III. A Brief History of Fear

Origins of Fear – The past

Fear has a survival function, it evolved to protect us. When faced with a physical threat our bodies undergo changes that prepare us to fight or run (the “fight or flight” response). If you recognize a threat before it reaches you, obviously, you are more likely to survive. If you see a snake with yellow and brown stripes and know that it has killed five people, then you recognize that snake as dangerous and avoid it. When we lived in caves with mastodons and other wild beasts roaming outside—we fought them or we ran.

Early humans could not control much of their lives. Life was precarious and insecure for everyone. And besides wild beasts that could be seen, and which could in fact harm you, there were many other things to be afraid of that were not so easy to understand or see, some of which could not possibly harm anyone. The phases of the moon were mysteries, and some people were afraid of a full moon, culminating with maddening connections between the moon and lunacy.¹ A solar eclipse was terrifying. Thunder and lightning could be heard and seen, but not understood. They were frightening. If you lived on a plain near a high snow-covered and impassable mountain, that too could be a source of fear—a border between the known and the unknown.

Other people who spoke a different language might make one afraid; some were dangerous, but some were not. Thus, otherness was born. There were countless things to be afraid of and beliefs and rituals evolved to make sense of these dangers, and to mitigate their effects. Whether these rituals had anything to do with reality did not matter, they helped. If primitive people (which we all were back then) felt that the evil eye could harm them, and developed magical ways to avert its gaze, that was all to the good. The biggest threat of course was death—the only certainty (other than in our day, taxes)—and despite the fact that eventually everyone dies, hundreds of beliefs and rituals have arisen to explain it, and to prolong life, albeit a fretful one.

Again, in the past, there were things one feared for good reason: Medieval cities were attacked by invaders and plundered, highway robbers could and did waylay travelers. Some dangers were seen for what they were—a highway robber was not believed to be the result of a witch, but other dangers lent themselves to such magnified superstitious beliefs.

The witch trials in Northern Europe and America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century resulted in an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people executed as witches, the majority women. Witches (and witchcraft) were blamed for everything from diseases to crop failures and famine, to economic dislocation.² One can argue that this “war on women” pervades many of the inequities visited on them until this day.

Are we so different today? In the highlands of New Guinea, members of the Tifalmin tribe believe that a person’s death is caused by a “bis” sorcerer, an evil person with the power to kill by magic. But a “bis” sorcerer can only kill a person if that person is alone. Therefore, the best way to prevent this from happening is never to be alone.³ And from Maine to California many of us avoid doing much on Friday the 13th, we do not walk under ladders, we cross our fingers and avoid black cats.

In our response to perceived risk and threat, do we not mix our own brand of sorcery and magic, rationality and irrationality? Do we not move back and forth between sensible fears of “real” danger and mild anxiety, between anxiety and phobia, between paranoia and panic? Surely, despite an enviable safety record that makes flying the safest mode of mass transit, the fear of flying falls into this category. However irrational, for some the prospect of hurtling through the sky in a cylindrical tube is a nightmarish death trap scenario despite all the evidence to the contrary. Whereas in the past fear may have kept primitive man alive and driven human adaptation, today it may be modern man’s greatest inner struggle.

Some Societal Responses to Fears

Probably the most common response to large scale threats was akin to closing the barn door after the horses had escaped. If an invasion by another people had taken place, the obvious response was a barrier or wall (The Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line). Walls keep people out but they also keep people in, and can be ways of protecting against invasion of ideas as well as people. The Berlin wall kept East Germans in, but it also tried to keep out the “bad influences” of the West.

Trump’s Wall

Even today, historical walls—real or virtual—are great flashpoints and very likely to be the causes of armed conflict and war. The 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula, which separates North and South Korea, is oxymoronically called a demilitarized zone (DMZ), when in fact it is one of the most fearfully armed places on the planet. Similarly, the Trump administration’s promised wall spanning over 1,000 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, is not likely to make the United States safer, but rather will serve to vilify an important trading partner and its people.

Despite the era of globalization, which appears to be coming up against some severe challenges with the return of economic nationalism, the world is in many ways larger, not smaller. This is so because for every country that “comes in from the cold,” such as Myanmar or Cuba, others slide backwards, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. A more interconnected, but remote world is one that breeds the fear of otherness. This societal polarization is fueled by cultural fears, nativism and a nostalgia for a time and a way of life perceived as lost.

The irrational fear of others manifests itself in some pernicious ways. Erecting many insurmountable yet invisible walls with visa requirements, immigration laws and quotas, income inequality and the chasms that still separate us by race, gender identity, religion and any other discernible differences remain the tools of choice of the fearful.

Origins of fear: The present – The Deeper Contest Between Populism and Pluralism Behind our Current State of Fear

During most of the post-World War II period the principal forces shaping the world were economic. Trade growth, GDP, global integration were among the preoccupations of policy makers, governments and board rooms, interspersed with the occasional conflict or political setback. Today, however, these post-war forces are being pushed aside. Populism, fanned by a combination of urbanization, technological innovation, and the loss of manufacturing jobs, as well as a deep resentment of traditional authority is now in a bitter contest with pluralism. The best place to see this tension is in a few recent ballot box surprises. From Britain’s Brexit, which won in the polls by a narrow margin, to Colombia’s rejection of a hard-fought peace deal with the FARC, to Donald Trump’s surprising persistence as a presidential candidate, followed by his win, voters are increasingly hard to read and emergent forces shaping the world are just as vexing. Historical patterns no longer seem to apply.

Where we used to count on globalization, communication technology and the spread of material and popular culture to bring the world together, these changes are pulling us apart. The rise of populism is a revolt against globalism, against diversity, and against the immigration-fueled melting pot that cities represent. Deeper down it is a revolt against openness—the openness to others, to free trade, and to cultural change. For too many people things happened too fast—they feel left out culturally, left behind economically. They are resentful, and deeper down, afraid.

While it would be naïve to believe that pluralists and burgeoning populists were ever comfortable with each other, there had been at least an implied compact of mutual acceptance, however grudging, between different political and social classes, between urban and rural, between one race and another. But the lid has come off these often-uneasy compromises, the compact has broken down and almost everyone is now aware of the fragility of arrangements we thought once to be lasting, even if they were not robust. Almost all of us now, on all sides, feel that things have been falling apart, and that sense of a fragile and unpredictable world is at the core of our present state of fear, the engine that drives most of our other fears.

The embers of populism have been glowing more and more vigorously around the world for at least a decade now (stoked by the financial crisis of 2008). But populism is not a standard ideological or political movement—indeed it manifests in enough contradictory ways to prevent it fitting into any neat box. Obviously, it is not merely a right-wing phenomenon, as evidenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rise to prominence of Bernie Sanders and his strident supporters, many of whom are calling for radical reform of the social compact. Indeed, it is telling that the oldest candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election enjoyed the support of many young voters who perceive they have the most to lose in the long term. What is clear is that the Trump vs. Clinton contest represented two points of view that were being fed by complex societal changes that crept up on our world over many decades.

Urbanization

In 1950, there were two megacities on the planet, New York and Tokyo, each home to at least 10 million inhabitants. Today there are 37 megacities all over the world, and 301 cities comprise more than half of all global economic output.⁵ By 2025, these same cities are expected to account for two thirds of the world’s GDP. In short, these cities are not only the linchpins of world history, they are themselves the protagonists of yet untold stories of how we thrive or decline in the next century. This trend has not only shifted the balance of global trade and economic output eastward towards emerging markets, it has shifted the character of nation-states making many countries a patchwork of cities, rather than a patchwork of states or counties. This shift has not only changed the course of humanity, giving rise to urban man (homo urbanus), it has also changed the political landscape. Where Europe’s post-war solidarity is fraying under the weight of a migration crisis combined with financial resentment and a return to nationalism, the historically red and blue U.S. electoral map is increasingly the color purple, in no small measure because of the force of cosmopolitan cities dotting the country (two-thirds of the states contain at least one of the 50 largest U.S. cities).⁶

Cities are imperfect places in our turbulent world. What unites them are the common hopes and aspirations of city dwellers, who in large part have forsaken their origins—whether in small towns and villages or other countries—in search of economic and social progress. This inexorable attraction to the city has tilted the balance away from rural life and for the first time in human history the majority of the world’s people live in an urban environment. These environments are inherently plural. The urban dweller cannot easily escape people who are fundamentally different from them, whether in color, economic and political strata, or religious and personal inclinations. At the same time, an urban environment can also be a cauldron of lost hopes and aspirations, which can quickly turn on the elite class who lose touch with the people. Just ask Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis, where the spark that set off the Arab Spring was ignited when Muhamed Bouazizi, an urban street vendor, set himself alight, or deposed Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s erstwhile ruler.

A World-historical Shift in the Nature of Production

The world has moved steadily and inexorably from primary modes of production (extractive industries and agriculture) in which most people were engaged to secondary ones (making and selling things and the management of those functions), to tertiary occupations (services), to today’s mix of tertiary and quaternary modes of production in which the key commodity is knowledge and technological innovation. Urban centers house the highest concentration of these drivers in the new economy, further widening the gap between populism and pluralism.

Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project asserts that a country’s competitiveness is measured by the extent to which its companies can compete in the global economy while simultaneously raising the living standards of the middle class.⁷ If the middle class are the leading actors in this drama, cities are the stage. But the dilemma of our age is that as populism and pluralism join urbanization in the tableau of dominant global forces, raising the living standards of the middle class is no longer a matter of going back to earlier modes of production, but of bringing people forward to the knowledge-based economy. To do that will mean finding creative ways to overcome the deep-seated fears of this very different future.