There is a reason fear is great motivator. For most of our species' history, survival was our prime concern. And the most fearful of our kind are the ones who survived. The early people who ran away when the twig snapped had a better chance of passing down their genetic profiles than the intellectually curious who moved toward the bump in the night.
Fear is baked into us--we've all experienced the quickened pulse and trembling associated with the flight-or-fight response. Even if it only woke us from a nightmare.
So we are descended from cowards. But fear doesn't compel, it offers us options. And not only flight or fight; those are just the deeply ingrained instincts. We can also rise above our fear. We can also choose to be brave.
In her 1964 essay "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," Hannah Arendt quoted her friend, the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy: "If someone points a gun at you and says 'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all."
You might tell me that's an impossible choice, which is no choice at all. But ordinary people have made that impossible choice again and again throughout human history.
"I had somehow taken it for granted that we all still believe with Socrates that it is better to suffer than to do wrong," Arendt wrote. "This belief turned out to be a mistake. There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same . . ."
Maybe we should have some empathy for people who act out of fear. Because we can understand why they acted as they did. If there's a shadow in a place we don't expect it, and it doesn't comply with our directions and maybe even answers us antagonistically, and we have a gun and have been charged by the government with keeping the peace, then maybe we too would shoot the shadow. Maybe we too would make a horrible mistake.
But we should remember that there's always the option not to shoot, and while that might be a difficult choice to make in a given situation, more often than not it's the right choice. Almost always, the right choice is to resist the fearful impulse, to feel it and to not give into it. To be brave. To not let your amygdala--which is so stupid it can't tell a real threat from a horror movie--make your decisions for you.
You might argue that's unreasonable, that you have to be an extraordinary person to behave bravely. I think you aren't giving yourself enough credit. We train people to behave bravely, to do difficult jobs despite real danger. Firefighters and police and soldiers and lots of other people routinely function in genuinely dangerous environments. And one of the reasons they are able to do so is because they don't want to fail their co-workers. They don't want to let their team down. They are proof that it is possible for a human being to put the welfare of others before self-interest.
You might counter that it's their fear of being perceived a coward that really makes them behave unselfishlessly. Fine. Whatever gets you through the night. Someone wise once suggested all we had to fear was fear itself.
Yeah, that sounds right. There are people willing to monetize your fear, to use it to manipulate you. One of the best ways to get people to give you money and power is to scare them. That's an old story.
What ought to worry us is the growing respectability of fear, our willingness to accept it as an excuse.
We shouldn't. We should hold ourselves and others to a higher standard. Just because we can understand the reasons people act in certain ways does not mean we have to forgive those actions. Can I imagine myself a murderer? Yes. That doesn't mean I condone murder or that I'm compelled to forgive murder. It just means I must consider that the murderer is human and that we have many things in common.
These days, we are repeatedly urged not to judge. We are told that the passing of judgment is wrong, especially if we have not been in precisely the same situation as those in the dock.
Don't believe that. It's impossible to avoid judgment. We all judge, we all will be judged. Having empathy for a murderer doesn't mean the murderer doesn't face judgment.
Fear doesn't justify anything. We ought to stigmatize it as weakness, even if it's the instinctual default mode of our kind. Because we need to be better than our default selves. We need to become more afraid of presenting as cowards than of people we don't know. Acting out of fear should be seen as shameful, not inevitable.
Fear is the place we start from, what we need to rise above. Though we may be fallen, we have have angelic apprehension. We have examples of selflessness, of courage, of goodness. While we know the world is a rough place and that there are real problems out there--opioid abuse, divisive tribalism, a deeply rooted disillusionment with our institutions, a nihilistic approach to managing our dwindling resources, the way so many people on both the left and the right are willing to detach themselves from truth--we can also understand there are those who mean to monetize our fear.
Look, we all face real risks every day. Crime is something that happens to people, but the fear of it shouldn't paralyze you or cause a panic at a high school football game. You get up and go to work even though you understand your commute to work is dangerous, and that people die because they woke up in the morning and left their house. But you don't have to leave your house to get killed.
Botham Jean didn't have to leave his apartment.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/18/2018