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December 03, 2005
I've returned to reading Carmen Lawrence's Lectures on Fear and Public Policy. I'm reading the third lecture entitled Fear and Annihilation.
In this lecture she quotes from Ernest Becker's psychologically-orientated Denial of Death (1973), where it is argued that:
"Ours is an age in which fear appears to be a major driving force; the "logic of our times, as one commentator put it, "never mind the evidence, just focus on the possibility"; there is a general tendency to exaggerate worst-case scenarios....Fear has become the dominant currency of modern public life---fear about security, about obesity, about flu pandemics, about paedophiles about flesh eating viruses and so on and so on. We almost expect some dark new apocalypse every day. While fear might begin with the things we fear, "over time, with enough repetition and expanded use, it becomes a way of looking at life."
That is a fair description of the emotional public mood we now live in. I don't know the work of Becker, but he appears to reworking the Nietzschean/Heidegger thesis that a central concern of culture is to prevent a regular awareness of death.
Becker argues that out of a sense of terror at this self-evident and persistent fact, we have structured our reality so as to deny it. The way in which that is accomplished is through what Becker called heroic projects. Becker called these activities the vital lies (myths for Nietzsche) we live by in order to avoid a continuous, overwhelming terror of our predicament of mortality. We need our illusions because our situation is so terrible that without illusions and myths we must go mad. Becker argues that our heroic projects leave us with a sense that we can live eternally through the belief systems of these heroic projects. Such belief systems function as absolute as well as true because they are not open to question.
Until they are undermined by the process of nihilism Nietzsche and Heidegger would add.
Some do find this kind of hermeneutical or existential philosophy nonsense. But let us stay with this existential psychology, which holds that human beings suffer from a primary death anxiety that is, contra Freud's view, irreducible to infantile fears. It states that that our primary death anxiety necessarily and quite literally drives us to distraction. Repression, if not imposed by civilization, would be self-imposed due to our need to deny the body that, in a variety of ways, especially in its anal functions, is a constant reminder of the mortality we cannot face.
Is this to onesided? Too much concentration on the negative?
Lawrence adopts a critical stance to this. She says that when people talk or write about a "war on terrorism, or more bizarrely about a "war on terror" it's not clear what they're actually talking about. Who is the adversary? When will it be over? How do you measure success? How do you decide you have won?
Well, this negative account holds that the world is a meaningless, chaotic realm of disorder, disintegration and death against which human beings need to be protected by illusions of meaning. As Lawrence points out, it is currently argued by governments that the biggest risk to our safety comes from terrorists who might attack us at any moment. This then leads to a panic to do something and so governments act to look like they are providing security. Hence we have the national security state that provides security, meaning and comforting illusions.
Lawrence adds that:
Fear should not dictate policy. While it is a technique that may be useful for incumbent politicians, it is an irrational basis for devising our domestic and foreign policy. Indeed an obsessive focus on a “War on Terror” and the fearful response which flows from it are already seriously distorting public policy. I think we must start from the premise that, horrific as they are, the terrorist acts cannot, by themselves, change societies or undermine our values. While inflicting terrible casualties, they cannot have a sustained impact, unless we act in ways which undermine the integrity of our own institutions and amplify the impact of the terrorist attacks.
My judgement is that the use of fear is being used by the conservatives to create an undemocratic national security state by winding back a liberal society in favour of Leviathan.
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Gary, It is great to see a sitting politician challenge the soporific political correctness of the now dominant "relaxed & comfortable" paradigm that dominates ( or really shuts down) the Oz political & cultural conversation.
The Judd review of Becker was a hoot. Judd being in effect a propaganda outlet for the Pentagon military-industrial complex---the politics & "culture" of fear (or flight from death) made manifest in no uncertain terms.
Judd also being a champion of the inherently selfish anti-"culture" of competitive individualism (which is in its most "advanced" form in the USA)----and pretending to be otherwise.
And all wrapped up and justified in the usual individual & collective self serving jesus/bible nonsense.
And Becker was entirely right about the flight from death being the fundamental impulse that generates our "cultural" strategies both individual & collective. John