Radical Moderation and the Politics of Fear
A lot of the immoderation we're seeing these days is driven by immoderate levels of fear. This fear is immoderate because it's almost always unrelated to the real risk that exists in the world and it distorts our behavior in really damaging (and immoderate!) ways. Fear contributes to everything from heightened anxiety to increased xenophobia. Despite most of us living in the safest world humans have ever known, we are increasingly anxious and afraid.
Troublingly, increased levels of fear seem to be present across all aspects of our lives. We'll run through a few below, but most of our readers are familiar enough with the way fear is running amok in American life. (See our linked post for this week about fearful parents sharing insane conspiracy theories on social media if you need more evidence.)
Let's start with the big ones...
Politics: Modern political life capitalizes on fear, in large part by amplifying legitimate concerns into mass hysteria. The language of politics itself contributes to this belief that we are constantly at war with shadowy and unknown enemies. Johnson's War on Poverty, Nixon's War on Drugs and Bush's War on Terror all have in common the belief that policy goals can and should take the form of an extreme fight to the death, using every weapon in our arsenal.
Political parties contribute to this narrative, making every election an existential fight over various crucial rights and liberties that we cannot possibly afford to lose. Republicans will claim that Democrats will take away all our guns while Democrats claim that Republican victories will lead to a Handsmaid's Tale future with no reproductive freedom. The irony is that if we actually supported moderate candidates, those dystopian futures would be much less likely than if we follow our partisan fears to their most extreme conclusions (more on this later).
Parenting: Fear drives parenting in all sorts of pernicious ways. Parents are beset by fears of all kinds: fear of abduction, fear of the hyper-competition of school, fear of physical or emotional harm, or even just the fear that we're screwing up (spoiler: we probably are! And it's ok). Parenting fear is stoked partly by media coverage and partly by the conversations between parents themselves, who feed the flames of fear by adding in shame and guilt to heighten the perception that these fears are in fact real and that the stakes are unimaginably high. If that's the case, then we must do everything in our power to protect our kids from shadowy forces like perverts or drug dealers (or pervert drug dealers! A parents' worst nightmare.).
Lenore Skenazy of LetGrow (and the Free Range Kids phenomenon) points out that the fear that encompasses modern parenting doesn't just rob parents of sleep and health. Because we're not paying enough attention to tradeoffs, our fearful parenting also robs kids of the freedom to make mistakes and confront challenges on their own, which, ironically, leads to greater levels of anxiety. Fearful parenting seems to create fearful children.
Health: Sadly, even our favorites foods are not immune to fear-mongering. The FoodBabe craziness from a few years back is a perfect example, where one of her criticisms of the pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks was that it "contains absolutely no pumpkin!", as though that's a bug and not a feature (the whole point of a pumpkin spice latte is the spice, not having squash in your latte, but we digress). She whipped up a frenzy of fear about various chemicals without addressing toxicity levels or threshold effects (more on this below), leaving the reader to believe they were drinking the equivalent of a massive dose of plutonium every time they indulged in their favorite fall beverage. Starbucks caved to the idiotic pressure and added, among other things, pumpkin to a latte, which is a crime in itself. Some excellent science-based bloggers have dubbed the FoodBabe "The Jenny McCarthy of Food" for the way in which her pseudoscientific approach manages to fuel fear while being completely scientifically illiterate. But her fear-based approach to nutrition is surprisingly popular and, when it comes to her attitude toward vaccines, actually dangerous. So yet again, immoderate fear makes us less safe, not more safe.
Sadly, like other immoderate errors, fear is a pretty natural thing for humans to fall for, in part because it has deep biological roots. Fear provides important feedback about what to avoid in our environment and, presumably in a time when we weren't constantly surrounded by media screaming in our faces, we were somewhat better able to assess how realistic our fears actually were. We also know that fear manifests in predictable ways. While some fears are specific to individuals (one of us lives in holy terror of silverfish in the basement), others are somewhat species-wide (snakes) or they can be triggered fairly easily (fear of strangers or fear of out-groups). Fear also spreads easily, because humans are social and we look to each other for cues about what to be fearful of. So while fear is almost certainly adaptive, it's also easy to manipulate and very easy to lose control over.
Why is Fear an Immoderate Error?
Fear does a couple immoderate things.
First, it's often wrong, and as Radical Moderates we seek the truth above all else. The stark reality is that most of the things we fear most are in fact very very unlikely to happen in general and to us in particular. Even the devastating things that are statistically common are in fact very unlikely to happen to any particular individual. And like a lot of things in human life, some fear is good. It's not a matter of getting rid of fear altogether, but of knowing what to be afraid of and how much. We want to be afraid of large trucks bearing down on us, or snakes rattling at us on a hike, or the shadowy figure in the alley we're walking down. Situational awareness and a healthy dose of fear in the right circumstances are good things things to have. What's not good is when moderate and healthy fear becomes aimed at things that are not actually dangerous or when our fear prevents us from doing things we want to and need to do to flourish.
Second, fear implies a lack of humility about the things we can and cannot control. We think that by being afraid we will prevent the negative outcomes we fear, but in fact most of the things we can prevent with moderate due diligence don't require living in constant anxiety and fear (lock your doors at night, but don't buy a bazooka). Most of us will have something tragic happen to us at some point during our lives, but it will probably not be the thing that we've stayed up late freaking out about, but instead something that wasn't even on our radar.
Third, fear often stems from a search for simple or easily visible "enemies", when in fact the reality is usually complicated and the dangers themselves quite complex. We may fear chemicals in our food, failing to understand that chemicals are everywhere, can be either good or bad, and that the danger of exposure depends in many cases on the dose (remember: water can be poisonous too!). But many of the things we fear are also heavily context-dependent. My child's risk of abduction is vanishingly small, but children who live in poverty or whose living situation is unstable will have a higher (but still generally low) risk. Radical Moderation requires that we understand when risks are relevant and when they are not.
Fourth, because fear leads us to try to find enemies, it also tends to push us toward groupthink. We look for outside influences, outside groups, or people with whom we disagree to explain our fear and discomfort, and targeting those people becomes a way to alleviate our fear, or at least make us feel as though we're protecting ourselves. Fear may be more readily associated with people outside our group, furthering the effect. This bias against outgroups challenges the Radically Moderate principles of respect for individuals and civility (among others).
Finally, fear leads us to extreme solutions that make us less safe in the long run. We saw this above with fearful parenting leading to anxious paralyzed kids, but there are plenty other examples. Researchers found that an additional 1,595 to 2,300 people were killed in car crashes following 9/11 by choosing to drive rather than fly. Restrictive sex offender registries may make it more likely that sex offenders will strike again by making it impossible for them to find stable employment or homes, which in turn makes them less mentally stable and harder to track. Parents fearful of rare vaccine injuries make everyone less safe. Our excessive political fears make us support more and more extreme candidates, with the result that the other side increases their extremism in turn.
Why are we so scared?
If misplaced fear has such negative effects and makes us less safe, why the hell do we keep doing this to ourselves? The answer, as usual, stems from a few immoderate errors humans consistently make. Here's a round up of the big ones:
Misunderstanding or not recognizing tradeoffs. Eliminating one type of danger may easily make us more susceptible to others. Fear of flying after 9/11 led many Americans to drive more instead. As a result, an additional 1,595 to 2,300 people were killed in car accidents by choosing a more risky form of transportation over the more safe, but seemingly dangerous option. By trying to reduce the (extremely low) risk of dying in a terrorist attack, we made it much more likely that we'd die in a car crash. Other kinds of tradeoffs are more subtle: anxious parenting robs our kids of the independence they need to mature; anxiety over traveling may lead us to avoid powerful experiences that could change our lives. And so on.
Misunderstanding or not recognizing threshold effects. FoodBabe is perhaps the best (and by this we mean The Worst) example of this error, but a lot of people fall into this trap. Most things are dangerous to some degree, if you take them/do them too much. A cup of coffee a day is almost definitely perfectly safe; 15 cups of coffee a day might not be. It turns out that even seemingly benign candy can kill you in short order in the right dose. Bungee jumping once or twice is probably pretty safe, but if you bungee jump every day chances are good at some point you'll get hurt, simply due to the odds. The goal is not to avoid anything even remotely risky, but instead to manage your risk by avoiding very obviously stupid errors (walking on busy streets with headphones in while staring at your phone) and being moderate about almost everything else.
Misunderstanding statistics. If we see a 500% increase we think "that's terrible!", but if the initial risk was very low to begin with, our absolute risk is still very low. Similarly, we look for patterns and often find them, but coincidences abound and just because two things seem suspiciously connected (Nicholas Cage movies and pond drownings!) does not mean any connection exists at all.
Heightened media coverage skews our view of risk. You can see various discussions of the falling crime rate here and here, yet we're more fearful than we've ever been. Media coverage makes rare things seem more common than they are and more salient in our lives.
Misappropriation and misuse of science. The internet has spawned a generation of Googling pseudo-scientists who fuel fear with incomplete or incomprehensible interpretations of scientific research. See the FoodBabe above, antivaxxers, and fear of GMOs for starters. The nature of scientific research itself contributes to this trend because, especially in the early stages, scientists will (and should!) disagree and it's easy to spin these internal disagreements into skepticism of the entire project.
How to Limit the Hold of Fear on Our Lives:
Take deep breaths (and maybe meditate!).
Take a step back and assess the reality of what you're being asked to fear. Who is telling you to be afraid? Is this person trustworthy? What evidence are they providing? What tradeoffs would you have to make to remove whatever risk they're discussing? Would those tradeoffs be worth it?
Work to avoid absolutist thinking. We see this all the time in conversations on social media: "No child should ever die. Any X is too much. There's no excuse for any Y." But the reality is usually much more complicated. There's no way to prevent all car accidents, all child deaths, all tragedies of any shape and kind. Sometimes terrible things happen to good people and it sucks. But the tradeoffs of avoiding many of those deaths would be even worse. It's not only about scarce resources. It's also about human flourishing, and in order to flourish we have to take chances. Sometimes those chances end poorly. It doesn't mean they weren't worth it.
Realize that, for most of the people reading this, we are in fact living in the safest time to be alive. (Repeat this to yourself as often as needed.)
Tune out fear mongering and, if you can, take a media break. There are a ton of benefits, but limiting your exposure to unlikely-but-scary-things might be the most important.
Read optimistic books! Steven Pinker thinks we're in good shape (still, even now), as does Matt Ridley. Read books before bed that emphasize the positive genius of human beings as a way to counter the negative media crap we consume during the day. Your brain, your sleep, and your anxiety levels will thank you. Or you can read more about how fear operates and how to defang it.
Finally, work with those around you, especially those you might disagree with, to have civil conversations, consciously setting fear aside. There are a growing number of groups set up to do precisely this (we got the following list from Jonathan Rauch's discussion here): Better Angels, Bridge the Divide, BridgeUSA, Living Room Conversations, and the Listen First Project. But there are many others, particularly local ones in your own backyard (drop links in the comments!).
So what about you? How have you seen fear amplified in modern culture? Are there resources you recommend for limiting the power of fear? Drop them in the comments!