The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things

Barry Glassner

New York: Basic Books, 1999. ISBN: 0-465-01490-9. Pp.: xxviii, 282, index

This is a bad book. Even worse, it masquerades as legitimate scholarship (because its author is a sociologist) but in reality offers nothing more than pulp fiction dressed up with some (not much) statistics. In the end, the book is a platform from which the author propagates fairly biased "explanations" and offers exceedingly simplistic "solutions" to our social problems.

Why are we afraid of the wrong things, like road rage, monster moms, violent youths, blacks, crack, and plane crashes? Because the media overstates the statistics? No: although the media does contribute, its effect is "indeterminate" because it often reports correctly. The real reason is Americans' guilt over "social policies of collective irresponsibility" (p. 101). That is, according to Glassner, most Americans understand perfectly well that the government should be spending more on the poor, the blacks, and the inner-cities, that it should be banning guns, and that it should be healing drug addicts instead of criminalizing them. However, the overwhelming majority of Americans have failed to support such policies that produce the things we really need to be afraid of (e.g. gun violence) and instead prefer to sublimate their fears by looking for unreal dangers to worry about, like children eating Halloween trick-or-treat apples stuffed with razor blades. As for monster moms, there's apparently a sadomasochistic longing deep down in every American that seeks satisfaction, along with the need to assuage self-doubts about one's ability to raise children!

The above paragraph summarizes the entire book. If it's too long, here's an even shorter summary: ban guns and increase government welfare spending.

It apparently never occurs to Mr. Glassner that the majority of Americans may not be sharing his particular guilt, if he feels any. I have little doubt that many intellectuals feel that the government should be doing more, not less, about social problems. But intellectuals are a minority, albeit a vocal one indeed. Worse, it's a minority that has little understanding for the social evils that it is combating with such bellicosity. Even worse, it is a minority which apparently does not understand what it offers to sacrifice to the gods of socialism.

Well, I am an intellectual too, so I have little understanding of the poor and the unsuccessful. But at least I come from an ex-socialist country, so I have quite a bit more understanding of what it means to live in a place where the government ensured that almost everyone was "equal." And, unlike Mr. Glassner, I can also read statistics and I understand multiple causation. So, on to specifics.

The book purports to be an honest evaluation of the reasons America is gripped by fear. What fear? Herein lies the first sin: the author indiscriminately piles together every single issue that has gotten wide media coverage, apparently believing that everything that journalists latch onto reflects hidden anxieties in the American public. There are two problems with this.

First, the media, far from a slavish follower of public opinion is an active shaper and molder of that opinion. No matter how much journalists like to pretend they are honest reflectors of what the public feels, they are in the business of informing, interpreting information, and creating opinions. Besides, journalists feed off one another more than they do off the story. Once a major outlet runs with an issue, it is very likely to be followed in short order by other media as well. We must never forget that journalists read other journalists for research, for insight, and sometimes out of plain laziness and unwillingness to check facts. This is how many errors get propagated endlessly. This is not to say that journalists never report any news or that they are always biased; it is only to point out the obvious: the fact that something is widely reported does not make it a widespread public fear.

Second, while some of the issues can be legitimately called fears of the public, others cannot. For example, child pornography, kidnapping, and online pedophiles are real fears (for reasons I explain below), while teen gambling, killers with angelic faces, and monster moms are not. The latter are unsettling, no doubt, but there is no reason to believe in mass panic over them.

Instead of reaching for pop psychological explanations that require all Americans to be covert supporters of an extreme liberal agenda, let us apply some common sense. What is truly frightening to an average American (or any other person) and the average American family? Personally, it would be something that directly threatens possible physical harm or damage to property, and something that the person feels little or no control over. A steep rise in homicides, burglaries, or rape would be a genuine cause of alarm. A threat of nuclear war or terrorism would be another. If one is Jewish, then increase in anti-Semitic violence would be another. If one is black, then a resurgence of white power movements would be another.

At the family level, the fear extends beyond one's person: to spouse and children, especially children. Anything that may threaten the well-being of one's children that one feels powerless to protect them against, would cause genuine fear. Online pedophiles who might arrange a secret meeting with one's kid and then proceed to sexually abuse and murder that kid; that would be a cause of fear. Drugs and violence in schools, and even perhaps teen suicide, would all cause genuine fear. A sharp increase in unemployment would also be a cause of alarm as any downturn in the economy that makes the family's financial prospects bleak.

Common sense suggests that we are afraid when something threatens someone we love or something we deeply care about and when we feel powerless to prevent it or adequately protect them against it.

According to this criterion, teen gambling cannot be a cause of mass panic. Perhaps some concern for parents whose children are involved, if even that. A child murderer with an angelic face is just that: a curious incident, not something that is likely to happen to you or anyone you know. A monster mom is a monstrous aberration, as repugnant in its nature as rare in occurrence. It suggests nothing about one's own ability to raise children and in no way impinges on one's life. Road-rage cannot be generalized to public fear either: even if it did exist, you have to be one of those rare people who stop to engage in a verbal confrontation with another driver to be vulnerable to that. Millions of us drive, many aggressively, get upset, honk, flick the finger, and sometimes shout obscenities, all without even thinking of getting near the objects of our aggression. Crack babies, I am sorry to say, also would not make the cut of public fear because the poor are below the radar of the average American. Inner-city problems are even further. While many may be concerned about the consequences of poverty, lack of education, and inequality, it is an exaggeration to call it fear. Even fear of flying cannot be generalized, as evidenced by the millions who travel every year.

Mr. Glassner selects widely reported issues about which there is little statistical evidence. This is laudable service in setting the record straight and, in cases like online pedophilia, it would arguably serve to assuage some fears (not all: the mere possibility would generally be enough for most people to start worrying about it). Such a methodology is great if one wants to debunk stories reported in the media but it is junk science if one wants to generalize about genuine public fears.

Before detailing some of Mr. Glassner's own myth-making endeavors, let me speculate on one crucial question. Why does the public buy into these fears? First, media irresponsibility. Truth be told, journalists and editors are after whatever sells and we cannot blame them for it. There is no law (nor should there be one) that holds journalists to unbiased or honest reporting. As has always been the case, the spectacular sells, the mundane does not. The ancient Romans went to the Coliseum, the Greeks went to the Olympics, the Aztecs went to their pyramids. Entertainment and the sensational are the two ingredients that ensure the survival of the media. If it's boring, then it won't making, even if it's honest. One is wise not to take journalists at their word. In these days, checking facts is as easy as going online.

Second, the public accepts uncritically many stories because it is generally unable to reason probabilistically and because it misunderstands statistical evidence and rules of inference. People are not good at distinguishing between incidence and rate. They are apt to construct patterns from few isolated events even when the overall trend contradicts them. They are emotional and are apt to disregard statistics and generalize from single cases. Unfortunately, journalists usually fare no better and hence misreport news with some regularity (just as Mr. Glassner documents). If there's any remedy for this, I would suggest that it involves education. I actually think that instead of teaching calculus in school (which most will never use in their life), we should spend time teaching probability and statistics (which will make better news consumers of us all).

On now to some spectacular failings of the book. Mr. Glassner's "analysis" is irreparably marred by his personal biases. "Our fear grows... proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them" (p. 72).

What's wrong with the following explanation? The media, seeking to grab our attention, exaggerates every incident and creates a trend out of two or three incidents even though random events may cluster temporarily and spatially here and there. The media is irresponsible because it neither takes sufficient care to ensure the statistical significance of the "trends" it reports or to put rates and incidences in perspective by making cross-national comparisons. Most Americans, woefully unschooled in basic probabilistic thinking, uncritically accept such "epidemics" and genuinely begin to worry about their safety even while they are getting safer by the year. So there you go: a generalized fear that has nothing to do with our collective responsibility or whatever. Mr. Glassner should also know that rhetorical tricks (us committing "violence" against our youth by not funding appropriate government programs leads to project real violence onto that youth) make for fine copy but for truly bad argument.

Mr. Glassner's bias is obvious in the chapter "Black Men: How to Perpetuate Prejudice Without Really Trying," in which he commits the precise sin of which he accuses us. According to Mr. Glassner, blacks are slighted by the media because it fails to report the fact that "many more black men are casualties of crime than are perpetrators" (p. 109), that "a black man is eighteen times more likely to be murdered than is a white woman" (p. 112), and that "for black men between the ages of fifteen and thirty, violence is the single leading cause of death" (p. 112). His explanation is that the media is racist because it panders to our racist prejudices: we expect blacks to be victims, so they are not newsworthy.

That may be so, but what does it mean? Nowhere in his chapter does Mr. Glassner cite relevant statistics. The US census report estimates that in 2002, the population of the U.S. was 287,973,924, of which 36,675,922 (12.7%) were black and 232,369,198 (80.7%) were white (both figures include Hispanic or Latino origins to make them useful for the FBI data which lumps whites and Hispanics together). In short, there are approximately 6 times more whites than blacks in the U.S. The 2002 FBI reported in its "Uniform Crime Report":

Of the 14,054 murder victims, 6,757 (48.1%) were white and 6,730 (47.9%) were black. This makes for 29 white victims per 100,000 whites, and 184 black victims per 100,000 blacks. An average black is six times more likely to be murdered than an average white. So perhaps Mr. Glassner is onto something?

Maybe not.

Of the 15,813 murder offenders, 5,356 (33.9%) were white and 5,579 (35.3%) were black. This makes for 23 white murderers per 100,000 whites, and 152 black murderers per 100,000 blacks. An average black is six times more likely to be a murderer than an average white.

What about interracial murders with single victim/single offender (only cases that FBI reports for)? There were 3,386 total murders in this category where the offender was black and 3,309 where the offender was white. Blacks murdered 483 (7.4%) whites out of 3,582, while whites murdered 227 (7.2%) blacks out of 3,137. This makes for 13 black-murders-white per 100,000 blacks, and 1 white-murders-black per 100,000 whites. An average black is thirteen times more likely to murder a white than vice versa.

What about hate crime? Of the 7,314 hate crimes where the offender's race was identified, 4,517 (61.8%) were white and 1,592 (21.8%) were black. This makes for 19 white hate crime offenders per 100,000 whites and 43 black hate crime offenders per 100,000 blacks. The average black is twice as likely to commit a hate crime as an average white.

Perhaps black victims are not reporting crimes? According to National Victimization Survey of the DOJ, 5.1% of whites and 4.0% of blacks did not report because police would not want to be bothered, and 3.0% of whites and 4.0% of blacks did not do it because they thought police was inefficient, ineffective or biased.

It is worth noting that the FBI has a pretty curious treatment of Hispanics, who are counted as victims of hate crime (anti-Hispanic) but not as perpetrators of any crime (where they are counted as whites).

In the end, the picture that emerges from the FBI statistics undermines Mr. Glassner's entire thesis because it appears that a fear of blacks is actually pretty well justified relative to fear of whites (and both should be pretty remote fears for the average American compated to things he/she should be really afraid of, like getting in the car and driving). Before someone labels this conclusion as racist, one must keep in mind that the statistics are only numbers. They do not reflect causes, which is something that social scientists are desperately trying to uncover. Poverty, inequality, and inner-city decay all contribute to crime and are problems we have to deal with. However, the fear (which is what Mr. Glassner is after) is real and for once seems rather sound.

Mr. Glassner further muddies the waters by claiming that despite all vitriol by the black Nation of Islam leader, anti-Semitism remains predominantly a white phenomenon. That may be so, but he misses a crucial component of the coverage of Khalid Muhammad, the fact that he (and his followers) are Muslim. The media's emphasis is not on his race but religion. This may be another form of bias, but it is not racism.

Another personal favorite of Mr. Glassner is the familiar refrain that government policies (and, by extension, the American public) are to blame for all sort of evils while personal responsibility is neglected in favor of an image of societal victimization. Case in point are the "wicked witches," single mothers, especially drug-addicts. "No one denies that a mother's use of crack injures her children, or that children are ignored or abused when their mothers go on crack binges. But many of the crack users... took great pride in their children's achievements and worked to steer them away from drugs. During periods when their own drug use got out of hand they placed their children with relatives. It may have provided a handy way for the American public to differentiate themselves from [mothers on crack, but] numerous other parties... to the entire New York City child welfare administration... were also at fault" (pp. 100-101).

What are we to make out of this? Because a few addicts manage to harm their children less than others, it follows that the government is to blame for the cases where addicts do harm them fatally? How about a comparison between children of drug addicts and non-addicts? How about a comparison between the ability of a drug-addict to provide for his/her family and that of a non-addict? There may well be complex causes to "women's own pathologies" but one cannot, in good faith, deny that drug addiction is harmful by itself and quite apart from environmental factors. How about a comparison between a poor drug-addict and a poor non-addict? Which one is more likely to provide adequately for his/her family? After reading Shipler's "The Working Poor," I do not doubt the answer. Again, this is not to say that drug addiction is the sole cause; this would be as simplistic as denying it as a serious contributing factor. Rather, it is to point out that these people bear personal responsibility for their behavior and the government-is-to-blame mantra can only encourage them to abdicate even the little responsibility that is left.

The government, in Mr. Glassner's book, is to be faulted for not caring enough. One egregious lapse of care is its failure to ban guns. On p. 55, Mr. Glassner screams (in capital letters): "IT'S THE GUNS, STUPID" (no wonder the other fear-monger Michael Moore featured him on his "documentary"). What is Mr. Glassner so upset about? Teen suicides. Yes, apparently it's the gun that cause suicides because 60% of the kids use them, and guns, being lethal and everything, cause deaths. This is so specious that one is at a loss where to begin.

First, Mr. Glassner may want to know that not all suicides are equal. Some people want to draw attention to themselves and elicit sympathy. Others really want to kill themselves. The ones in the first category are unlikely to jump from the 25th floor, shoot themselves, or quietly suffocate themselves with exhaust emissions. The ones in the second category are quite likely to use these methods. Why? Because they do not want to survive the attempt and are likely to choose an appropriate method. Everyone knows that if you blow your brains out, your chances of survival are nil. You would not do it if you were crying for attention. Hence, even if all guns are banned, kids who want to kill themselves will substitute another equally lethal method. There are many.

Second, Mr. Glassner may want to know a bit about suicide rates. The World Health Organization 1995 report shows that rates are 19.8 (males) and 4.4 (females) for the U.S., 21.5 (M) and 5.4 (F) for Canada, 21.8 (M) and 8.3 (F) for Germany, 30.8 (M) and 6.3 (F) for Luxembourg, 30.4 (M) and 10.8 (F) for France, 37.3 (M) and 11.9 (F) for Belgium, 24.1 (M) and 11.3 (F) for Denmark, 25.0 (M) and 12.0 (F) for Japan, 11.0 (M) and 4.0 (F) for Israel, and 11.0 (M), 3.3 (F) for the UK. The combined male/female rates are as follows. UK 14.3, Israel 15, U.S.\ 24.2, Canada 26.6, Germany 30.1, Denmark 35.4, Japan 37.0, Luxembourg 37.1, France 41.2, and Belgium 49.2. Of the countries that top this list, all have strict gun controls. I did not even include the countries with the highest rates (e.g. Hungary 72.3, Russia 87.4, among others). The point is that suicide is not a matter of having guns or not having them but a complex phenomenon that seems to be afflicting many affluent Western nations, with the U.S.\ near the bottom of this list. Why should we worry about suicides and why should we be seeking to ban guns, are questions that Mr. Glassner fails to answer.

There are many other places in the book where Mr. Glassner offers his twin "solutions": ban guns and increase government welfare spending. Nowhere does he discuss he ramifications of such remedies. Indeed, he cannot for he refuses to acknowledge that there can be no simple solution and in some of his recommendations the solution would probably be worse than the disease. In the end, Mr. Glassner perpetrates the same trick he accuses the dirty policy magicians of: by misdirecting our attention to gun control and government welfare spending he channels the deliberation away from the real problems.

June 15, 2004