The people of the west in the twentyfirst century are by and large the best fed, least disease prone, and longest lived population the world has ever known, and they seem likely to remain this way as long as global warming or a shortage of oil do not drastically affect their lifestyle. We have only one chance in over 15000 of being murdered in any year, and one chance in 500 of dying of cancer. Unless we’ve been posted to Iraq our chance of being killed by terrorists in unimaginably smaller than this. So why is there so much anxiety?
It can’t have always been like this. I remember walking to and from school every day from the age of five or six. Today less than one child in six in the US has this opportunity. Between 1990 and 2000 US homeowners spent $42 billion on electronic security systems. Perhaps my memory has rose tinted glasses, but most people where I grew up left their back door unlocked so the neighbours could come in and out without having to knock. The rate of crime has only increased marginally in five decades, however.
This has crept up on us all over thirty or forty years. Not exactly fear, more like a miasma of generalised anxiety. Like the traffic noise or the hum of the electric lights, it’s just below the level of consciousness, but it affects us just the same. For that matter I spent some time wondering whether noise pollution or radio frequency e-m hum might be the cause, but I think I’ve come up with some better ideas.
The most basic, and perhaps most important influence is the weakening of community. Seventy years ago my mother grew up to a refrain of “what will the neighbours think?” I can’t imagine anything more stifling, but you knew that if you got into difficulty they were going to help you out, too. Traditional western society had no such thing as Social Security, but it didn’t need it because people naturally helped one another through hard times, and the church handed around the collection plate. Maybe it wasn’t quite as easy as that, but it was only when the big landowners began hiring itinerant labourers to work their land rather than relying on the tenant farmers that people began to refuse help and travellers became vagrants. Even when my mother was young, you could depend on your neighbours and your family in a way most city dwellers couldn’t dream of nowadays.
While we’re talking history, most of our grandparents went through the depression and the second world war, and I get the impression that if you made it through those two you had the attitude that there wasn’t a lot of things that were going to stop you. I think the sedentary work most of us do is no help either. Not having the strength and fitness of the past makes us less physically confident, which has a psychological effect that’s compounded by unfulfilling work within monolithic company structures. We work long hours in stressful situations, have long commutes, lack sleep, and all on a treadmill of aspirations which can’t quite be met.
My dad couldn’t play tennis until he was in his twenties, because his parents couldn’t afford a racquet. They were proud because he was the first one in the family to go to University. These things sound absurd fifty-odd years later, not because we might not struggle to send a child to college but because we don’t feel that we should have to struggle to do so. In terms of justice we’re right: the nation is so much wealthier that were that wealth distributed as evenly as it was in the 1950′s no one would go without a tennis racquet to afford tuition. But it’s the expectations which have really changed. I heard someone say the other day that she “only just got by on her teacher’s salary, and in fact may not be able to make it back to Italy again next year.”
Lack of community, lack of confidence, stressful sedentary jobs, unreasonable aspirations; I’ve left out the biggest cause of anxiety, the media and politicians. For various reasons I rarely watch the commercial news and current affairs programs (what in the US would be called the Network news), but if I did I’m not sure I’d sleep well at night. The three lead stories, unless there’s a terrorist attack in a foreign country or a celebrity had a clothing malfunction, are always crime stories. Apparently home invasions rate higher than car accidents rate higher than bad news about the economy. The subtext of the whole thing, from the language used to the interviews with the victims, is why you should be frightened. Which is strange because these bulletins are actually entertainment programs, designed (I should say fabricated) to gain ratings rather than to inform.
Likewise the politicians have a way of insulting our intelligence by playing to our fears rather than appealing to our reason. They must think it works for them, but perhaps it works because it’s what people are used to. Besides which, with the media indulging in infotainment in place of reporting, you can’t get a rational argument out there in 15 second sound bites.
You might notice I haven’t talked about guns. I’ve seen Bowling for Columbine but I don’t live there, so I don’t feel I can comment. As for the other things people are frightened of, most of it is about incorrectly judging risk. Whereas 50000 people died last year from air pollution and 7800 of skin cancer, short of joining the army you’re hard put to be a victim of a terrorist attack.
What we really should be concerned about are things like global warming, making a fairer society which cares for it’s less fortunate, and looking after what’s left of the environment. And how about using some of the wealth, power, and influence of the west to actually make things better for the people of the rest of the world, rather than just making things better for western corporations as they rob the rest of the world? It’s that miasma of anxiety that’s getting in the way: allowing the politicians to play on our fears and letting the fear-mongers in the media tell us what to be afraid of. Time to gird our loins, steel our spines, and start courageously insisting on a few things we know to be true, once we can look past our fears to see them.
My list involves fixing some things which require genuinely thoughtful and imaginative policy solutions, like energy, climate change, and social inequity. And perhaps once we’re not so driven by fear we might find we’ve got some money left over from the defence budget with which to accomplish all this.