The Culture of Fear (33 page)

Soon after the broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Hadley Cantril, a social psychologist at Princeton, set out to determine why more than a million Americans had been frightened and thousands found themselves “praying, crying, fleeing frantically to escape death from the Martians.” In a book that resulted from his research—
The
Invasion from Mars, first published in 1940—Cantril refuted social scientists of his day who presumed, as one put it, that “as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy” on the rival network. Based on his analysis of the broadcast itself and interviews with people who heard it, Cantril showed that the explanation lay not in a lack of intelligence on the part of listeners but in the acumen of the program’s producers and in social conditions at the time.

The program had a credible feel, Cantril suggested, largely because it featured credible-sounding people professing to report scientific or firsthand information. The character played by Orson Welles, Professor Richard Pierson of the Princeton Observatory, was only one of several with distinguished titles and affiliations. Other professors and scientists spoke as well, and at various points in the drama people identified as secretary of the interior, vice-president of the Red Cross, and commander of a state militia chimed in.

In nearly every episode of fear mongering I discussed in the previous chapters as well, people with fancy titles appeared. Hardly ever were they among the leading figures in their field. Often they were more akin to the authorities in “War of the Worlds”: gifted orators with elevated titles. Arnold Nerenberg and Marty Rimm come immediately to mind. Nerenberg (a.k.a. “America’s road-rage therapist”) is a psychologist quoted uncritically in scores of stories even though his alarming statistics and clinical descriptions have little scientific evidence behind them. Rimm, the college student whom Time glorified in its notorious “cyberporn” issue as the “Principal Investigator” of “a research team,” is almost totally devoid of legitimate credentials.

I have found that for some species of scares—Internet paranoia among them—secondary scholars are standard fixtures. Bona fide experts
easily refute these characters’ contentions, yet they continue to appear nonetheless. Take scares about so-called Internet addiction, a malady ludicrously alleged to afflict millions of people and sometimes cause death. Far and away the most frequently quoted “expert” has been psychologist Kimberly Young, whom journalists dubbed “the world’s first global shrink” (Los Angeles Times). Her “major study” (
Psychology Today
) turns out to have been based on unverifiable reports from a nonscientific sample of people who responded to her postings online. Young’s research was rebutted on basic methodological grounds by scholars within and outside her field. Yet she managed to give Internet addiction a clinical air and tie it to serious afflictions by talking of “a newfound link between Net addiction and depression” (
USA Today
) and offering ill-suited similes. “It’s like when a smoker thinks they can quit anytime they want, but when they try they can’t,” Young told a reporter.
³

Fear mongers make their scares all the more credible by backing up would-be experts’ assertions with testimonials from people the audience will find sympathetic. In “War of the Worlds” those people were actors playing ordinary citizens who said they had seen the Martians, experienced the destruction they wrought, or had a plan for how to survive the attack. In the stories I studied comparable characters appear: victims of Gulf War Syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, and breast implant disorders who testify before congressional panels, juries, and talk show audiences; “seasoned travelers” who express their concerns to reporters at airports after plane crashes; former friends and neighbors of women who have murdered their children.

Professional narrators play an important role too in transforming something implausible into something believable. Cantril observed of “War of the Worlds” that “as the less credible bits of the story begin to enter, the clever dramatist also indicates that he, too, has difficulty in believing what he sees.” When we are informed that a mysterious object is not a meteorite but a spaceship, the reporter declares, “this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed.” Anchors on TV newsmagazines utter similar statements at the beginning or end of scare stories. “It’s frightening,” NBC’s Katie Couric says as she introduces a
report suggesting that “shots designed to protect your children might actually hurt or cripple them.” ABC’s Barbara Walters opines at the conclusion of a report about a woman who falsely accused her father of sexual abuse, “What a terrifying story.”
⁴

 

Statements of alarm by newscasters and glorification of wannabe experts are two telltale tricks of the fear mongers’ trade. In the preceding chapters I pointed out others as well: the use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous.

If journalists would curtail such practices, there would be fewer anxious and misinformed Americans. Ultimately, though, neither the ploys that narrators use nor what Cantril termed “the sheer dramatic excellence” of their presentations fully accounts for why people in 1938 swallowed a tall tale about martians taking over New Jersey or why people today buy into tales about perverts taking over cyberspace, Uzi-toting employees taking over workplaces, heroin dealers taking over middle-class suburbs, and so forth.
⁵

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. In excerpts Cantril presents from his interviews it is clear what the primary anxiety was in his day. Another year would pass before Britain went to war with Germany, and more than three years before the United States finally joined the Allies in World War II. But by late 1939 Hitler and Mussolini were already well on their way to conquering Europe, and less than two weeks after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast Nazi mobs would destroy Jewish synagogues, homes, and shops in what came to be known as
Kristallnacht.

Many Americans were having trouble suppressing their fears of war and at the same time their sense of culpability as their nation declined to intervene while millions of innocent people fell prey to the barbarous Nazi and fascist regimes. For a substantial number of listeners “War of the Worlds” gave expression to those bridled feelings. Some actually rewrote the script in their minds as they listened to the broadcast. In place of martians they substituted human enemies. “I knew it
was some Germans trying to gas us all. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars I just thought he was ignorant and didn’t know that Hitler had sent them all,” one person recalled in an interview in Cantril’s study. Said another, “I felt it might be the Japanese—they are so crafty.”
⁶

Such responses were not the norm, of course. Most listeners envisioned the invaders pretty much as Welles and company described them. Yet this didn’t stop some of them from making revealing connections to real dangers. “I worry terribly about the future of the Jews. Nothing else bothers me as much. I thought this might be another attempt to harm them,” one person said. Reported another: “I was looking forward with some pleasure to the destruction of the entire human race and the end of the world. If we have fascist domination of the world, there is no purpose in living anyway.”
⁷

Flash forward to the 1980s and 1990s and it is not foreign fascists we have to put out of our minds in order to fall asleep at night, even if we do fantasize about hostile forces doing us great harm. (Witness the immediate presumption after the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 that Middle Eastern terrorists were to blame.) Mostly our fears are domestic, and so are the eerie invaders who populate them—killer kids, men of color, monster moms. The stories told about them are, like “War of the Worlds,” oblique expressions of concern about problems that Americans know to be pernicious but have not taken decisive action to quash—problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population.

Will it take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince us that we must join together as a nation and tackle these problems? At the start of the new century it ought to be considerably easier for us to muster our collective will and take decisive action than it was for our own parents and grandparents six decades earlier. This time we do not have to put our own lives or those of our children at risk on battlefields halfway around the globe.

We do have to finance and organize a collective effort, which is never a simple matter, but compared with the wholesale reorientation of the
U.S. economy and government during World War II, the challenge is not overwhelming. Fear mongers have knocked the optimism out of us by stuffing us full of negative presumptions about our fellow citizens and social institutions. But the United States is a wealthy nation. We have the resources to feed, house, educate, insure, and disarm our communities if we resolve to do so.

There should be no mystery about where much of the money and labor can be found—in the culture of fear itself. We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel—which is already safer than other means of transportation—safer still.

We can choose to redirect some of those funds to combat serious dangers that threaten large numbers of people. At election time we can choose candidates that proffer programs rather than scares.
⁸

Or we can go on believing in martian invaders.

And Some Old Ones Updated

I
n the final chapter of this book’s first edition, I asked whether it would take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to shift Americans’ attention away from puffed-up dangers and onto very serious ones we have largely ignored. Not long after the book was published such an event occurred: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of those attacks, what became of the dubious and overblown fears I discussed? How have they fared since 9/11?

In the short term, the response was heartening. In the weeks following the far-too-real horrors of that event, the counterfeit horrors that had occupied much of the popular media almost completely disappeared from public discourse. No longer were TV news programs and newsweeklies obsessed, as they had been just prior to the attacks, with dangers to swimmers from shark attacks and to Washington interns from philandering politicians. Gone were warnings about roller-coaster accidents and coyotes prowling suburban neighborhoods.

Nor did the latest incident of violence in a workplace or school make headlines and provoke pundits to decry the sorry state of America’s youth. Part of the reason for that change was clear: the loss of thousands of lives and the threat of more terrorism utterly overshadowed any such stories. Even producers at local TV news programs and cable news shows could not fail to understand that for some time, stories about bioterrorism, airport security, and hate crimes against Arab-Americans would hold more interest and importance for viewers than the usual fare.

But there was a more important and longer-lived reason that some of the old scare stories did not occupy the news media post-9/11: a powerful and pernicious narrative of the past few decades largely lost its usefulness for fear mongers in the news industry and for the politicians
and pundits they quote—what I dubbed the “sick-society” narrative. In that narrative, the villains are domestic, heroes are hard to find, and the storyline is about the decline of American civilization. That narrative is incompatible with another that came to the fore after the terrorist attacks. The new narrative was about national unity, villains from foreign lands, and the greatness of American society. One result of this new narrative was a shift in the putative dangerousness of certain categories of people and behaviors.

The demise of the sick-society narrative augured especially well for one sector of the U.S. population. Young Americans in their late teens and twenties were portrayed in the media throughout the first decade of this century as heroes in the New York City Fire Department and in the military, or alternatively, as campaigners for world peace. It’s a striking departure from how this age group was characterized in the 1990s—as “seemingly depraved adolescent murderers,” “superpredators,” and teenaged single moms who “breed criminals faster than society can jail them.” Plainly, that old story didn’t fit the celebration of American society and its citizens, or the appeals to young Americans to make wartime sacrifices.

Nor do some of the supposed causes of youth violence fit into the new narrative. Consider, for example, the public discussion of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999, a gruesome incident that occurred between the time I sent the manuscript of this book to the publisher and when it arrived in book-stores. In the national response to Columbine, there was misdirection away from real trends and dangers that confront children and adolescents, like the fact that millions do not have health insurance, are malnourished, and attend deteriorating schools. There was misdirection as well away from the most proximate and verifiable factor in the deaths at Columbine and elsewhere—namely, the ready availability of guns to people who shouldn’t have access to them. A study published in the
Journal
of the American
Medical
Association the same year as the Columbine shootings documented that, even though the number of youth homicides had been declining, guns were responsible for an increasing proportion of the killings.
¹