Is This the Age of Anxiety?
Fear is an instinct. Anxiety is a neurosis. It is a sublimation of fearThe fears we know are of not knowing - WH Auden, "The Age of Anxiety'
Academic book titles are notoriously dreary affairs. Rolling out two or three themes in alliterative succession - Life and Labour in Bristol, 1757-1798 or Metaphor, Myth and Masculinity - they dutifully announce a book's content but rarely communicate its argument.
Innocent as it may sound, the title of Joanna Bourke's new book [Fear: a Cultural History] packs a wallop. Two, in fact.
First, it claims that fear has a history. Many of us probably think of fear as the primitive sludge of human experience, varying little across time or space. Not so, says Bourke: fear is a creature of history, an artefact of when and where.
What an Englishman feared in 1805, and how he feared it, are fundamentally different from what and how an American fears in 2005.
Take the fear of death, arguably the most universal, immutable and insistent of all emotions. As Bourke shows, the fear of death is surprisingly plastic. During the 19th century, the great fear in Britain was not of death, but of dying poor.
Dead paupers were buried in anonymous graveyards, where "no plaque would be mounted to commemorate a life, thus symbolically attesting that the pauper's passing would not be remembered, let alone mourned".
Their corpses, which fetched a good price at local anatomy schools, were stolen by grave-robbers, dissected, refastened with limbs from other corpses, and reburied with "a Protestant head and a Catholic body".
Wealth shielded the rich from such degradations, buying the upper classes heavy locks and iron coffins, overweight tombstones and paid grave-watchers.
Although the Anatomy Act 1832 alleviated poor people's fear of grave-robbing, it still allowed schools to collect unclaimed corpses from poor-law institutions.
"As late as the mid-1930s," Bourke writes, "less than 4 per cent of corpses dissected in medical schools in Britain were the result of bequests."
By the start of the 20th century, the fear of dying destitute had given way to a fear of premature burial.
This moral panic spread like wildfire, prompting men and women of means to outfit their graves with appropriate countermeasures: glass walls to facilitate observation from above; breathing pipes running in and out of coffins; bells, whistles and ladders, "enabling the entombed individual to climb to safety or summon help".
Modern warfare - which distributes violent death with an almost fiendish sense of equality among soldiers and civilians alike - also yields variations in the fear of death.
The Second World War rained many more bombs on Britain than did the First, but British civilians exhibited far less fear during the later war.
One constable during the Second World War even complained of being unable to get the public to take cover during heavy aerial bombardments, because they "will stand about in doorways and gossip at corners".
If civilians during the Second World War were afraid of anything, Bourke writes, it was of being confined in tight spaces or being separated from loved ones.
The second suggestion of the book's title is that fear is conditioned by culture. We communicate our fears in print, on screen, in music, and those cultural representations shape our subjective experiences.
Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who claimed that "not only ideas, but emotions, too, are cultural artefacts in man", Bourke argues that when we express our fears to others, we fit them into the vocabulary of public life, if for no other reason than to be intelligible to our fellow citizens.
These linguistic conventions mould our emotions, even an emotion seemingly as personal and instinctive as fear.
During the First World War, when codes of military honour still held sway, a medical officer observed that fear of death was "the least of fears" among soldiers.
It could not be "a deep-rooted instinct", he argued, because it gave way "before many sudden emotions or impulses such as love, the excitement of battle, the call of duty, religious devotion and the maternal instinct".
Though soldiers were certainly afraid, the taboo against fear produced "conversion" neuroses within the military, turning fearful, psychosomatically inclined soldiers blind, paralysed, deaf or mute.
As religion and honour lost their hold, psychology took their place. A legion of army psychiatrists - an addition to the machinery of war, Bourke shows, as critical as nuclear weaponry - now encouraged soldiers to express their fears.
More attuned to their feelings than were their fathers and grandfathers, these men seemed less able to withstand the pressures of battle. By the end of the 20th century, military writers were lamenting the disappearance of the pre-WWI generation.
For these were men, as one army journal put it in 1976, of "stronger fibre" who "often lacked the faculty for deep thought which drew no picture of danger or feeling of fear".
Though Bourke confines herself to 19th- and 20th-century Britain and America, she ranges widely in her choice of topics, from individual phobias and mass panics to nuclear war and rape.
Her taste in evidence is equally catholic: she discusses film, television and radio; academic journals, learned treatises and newspapers. There is even an ongoing rendition, framing each chapter, of Auden's monumental poem "The Age of Anxiety".
Bourke's roaming sensibility is the great strength of her book - and its weakness. For though her history is compendious, her sense of history is more akin to "one damned thing after another" or "one damned thing over and over".
Bourke rarely charts intelligible movement across time; instead, she settles for a recitation of anecdotes and quotations, the meaning of which is left unstated - or which contradict the wisps of a thesis that occasionally float across the page.
Throughout her book, we hear that science has displaced religion and changed our experience of fear, only to find religion reappearing, sometimes in the next chapter, sometimes in the next paragraph.
Though I am sympathetic to Bourke's argument that culture shapes the individual experience of fear, she seldom adduces much proof for that claim.
She leaves it to contemporary commentators (seldom disinterested) to tell us what people are feeling at any given moment, without much interrogating those commentators' motives or the truth of their arguments.
At times this naivety (or laziness) produces real howlers. After the cold war, Bourke writes, Americans were terrified of international political extremists because they felt guilty "about the place of America in the world".
I'd be mighty pleased to learn that Americans feel morally squeamish about their country's imperial power and that their fear reflects such qualms.
However, I am not convinced that the comment of a single Russian terrorist in the 1997 film Air Force One - "You murdered 100,000 Iraqis to save a nickel a gallon on gas. Don't lecture me on the articles of war!" - tells us much about Americans' actual state of mind.
It is unfortunate that Joanna Bourke does not truly give us a cultural history of fear, for the unintended consequence of this shapeless mess of a book is that it confirms precisely what so many of us thought in the first place: that fear is a murky, ancient force, resistant to anything so civilised as a coherent historical narrative.