Fear

Why do you fear what you fear? Joanna Bourke argues that fear is not a static human reflex but a social technology—a tool shaped by culture, history, and power to regulate emotion and behavior. Across centuries, institutions from churches to laboratories, armies to media networks, have defined what fear means, what objects deserve it, and how you should express or suppress it. The resulting story is not simply about emotion but about how societies organize authority and truth.

Fear as Language and Performance

You learn early in Bourke’s book that emotions have public grammars. The concept of emotionology—developed by Peter and Carol Stearns—captures how emotions operate through cultural scripts: each society sets expectations for how to display, manage, and interpret feelings. Calling something “fear” activates shared vocabularies that shape both sensation and performance. In the nineteenth century, for instance, clergy used fear of hell to secure moral compliance, while twentieth-century doctors reframed fear around disease, death, and hygiene. Each professional regime created distinct hierarchies of legitimacy and comfort.

Institutions and the Manufacture of Emotional Authority

Throughout history, new institutions have captured fear by redefining its causes. Priests once managed the terror of damnation; scientists then took over the rhetoric of contagion, radiation, and psychological disorder. Governments, too, redefined fear through law and surveillance—transforming private feeling into a matter of national interest. Bourke uses examples such as protection campaigns, moral panics, and epidemiological scares to demonstrate how designating something as “fearworthy” authorizes new forms of expert power. If the state names fear as a public problem, it can justify interventions from censorship to medicalization.

Historical Examples of Emotional Engineering

To grasp how cultures redirect fear, consider the changing relationship between religion, science, and death. In the nineteenth century, clergymen used exposés of premature burial—newspapers, sermons, and pamphlets—to dramatize moral disorder and divine warning. The same fear was later reinterpreted medically as a symptom of distrust in science or poverty. When microbes replaced miasma, or radiation replaced supernatural threat, the tone remained anxious even as authority shifted. Spike Mays’s poor child weeding to prevent starvation embodies how structural insecurity becomes personalized dread: the fear of hunger internalizes social inequality.

Bourke’s discussion of disasters like the Iroquois Theatre fire or the Victoria Hall tragedy continues this logic. Panic is not mere hysteria—it is a structural effect of poor architecture, regulation, and class division. Engineers such as William Paul Gerhard and John Ripley Freeman treated fear as something that could be managed through building design. The invention of the “panic bar” represents this new philosophy: regulate humans by regulating their environments.

From Bodily Expression to Neurochemical Discourse

At a different scale, Bourke traces how science sought physiological signatures of fear. Experiments by Duchenne de Boulogne and Darwin on facial muscles inaugurated a long debate between biological universalism and cultural relativity. Later, psychologists like Paul Ekman claimed cross-cultural universality of expressions, while neurologists highlighted the amygdala’s role in fear recognition. Yet Bourke reminds you: faces and tremors are ambiguous signs. The expression of fear depends as much on training, representation, and context as on brain circuits. Soldiers trembling before battle or civilians shaking in air-raid shelters are physiological actors in cultural scripts of courage and vulnerability.

Fear, Power, and Historical Awareness

Bourke’s central message is political and epistemological. You cannot assume that an emotion labelled “fear” reflects the same internal state across time. Each naming constructs permission: to fear God validates ecclesiastical authority, to fear microbes validates scientific vigilance, to fear terrorists validates surveillance. The study of fear thus becomes a study of power’s emotional architecture. When you examine how different eras frighten their citizens, you are also examining how they legitimate control. Understanding this history gives you a toolkit to question today’s rhetoric of emergency—whether about pandemics, terrorism, or ecological collapse—and to ask: whose interests are served by the fear you are asked to feel?

Death, the ultimate locus of fear, offers Bourke her most vivid examples of emotional change. In nineteenth-century Britain the panic over premature burial and pauper graves intertwined with moral reform and distrust of medicine. Newspapers like the Pall Mall Gazette stoked horror stories of waking in coffins, and technological fixes—patent coffins with air tubes and bells—emerged as both reassurance and symptom of unease. The Anatomy Act of 1832, which allowed dissection of unclaimed pauper bodies, deepened class anxieties. The poor literally feared losing bodily integrity after death.

Changing Rituals of Terror

By the early twentieth century, cremation replaced burial as the language of purification. Clergymen gradually softened depictions of hellfire, turning fear of judgment into consolation for grief. Later, medicine replaced theology in managing dying: doctors, not priests, became the custodian of the deathbed experience. This transformation reveals a substitution rather than a decline of fear—terror of eternal fire gave way to dread of prolonged suffering or mechanical survival. In the nuclear and biomedical age, the question of how to die well becomes a political and technological question.

Fear in Collective Catastrophe

The same interplay of structure and meaning governs disaster panics. Fires at the Iroquois Theatre (Chicago, 1903) and Victoria Hall (Sunderland, 1883) transformed private alarm into collective tragedy. Rather than blaming individuals, reformers like Gerhard and Freeman translated panic into engineering language: wider exits, brighter lighting, standardized drills. These material reforms illustrate a new bureaucratic management of emotion. Disasters became laboratories for designing safer, more governable publics.

From Soldiers to Civilians Under Fire

Wartime magnified these dynamics. Combat fear, Bourke shows, is paradoxically both universal and institutional. Reports from Okinawa or Iwo Jima document vomiting, trembling, and paralysis—biological facts—but also moral judgments about courage. William H. R. Rivers observed that terror peaks when action is impossible; impotence, not danger itself, triggers breakdown. Armies responded with drills, “manipulative activities” like digging or cleaning weapons, and psychiatric triage to convert fear into functional energy. Discipline thus became emotional engineering.

Civilians under bombardment during the Second World War confronted mass fear differently. Surveys showed most Londoners adapted to nightly raids, creating routines that turned horror into community resilience. Yet moments like the Bethnal Green tube disaster exposed the thin line between order and chaos. With minimal light, one stumble, and bad design, 173 people died. Authorities suppressed inquiry findings for fear of morale collapse. Scapegoating soon followed—Jews and foreigners were blamed—revealing that panic always carries a political aftermath.

The Architecture of Fear

From Victorian coffins to wartime bunkers, Bourke insists that architecture embodies emotional expectations. Structures teach you when to feel safe and when to fear. Whether an ornate coffin or an air-raid shelter, the technological mediation of fear exposes who is protected and who is expendable. Physical design thus becomes moral design—the literal infrastructure of emotionology. You learn that collective fears often crystallize into blueprints, engineering codes, and rituals that persist long after the threat has passed.

If death and disaster show fear’s social face, medicine and psychology show its professional capture. From behaviorist laboratories to operating theaters, Bourke tracks how experts turned fear into experimental object and curable pathology. Each new approach—conditioning, psychoanalysis, surgery, or counseling—reflected not only a scientific paradigm but also moral and political priorities.

The Child as Experimental Subject

Childhood becomes a recurring locus of experimentation. Early theories of maternal impressions warned pregnant women that anger or fear could deform fetuses, moralizing maternal emotion. Later, John B. Watson’s conditioning of “Little Albert” marked a shift: fear was something to be induced and studied under clinical control. Behaviorists claimed emotional responses could be trained or untrained, promising a secular, manipulable humanity. By midcentury, parenting advice pivoted repeatedly—from fear-based discipline to reassurance and back again under Cold War masculinity drives—showing how cultural anxieties about citizenship, gender, and control filtered through the nursery.

Psychoanalysis and Pathology

Freud’s cases (such as Little Hans’s horse phobia) reinterpreted fear as symbolic drama: external terrors mask unconscious conflict. Later psychotherapists viewed phobia as displaced anxiety, to be cured by revealing hidden meanings. Behaviorists countered that insight was unnecessary—systematic desensitization or “flooding” could unlearn fear mechanically. Both approaches shared faith in expert mediation: fear became a phenomenon to be managed by professionals rather than communities or faiths.

Cutting the Emotion Out

At its most extreme, psychosurgery treated fear as a neurophysiological malfunction. Egas Moniz’s leucotomy and Walter Freeman’s lobotomies promised calm through excision. Bourke details cases like fourteen-year-old O.T., who lost affect and ambition after the procedure. Women were disproportionately targeted. The goal was psychological docility, not autonomy—a chilling reminder that cure often masked control. The subsequent shift toward drugs and behavioral therapy did not erase this logic; it only made it cleaner and faster.

Nightmares, Trauma, and Neuroscience

Dream life offers another window into competing models. Nineteenth-century physicians blamed indigestion or sleeping posture; Freud saw symbolic wish-fulfillment; William Rivers, treating shell-shocked soldiers, argued that nightmares are unprocessed memories demanding integration. Modern neurobiologists replaced symbols with REM cycles and amygdala activation, translating psychic distress into neural mechanics. Bourke’s comparative lens shows that meaning depends on who interprets: the same dream means “repression” to a Freudian, “conditioning” to a behaviorist, and “PTSD replay” to a military psychiatrist.

Ultimately, therapeutic history is a moral history. Each model of cure embeds social expectations—of obedience, productivity, or resilience. Bourke prompts you to ask: who decides when fear should end, and at what cost? The politics of cure mirror the politics of fear itself.

Technology multiplies the velocity and reach of fear. From early radio to television and global internet feeds, Bourke traces how media turn isolated events into shared emotional shocks. What unites the 1926 Father Knox broadcast, the 1938 War of the Worlds panic, and the televisual trauma of 9/11 is not gullibility but trust in authoritative media forms. When a medium carries institutional credibility, fiction and reality can fuse catastrophically.

From Radio Rumors to Real-Time Catastrophe

Father Ronald Knox’s satirical “Broadcasting from the Barricades” (1926) provoked panic because listeners believed the BBC’s sober tone guaranteed factuality. Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds twelve years later intensified the lesson: realistic news bulletins and authoritative voices overwhelmed rational filtering. Psychologist Hadley Cantril quantified the aftermath—up to 1.2 million believed aliens had landed—and warned that radio created a kind of “crowd mind.” The moral was less about foolish audiences than about new technologies collapsing boundaries between reportage and invention.

Decades later, the television coverage of 9/11 revived this dynamic. Journalists like Ashleigh Banfield described downtown Manhattan as a “movie set” come alive. Viewers processed the attacks through cinematic grammars from Independence Day or The Towering Inferno. Producer Timothy Hines even rewrote his film War of the Worlds to avoid parallels that were suddenly unbearable. The uncanny convergence between spectacle and trauma blurred imagination and memory, shaping the twenty-first century’s emotional vocabulary.

Fear versus Anxiety in a Mediated World

Bourke distinguishes between fear—response to tangible threat—and anxiety, diffuse unease without clear object. Yet she shows how media make the two interchangeable. The Martians in 1938 and the terrorists in 2001 externalized preexisting anxieties—economic depression, global instability—into immediate, nameable fears. Political leaders exploit this conversion: naming an enemy channels anxiety into action but also licenses repression. Conversely, pathologizing fear as mere “anxiety” can depoliticize legitimate social concerns, isolating citizens in therapeutic self-management rather than collective engagement.

Thus, modern media are not just conduits of fear—they are architects of interpretation. They determine who speaks with authority, whose panic counts as reasonable, and how societies transform emotion into policy.

From Cold War bunkers to post‑9/11 security regimes, fear has been weaponized as governance. Bourke shows how modern states convert existential dread into institutional survival. The nuclear age, terrorism discourse, and moral panics over crime or disease all rehearse this pattern: fear legitimizes control, while control reproduces fear.

The Nuclear Condition

After 1945, the atomic bomb created a new temporality of fear—continuous, abstract, and total. Schoolchildren practiced duck‑and‑cover drills; governments promised survivability through civil defense; and public campaigns blended reassurance with denial. Sociologists like Guy Oakes argued that civil defense functioned politically, not practically: it maintained faith in deterrence by minimizing perceived danger. Bourke calls this “the politics of reassurance,” where the state manages fear through symbolic preparedness rather than structural change. Einstein’s warning that collective survival demands cooperation haunted these efforts; cooperation seldom arrived.

Invisible Threats and Distrust

By the 1960s, new invisible enemies—pesticides, radiation, pollution—replaced visible bombs. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened ecological anxiety by revealing how toxins infiltrate food chains and bodies. Incidents like Three Mile Island or Sellafield proved that technical expertise and corporate secrecy generate distrust. Regulatory debates over “acceptable risk” exposed that thresholds are political compromises, not neutral science. Facing uncertainty, citizens retreated into individual solutions—detox culture, organic diets—that personalized systemic dangers without solving them. Environmental fear, Bourke argues, thrives where authority and transparency erode.

Strangers, Others, and Scapegoats

Late-twentieth-century moral panics—the Cleveland child‑abuse cases, fears of violent youth, or sexual violence—illustrate how fear binds moral order to social exclusion. Media narratives magnify rare atrocities into generalized threats, justifying surveillance and security industries. After 9/11, scapegoating of Muslims and Arabs repeated this pattern at global scale. Within days of the attacks, hate crimes proliferated, and official rhetoric treated terrorism as a contagion or “cancer” to be excised. Such metaphors moralize eradication, silencing discussion of causes. Bourke reminds you that every panic has victims beyond its stated target: fear redistributes vulnerability.

Preparedness and the Industry of Anxiety

The final paradox Bourke identifies is the commodification of fear. Security technologies, self-help manuals, and 24‑hour news profit from constant vigilance. While fear can promote safety—anti‑smoking or seat‑belt campaigns use it ethically—it can also numb attention through overexposure. A “cloud of alarm,” she writes, leaves you both hyper‑alert and apathetic. The challenge is civic: harness fear’s cautionary value without succumbing to its manipulative potential. Recognizing fear’s history as a tool of governance allows you to reclaim it as a signal for solidarity rather than submission.

As modern societies medicalize fear, they also commodify healing. By the early twenty‑first century, psychological trauma becomes the dominant lens through which you interpret catastrophe. Bourke calls this the rise of the trauma society: a culture that expects professional therapy as both moral right and civic duty following disaster.

Children and the Therapeutic Imperative

After 9/11, politicians framed children as emblems of national innocence. Surveys by Christina Hoven revealed over 75,000 New York children with multiple PTSD symptoms. Yet access to care was profoundly uneven: Eric M. Vernberg reported that only one‑third saw any mental‑health professional. The gap between expectation and infrastructure exposed the paradox of the trauma society—it recognizes psychic pain but underfunds genuine recovery. Teachers were recruited for makeshift counselling; FEMA offered short‑term help without long‑term continuity. Mental health remained, in Bourke’s words, “the stepchild of all health.”

From Moral Strength to Clinical Survival

Historically, citizens were told to master fear through fortitude—Johannes Müller praised danger as the “school of courage.” Today, therapy replaces stoicism. This shift humanizes suffering but also narrows political horizons: when fear is privatized as pathology, structural causes of insecurity—poverty, war, inequality—fade from view. Watching endless televised trauma blurs empathy into fatigue, expanding diagnosis faster than care. Bourke links this to earlier patterns of labeling: when fear was sin, priests treated souls; when fear is illness, clinicians treat brains. Both risk missing the social body.

Recovering Collective Meaning

Bourke concludes that fear need not always imprison you. Across the centuries, communities have ritualized terror into solidarity—from wartime resilience to AIDS activism that turned stigma into protest. The lesson is to restore communal agency within therapeutic modernity: to pair psychological aid with social critique. Only then can fear return to its evolutionary role—not to paralyze, but to signal interdependence. Recognizing its history, you can learn to fear wisely: to differentiate manipulation from warning, and to channel anxiety into constructive change.