“I fear that this will not be the last time I write to you with such a tragic message …” These were the words of Larry Moneta, Vice President for Student Affairs, in his email to the Duke community on Tuesday morning. News of the ISIS attacks in Brussels had just reached campus, rekindling familiar fears of terrorism and introducing a new one: the fear (which Moneta alluded to) that these atrocities are becoming the new normal.
When I first learned of the attack my mind went blank, emotionally consumed by shock and sorrow. Once I regained my composure, fear was the first word that came to mind. Frightening questions and possibilities quickly overwhelmed me: what does this mean? What if they strike here? What if we can’t stop them? What if this is the start of an all-out war? These what-ifs segued into paralyzing personal doubts: should I still go to the United Kingdom for grad school? Will I be safe? What does this change?
I read Larry Moneta’s email again and found there was even more to fear than I thought; his recognition of the potential backlash against Muslim students made me realize how fear is now growing exponentially: the attacks inspired fear, which are producing fear of that fear, and so on. That is exactly what ISIS wants.
Psychologists have offered an explanation of this phenomenon: Terror Management Theory. TMT posits that a conflict between the knowledge of our mortality and our fear of dying produces a “terror of death” unique to humans; we attempt to mitigate that terror with culture (most obviously, perhaps, through religious promises of an afterlife). Disturbingly, the authors of TMT found that “the same psychological forces that promote support for terrorist violence also promote support for aggressive counterterrorist policies.” My greatest fear is that this vicious cycle of fear may be unstoppable.
In trying to apprehend the manifestations of fear, I turned to the word itself. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun fear (in its most common sense) as, “The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible evil.” Interestingly, 700 or so years ago fear “applied to its more violent extremes”; you would not have used fear to speak of your relationship with spiders, for instance. In an address to the nation following the Paris attacks, President Obama invoked this sense of the word, declaring, “Freedom is more powerful than fear.”
The next sense of fear includes “apprehension or dread of something that will or may happen in the future,” (as in “fear of a terrorist attack”) as well as “[an] apprehensive feeling towards anything regarded as a source of danger, or towards a person regarded as able to inflict injury or punishment,” (as in “fear of radical Islam”). Yet another sense corresponds to “anxiety for the safety of a person or thing,” (as in “out of fear for his life”).
The verb fear is (not so) helpfully defined as, “To feel fear; to regard with fear.” Thus, “to fear” can be to feel any of the emotions described above, from “[being] afraid of (a person or thing as a source of danger, an anticipated event or state of things as painful or evil)” to “[having] an uneasy sense of the probability of (some unwelcome occurrence in the future)” to “[being] afraid that (something will be or is the case)”.
Here the various inflections of fear become hopelessly (and poetically) intertwined. We fear (dread the possible appearance of) things that cause us fear (emotional distress over imminent danger).
This mirrors how our bodies and minds generate fear; scientists have found that experiencing danger activates two fear pathways: one conscious, one unconscious. When we fear things in the sense of feeling rationally apprehensive about an ominous possibility, we often simultaneously fear them in the sense of feeling emotional pain or uneasiness.
Walking through a sketchy neighborhood at night, your mind fears the probability that danger will befall you. This will be easily expressible when you get home; you can tell your roommates you feared, given the circumstances, becoming the victim of some crime. But as you walk your heart may also start pounding and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Your ears may prick up at the slightest noise. This “fear” will not be readily expressible; you may describe the symptoms of the distress but not the act of fearing itself. This is the fear that scientists have traced to the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions and sensations. There, they subconsciously influence our behavior but are not consciously understood or integrated into our rational thinking. Your racing heart contributes enormously to your rational conclusion of apprehension, even though you cannot say precisely how.
But as I mentioned, these kinds of fear do not always coincide. You may cling to deep-seated fears for no particular reason; your palms may sweat even when, for instance, you know it’s only a movie. By the same token, you may describe having “feared” that your team would lose (and, as a Giants fan, I empathize) without experiencing any of the emotional pain associated with impending danger.
Horrors multiply when we cannot bridge the gap between unconscious and conscious fear. People lash out at innocent Muslim-Americans because their emotional fears support an irrational link between peaceful Islam and jihadi terrorism. Young Muslim men, isolated and persecuted by Westerners increasingly preoccupied with subconscious “fear of death”, begin to attach the reasoning of ISIS to their own mounting resentment and “fear of death”. Worse, the irrational actions of non-Muslims who give in to Islamophobia often make it so that the fears of would-be ISIS recruits become rational (even if their responses are not). The men who have carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels were European nationals who turned to jihadi terrorism. Our irrational, fear-driven behavior may feed the image of ISIS as their only alternative.
The relationship between fear as apprehension and fear as a palpable response to imminent danger that is present in our language parallels the relationship between “feeling” fear and “thinking” fear that is present in our bodies and minds. These relationships are subtle but strong. Everybody hurts, everybody cries, certainly, but nobody wants to—and so everybody fears as well.
It’s also not hard to see how fearing the feeling of fear could compound the evolutionary advantage of fear itself. Fearing fear removes us one step further from the danger. Fear may be unpleasant because it is better (for survival) to unconsciously avoid even needing to feel fear. This makes it an even more formidable obstacle to rational thought.
We need to struggle against the undertow of emotional fear to break the vicious cycle. Gandhi (unsurprisingly) said it better than I ever could: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”
Lauren Forman is a Trinity senior. Her column runs on alternate Fridays. To suggest a word for a future column, please email Lauren at lauren.forman@duke.edu or tweet her at @lauren_forman.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.