Fear’s not just a factor, it’s a major player

“THIS changes everything, forever,” the media repeated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Perhaps they were right, but not necessarily in ways they had in mind. The most insidious and long-lasting effect of the attacks seems to be the paralyzing and politically corrosive anxiety. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are gone, but fear remains, spreading and intensifying. After two rounds of bombings last month in London, the police killed an electrician on his way to work, fearing he was another suicide bomber. In its summer issue, the normally staid journal Foreign Affairs featured a piece headlined “The Next Pandemic?,” warning that millions may soon die of avian influenza (jumping from chickens to people) and that, unless the world jolts itself into action, doom may loom.

The politics of fear has long since overtaken the threats raised by disease and terrorism. Under these hysterical circumstances, two recent books prudently offer contexts for the anxious atmosphere in which we live.

In “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear,” Marc Siegel, a practicing internist and contributor to The Times’ Health section, tries to reduce the hysteria quotient with a straightforward recitation of facts and statistics. He says that anthrax, severe acute respiratory syndrome, bird flu and Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction have been transformed by exploitative politicians and a pandering media into prompts that raise our anxiety levels much higher than the statistical likelihood of these threats happening.

Siegel notes that obesity, alcohol, smoking and physical inactivity take millions of lives every year, and we hardly worry about them at all. On the other hand, we stockpile Cipro (against anthrax), develop yellow-orange-red alert codes, body-search old women at the airport and perform random bag checks of a few hundred New York subway riders every day (on a system that carries millions to and from work) in response to threats whose most harmful effect is our level of fright. Recalling the famous Orson Welles broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” Siegel tries all too sensibly (and one suspects futilely) to assess risk accurately and respond only to “plausible” threats such as the vulnerability of our container ships or “loose nukes” in former Soviet republics.

Fear, biologically wired in, has been a protective adaptation that has allowed the human species to survive. But today, as Siegel suggests, it is counter-adaptive. Take terrorism. Terrorists are by definition powerless: That is why they resort to terror. They have only the indirect power that comes from manipulating the strength of their enemies. The Sept. 11 perpetrators had only box cutters, but they turned American planes into missiles. They did their dirty work in a single horrendous morning, but we have been busy damaging ourselves for years. By producing a politics of fear in the face of Al Qaeda’s deeds, we scare ourselves into abandoning our ideals and polarizing our politics.

If Siegel’s book aspires to calm us by offering a big-picture point of view, Corey Robin’s “Fear: The History of a Political Idea” manages to scare us by showing that fear is an essential aspect of the liberal ideal our institutions are founded upon -- in fact, the politics of fear from which we suffer today thrives on liberal democracy. (Liberalism, as it is used here, refers to the 19th century ideology of laissez faire, limited government, not to modern progressive liberalism which is what many people may think of when they hear the word “liberal.”) Robin is not engaged in a dull scholastic exercise but is offering a diagnostic tool for understanding today’s political ills.

The politics of fear is hardly new. Robin examines the works of 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes as well as the writings of other thinkers, including Montesquieu, where fear becomes “terror”; Alexis de Tocqueville, where it is sublimated as anxiety; and Hannah Arendt, for whom total terror is modernity’s most fateful gift to the world.

Hobbes is best known for his “Leviathan,” a work of political theory that illuminates fear’s “moral and political dimensions” in broad, convincing strokes. Hobbes shows fear’s role in motivating people to surrender their liberties and place themselves under an overweening authority (which is what the work’s title refers to). It is fear of violent death at the hands of their peers that drives people into this social contract, impelling them to turn over police power to a sovereign.

Hence is born that conundrum in which people seeking to secure their liberty are frightened into surrendering much of it. This formula dominates the social-contract tradition that includes the writings of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and America’s Declaration of Independence, in which Hobbes’ formula that the goal of “Obedience [to government] is protection” reappears as Jefferson’s declaration that governments are instituted among men to secure life, liberty and happiness. In Robin’s powerful dialectical gloss, “the rule of law is not an exception to rule by fear; it is the fulfillment of rule by fear.” Law here is about sanctions and punishment, which keep citizens from one another’s throats.

If fear is an obvious player in Hobbes’ social-contract theory, it is a more subtle and, to Robin, more insidious player in Montesquieu’s political thought. Unlike Hobbes, who wrote during a period of Puritan revolution and monarchical upheaval in Stuart England, Montesquieu’s writings came half a century later in a France far calmer and more stable under Bourbon rule. Yet, Robin insists, Montesquieu also “turned to fear as a foundation for politics.” Robin similarly argues that Tocqueville relied on the idea of fear in his works about the young United States. Robin’s analysis is nuanced and skillful, especially when he examines how Arendt’s 20th century writings moved from an explanation of totalitarianism, in which total terror is crucial to the operation of the state (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”), to a vision in which banality and normalcy engender cruelty and destruction (“Eichmann in Jerusalem”).

Siegel thinks fear today is a response to political and media manipulation; Robin believes our liberal culture behaves very much according to Hobbes’ view of the social contract, and this is part of why we actively seek strong police powers in times of trouble. Robin devotes much attention to Arendt, but one could argue that the modern successor to Hobbes is not Arendt but Judith Shklar or other contemporary liberal thinkers for whom “fear” is an ambiguous concept: For them, fear justifies our desire to be protected by government as well as our deep mistrust of it. Robin gives Shklar some modest attention in his book, but he could have focused more on her and her contemporaries.

In the second half of Robin’s book -- titled “Fear, American Style” -- he leaves behind a history of political philosophy and directly confronts fear’s role in liberalism. “Politically repressive fear,” he argues, “is far more present in the U.S. than we would like to believe.” The book doesn’t address Sept. 11, which figures only as a footnote because it was written earlier. Instead Robin focuses on the era of Joseph McCarthy. From the late 1940s, the Communist witch hunts manifested exactly that kind of panic that Robin says leads to the surrender of liberties in the name of saving them. Public opinion and media pressure secured what the state alone couldn’t -- a reign of fear in which liberty self-destructed.

One of Robin’s most provocative arguments is one of his most compelling: Civil society and its free, pluralistic institutions can be as nefarious as a coercive state force -- more dangerous, in fact, for being informal and commonplace. Pressure from below can be as paralyzing as repression from above. McCarthy got public opinion, civil society and the workplace to do the dirty business of censorship -- foreshadowing what the Bush administration has achieved in the aftermath of Sept. 11 by manipulating culture, religion and the media. Liberalism has learned how to scare itself to death -- it knows too well how to compromise freedom in freedom’s own name.

In what is Robin’s most startling and uncomfortably persuasive claim, the social capital and civil society that Tocqueville and, more recently, public policy expert Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) celebrate can be subverted by fear and repression. Bowling groups, Putnam wrote, can be a recipe for conformity -- and for repression. “Elites and their collaborators,” Robin points out, “also work through pluralist, autonomous institutions of civil society ... where they find a sizable armory of repressive weapons.” Workplace intimidation can be more effective than political coercion, and it creates just as much fear even though it is coming from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Neither in the McCarthy era nor today can the law be said to be repression’s enemy: The truth is that in both eras, Robin writes, “repression succeeded, and the rule of law triumphed.”

In the end, Robin’s book suggests that the politics of fear and the long shadows cast by the Guantanamo Bay detention camps and the Patriot Act’s scope are not simply the result of a government that is out of control or a president who thinks he’s Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” Such fear isn’t even a consequence of what Marc Siegel views as media-induced hysteria. It arises out of liberalism’s own paradoxical nature and attests to the deep ambivalence that we, the children of Hobbes, exhibit in confronting fear -- which is forever both liberty’s nemesis and its chief operating principle.