KEY POINTS:
When he came to power in 1933, in the depths of a bleak Depression, President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to use his inauguration address to put heart back into an America crushed and broken by galloping inflation and widespread unemployment. He succeeded.
As a call to arms the
speech was electric, one of the greatest examples of political oratory in the history of the 20th century. Nor has the power of the words been dimmed by time:
We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.
Who could fail to be heartened by the muscular eloquence of FDR's rallying cry? When he died the US lost one of its greatest statesmen, a loss that must be felt all the more keenly in this haphazard age.
Now we listen to Roosevelt's present counterpart trying to engage His Fellow Americans in The War on a Noun, unencumbered by any knowledge of grammar, style or indeed the English language.
Yet for all of its stirring power, I've always had a problem with this great speech, specifically with its most famous component. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," Roosevelt told his countrymen, "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
An iconic epithet, possessed as it is of brevity, simplicity and poetry, the three attributes needed to make it one of the great maxims of our time.
I can't fault Franklin on his eloquence and yet I remain unconvinced as to the sentiment. For what is wrong with fearing fear itself? On the contrary, being afraid of fear is an eminently sensible attitude. That is how the mechanism of fear works.
Something or somebody, from the bogeyman to a very steep drop, inspires a feeling of fear in us and we respond to this impulse by practising avoidance and evasion until the threat is passed, morning has broken and we're back on safe ground once more.
As an emotional response to the threat of danger, fear is a mechanism, and as mechanisms go, a very successful one. The feeling of fear may run the spectrum from pure terror to mere unease, but listening to our fears, responding to our feeling of fear with appropriate behaviour - be it running away, starting the car, or picking up a very big stick - is what keeps us safe.
Sure some fears are less, shall we say, concrete than others - the aforementioned bogeyman in your closet is probably less tangible a threat than, say, the rapist in your hallway - but nevertheless learning to listen to one's fears, to foster them even, as well as making you look like a big sissy, will also make you more risk averse, and thus a lot safer.
Fear of looking like a fool also is a very handy fear and should always be attended to. When properly cultivated it can prevent one from making a myriad of mistakes, everything from asking out a guy who isn't interested to wearing a short skirt when you haven't got the legs for it.
I shudder at the thought of those terrible books that exhort the dear reader to Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway. Such publications incite wanton recklessness. Is the author promising to be there when things get reckless and somebody loses an eye, or their footing? Of course not. Fear is there for a reason. Ignoring it is foolhardy.
That's not to say that fear exists only to keep us safe. It doesn't, it has another function as well. When harnessed properly it is the most powerful spur we possess for effecting positive change.
I myself am an avowed scardeycat, staunchly risk-averse and attendant to nameless unreasoning terror in a way that would have FDR shaking his venerable head in disapproval.
And yet sometimes I surprise and delight myself by doing something that scares me. Not in the leaping out of planes, swimming with sharks sort of way, that's not at all my kind of fun. No, more the standing up for myself or saying what's really on my mind sort of way.
It is my fear of doing or saying these things that makes me do them at all, and it is in overcoming that fear that the best sort of satisfaction is to be gained.
Roosevelt knew this. He wasn't telling his countrymen not to be afraid, he couldn't, their anxieties were completely well founded. Rather he was telling them not to do nothing about that fear.
At the heart of FDR's exhortation was an understanding that doing nothing is the quickest way to get nowhere. That the sort of fear that is not good for you is a fear that paralyses, that deadly fear that worms its way inside of you and stops you from thinking, from moving or feeling.
A terror that freezes will kill you, whether by keeping you rooted to the spot when the monsters bear down, or by keeping you trapped in a personal hell of your own making.
That, with apologies to the 32nd President of the United States, is the only sort of fear to be afraid of.