[thematic statement]   [complete agenda]
 

session 1

Keynote: The Politics of Fear
Thursday, February 5, 2004, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Vice President Al Gore  

session 2

Fear and How it Works: Science and Social Science
Friday, February 6, 2004, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Joseph LeDoux
What happens in your brain when you are afraid? And why should you care?  Modern research has identified in great detail the circuits, cells, synapses and molecules that underlie the reaction to a dangerous stimulus, and the learning of associations that come to control fear behavior. Although these studies have been performed in rats, the basic findings have been confirmed in studies of humans with brain damage and in studies of normal volunteers using brain imaging. Also, the same circuits are altered in patients with pathological fear, such as panic or post-traumatic stress disorder. The animal work is also leading to new ideas about how to treat fear disorders both with drugs and through cognitive and behavioral therapies.
Joe LeDoux is Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University.  His laboratory in the Center for Neural Science conduct research aimed at understanding the biological underpinnings of emotions such as fear.  He is the author of Synatpic Self (2002 and The Emotional Brain (1996).

Barry Glassner
Power and money await individuals and organizations that tap into Americans' moral insecurities. By means of fearmongering about social problems, politicians sell themselves to voters, TV news programs sell their programs to viewers, advocacy groups sell memberships, lawyers sell class action lawsuits, realtors sell homes in gated communities, and on and on. This paper explores three of the techniques that fearmongers use: misdirection; the christening of isolated incidents as trends; and pseudo-experts who supercede true experts.

The paper argues that as a result of successful fearmongering, Americans waste billions of dollars and person-hours each year on largely mythical hazards such as on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, and programs designed to protect young people from hazards that few of them actually face.
Barry Glassner is Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California. He researches theory, culture, media, marginality, and qualitative methods. Much of Glassner's current research enlarges on his earlier work on the use of fear by politicians, marketers, advocacy groups, and the news media. His is the author of Culture of Fear and his articles have appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other journals.

Tom Pyszczynski
Why Are We Afraid? On the Relations between Anxiety, Meaning, and Self-esteem
Humankind is unique from all other living things in that only we possess the sophisticated intellectual abilities that make us aware of the inevitability of our own death. Terror management theory posits that cultural worldviews and self-esteem are the primary means by which our species protects ourselves from this fear. I will provide a brief overview of converging lines of evidence that supports this view, consisting of our 200 studies conducted in at least 9 different countries. I will also discuss the implications of this line of thinking for understanding many of the current global crises that make this an especially frightening time to be alive.
Tom Pyszczynski is Professor of Psychology at Colorado UniversityBColorado Springs. His in social and personality psycholoy research is concerned with self-esteem maintenance and defense, the role of self-esteem, cultural world views, and interpersonal relationships in the management of anxiety and fear, the role of self-focused attention and self-regulatory processes in depression, and the interplay between defensive and self-expansive growth oriented motive systems. He is the co-author (with Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg) of In the Wake of 9/11: the Psychology of Terror (2002).

Steven Heller
Fear is one of the tools of the visual propagandist for instilling unease and inciting action. The graphic language of fear includes a panoply of symbols, which when used in the right combination, triggers the untold psychological responses. This talk will survey that language, From images of rape and pillage to towering mushroom clouds, its contexts and applications over the past century.
Steven Heller is art director of the New York Times Book Review and co-chair of the MFA/Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. He has authored, co-authored, and edited over 80 books on political art, popular culture, and graphic design. Among his books are Red Scared: Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture (co-authored with Michael Barson); The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption; Art Against War (with D.J.R. Bruckner and Seymour Chwast); Angry Graphics: Protest Posters of the Reagan Bush Era (co-authored with Karrie Jacobs); and his most recent is Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century.

session 3

The Political Theory and Vocabulary of Fear
Friday, February 6, 2004, 2:00  - 5:00 p.m.

John Hollander
I propose to discuss some of the complexities of the language by which we invoke various concepts of, and relating to, Fear. One of the reasons for so doing is to try to understand a spectrum along which related inner states would range from pure immediate (and, physiogically, most strongly marked) terror all the way through to a calm condition of acknowledgement of the dubiousness of some outcome or other. A good many different terms in English scatter their designations--most inconsistently--along this array; trying to understand fear in a moral or political context requires some linguistic and rhetorical scrutiny.
John Hollander is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University and a poet and critic. Most recent among his seventeen books of poetry are Figurehead (1999), Tesserae (1993), Selected Poetry (1993) a reissue of his earlier Reflections on Espionage (2000). His critical books include The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700 (1961); Vision and Resonance (1975); The Figure of Echo (1981); Rhyme's Reason (1981) [3rd expanded edition 2000]; Melodious Guile (1988) The Gazer's Spirit, (1995) The Work of Poetry (1997);The Poetry of Everyday Life (1998). Among twenty books edited, he is co-general editor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1972), poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1990), Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1992) and American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (2 vols.) (1993).
 

George Kateb
In his typology of governments, Montesquieu says that the organizing and animating "principle" of despotism (or tyranny) is fear. To keep his power (often usurped) the despot aims to keep the people submissive to his rule by a variety of techniques of coercion and intimidation. He acts out of what Burke calls "the tyrannous maxims of distrust." The result of these techniques is to spread among the people a continuous fearfulness or apprehension. Some tyrannies keep people in line by inducing passivity; some, in contrast, keep the people mobilized or whipped up against a designated enemy (internal or external), and thus distracted from their hatred of the tyrant. At the extreme, fear may turn into terror where no one is safe, no one knows for sure what is expected of him, no one knows whose turn is next. The abstract fear felt by the tyrant engenders the real daily fear felt by his subjects. In the paper, I hope to explore these issues, while paying some attention to the idea that tyranny may be wielded over only a segment of a population (for example, tyranny of the majority, or racial subordination).
George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University. His books include The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, winner of the 1994 Spitz Book Prize by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought.

Corey Robin
Despite our notion that fear is opposed to freedom, modern political theorists, liberal and conservative alike, have consistently argued that fear may be a precondition of political freedom and individual flourishing. Not in the obvious sense that fear is a necessary and inevitable aspect of the human condition ö fear, after all, alerts us to real dangers in the world, making it possible for us to take informed, remedial action against those dangers ö but in a more troubling sense. Since the seventeenth century, theorists from Locke and Burke to Tocqueville and contemporary American intellectuals, have argued that fear is a necessary spur to individual agency and also a source of collective moral and political renewal. Without fear, these writers have claimed, we would be lost ö adrift in personal torpor, padding in moral confusion and anomie, listless about our own fates and destinies. Danger and the fear it arouses have been seen as providential moments of individual and collective awakening. Today, this understanding of fear has become all too resonant. It explains the curious euphoria that seized so many intellectuals, on the Left and the Right, after 9/11 and in the years since.
Corey Robin is an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His essays and articles on political theory and contemporary politics have appeared in American Political Science Review, The New York Times Magazine, Raritan, The Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, and Social Research. His first book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 

Ira Katznelson
Following a long period of desolation in the West dating from the First World War and including the collapse of more than twenty constitutional democracies and the rise of a wide array of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, American scholars and intellectuals faced up to the implications of this crisis after Pearl Harbor when the United States was consumed by total war. In the early 1940s, established thinkers, notably including Harold Lasswell, the era's leading political scientist, and younger scholars, including Daniel Bell and David Riesman, grappled with the implications of the global crisis and its climate of anxiety for the future of liberal democracy. They wrote essays on the erosion of the boundary between normal and emergency periods. I would like to revisit their writing and their formulations as the first such efforts after the loss of American isolation and innocence. Are they pertinent today? If so, how?

session 4

What We Gain, What We Lose: The Effects of Fear
Friday, February 6, 2004, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Stanley Hoffmann
Here are some indications about what I'd like to talk about at the conference on fear: I would like to discuss two different topics. (1) The role of fear in international relations. To what extent has fear of a superior power or of a rival or even of a smaller power that is seen as a threat been a major factor in the history of international conflict? Does the role that Thucydides attributes to fear in his discussion of the Peloponnesian war continue in present day international affairs? (2) I would like to examine the role that fear plays in shaping the foreign policy of states because of its effects on domestic opinion and on submitting the state's foreign policy to the pressures of the public or of influential sectors of the public.
Stanley Hoffmann is the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard. Among his publications, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 30's (1974); Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy since the Cold War (1978); Duties Beyond Borders (1981); Janus and Minerva (1986); and The European Sisyphus (1995); The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (1997); and World Disorders (1998).

Cass Sunstein
This paper will show how social fear produces excessive and unjustified government reactions to social risks. In particular, it will bring the international debate over fear and the "precautionary principle" to bear on civil liberties and war. The precautionary principle holds that to justify government regulation, a certainty of harm is not required; a mere risk of harm justifies aggressive action. Often something akin to the precautionary principle is invoked to justify restrictions on civil liberties. But the precautionary principle is a recipe for serious blunders and should be rejected. The reason is that it ignores the probability of harm, as fear typically does. In addition, the precautionary principle fixates on a subset of the interests at stake, ignoring others with a claim to social attention. Discussion is devoted to the nature of "balancing" in cases in which security and liberty collide, with concrete suggestions for how to avoid the most serious civil liberties violations without endangering security.
Cass R. Sunstein is Karl N. Llewellyn Dist. Service Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School, Department of Political Science and the College. He is author of many articles and of books, including After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (1990), Constitutional Law (co-authored with Geoffrey Stone, Louis M. Seidman, and Mark Tushnet) (1995), The Partial Constitution (1993), Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (1996), Free Markets and Social Justice (1997), Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy (1998) (with Justice Stephen Breyer and Professor Richard Stewart and Matthew Spitzer), One Case At A Time (1999), Behavioral Law and Economics (editor, 2000), Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (2001), Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), The Cost-Benefit State (2002), and Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (2002).

Eric Alterman
My paper will discuss the manner in which the Bush administration, with the cooperation of a docile media, and the energetic support of a powerful ideological movement, has manipulated the fears inspired by the attacks of 9/11 to serve purposes entirely unrelated to those attacks, while in the process failing to address the concerns that such entirely legitimate fear might produce. To put the matter bluntly, they are engaged in a "bait and switch" operation made possible only by their successful manipulation of our fear and dread of "terrorism."
Eric Alterman currently writes the "Stop the Presses" media column for The Nation and the "Altercation" Weblog (www.altercation.msnbc.com) for MSNBC.com. In recent years, he has been a contributing editor to, or columnist for: Worth, Rolling Stone, Elle, Mother Jones, World Policy Journal, and The Sunday Express (London). His ''Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy" (1992 2000), won the 1992 George Orwell Award. He is also the author of ''Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy," (1998) and the New York Times national best seller, ''What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News" (2003). In 2004, he plans to publish ''The Book on Bush: Truth and Consequences for America's 43rd President" (with Mark Green), and ''When Presidents Lie: Deception and Its Consequences." He is also a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at New School University, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University.

Aryeh Neier
An element of terrorism is that it is intended to create fear that is disproportionate to the actual danger that it poses. Because the victims of terrorism may be randomly selected, it often succeeds in this aim. A consequence is to elicit responses by governments that violate human rights in ways that are not directly related to the prevention or punishment of terrorism. This is because governments may feel that they need to respond in ways that are proportional to the fears aroused by terrorism. In so doing, governments may serve another of the purposes of the terrorists by discrediting themselves in the eyes of many of those who become victims of such repressive measures. From the standpoint of the terrorists, arousing disproportionate fears and eliciting repressive measures that discredit the governments that react in this way makes their terrorist acts doubly successful.
Aryeh Neier is President of the Open Society Institute. Formerly Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, he also served as National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. His books include War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice (1998), and his articles have appeared in numerous publications.

session 5

Cases Studies: What Can They Teach Us?
Saturday, February 6, 2004, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Ellen Schrecker
McCarthyism: Political Repression and the Fear of Communism
During the early years of the Cold War, American policy makers believed that it was necessary to invoke the fear of communism in order to mobilize popular support for U.S. foreign policy. Such scare tactics, while tapping into a long-standing vein of what the late political scientist Michael Rogin has called "the countersubversive tradition," also provided cover for an ongoing partisan campaign against the New Deal administration. The unfortunate concatenation of political opportunism with a genuine (though overexaggerated) sense of crisis produced what turned out to be the longest lasting and most widespread episode of political repression in American history. This paper will examine that political repression (a.k.a. McCarthyism) as a way of examining how the fear of communism could be manipulated to limit dissent and violate individual rights.
Ellen Schrecker is Professor of History at Yeshiva University. Her books include Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1999), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents(1994), No Ivory Tower: McCartyism and the Universitities (1986), and Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s (edited with Craig Kaplan 1983). She also serves as Editor of the journal Academe.

E. Valentine Daniel
The Political Economy of Fear in Sri Lanka: Doing Anthropography during "The Troubles"
Based on ethnography carried out during the height of the 1983 pogrom against the Tamils of Sri Lanka, and in 1990, among Tamils who fled from violence and settled in the Netherlands, this essay attempts to understand what it means to "be in fear" as opposed to "having fear." The distinction between these two kinds of fearfulness emerges from ethnographic interviews. An attempt would be made to interpret the phenomenon in cultural terms.
E. Valentine Daniel is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and director of Columbia University's Southern Asian Institute. Recent publications include: Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (1984) Co-edited with Geoffrey Peck, Culture/Contexture: Essays in Anthropology and Literary Study (1986), Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (1997). E. Valentine Daniel explains the background of the animosity between Hindu fundamentalists and Buddhist fundamentalists in Sri Lanka, a relatively recent phenomenon.

Jessica Stern
In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax mailings, U.S. policymakers scrambled to enact new legislation to address the terrorist threat. The urgency of the effort precluded careful balancing of competing interests, with potential adverse effects on civil liberties, public health, and national security. Risk analysts have long observed a tendency for policymakers to respond rapidly to visible crises, even if the baseline rate of danger has not changed; and 'action bias,' -- decision makers penchant for taking action without necessarily considering long-term effects, coupled with a tendency to choose those actions for which they are likely to receive the most credit. At the same time national attention often drifts once a crisis appears to be over. Perhaps then the biggest challenge for policymakers in responding to the autumn 2001 terrorist strikes is to avoid overreacting while the terrorist strikes remain vivid in people's minds what risk analysts refer to as 'availability' -- and to sustain the effort to reduce the threat, even during periods when the risk recedes from national consciousness. My paper will argue that effective policy making requires an assessment of countervailing dangers introduced by remedies intended to decrease a target risk (the one the policy aims to reduce), even when the target risk is particularly dreaded and when both target and countervailing risks are difficult to quantify. Such risk trade-off analysis has become commonplace in evaluations of medical procedures, health risks of pesticides, and policies for protecting the environment, but it is not yet practiced in foreign policy or national security decision making
Jessica Stern, is Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a faculty affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She is the author of Terror in the Name of God (HarperCollins, 2003), The Ultimate Terrorists (Harvard University Press, 1999), and of numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

session 6

Politics of Fear After 9/11: Can the Past Inform the Future?
Saturday, February 6, 2004, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Moderator: Kenneth Prewitt
Panelists: Eric Alterman, Andrew Arato, Stanley Hoffmann, Tom Pyszczynski, Corey Robin, and Jessica Stern

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