Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953
In this bestseller, sociologist Glassner indicts the media on several counts of fear-mongering, and claims that misappropriated fear causes both undue trauma over the feared issue and starves away concern over the real problems.
First, he argues, we are afraid of things that are mostly harmless. Road rage, delinquent kids, single moms, black men, hard drugs, strange illnesses seemingly from breast implants and desert wars, plane crashes, and Martians invading New Jersey (“The War of the Worlds”); all these are of little danger to most anyone. These fears often follow general rules that we can use to ferret them out (page 206-8), but regardless, they inspire worry in many people. The danger of fearing too much, Glassner argues, is that it “knocks the optimism out of us by stuffing us full of negative presumptions about our fellow citizens and social institutions” (page 208). This makes us believe that we cannot solve our real problems, which adds even more to our fear in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Second, and worse, fearing the harmless keeps us from seeing and solving the real problems that plague our society. Often the hyped-up fears are successful, in fact, because they are a stopgap solution, giving us a smaller battle to fight while we ignore the greater war because it has gotten “too big”. Glassner puts it this way: “The success of a scare depends not only on how well it is expressed but also, as I have tried to suggest, on how well it expresses deeper cultural anxieties.” For instance, the War of the Worlds was successful because it tapped into people’s current fears of the Nazis and World War II, which America had so far done nothing about.
What fascinates me about all this is the reasons we feel afraid of things that, statistically, have almost no chance of affecting us. I attended a talk by Glassner and other media experts (or “experts”), and a woman stood up in the middle of the talk to admonish Barry: “You can say all you want to pay attention to statistics, but I live in Manhattan, and we know what fear is there after 9/11.”
It seems that we’re experiencing what Robert Wright called “culture lag” in Nonzero–the idea that society hasn’t learned yet how to deal with the powers new technology affords. For millenia we lived in relatively small communities, with little knowledge of the lives of people outside them. If you heard about a murder, robbery, or plane crash (well, maybe wagon crash) then, it was because it happened close to you. You were well to be afraid then, because your likelihood of becoming the next victim had just increased. But today, thanks to tv and the internet, we hear about and see dozens of murders, robberies, and other dangers daily. Our minds still register that as threatening, because they still believe that what we see is what is physically around us.
This is a good read, if only for the reassurance in the validity of statistics. Everyone’s heard that “you’re more likely to die driving home from the airport than in a plane crash”–but we haven’t heard the other comforting facts as much, like the better odds that children and single mothers have today, and the drop in crime despite increased media coverage of what’s left. And it’s always nice to hear good news again–it’s news of a dying breed.
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