It is better to be feared than loved. Machiavelli
The thing I fear most is fear. Michel de Montaigne
In the twentieth century, the idea of human universality rests less on
hope than on fear, less on optimism about the human capacity for good than
on dread of human capacity for evil, less on a vision of man as maker of
history than of man the wolf toward his own kind. Michael Ignatieff
Fear is one of the most basic and motivating of human emotions. Corey
Robin, in his new book Fear: The History of a Political Idea, argues that
fear is the first emotion mentioned in the Bible. Philosophers from Aristotle
to Locke to Burke have seen fear as a motivating force, a means to action,
without which the human populace remains passive and satiated. It can be
a source of human industry or of human misery.
Political fear finds its place in the competing ideas and ideologies of
our time: traditional values in opposition to modernity, religion in opposition
to secularism, freedom in relation to security, globalization in relation
to nationalism, etc. These are arguments that tend to be posed in an either-or
polarity, often representing the Manichean struggle of good versus evil.
Fear often forces societies and its citizens to choose sides and relegates
complexity and ambiguity to the sidelines. Is this political manipulation
or a clash of civilizations on a range of levels?
The Spanish Inquisition...The Rise of the National Socialist Party...The
Red Menace and McCarthyism...The Cold War and its subsequent proxy wars...Desaparecidos...
Kosovo’s Field of Blackbirds...Apartheid...Radio Milles Collines...Bharatiya
Janata Party, Ayodhya and the Babri Masjid Mosque...Darfur.
Has any country gone untouched by the politics of fear? From Argentina
to Bosnia to Burma to Chile to China to Iran to Iraq to Russia to Rwanda
to the United States? The politics of fear has been and is pervasive in
society, from the military juntas of Latin America to Mao’s Cultural
Revolution to the autogenocide in Cambodia to environmental movements to
the media and advertising industries.
Some argue that decades ago, the idea of collective fear had a specific
source: the atom bomb. Today, our shared anxiety has become far more complex
and insidious, arising from tyranny, terrorism, and the invisible power
of the quasi-state.
Are the two prongs of the U.S. anti-terror strategy -- preventive war
and democratization -- at odds? Can fear be used as a democratic weapon
in the fight against terrorism without undermining the values of liberalism?
Benjamin Barber argues that “Terror succeeds in what it promises,
rather than in what it actually achieves, and so turns the effort to defend
against it into its chief tool.” Are patriotism and criticism of
the government mutually exclusive? Has the war on terrorism compromised
the First Amendment?
To what extent, if at all, are citizens or segments of society willing
to sacrifice the rule of law for security? From Italy to Uruguay? From
Russia to the United States? Are fascist states only an early 20th century
phenomenon or could they return? Is there a current trend in South America
toward more authoritarian states? Will totalitarianism re-emerge?
What are the means for countering political fear? How do societies transition
from repressive to democratic governments?