Most of you reading this piece have not yet reached the age of 70, as I did earlier this year (though some of you will have passed that milestone long ago). You no doubt have a vague set of notions about what it will be like, should you not die prematurely—and, of course, one size does not fit all. Still, it’s safe to say that until you have actually attained that age, or approached it, you will have only a feeble grasp of what scholars like to call the “lived experience.”
For instance? All right: Everything reminds you of something else. The word “digression” becomes close to meaningless; thought simply is digression. (That sounds a bit like a riff on Derrida, which reminds me—but no, not now.)
For at least six months, I’ve been thinking about fear—or, more precisely, thinking about what various people might mean when they talk about “fear.” It’s not that I never thought about this before! But over these months I’ve been thinking about it in a more concentrated way.
I’m aware that this may come across as a po-faced declaration (as if I had in mind one of those 1950s-vintage black-and-white magazine ads for pipe tobacco, featuring a clean-cut professorial type evidently thinking seriously about something). But I want to warn you: If you plunge into this subject, you’ll encounter trails leading everywhere; you may never be seen again, or you may find yourself lumped in with Kennedy assassination freaks, ufologists, and other such lost souls.
Of course, just like you, I know about fear firsthand. If there really are any “fearless” people, I’m the other kind. But “fear” is a slippery notion when deployed as an explanation for Everything. One of the best accounts of fear that I know comes in a book called The Long Shadow of Temperament by Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman:
Of course, those words weren’t “invented,” as suggested here; that’s not how language evolves. But never mind.
If you tell people you are reading and thinking about fear, be prepared to hear quoted, ad nauseam, that perhaps inspiring but undeniably fatuous pronouncement by FDR. As an antidote, I’m reminded of Lee Clarke, who wrote a book a dozen years ago, Worst Cases, arguing that we ought to be worrying a lot more about events that are not likely to occur but that are possible and that would surely be devastating, should they come about—for instance, the threat of asteroids devastatingly striking the planet or the accidental release of chemical weapons from military facilities where our Cold War stockpiles are being destroyed. (I should add that Worst Cases includes one of my all-time favorite sentences, in the form of a quotation from Scott Sagan, an expert on risk assessment: “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”) Clarke wasn’t recommending a perpetual paralyzing anxiety but what you could call a thoughtful fear, one that prods us to plan appropriately for the possibility of terrible things while recognizing that ultimately there are severe limits to what we can control—a humbling realization. Perhaps “fear” can be healthy as well as destructive. Please hold that thought.
Are we living in an “Age of Fear”? Are Americans today more fearful than they were in the 1960s, say? The 1950s? The 1940s? The 1930s? How would we know? (By the way, how long is an “age” nowadays? Ten years? Five years? Two years? Ages aren’t what they used to be.)
One thing we do know for certain: A lot of people are talking about fear. In July in these pages, I reviewed Matthew Kaemingk’s important book Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear. Around the same time, Eerdmans published Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, in which the excellent historian John Fea offered a “short history of evangelical fear” as an explanation for the mess we find ourselves in. In July, Vox critic Alissa Wilkinson (who is on my always-must-read list) posted a piece on the fictional Gileads of Margaret Atwood and Marilynne Robinson. “You’d have to be extraordinarily blind,” Wilkinson wrote, “to not know that fear is a dominant, if not the dominant, feeling in 2018.” (Oh, no. On top of all my other problems, I’m extraordinarily blind!) And then there’s Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House.
Many instances of what we might call the discourse of fear depend on a rhetorical sleight of hand: To describe those you are arguing against as being driven by fear is thought to be effective, even as you are appealing to fear of the outcome should these fearful types get what they want. In his recent remarks on the Trump administration, a critique in many respects persuasive, former president Barack Obama denounced “the politics of fear,” as he had while he himself occupied the White House. Never mind that President Trump’s critics have themselves routinely waxed apocalyptic. Lisa Sharon Harper, a widely respected African-American evangelical speaker, writer, and organizer, tells us that “majority conservative rulings have already whittled back civil rights protections, leaving this generation’s children as vulnerable to a new Jim Crow as my great-grandparents, who fled for their lives from the terror of the Jim Crow South,” a warning clearly intended to inspire fear and dread.
Does such argumentation by fear prove that fear really is pervasive, bone-deep, or does it rather suggest the perceived advantage of employing a particular rhetorical strategy?
Martha Nussbaum’s The Monarchy of Fear is deeper and more subtle than many current accounts of fear, but at the same time (as the title suggests) it is even more sweeping in its assertion of fear’s role in our common life: “It is both chronologically and causally primary, getting its teeth into us very early and then coloring the rest of our lives to a greater or lesser degree.”
Nussbaum, who has taught for many years both in the department of philosophy and the law school of the University of Chicago, has been called America’s most prominent philosopher of public life. Her new book, Nussbaum explains at the outset, was inspired by the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. On election night, she was in Kyoto to accept an award. (The author’s bio inside the back flap of the dust jacket tells us that “the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy . . . is regarded as the most prestigious award available in fields not eligible for a Nobel.” Good to know.) She describes, as many others have done, how, as “the election news kept coming in,” she felt “increasing alarm and then, finally, both grief and a deeper fear, for the country and its people and institutions.” So far, so familiar. But then, she writes, “I was aware that my fear was not balanced or fair-minded, so I was part of the problem that I worried about.” That’s not so common a perspective. This book was the result.
Nussbaum here draws on and expands the argument of her 2004 book, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. That was a full-dress academic work, though clear and readable, as Nussbaum always is. The Monarchy of Fear, by contrast, is much shorter, addressed to a wider range of readers, more conversational in style (occasionally she begins a paragraph by saying “Okay, . . . ”), perhaps drawing on her interactions with students. But at the core of the new book is the claim made in Hiding from Humanity that we humans must learn to overcome our “fear of our animal bodies.” We hide from our humanity when we pretend that we are not fundamentally animals and when we suppress self-knowledge of our mortality. “But this distancing from what Nussbaum regards as the bedrock reality of human existence,” as I wrote in a review back in 2004, “comes at a great cost. It leads me to distance myself from other people who remind me of my vulnerability—indeed, to define myself by my disgust for them. You stink, therefore I am. You are deformed, I am normal.” (It follows, as I wrote back then, that this unmastered fear “may also lead me to accept all kinds of crazy, dangerous notions—the notion, for instance, that there’s a God, and that when I die I’ll go to be with him in eternal bliss.” I’m just not tough enough.)
There’s much to chew on in The Monarchy of Fear, but I would draw your attention in particular to the beginning of Chapter 2, titled “Fear. Early and Powerful.” Here’s how it begins:
This paragraph continues for several more sentences in the same vein. Then the second paragraph begins: “This is the stuff of nightmare.” Indeed. But then, the punchline: It “is also the unremarkable daily life of every human baby.”
I do not exaggerate when I say that over a period of weeks I reread this opening and the following several pages at least 10 times. The words were clear enough, but how were we to understand them? For me it was difficult to believe that Nussbaum (for whose incisive intellect I have great respect) intended us to take this account seriously. As a satire, intended to jab at idealized renderings of infancy, it might be seen as darkly funny, but that reading doesn’t seem to have any purchase here. And so I went back and read those pages again and they seemed as grotesque and ludicrous as they did on first acquaintance. I thought of the infant I currently know best, our youngest grandson George. Did Nussbaum’s version square with my firsthand observation of this 1-year-old? Of course, I couldn’t read George’s mind. Does Nussbaum have that power? Does the road to becoming a Trump voter, and to all manner of other instances of “the monarchy of fear” in our lives, really begin in the nightmarish helplessness of our infant selves, as Nussbaum argues at length?
Maybe, as I warned earlier, thinking too much about fear can be dangerous. But even readers (like me) who are unconvinced by Nussbaum’s account of the origin and extent of fear in our common life can agree with her that at this present moment, as ever, we have a pressing need to nurture and practice hope, faith, and love, as she argues in her concluding chapter. “Christian thought,” Nussbaum writes, “traditionally links these three, and Saint Paul adds that the greatest of the three is love. Martin Luther King Jr. follows Christian teaching by linking the three attitudes, albeit not in a theistic and theological way, but in a this-worldly way that embraces all Americans.” Set aside, for now, the anti-theological reading of King and the dubious assumptions underlying Nussbaum’s phrase “a this-worldly way that embraces all Americans”; let’s focus on the exercise of faith, hope, and love, as Nussbaum encourages us to do, adding this wisdom from Saint Paul: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
