Frank Furedi

The subject of fear, so present in our current political and cultural discourse, is the object of an extensive theoretical analysis that enters cultural, social and political territories. The author of this work, which also describes and analyses the mechanisms of fear, is Frank Furedi, emeritus professor at the University of Kent and a specialist in the sociology of fear. In this interview, he explains how the logic of fear operates.

Frank Furedi is an emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. He initiated a sociology of fear in 1997 with a book entitled Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. Back then, the ‘culture of fear’ was a new and even strange concept, which gave the book a groundbreaking aspect. Furedi tried to explain that a concern with safety had become so obsessive in our society that it had led to an allergy to risk. As a consequence, society had distanced itself from new experiences and the unknown: to avoid all risk, Furedi writes, is to eliminate the spirit of exploration and experimentation. An example of this paranoid attitude towards risk can be found in the way parents overprotect their children. To allow your kids to go to school alone is now frowned upon, or even proof of negligence. The culture of fear has another consequence: a separation between perception and facts, between real and fantastical dangers. In the end, the problem is not a fear of something, but the fear of fear itself, i.e. fear itself becomes the problem. This autotelic form of propagating fear determines that ‘the only thing that we should be afraid of is the culture of fear itself’, i.e. the culture that redefines every problem using the language of fear, with well-known effects: it isolates people, produces an atmosphere of distrust and encourages a depressive style of self-definition present in contemporary culture.

Almost twenty years later, his book How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century was published. In it, Furedi continues his sociological investigation, trying to understand the way in which fear manifests itself in the 21st century. He notes that the rhetoric of fear is increasingly used and that fear has become the main tool of a particular ideology. Now, the rule of fear is the disproportionate amplification of some threats in relation to factual dangers. On the other hand, there is the tendency to treat problems that were considered moral or existential before, from a medical or psychological perspective.

In these twenty years, the ‘culture of fear’ has become stronger and expanded alongside the tragic awareness that society, and humanity itself, are faced with the threat of destructive forces. The culture of fear of the 21st century is determined by an explosion of new dangers that evoke heavy concepts: apocalypse, collapse, catastrophe. Our collective imagination now works for the worst outcome possible, that which causes the most fear: the possibility of a negative future, or of no future at all. We have become a presentist society, separated from the past and afraid of the future. The result: fear has become the prevailing cultural perspective.

According to the timeline proposed by Frank Furedi, from the late 1990s onwards there was a politisation of fear. In The Politics of Fear. Beyond Left and Right, from 2005, he wrote that all parties adopt the politics of fear, but each one chooses ‘its’ own fear. The issue of immigration is the preferred fear of far-right and populist parties. Left-wing parties, on the other hand, choose the fear of humanity becoming extinct. Whatever the case may be, fear is that big thing that our time has turned into a culture.

In this interview, Furedi addresses these issues examined in his three books on fear.

Francis Bacon, Figure Turning, 1962 © Photo: Scala, Florence / Christie’s Images, London © The Estate of Francis Bacon / DACS, London / SPA, Lisbon

Francis Bacon, Study of Figure in a Room, 1953 © Photo: Scala, Florence / Christie’s Images, London © The Estate of Francis Bacon / DACS, London / SPA, Lisbon

ANTÓNIO GUERREIRO Your first book on fear is entitled Culture of Fear. This title immediately indicates that the book will develop the idea that fear has spread as a cultural construct. Is our era obsessed with fear?

FRANK FUREDI Yes, I think so. It took me a long time to understand how fear works. I began because I realised, a long time ago, that a lot of these moral panics that broke out were over things that made no sense. Panics about child abuse, panics about everything, from the weather to global terrorism. Every issue wasn’t just simply seen as a problem. It was also seen in a very alarmist way as a threat. Our definition of threat was expanding all the time. To give an example, something I began to work with was the way children were seen. I remember waking up one day and realising that these days, children are not allowed to go to school by themselves in the way that I did because we are told that it’s very dangerous. When I was a child, it was no less dangerous than now. But in each case, the way that the problem was seen was very different. And this has spread all over. I remember because one of my friends, who was a doctor, decided to let his child walk to school without an adult, and he got so much criticism for putting his child in danger. So I began to ask the question: why is it that we seem to have almost become addicted to fear? And over the years, I began to realise that there were many reasons, but the most important reason was that we simply lacked a vocabulary to give meaning to human experience. That’s because by the time I was writing, the old ideologies – communism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism – were no longer inspiring people. They didn’t explain anything. You didn’t have any philosophical or religious interpretation of the world. And people were, in a sense, left without a grammar through which they could give meaning to human experience. I think under those circumstances, ordinary problems became threats, and threats became existential threats. So, all the time, year by year, the alarmism was growing stronger and stronger.

AG When you published this book, in 1997, the ‘culture of fear’ was not as powerful and evident as it is today. What has changed over this time?

FF Well, it’s interesting you say that because when I wrote Culture of Fear, people were sure that this was really the case. Five years later, everybody had started using the expression ‘culture of fear’. If you look at the newspapers, more and more people were talking about it. I think that what happened was that in parallel to the growth of fear was the growing redefinition of what a human being was, what human subjectivity was. Increasingly, human beings were regarded as lacking the capacity to deal with problems – what I call diminishing subjectivity, which basically meant that people were not expected to deal with difficult problems. Often, if people were dealing with problems or if they faced a crisis, which is normal, instead of providing a social or a cultural explanation, you increasingly had a psychological explanation. Therefore, people were almost infantilised, seen as just not able to deal with these things, particularly younger people such as university students, though, in fact it was all across the board. As human subjectivity declines, their ability to deal with problems is also undermined. Therefore, under those circumstances, their sense of danger and alarmism and fear becomes more and more pervasive.

AG Every time has its fears. Can we say the same for every society?

FF That’s right. Every society throughout history has had their own vocabulary of fear. I always remember that my grandparents’ generation were scared of massive unemployment in the 1930s. My parents’ generation were really worried about nuclear war, during the cold war, among other things. But the interesting thing is, and this is the point that I write about, that in the past, there was usually one fear that united people. They were all scared of nuclear war. They were all worried about unemployment, or they were worried about God’s word, or about going hungry. Whereas in our world, we have not just one, but a lot of different fears, which completely changes things. If you were interviewing me ten years ago, we’d be talking about the threat of global terrorism. Everybody was talking about it then. Today, we talk about climate change and the end of the world because of an environmental disaster.

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