"What are you, chicken?" I remember hearing this a lot growing up. It could be in relation to moving firewood crawling with earwigs, searching the 200-year-old basement for the Christmas decorations, or swimming out to a mooring to make underwater repairs. It's a bit of a shock looking back on those times because I realize that fear was not always so credentialed as it appears to be today. Whether it was scary or not, a young man of my generation was expected to dutifully confront challenges without (or at minimum repressing any) feelings of anxiety. When a flood cut off the only road to elementary school, we had to cross abandoned railroad tracks over rushing rapids to arrive by the bell. Not even to mention inconvenience, fear, justified or not, was no alibi. But all that changed in the early 2000's.
My father is a small-town doctor. People often assume that having a doctor in the family somehow leads to better medical care. [To the contrary, only once--after crashing a bicycle at full speed as a teenager--have I received any medical advice beyond instructions to rest and drink fluids haha.] Yet the wisdom that my father obtained in witnessing thousands of patients age and transform--treating their ailments, allaying their concerns, and reconciling them to their most intimate problems--has been a far more valuable resource, even if available only occasionally and second-hand.
My favorite story of his is of a young adult who insisted that he was being followed and that people were conspiring to put him away. Over the course of several months, the patient's frantic attempts to avoid imaginary pursuers ultimately resulted in him being committed. Initially, his pleas for help escaping were manifestly irrational, yet his commitment to them eventually made them logically coherent. While it is easy to label a once ordinary patient a paranoid schizophrenic in retrospect, much like Schrödinger's cat, his pleas for help escaping were at once entirely rational and entirely insane at the time he expressed them.
Another surprising tidbit gathered from my father's laissez-faire parenting is that much of medicine is getting a patient's immune system not to over-react. Whether the ailment is COVID or a sprained ankle, the threat is not the microbe or blunt force trauma per se but our own body's response to it. Inflamed tissue, swelling, and cellular immune responses lead to dysregulation and most of the symptoms we associate with illness.
To get to the subject of the post, only too much grief has been aired about the surprise slaughter of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001. (My friend's father died on UA 93 and my father-in-law missed a meeting in the building on that day only because he had an upset stomach, so I am not entirely remote.) Yet for those of us who lived the time with a pre-existing notion of patriotism, it is not the impacts of Boeing 747s on the Twin Towers or the Pentagon that lingered like a bruise on the soul but rather our dubious, collective attempt to believe in the justice of what followed.
Those few who served in the U.S. Infantry or who knew the politics of the "military industrial complex" or who could distinguish between tragedy and patriotism suffered greatest, among Americans at least. For everyone else was inscribed the political fact that the toppling Twin Towers were jus ad bellum sufficient for any jus in bello. How exactly the United States came to prosecute a second Vietnam, this time lacking even an ideological opponent, was the question of the day, but it could scarcely be spoken. 9/11 could easily have been a Pearl Harbor, a rallying beacon for concerted international action. Instead, Americans were told to "continue shopping" while the Coalition of the Willing deployed munitions and machines of war to Iraq and Afghanistan for decades to come. The linguistic auspices for all of this should be infamous: "The War on Terror."
With breathtaking economy, the "War on Terror" insisted that fear justifies war. Platonic concepts of statehood entail an identity between citizen and state (most thoroughly treated in Gorgias and The Republic), an identity that is impacted at every level by the conduct of state. Which I raise to posit that the War on Terror was not an abstract exercise for our country.
The qualitative justification for war in the aughts birthed cultural blowback that we are still working through today. It does not take much introspection or therapy to recognize that a war with fear is a circular proposition. Fear is an internal emotional state insusceptible to external projections, i.e., military force. It remains devilishly unclear whether states possess a righteous means to eradicate ("War") that which makes us afraid ("Terror").
But if fear justifies war, it simultaneously justifies all less extreme propositions. The implicit tautology of 'fighting terror' legitimizes many ensuing cultural trends that conservatives now castigate: safe spaces, snowflake liberalism, getting fired for or doxxed for being perceived as a threat--to whom or for what is always changing--even COVID restrictions. And no one (least of all pharmaceutical companies) seems to want the avalanche of fear to abate, to question its character post-hoc like Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, or--God forbid--stand beside the next target singled out for bodiless moral condemnation.
To be fair, the foreign policy of the early 2000's seems to have either held radicalist violence at bay or deflected it to softer European targets. Far too rarely treated, however, are the domestic consequences of how politicians justified that policy.
As not a few international policy insiders in Washington know, the U.S. list of terrorists is not like a list of, say, card-carrying communists but rather a (frighteningly) malleable matrix. It is thousands of analysts' job to classify international combatants according to ever-shifting bureaucratic processes that can have a significant impact on who receives support and training and who becomes a guinea pig for the latest drone technology. (And drone warfare picked up under the Obama administration.) To this day, people in struggling parts of the world are snuffed out based on the notional threat they pose to national security. I actually tend to trust the intentions of military professionals. And a mess of anodyne bureaucracy tethers this foreign-facing taxonomy. But the animating principle remains the same: Fear.
Some would suggest that, like the paranoid schizophrenic, the United States created the enemies it imagined by waging war in the Middle East inter alia. I am not cynical enough to think that this was policymakers' objective when they predicated foreign policy on fear. What even the neocons couldn't predict was that manufacturing fear as carte blanche would give rise to actual boogeymen at home.
Since 9/11, fear has become a matchless political credential that infuses every issue our society discusses today. Sure, politicians will get you to vote for them by making you afraid of what the other party's nominee will do. (This is more familiarly framed as "increasing partisanship" and demonstrated by colorful graphs in the newspaper.) And fine! COVID gave us good reason to look askance at our neighbors. But meanwhile, schools have become battlegrounds. Academic leadership is being assailed by parents and students breathless over some far-too-particular corruption. And they have meanwhile quite literally become battlegrounds, on a random day of the aggrieved's choosing. These pre-emptive strikes for the record books presuppose (the perpetrator's) deep mistrust. Separately(?), Generation Z overwhelmingly prefers to punish first and ask questions later when it comes to leaders, colleagues, fellow students--whatever--with differing--and purportedly irredeemable--points of view. Across civic spaces, threats no longer need be concrete or indeed even articulated to prompt retribution or revanchism.
Bathrooms, of all things, became a heated battleground for mostly a priori discussions of sexuality and threats thereto. Whatever your stance on transgender rights and policy, a notable aspect of this polemic is that the liberal majority galvanized to oppose threats to a tiny minority of transgender folk, and were in general far more vocal on the issue than that minority. Surely, fear of somehow inappropriate intrusions motivated the conservative policies. On the other hand, there was no Rosa Parks, no actual martyr. Rather, ardent protest on ideological lines arose to entirely non-particularized menaces--of indignity or safety or discrimination or intolerance. And it marches on still, tracing some constellation of anxieties in American political discourse.
For the first time in history, citizens seized Capitol Hill, utterly convicted that democracy was disenfranchising them. To a remarkable degree, fears--fears that most people would consider groundless--catalyzed these social movements. Fear is not new. Racial objectification and xenophobia pre-date civilization, after all. What stands out today is the conscious--and breathtakingly broad--embrace of fear as a policy cornerstone.
Stand your ground laws threaten to legitimize the killing of children who knock at the wrong door. As concerns searches for threatening objects such as guns, on the other hand, the Fourth Amendment has been contorted beyond recognition by carve-out after carve-out that rarefies the officer's subjective impressions. Whether the proponent is a bearded man standing at the door with a smoking shotgun muzzle or a trim police officer describing a "traumatic incident" in court, the justification is the same: "I was afraid for my safety."
And the victims--dead or alive--of these policies have no choice but to accept that rationale. Today, fear is first principle and predicate to state action and the assertion of individual rights alike. Fear is the trump card, and no social interest, no matter how fundamental (male sexuality, anyone?), is safe from its imposition. Since Operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems, fear has been axiomatic and elemental to the United States and its citizens.
As unprecedented and eclectic as polemics today may appear, they all lean into and exult in fear.
My father is a small-town doctor. People often assume that having a doctor in the family somehow leads to better medical care. [To the contrary, only once--after crashing a bicycle at full speed as a teenager--have I received any medical advice beyond instructions to rest and drink fluids haha.] Yet the wisdom that my father obtained in witnessing thousands of patients age and transform--treating their ailments, allaying their concerns, and reconciling them to their most intimate problems--has been a far more valuable resource, even if available only occasionally and second-hand.
My favorite story of his is of a young adult who insisted that he was being followed and that people were conspiring to put him away. Over the course of several months, the patient's frantic attempts to avoid imaginary pursuers ultimately resulted in him being committed. Initially, his pleas for help escaping were manifestly irrational, yet his commitment to them eventually made them logically coherent. While it is easy to label a once ordinary patient a paranoid schizophrenic in retrospect, much like Schrödinger's cat, his pleas for help escaping were at once entirely rational and entirely insane at the time he expressed them.
Another surprising tidbit gathered from my father's laissez-faire parenting is that much of medicine is getting a patient's immune system not to over-react. Whether the ailment is COVID or a sprained ankle, the threat is not the microbe or blunt force trauma per se but our own body's response to it. Inflamed tissue, swelling, and cellular immune responses lead to dysregulation and most of the symptoms we associate with illness.
To get to the subject of the post, only too much grief has been aired about the surprise slaughter of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001. (My friend's father died on UA 93 and my father-in-law missed a meeting in the building on that day only because he had an upset stomach, so I am not entirely remote.) Yet for those of us who lived the time with a pre-existing notion of patriotism, it is not the impacts of Boeing 747s on the Twin Towers or the Pentagon that lingered like a bruise on the soul but rather our dubious, collective attempt to believe in the justice of what followed.
Those few who served in the U.S. Infantry or who knew the politics of the "military industrial complex" or who could distinguish between tragedy and patriotism suffered greatest, among Americans at least. For everyone else was inscribed the political fact that the toppling Twin Towers were jus ad bellum sufficient for any jus in bello. How exactly the United States came to prosecute a second Vietnam, this time lacking even an ideological opponent, was the question of the day, but it could scarcely be spoken. 9/11 could easily have been a Pearl Harbor, a rallying beacon for concerted international action. Instead, Americans were told to "continue shopping" while the Coalition of the Willing deployed munitions and machines of war to Iraq and Afghanistan for decades to come. The linguistic auspices for all of this should be infamous: "The War on Terror."
With breathtaking economy, the "War on Terror" insisted that fear justifies war. Platonic concepts of statehood entail an identity between citizen and state (most thoroughly treated in Gorgias and The Republic), an identity that is impacted at every level by the conduct of state. Which I raise to posit that the War on Terror was not an abstract exercise for our country.
The qualitative justification for war in the aughts birthed cultural blowback that we are still working through today. It does not take much introspection or therapy to recognize that a war with fear is a circular proposition. Fear is an internal emotional state insusceptible to external projections, i.e., military force. It remains devilishly unclear whether states possess a righteous means to eradicate ("War") that which makes us afraid ("Terror").
But if fear justifies war, it simultaneously justifies all less extreme propositions. The implicit tautology of 'fighting terror' legitimizes many ensuing cultural trends that conservatives now castigate: safe spaces, snowflake liberalism, getting fired for or doxxed for being perceived as a threat--to whom or for what is always changing--even COVID restrictions. And no one (least of all pharmaceutical companies) seems to want the avalanche of fear to abate, to question its character post-hoc like Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, or--God forbid--stand beside the next target singled out for bodiless moral condemnation.
To be fair, the foreign policy of the early 2000's seems to have either held radicalist violence at bay or deflected it to softer European targets. Far too rarely treated, however, are the domestic consequences of how politicians justified that policy.
As not a few international policy insiders in Washington know, the U.S. list of terrorists is not like a list of, say, card-carrying communists but rather a (frighteningly) malleable matrix. It is thousands of analysts' job to classify international combatants according to ever-shifting bureaucratic processes that can have a significant impact on who receives support and training and who becomes a guinea pig for the latest drone technology. (And drone warfare picked up under the Obama administration.) To this day, people in struggling parts of the world are snuffed out based on the notional threat they pose to national security. I actually tend to trust the intentions of military professionals. And a mess of anodyne bureaucracy tethers this foreign-facing taxonomy. But the animating principle remains the same: Fear.
Some would suggest that, like the paranoid schizophrenic, the United States created the enemies it imagined by waging war in the Middle East inter alia. I am not cynical enough to think that this was policymakers' objective when they predicated foreign policy on fear. What even the neocons couldn't predict was that manufacturing fear as carte blanche would give rise to actual boogeymen at home.
Since 9/11, fear has become a matchless political credential that infuses every issue our society discusses today. Sure, politicians will get you to vote for them by making you afraid of what the other party's nominee will do. (This is more familiarly framed as "increasing partisanship" and demonstrated by colorful graphs in the newspaper.) And fine! COVID gave us good reason to look askance at our neighbors. But meanwhile, schools have become battlegrounds. Academic leadership is being assailed by parents and students breathless over some far-too-particular corruption. And they have meanwhile quite literally become battlegrounds, on a random day of the aggrieved's choosing. These pre-emptive strikes for the record books presuppose (the perpetrator's) deep mistrust. Separately(?), Generation Z overwhelmingly prefers to punish first and ask questions later when it comes to leaders, colleagues, fellow students--whatever--with differing--and purportedly irredeemable--points of view. Across civic spaces, threats no longer need be concrete or indeed even articulated to prompt retribution or revanchism.
Bathrooms, of all things, became a heated battleground for mostly a priori discussions of sexuality and threats thereto. Whatever your stance on transgender rights and policy, a notable aspect of this polemic is that the liberal majority galvanized to oppose threats to a tiny minority of transgender folk, and were in general far more vocal on the issue than that minority. Surely, fear of somehow inappropriate intrusions motivated the conservative policies. On the other hand, there was no Rosa Parks, no actual martyr. Rather, ardent protest on ideological lines arose to entirely non-particularized menaces--of indignity or safety or discrimination or intolerance. And it marches on still, tracing some constellation of anxieties in American political discourse.
For the first time in history, citizens seized Capitol Hill, utterly convicted that democracy was disenfranchising them. To a remarkable degree, fears--fears that most people would consider groundless--catalyzed these social movements. Fear is not new. Racial objectification and xenophobia pre-date civilization, after all. What stands out today is the conscious--and breathtakingly broad--embrace of fear as a policy cornerstone.
Stand your ground laws threaten to legitimize the killing of children who knock at the wrong door. As concerns searches for threatening objects such as guns, on the other hand, the Fourth Amendment has been contorted beyond recognition by carve-out after carve-out that rarefies the officer's subjective impressions. Whether the proponent is a bearded man standing at the door with a smoking shotgun muzzle or a trim police officer describing a "traumatic incident" in court, the justification is the same: "I was afraid for my safety."
And the victims--dead or alive--of these policies have no choice but to accept that rationale. Today, fear is first principle and predicate to state action and the assertion of individual rights alike. Fear is the trump card, and no social interest, no matter how fundamental (male sexuality, anyone?), is safe from its imposition. Since Operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems, fear has been axiomatic and elemental to the United States and its citizens.
As unprecedented and eclectic as polemics today may appear, they all lean into and exult in fear.