inkbluesky

the old fish house. I don’t have to do much in the way of soul searching self analysis to know why I like pictures like this. They’re relaxing. Shades of blue tend to be calming. The ocean front is one of my favorite places - on occasion I’ll entertain the idea of someday retiring to someplace out west like New Mexico, but I know that it would drive me crazy to be that far from the ocean.

The only thing we have to fear is the ‘culture of fear’ itself

Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an ‘Age of Anxiety’ (1). But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated.

The rise of catchphrases such as the ‘politics of fear’, ‘fear of crime’ and ‘fear of the future’ is testimony to the cultural significance of fear today. Many of us seem to make sense of our experiences through the narrative of fear. Fear is not simply associated with high-profile catastrophic threats such as terrorist attacks, global warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic; rather, as many academics have pointed out, there are also the ‘quiet fears’ of everyday life.

According to Phil Hubbard, in his 2003 essay ‘Fear and loathing at the multiplex: everyday anxiety in the post-industrial city’, ambient fear ’saturates the social spaces of everyday life’ (2). Brian Massumi echoes this view with his concept of ‘low-grade fear’ (3). In recent years, questions about fear and anxiety have been raised in relation to a wide variety of issues: the ascendancy of risk consciousness (4), fear of the urban environment (5), fear of crime (6), fear of the Other (7), the amplification of fear through the media (8), fear as a distinct discourse (9), the impact of fear on law (10), the relationship between fear and politics (11), fear as a ‘culture’ (12), and the question of whether fear constitutes a ‘distinctive cultural form’ (13).

Not all of us, but a good many people seem to thrive on and encourage a culture of fear. If you’re over forty five this isn’t all that new having grown up with the purported threat of nuclear conflict with the old U.S.S.R.. The we seemed to have a certain lull - Vice President Dick Cheney declared that we could afford to cut ten divisions from the military in the nineties. Now, despite the fact that we’re not building bunkers and facing the possibility of a massive nuclear conflagration some people are more afraid and thus more shrill then ever. Fear always drags along hatred in its trail. Someone or something is causing that fear and that someone or something might well exist, but the hate elevates it from something that can be dealt with to something that is massive dark and threatening that only the most extreme reaction can control. Moderation and reason gets trampled in the panic. Which begets more fear and more extreme feelings.