The Usefulness of Fear

Fear has been unfashionable for the last half century. Since the end of the Great Depression and World War II, modern civilization has adopted a persona of happy optimism. The industrial and technological energy that was unleashed during the war years transformed itself into consumerism and a boundless confidence that human ingenuity could materialize and even surpass all the imaginings of our most luscious dreams.

This confidence and optimism have come at a cost. We invented the nuclear industry with the assumption that we could control the proliferation of reactors, bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles and radioactive contamination. We did the same with pesticides — advertisements of the 1950s show happy householders nonchalantly spraying clouds of DDT on the family lawn while their children laughed and played nearby. Plastics became a miracle product, so strong, versatile, cheap and ubiquitous that we never considered they might contain dangerous carcinogens and hormone disrupters. We let our factories spew their wastes into air, water and land, naively assuming that nature was infinitely resilient and forgiving.

Our sense of entitlement and hopefulness has created a blinding spell of optimism and trust that has been difficult to dislodge. This attitudinal barrier has been the unspoken obstacle that environmentalists and health-care professions have struggled against for decades. People who are neither fearful nor doubtful are unable to anticipate the sorry consequences of careless behaviour. So we still insist on incontrovertible proof to counteract our faith that whatever we make is good. The deleterious health effects of smoking have finally been established. But do we still need more evidence about transfats, pesticides, asbestos, mercury, arsenic or a plethora of complex concoctions produced by the ingenuity of our chemical industries? How many more statistics do we need to establish that oil tankers will inevitably spill their toxic cargo? How many more studies do we need to establish that open-net salmon farms are environmentally unsound? The unquestioned trust and boundless optimism of a society without fear has made a mockery of the Precautionary Principle’s sensible carefulness.

Courier-Islander