and the like seemed trivial, obsolete, beside the point. The nation’s collective fear sensibly coalesced against a hard target: Osama bin Laden and his organization, al Qaeda.”

But as the attacks receded in the public’s memory, the first decade of the 21st century has seen a return to faux mass hysteria, Glassner said — not the least of which has been caused by politicians’ cynical manipulation regarding the fear of terrorism.

Beyond the two ground wars launched and the global war on terror, Americans still do not seem to have a balanced perspective on what to be worried — or not worried — about, he said.

Take the case of the advocacy groups who have managed to repeatedly raise the false fear that vaccines in small children cause autism. Years after a supposed link between the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine and autism had repeatedly been debunked by scientists in the United States and elsewhere, advocacy groups continue to organize public challenges.

“The vaccine scare underscores a fundamental if regrettable reality about metaphoric illnesses, and more generally, about the persistence of fear in American society. 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,” Glassner said.

So, are we living in exceptionally dangerous times?

In his book, Glassner demonstrates that it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk.

He exposes the people and organizations that manipulate our perceptions and profit from our fears, including advocacy groups that raise money by exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases and politicians who win elections by heightening concerns about crime, drug use and terrorism.

TAGS: books, humanities

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