The Culture of Fear (5 page)

Mary Douglas, the eminent anthropologist who devoted much of her career to studying how people interpret risk, pointed out that every society has an almost infinite quantity of potential dangers from which to choose. Societies differ both in the types of dangers they select and the number. Dangers get selected for special emphasis, Douglas showed, either because they offend the basic moral principles of the society or because they enable criticism of disliked groups and institutions. In
Risk and Culture,
a book she wrote with Aaron Wildavsky, the authors give an example from fourteenth-century Europe. Impure water had been a health danger long before that time, but only after it became convenient to accuse Jews of poisoning the wells did people become preoccupied with it.

Or take a more recent institutional example. In the first half of the 1990s U.S. cities spent at least $10 billion to purge asbestos from public schools, even though removing asbestos from buildings posed a greater health hazard than leaving it in place. At a time when about one-third of the nation’s schools were in need of extensive repairs the money might have been spent to renovate dilapidated buildings. But hazards posed by seeping asbestos are morally repugnant. A product that was supposed to protect children from fires might be giving them cancer. By directing our worries and dollars at asbestos we express outrage at technology and industry run afoul.
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From a psychological point of view extreme fear and outrage are of ten projections. 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 bogeypeople—pedophile preschool teachers, preteen mass murderers, and homicidal au pairs, to name only a few.
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When Debbie Nathan, a journalist, and Michael Snedeker, an attorney, researched the evidence behind publicized reports in the 1980s and early 1990s of children being ritually raped and tortured they learned that although seven out of ten Americans believed that satanic cults were committing these atrocities, few of the incidents had actually occurred. At the outset of each ritual-abuse case the children involved claimed they had not been molested. They later changed their tunes at the urging of parents and law enforcement authorities. The ghastly tales of abuse, it turns out, typically came from the parents themselves, usually the mothers, who had convinced themselves they were true. Nathan and Snedeker suggest that some of the mothers had been abused themselves and projected those horrors, which they had trouble facing directly, onto their children. Other mothers, who had not been victimized in those ways, used the figure of ritually abused children as a medium of protest against male dominance more generally. Allegations of children being raped allowed conventional wives and mothers to speak out against men and masculinity without having to fear they would seem unfeminine. “The larger culture,” Nathan and Snedeker note, “still required that women’s complaints about inequality and sexual violence be communicated through the innocent, mortified voice of the child.”

Diverse groups used the ritual-abuse scares to diverse ends. Well-known feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Catharine MacKinnon took up the cause, depicting ritually abused children as living proof of the ravages of patriarchy and the need for fundamental social reform.
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This was far from the only time feminist spokeswomen have mongered fears about sinister breeds of men who exist in nowhere near the high numbers they allege. Another example occurred a few years ago when teen pregnancy was much in the news. Feminists helped popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two out of three teen mothers had been seduced and abandoned by adult men. The true figure is more like one in ten, but some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the bogus stat had been definitively debunked.
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Within public discourse fears proliferate through a process of exchange. It is from crosscurrents of scares and counterscares that the culture of fear swells ever larger. Even as feminists disparage large classes of men, they themselves are a staple of fear mongering by conservatives. To hear conservatives tell it, feminists are not only “anti-child and anti-family” (Arianna Huffington) but through women’s studies programs on college campuses they have fomented an “anti-science and anti-reason movement” (Christina Hoff Sommers).
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Conservatives also like to spread fears about liberals, who respond in kind. Among other pet scares, they accuse liberals of creating “children without consciences” by keeping prayer out of schools—to which liberals rejoin with warnings that right-wing extremists intend to turn youngsters into Christian soldiers.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.” Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: “People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.” That principle, which guided the late president’s political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well.
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The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes. This book provides the longer answer by identifying the actual vendors of our fears, their marketing methods, and incentives the rest of us must buy into.

How Fears Are Sold

S
tart with silly scares, the kind that would be laughable were they not advanced with utter seriousness by influential organizations, politicians, and news media. Promoted by the same means as other fears—and often to the same ends—they afford a comfortable entry point into the fear mongers’ bag of tricks. It becomes easier to recognize how we are bamboozled about serious concerns, having seen the same techniques at work in the promotion of frivolous dangers.

“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” said the ultimate master of terror, Alfred Hitchcock. Fear mongers regularly put his wisdom to use by depicting would-be perils as imminent disasters. “They’re all around you, everywhere you drive, waiting to explode,” exclaimed an announcer at the beginning of ABC’s newsmagazine “20/20” in 1996, devoted to what he called ”a growing American danger—road rage.” Hugh Downs, the program’s coanchor, continued the ruse. Eliciting viewers’ everyday experiences, he recast them as portentous. “How many times have you been bullied on the road, honked at or tailed, cursed at by another driver? Maybe you’ve done this yourself. Well, tonight, you will see again where this kind of aggression can lead,” said Downs, insinuating that viewers had already anticipated what Tom Jarriel, the reporter whose story he then introduced, was about to detail.
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A seemingly innocuous beep of the car horn can lead, Jarriel said, to “anger so explosive it pushes people over the edge: fist fights, even shootings, between perfect strangers.” Out in the real world, people honk their horns all the time without getting socked or shot, but in the
fluid logic of Jarriel’s narrative stark imagery and atypical anecdotes eclipsed reality. “It happens without warning to ordinary people,” Jarriel said, and to prove the point, he interviewed a man who was shot in the face after cutting someone off on a highway.

Oprah Winfrey, in a program on road rage in 1997, used the same approach. First she transmuted familiar occurrences into a huge new danger. “We’ve all been there. It starts out with the tap of the horn, an angry gesture, a dirty look ... ,” she declared. Then she proceeded to recount a few actual incidents in which the outcome was a shooting or fistfight. That expressions of annoyance almost never intensify to a shooting or fight was beside the point. “This is a show that affects so many people,” she said, and then cleverly produced an impressive but ultimately meaningless number. “This woman’s biggest offense was pulling out of her driveway ... countless millions of you have done that,” she said in the course of introducing someone who had been attacked by another driver.
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Journalists in the print media used a slightly different tactic. Call it the foreshadowing anecdote. After relaying the gory details of a particular instance of highway violence, they asserted that the given example “raises the overarching question of road anarchy”
(Time)
or represents “just the latest case of ‘road rage’ to gain national attention”
(USA Today).
A page-one story in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1998 declared that “road rage has become an exploding phenomenon across the country” and depicted the Pacific Northwest as a region particularly “plagued by a rise in road rage.” Only after wading through twenty-two paragraphs of alarming first-person accounts and warnings from authorities did the reader learn that a grand total of five drivers and passengers had died in road rage incidents in the region over the previous five years.
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An average of one death a year constitutes a plague? The only other statistical evidence the reporter managed to muster was from a study released in 1997 by the American Automobile Association. Cited habitually in stories about road rage, the AAA study afforded reporters an opportunity to declare that incidents of road rage had “been rising 7% a year”
(Los Angeles Times),
or as
People
magazine put it, “more than 50 percent since 1990.” I found only one article that put the AAA’s findings
in proper perspective: a piece in U.S.
News & World Report
noted that, of approximately 250,000 people killed on roadways between 1990 and 1997, the AAA attributed 218 deaths, or less than one in a thousand, directly to angry drivers. And of the 20 million motorists injured during that period the AAA attributed less than 1 percent of those injuries to aggressive driving.
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Big percentages do not necessarily have big numbers behind them. The dramatic “up more than 50%” statistic in the AAA study derived from the difference between two relatively modest figures: the number of traffic incidents that involved major violence in 1990 (1,129) compared to 1996 (1,800). An increase of 671 incidents in fifty states over seven years is hardly “a growing epidemic”
(USA Today’s
description of road rage). Nor does it warrant the thousands of stories about road rage that appeared in print and on radio and television—coverage that helped produce the 671 figure in the first place. The AAA derived their estimates from newspaper, police, and insurance reports, all of which are influenced by hype. The more talk there is about road rage, the more likely are newspaper reporters, police officers, and insurance agents to classify as examples of it incidents that they would have ignored altogether or catalogued differently in the past.
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Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the Pygmalion effect, in deference to George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw’s
Pygmalion,
Liza comes to appreciate that, as she puts it to Colonel Pickering, “the difference between a flower girl and a lady is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.” Posits Liza, during an exchange with the Colonel, “I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”
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In the late 1990s police and reporters treated all variety of highway mishaps as road rage. One evening in 1998 the lead image on local news shows in Los Angeles was a car that had been sliced in half by a truck on a freeway. The fatal accident had been caused by the driver going up an exit ramp in the wrong direction, but reporters and highway patrol officers labeled it “another case of road rage.” Their justification? Witnesses reported the driver had been tailgating a van just
moments earlier. At the time she drove up the exit ramp and into oncoming traffic she was neither a perpetrator nor victim of road rage, but because she may have acted aggressively in the recent past the incident could be counted as road rage.
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A few days after that incident, when an off-duty prison guard was shot dead on a freeway ramp, police and reporters described the event as “a random act of violence, like other examples of so-called road rage violence plaguing the nation’s motorists”
(Los Angeles Times).
This time too the characterization was unfounded. The victim’s husband, who had been driving the car, let police know immediately after the event that it was neither random nor an instance of road rage. According to his account, their assailants had followed them from a shopping mall, forced them to pull off the road, and stolen money. It was when his wife pulled out her state corrections officer badge, the husband reported, that they shot her. Police later suspected the husband himself in the murder, but never was road rage a likely hypothesis.
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Stories about road rage left little doubt as to what, or rather who, was responsible—vicious strangers. Over the past decade or so police and reporters had warned of disparate new categories of creeps out to get us—home invasion robbers, carjackers, child nabbers, deranged postal workers. Now they were issuing an even broader warning. Everywhere we go are “strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move,” the announcer on “20/20” cautioned. Indeed, Tom Jarriel went on to suggest, “the most disturbing aspect of the growing trend toward roadway violence is that we can’t choose who we drive with on the highways.“
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