Fear is all around us. It was a key weapon in the recent election, where hoardings on every street corner warned of the consequences of letting any of the others take power. During the Covid-19 pandemic, just the mere proximity of other people was enough to invoke fear. Even the act of looking at the news on your phone is often called “doomscrolling”. In the 24-7 digital news world, fear is fuel.
British writer Robert Peckham tries to weave an all-encompassing history presenting fear as a prime motivator in our past, present and future, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the Trump era.
Although it falls a little short of being definitive, it’s a sweeping and thought-provoking look at how things we’re afraid of help shape the world around us, be it in war, politics, health or finance.
Peckham shows that fear comes in many distinct flavours: simmering anxiety, sweaty panic, jittery phobias, angry rage. It has been a tool for kings and dictators, a spark to light revolutions.
The Catholic Church ruled for centuries through threats of eternal damnation that promised fear spanning far beyond life itself, until the Black Death and the Reformation loosened its grip. Blood-soaked events like the French Revolution, slavery and colonisation often relied on fear to further power – or destroy it.
“Fear is a man’s best friend,” the singer John Cale memorably put it in the 1970s, while then-candidate Donald Trump said in 2016, “Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.”
We use words of fear to define crises, with terms like “financial panic”, “a war on terror” or “eco-anxiety”.
Peckham makes some novel connections, such as linking the howling spectre of Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream to concerns over the rise of electricity in society, or comparing King Kong’s 1933 on-screen rampage in Manhattan to the carnage wrought by the Great Depression on Wall Street.
He also shows how fear has changed over the years, such as the vogue in the late 1800s for labelling everything as a phobia. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, there is one called “phobophobia”, which is a fear of fear itself.)
But can fear also be a positive force? “Fear can be beneficial, working as a social glue and a check on power,” Peckham concludes. The Cold War never quite turned hot due to worries of nuclear annihilation. With climate change, fear is used by parties on all sides to try to get results. As climate activist Greta Thunberg said in 2019, “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”
“Fear isn’t always inimical to freedom but may be its corollary, an integral facet of empowerment,” Peckham writes.
Nearly 100 pages of notes book-end the nearly 450-page Fear, and Peckham strews his well-researched book with anecdotes and quotes about the way fear has shaped us. But this “alternative history” falters a little when it comes to drawing any revelatory conclusions.
If there is a case for a “benevolent fear”, one that “sees grounds for hope, not despair, in uncertainty”, the unanswered question is whether that flies in the face of human nature.
Peckham’s big point seems to be that fear has been a large part of history. But is this really surprising to anyone who is even hazily aware of the blood and chaos that make up much of the past?
Readers would want a hefty historical tome like this to sharply carve through their perspectives and produce some kind of epiphany. It ultimately feels like more of a guidebook than an argument.
More also could have been said about how the internet increasingly lets fear spread like wildfire, with conspiracy theories and hate speech potentially rallying ethnic violence. If hope is fear’s opposite, why does it feel so often lately like fear is winning the war?
Fear ends with a bit of a sigh, acknowledging fear is here and always will be, settling into being a solidly readable collection of fascinating research, though one could readily quibble over whether it truly paints an “alternate history of the world”.
In reality, it feels like the same history we’ve always had, albeit surveyed with a very keen eye. Fear shows us how that primal emotion has pushed and pulled humanity in many directions over the centuries, making it in some ways the ultimate master of our fate. That’s kind of a scary thought.
