Creating Fear

An interesting article by Edward Rothstein in the NYT (via AL Daily) reports on a conference organised by the magazine Social Text on “Fear: Its Uses and Abuses.”

[T]he dominant idea was that, as the conference’s thematic statement put it, fear was being “encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media.” It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right. Talks about other aspects of fear — how, for example, it tends to drive out reflective thought with its stimulus of the “lateral nucleus of the amygdala” — mainly served to frame the theme. Mr. Hollander devoted some time to discussing Roosevelt’s classic statement that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but after a while it became evident that “fear itself” was what many speakers wanted to inspire, not just to describe.

Here are some sentiments we’re now familiar with from our intellectual elite:

Mr. Kateb, an emeritus professor of politics at Princeton, saw a conspiracy at work. He compared President Bush to a “despot.” In Chomskyesque fashion he argued that the American government is using its war on terror “to justify the national security state” and feed its economy, and that terrorism is just a stand-in “for a much larger enemy, which is made up of Arabs and Muslims everywhere” who are now being tyrannized in a “racist” and “imperialist” enterprise.

Rothstein brings in Lee Harris (from his new book “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History”) for some apposite quotes:

For we live, according to Mr. Harris, in a civilization with an intellectual culture that is reluctant to take the idea of an external enemy seriously; its enemies, though, have no such qualms. “We are caught,” Mr. Harris writes, “in the midst of a conflict between those for whom the category of the enemy is essential to their way of organizing all human experience and those who have banished even the idea of the enemy from both public discourse and even their innermost thoughts.”

I can’t resist adding that Social Text is the magazine which back in 1996 published in all seriousness an article by Alan Sokal entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. As the Amazon review describes it:

[P]acked with recherché quotations from “postmodern” literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory–but fatuous–prose.

Good to know they’re maintaining the same intellectual standards.