FEAR

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Just as in a recent column I mourned the death of dialogue, in this one I am laying to rest my campaign for balanced journalism. I understand why people who start out in their youth as radicals end up as deeply conservative; having said the same, obvious things a thousand times to no effect they become resigned to the inevitable. There have been numerous attempts to establish good newspapers and television channels but they have all failed, with the possible exception of family branded television channels but, even then, you can always get some violence at the push of a button.

In a sense which I do not pretend to understand it seems that we all need to be frightened.

We are inconsolable.

We do not want to be told that everything is going to be all right unless we are told this at a time when everything is going wrong. We all know people who are worried because there's nothing to worry about.

Here we are, in an age when we have never been safer, worrying about accidents more than we ever have before. In an age of the greatest ever sexual indulgence we still nurture our post coital tristesse. At a time when there has never been more good news on diet, health, medicine and consequent longevity, our fear of dying apparently intensifies. Where once the three score years and ten was cause for grand celebrations, many of us now try not to celebrate birthdays with a big O. We are strangers to ignorance, suspicious of superstition, sceptical of authority and insured and pensioned up to the actuarial hilt.

I think, incidentally, that I might also abandon my lesser campaign to promote risk literacy because, in writing the previous paragraph I conclude that we are quite deliberately risk illiterate, we want to be frightened and pessimistic.

It is Lucifer's adrenalin, the secular version of the idea of Original Sin. In spite of our brave efforts our existentialism is shallow and usually drug-induced. We are walking wounded, suppurating schadenfreude. All the best songs, even for teenagers, are about unrequited or dying love.

I used to think that this was a terrible state of affairs. Even as recently as last week I became annoyed when the news reported a whole load of things that went wrong but nothing that went right.

Apart from the very necessary democratic precaution that we should be sceptical about the activities of our elected representatives and their officials it seems to me that the real justification for this lies deep in our social psyche. We are not, as a set of races, far from being the butchers of Kosovo or the genocidal maniacs of Kampuchea. Where Hitler trod there were many willing to follow in his footsteps and many others before him who would have done his work if the circumstances and technology had been propitious.

Neither, to meet the simplistic feminist case about male violence, are any of us far from collusion, from sending our menfolk to fight. We know in every fibre of our civilised being that civilisation is skin deep and it is this knowledge that deepens it.

There may not be a knock on the door at 03:00 AM, there will very likely not be a massacre in our city of the proportions of the barbarian sack of Rome, the Frankish sack of Constantinople; there will likely not be another Hiroshima, Leipzig or Coventry in the near future -- but to say that it will not happen to us is not the same as saying that it will not happen at all.

There is touching solidarity, as well as prurience, in our preoccupation with disaster.

This explains why all the great secular enterprises to make us happy have failed miserably. We all know that it is not Freud's sexual guilt nor Marx's industrial alienation that make us sad and we know that if these supposed ills could be cured we would still find something to fear.

Not that our relationship with our fear is uncomplicated -- being human it can't be -- so, we have a love-hate relationship with it, much as we do with diet and dieting; we spend a great deal of our economic and emotional resource on generating fear and another part assuaging it. This, however, is not an exercise in mindless, wasteful contradiction, it is a kind of mental exercise to keep our self image muscular.

There is nothing that we do not do to excess and so being frightened of ourselves and each other is no exception.

I suspect, too, that the less need we have of fear the more likely we are to hype up any pretext. This is why, in the safest, sanest society you have ever seen we look as if we are on the verge of going nuts.

Is there something, perhaps, about longevity itself which drives us to shrinks? Is the fact that we spend so long thinking of the fact that we are going to die having an effect on our collective psyche? Was it better when life was nasty, brutish and short for almost everyone, when we were not entered against our will into a lottery of success and a long life?

Perhaps we are least frightened when we don't have time to think. We are often least frightened when we most need to be. We are biologically and socially conditioned to a degree of bravery we cannot imagine until the point of crisis. It is at the point where we might be severely hurt or might die that we fear it least. That shows what a wonderful species we are.

Like most of us, I cannot imagine being brave -- but I have the severe social disadvantage of being almost fearless which is why I find the media so intolerable, so out of tune with my temperament.

I am equally out of humour with most of what passes for entertainment and I don't like documentaries about cruelty and misery because I presume to know that they exist and know the limits of how I might help. In some way which sets me apart as freakish I cannot understand what drives people to violence. I confess to a residual fear of death by fire which originates in a horribly realistic scene in my childhood of the mad suicide of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre but I like growing old and am ready to die whenever it happens (or at least when I've stopped changing my mind over the hymns for the Requiem Mass) though, like most other people, I would be quite pleased to live for some time yet. Fortunately, it's not my decision.

The one thing none of us could handle would be to know our futures.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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