book review by M.OConnor (original) (raw)
“In the words of Archdeacon R.H.Charles in 1931, science may have ‘exposed many superstitions of the dark ages and laid bare the falsity of the religious and secular magic of the past and present, yet in their stead it has introduced legions of new alarms that beset our lives from the cradle to the grave'” – Fear: A Cultural History by Professor Joanna Bourke [pg5]
In 1862 Duchenne de Boulogne, a pioneering French neurophysiologist, published a book, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. A remarkable study, where he took the face of an old man, anaesthetised, and through electrocution sought to reproduce various emotions. With various muscles contracted, the emotional portrait of fear that he produced and photographed is as striking as it was thought provoking. According to Duchenne the face reflected directly the emotions (thus a wicked face is indicative of a wicked character). At the same time Darwin was putting forth his arguments for evolution and the ‘principles of expression’, and argued that the face of fear had physical attributes beneficial to survival (the eyes open widely with eyebrows raised, enabling the subject to view all around quickly). Professor Joanna Bourke, in her latest book, Fear: A Cultural History, uses this debate as her introduction to a vast subject, pointing out that while the experts could agree on what the face of fear looks like, they didn’t give us any greater understanding of what fear actually is, and what results from it.
One could imagine that the idea for this fascinating study came somehow through an observation of our post 9/11 world, but the inspiration was more historical. “It was supposed to be a history of emotions more generally: fear, anger, hatred, jealously, love, and so on”, eplains Bourke, who is a lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London. “The reason for my interest in the history of emotions grew out of an uneasiness with some of my earlier books, which looked at some of the most traumatic moments in modern history through a distinctly dispassionate eye. I had spent a decade reading the letters and diaries of men and women in or near the front lines in war, and yet had failed to really address the issue of emotion. It was a flaw, I believed, that was shared by most other history books I was reading. Historians love to talk about rationale responses and ‘moral economies’ and causality – and are less comfortable with irrationality, a characteristic often given to emotions.”
The book examines the predominant fears experienced and documented in Britain and the United States (also taking in Ireland and Australia), over the past 150 years. Starting in the 1860s with Duchenne de Boulogne’s experiments and finishing up to date with reflections on the ‘war on terror’, the book is a mine of thought-provoking episodes. The chronological approach has allowed Bourke a perspective to suggest fascinating contrasts between the fears that dominated 19th century society and our own: “In the nineteenth century, – says Bourke, giving an example, – fears relating to imminent death were intimately connected to fears about any possible afterlife and related to anxiety about the accurate diagnosis of death (in other words, leading to premature burial). In contrast, in the contemporary world, we are much more likely to be worried about being wrongly obliged to stay alive (denied the opportunity to ‘die with dignity’). Medical personnel, rather than clerics, increasingly preside over death’s terrors. Current debates about euthanasia and assisted deaths are related to these shifts.”
To what extent can Fear: A Cultural History be seen as a companion piece to her earlier books? “To some degree, the Fear book is a companion piece to An Intimate History of Killing. One of the criticisms I faced when the earlier book came out was that I had placed too much emphasis on the pleasures of wartime killing – the glee, excitement, and sheer exhilaration that many combatants expressed just after brutal slaughter. To some extent, I accepted this criticism – my defence being that a book before An Intimate History of Killing had dealt explicitly with the horrors of war (the title of this earlier book tells it all: Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War). Nevertheless, the Fear book is much more than a ‘companion piece': only three of the eleven chapters are about wartime societies. The Fear book also addresses topics as varied as phobias, fear of God and death, nightmares, children’s worries, sickness, crime, and terrorism.”
When researching for An intimate History of Killing, Bourke found a huge amount of candid material in diaries and letters from men and women involved in the First World War. How much good source primary material, though, is there when dealing with such a complex emotion, an emotion that culturally many people refuse to admit having? How do you find honest accounts when, for example, generations of British men have been taught to keep the stiff upper lip in relation to emotions? “The notion of the British ‘stiff upper lip’ is nonsense, – dismisses Bourke. – They are an emotional people, but show it in different ways, perhaps. The problem with sources was too much, not too little. Emotion is everywhere. Fear is constantly discussed: in letters, diaries, official reports, newspapers, plays, novels, films, Parliamentary papers, memoirs, even statistical compilations (as in the Mass Observation archive in Sussex). The mass of material forced me to identify some of the ‘big fears’ for each period, rather than try to look at every fear (an impossible task). Of course, it does mean that some fears are left out – fear of dentists, for instance – but, in the end, it does mean that readers can trace changes over time in the construction of what makes us afraid, and why.”
Defining Fear
To research the cultural history of an emotion, such as fear, is in many ways a more complex task than that of analysing specific historical events. To begin with, can we be sure that what is termed ‘fear’ by a person in one historical period coincides with what his/her predecessors meant? What is the difference between fear and rage – they often share similar characteristics (think of the trembling hands of someone who is fearful or consumed with rage). These are questions that Bourke is well aware of, and confronts head on: “It is significant what people claimed to ‘fear’ in one period compared with another – and that is what the book does. It is not helpful (in my view) to categorically define what ‘fear’ is at the outset. Evolutionary psychologists like doing this, of course, because they attempt to point to an underlying, essentialist, biological ‘thing’ that is fear. I have never subscribed to this view, and have published an article setting out my response to the essentialist/constructivist dichotomy [see the journal History Workshop, 2003).”
“It is a difficult question, – continues Bourke, – distinguishing between fear and other emotions is uncertain. How does fear differ from dread, consternation, or surprise? Anger, disgust, hatred, and horror all contain elements of fear. Jealousy might be understood as fear of losing one’s partner; guilt might be fear of God’s punishment; shame might be fear of humiliation. It would render a history of fear indomitable if all negative emotional states are classified as ‘really’ being fear states. So, my solution was simply to say that whenever someone in the past used a ‘fear-word’ (ie. frightened, fearful, anxious, terrified etc), they were talking about fear. The important questions were: ‘how was the word ‘fear’ used in cultural contexts?’ and ‘what were the social norms in the expression of fear?'”
One Man’s fear
Fear is a human emotion, but culturally, as one would expect looking through history its definition and acceptance by society has differed depending upon the gender of the person experiencing it. “Gender stereotyping relating to fear (and all emotions), – Bourke points out, – is still firmly in place. One of the discoveries I made in the course of writing the book was that men and women tended to respond in very different ways to the question: ‘tell me about what makes you fearful?’ or ‘what scares you?’. Men were much more liable to respond along the lines ‘I am afraid of” (ie. I am afraid of flying, spiders, death). In contrast, women were much more like to respond along the lines ‘I am afraid for‘(I am afraid for my children, husband, the poor in Africa).”
The way the genders traditionally deal with fear has been different, and illuminating. While researching the physical effects of fear, Bourke found a fascinating study from the Second World War, Psychiatric Casualties in a Women’s Service, that ran counter to traditional stereotypes that suggest men handle fear better: “The women in the Air Force during the Second World War were less liable to suffer from hysterical conversion disorder precisely because they were much more emotionally expressive. Because they showed their fears more openly and talked about them, they had less need to ‘mask’ fear through physical symptoms. As the researcher put it in 1945: ‘the socially acknowledged and permitted emotionalism of women allows for a more direct expression of adaptive and emotional difficulties, and that this renders prolonged and inconvenient physical symptoms superfluous. Men, on the other hand, submit to a sterner social and emotional code. They have, therefore, a greater need to preserve their self-esteem by the development of a more complex disguise or escape mechanism.'”
One particular fear, predominantly experienced by women, will be the subject of Bourke’s next book, a history of rape. ” One section of the Fear book looks at fear of crime and, in particular, the fears most women possess of rape. I was immensely heartened by the resilience of so many rape victims, and the creative ways they employed to ensure that the perpetrator did not ‘win’. I was also struck by the relative absence of serious academic research on rape and rapists. We still know so little about these ‘dangerous Others’. Our ignorance is born of fear. The whole issue of sexual aggression is characterised by a deep anxiety about speaking honestly about the complexities of our own and other peoples’ sexuality. This is not merely ‘political correctness’, but a very valid horror about excusing perpetrators for their abhorrent and traumatising acts.”
“As a result, – she continues, – however, serious discussions tend to be carried out in highly specialised professional journals, frequently associated with penal policy or psychiatric management. The general, intelligent public are exposed to the debates in three main forums. The first is the sensationalising accounts on the front pages of our newspapers. The second source of knowledge concerning rapists resides in popular science. In recent years, this has been dominated by the invidious arguments of evolutionary psychologists, such as R. Thornhill and C. T. Palmer. According to their book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2000), rape is an inherited mechanism that increased our ancestors’ reproductive success. It is an argument that threatens to absolve rapists of responsibility for their actions while simultaneously trivialising the act itself. The final source is a particular strand of 1970s/80s feminist polemic. While feminist research generally is one of the most vibrant and sophisticated strands of analysis, and one that informs all of my work, when examining what must be classed as one of the most important fears experienced by women today – rape – it remains dominated by unfounded accusations against ‘men’, either as rapists, rape-fantasists, or beneficiaries of the rape-culture. Even writers who want to distance themselves from essentialist, male-hostile discourses which insist that the male body is inherently primed to rape, still find it necessary to devote substantial space to the arguments of Sheila Brownmiller or Andrea Dworkin.”
The book is due for publication in 2006, and will, she hopes,”set these rapists in their historical context. It is important that this is a history of rapists in C19-20 Britain, America, and Australia. The emphasis on their history de-naturalises acts of sexual violence and enables us to see competing ways of comprehending and dealing with violent acts. Although the stories told by male and female perpetrators of sexual violence may be painful to read, and often even disgusting and frightening to contemplate, it is still important to hear the rapists speak, to seek out their history, if we are to imagine a world free of unwanted sexual violence.”
Scaremongering – The Media and the use of fear
While Bourke doesn’t devote a specific chapter to examining the media’s role in the creation of either fear or anxiety, it remains a protagonist throughout much of the book. “A proportion of the book, – Bourke agrees, – does address the role of the media in inciting fears, although I often don’t specify that the causal element is ‘the media’ (for instance, in my section on the AIDS panic, the examples of irresponsible stoking up of panic were taken from newspapers). We must remember, though, that the media was not always the main engine of fear-mongering. It really started to do this in a big way after 1885, with Stead’s newspaper story entitled Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which is the first example of a moral panic about child sex abuse being created by newspaper stories.
In the modern period, sensational scaremongering is, of course, ubiquitous, but consumers are not simply blank receptacles for these scare-stories: we believe some and not others. What is interesting is precisely what scare story ‘pushes the button’ of fear. Moral panics about child sexual abuse is one example. There were definite panics about the sexual abuse of children in the 1880s, 1947-54, and 1980s. Yet, journalists published scaremongering stories of children being abused outside of these periods, but the fear did not have much resonance within societies, so there was no wider ‘panic’. In other words, what is interesting is less the sensationalist reporting, but when and why sensationalist reporting is effective in one period and not the other.”
Related to media ‘scaremongering’ was one of the most famous modern outbreaks of panic, that created by the spoof radio broadcast The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles in 1938. Interstingly, though, a similar panic had been created by a BBC radio play by a certain Fr. Knox, broadcast in 1926. Many of the elements were the same, the fake use of a trusted news format and rising panic in the broadcaster’s voice. Its effects were similar as well, creating panic throughout the UK. It seems strange though that it has disappeared from popular memory, in a way that the War of the Worlds episode hasn’t. “I do think that Welles’ radio-induced panic has overshadowed Knox’s one, – agrees Bourke. – After all, in the latter panic, over one million Americans were affected – many more than in 1926. However, there was another reason as well: in 1926, there was a palpable sense of shame. Everyone wanted to forget it as quickly as possible. In contrast, in the USA, although shame was present, in many ways other groups within society used the panic to bolster their own (superior) status. Sociologists got involved, drawing up elaborate theories of crowd psychology. There was a professionalisation of panic in 1938 that simply wasn’t there in 1926.”
The Second Cold War
“[Terrorists] are more daring, they are served by the more terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which, if recklessly unchained, may some day wreak universal destruction” [Fear: A Cultural History Pg 364]
Not a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, educating us on the nature of the new ‘global war on terror’, but rather the observations of a British policeman, in 1889, in reaction to various ‘murderous organisations’ involved in attempted political assasinations. Terrorism may be the focus of a new cold war, as Bourke argues in her book, but it is far from new. Fear of terrorism has been widespread from at least the ’70s onwards. Between 1977 and ’78, as cited in Bourke’s book, 85-90 per cent of the population of the USA and Britain regarded terrorism as a very serious problem.
Amongst the historians that Bourke cites as influences are Eric Hobsbawm (also of Birkbeck College), and the late E. P. Thompson, both historians of international renown who, according to Bourke, “fuse intellectual rigour with political commitment and verve”. Fear: A Cultural History has its fair share of political committment and verve, not shying away from contemporary fears. She points out that, “despite the fact that only seventeen people were killed by terrorists in America between 1980 and 1985, the New York Times published an average of four stories about terrorism each issue. Between 1989 and 1992 only thirty-four Americans were killed by terrorists throughout the world, but over 1300 books were catalogued under the rubric ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorism in American libraries” [pg365].
One of the over-riding effects of September 11th is that it has given a, paradoxically re-assuring, face to this fear. As Bourke puts it: “With the 9/11 attack there was a relief that – finally – the enemy could be defined as an ‘outsider’. It was no longer the CIA (as in the Kennedy conspiracy in 1963) or a crazed American (as in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City), but foreign Islamic ‘fundamentalists‘. Although there was considerable unease with the adroit way these terrorists were able to assimilate into Middle America, the relief of their otherness was clear. The enemy could be identified: he was ‘the Muslim’.”
Notwithstanding the very real and horrific attacks of 9/11, does she think that our culture, that of the industrialised west, requires an enemy? “One of the most interesting responses to fear is scapegoating”, Bourke responds. “In the book, I draw a distinction between two kinds of fear: fear and anxiety. In the first, an enemy is clearly identified and individuals can respond by either fighting or fleeing; in the second case, anxiety is free-floating, an enemy difficult to define. The important thing about this distinction is that in fear states, people tend to huddle together – they form organisations to fight the enemy or they create communities as a form of protection. In contrast, in anxiety states, individuals tend to retreat into private spaces: they feel incapable of communicating or communing with others – they tend to retreat into their homes, for instance, where they watch violent films and dramas which make them even more afraid of the world outside.”
“These responses, – continues Bourke, – have a clear political dimension. In other words, what is a ‘fear’ for one individual or group may be an ‘anxiety’ for another. The distinction between the two states is defined according to the stimulus, but what is an ‘immediate and objective’ threat for one group may simply be an ‘anticipated and subjective’ threat for another group. Indeed, because one common response to threat is scapegoating, it could be argued that the only difference between a ‘fear’ and an ‘anxiety’ is the ability of individuals or groups to believe themselves capable of assessing risk or identifying a (supposed) enemy. Put another way, the difference lies in the ability to externalise threat, thus providing a sense of personal invulnerability. Furthermore the difference between fear and anxiety oscillates wildly. Anxiety is easily converted into fear, and vice versa. The uncertainty of anxiety can be whisked away by processes of naming an enemy (whether a plausible or implausible one), converting anxiety into fear. Scapegoating, for instance, enables a group to convert an anxiety into a fear, thus influencing voting preferences against an ‘outsider’ group.”
The implications of this division between fear and anxiety are not inconsiderable. “If anxiety can be turned into fear, – Bourke explains, – and thus provide an enemy to engage with, fear can, similarly, be converted into anxiety. There have been good historical reasons why certain groups might wish to convert fears into anxieties. The power of particularly institutions and their diverse discourses depended upon it. It is no coincidence that the word ‘anxiety’ became more popular as the twentieth century progressed – in part due to the decline in external threats to the individual’s existence experienced by Britons and Americans in that period, but also because of the conversion of fear into anxiety through the therapeutic revolution. Whereas, in the past, the frightened individual might turn to her community or religious institution for advice and comfort – a process that often involved the delineation of an evil ‘other’ – as the century progressed, the emotion became increasingly individualised, appropriated by the therapist or, in the most isolated fashion, the contemporary ‘self-help’ movement. The modern construction of the unique self as residing ‘within’ the body and accessible to psychotherapeutic confession prioritises the language of anxiety. As a consequence, anxiety may have been higher in late-twentieth century America, because of the greater cultural resonance of therapy in that country but also because a much more entrenched class structure in Britain served to dilute some forms of status anxiety.”
We’ve seen, in particular in the last four years, a harnessing of fear on the part of both the US and UK governments. Would Bourke agree with the contentious suggestion that both countries have a political culture that promotes and harnesses fear, to an extent that most other nations do not? Is there a link between the political culture of fear and power? “I am not sure about whether the UK and USA political culture promotes fear more than other nations – think of Nazi Germany, or North Korea today. However, there is no question that the politics of fear has become a dominant feature of our governments in recent years. It seems to be at the heart of statecraft. Governments need to be wary, though, of using the politics of fear in this way: unless they are willing to employ a great deal of force against their own people (which they are not), the politics of fear is more effective in the short or medium term, rather than long term. Within democratic societies, individuals simply cannot live under the constant oppression of fear.”
原文:http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/a-history-of-fear-professor-joanna-bourke-in-interview/
另附:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/19/highereducation.terrorism