UU Society of Cleveland

February 10, 2008

Fear Itself

by Rev. Colin Bossen

What we fear is largely a cultural and political construct. We are taught from an early age what, and whom, to fear. When we encounter something that we are afraid of we are offered two basic choices. The first is to respond reflexively and immediately. The second is to take a breath, pause and reflect, if only for a moment, before acting. Our liberal religious community and tradition can help us to do the later.

I was motivated to write today's sermon because of the recent attack in Shaker Heights and the debate in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that it engendered. The attack that I refer is the New Year's Eve assault on Kevin McDermott which took place in the Ludlow neighborhood that straddles Cleveland and Shaker Heights. For those who do not know, McDermott, a white man, was jumped from behind by seven African American youths as he was out for an early evening walk. He was severely beaten with a pipe and probably would have been killed if the youths had not been scared away by a neighbor banging on a window.

I read about the assault in the New York Times while my family and I were visiting my mother-in-law in Portland, Oregon. The Times article discussed the general dynamic of white flight from the city of Cleveland and the inner ring suburbs to communities further out from the city center. It also mentioned that many who live in the area surrounding Cleveland could not understand why Shaker residents would not want to flee to the outer suburbs in the face of the perceived dangers of the city. The Times then quoted a column by Plain Dealer columnist Dick Feagler in which he advised Shakers residents and those concerned for their safety "So move. But do it like we all have--like the whole three-county area has--don't call it racism. Call it reality." Feagler's quote got my blood boiling. When I returned home from my vacation I looked up his column, spent a couple of hours on cleveland.com and found another column written by Phillip Morris in response to Feagler.

After engaging in overly verbose praise of Feagler, something he probably has to do before publicly criticizing a colleague, Morris settles down to the brass tacks of the matter and calls Feagler's racism for what it is. He writes:

"Feagler--someone who did move away--could not be more wrong in the meaning and instruction he finds in the story of...Kevin McDermott...

...Feagler used the attack to justify those who look to their racial fear as reason to flee the city or the region. He calls it "reality" and implies that moving to get away from black neighbors is not racism.

Instead, he call it realism."

Morris goes on to point out the real problem is not race but crime. He also reminds his readers that the criminals in question "prey on blacks in much larger proportion then they do whites." Then he ends with a plea for "a thoughtful discussion of our fears and misunderstandings [that] will move us...further along as a region than reflexive justification...of flight." Today's sermon is then, in part, an effort to make my own small contribution to such a discussion.

Fear is deeply embedded in our psyche. It is one of the basic emotions that colors how we see and behave in the world. I want to postulate that fear has at least three interlocking components: a physiological component, an experiential component and a cultural or political component. I will address each of these components in turn.

When I say that fear is physiological I mean that it is rooted in the human body. Human beings are animals. We can learn a lot about ourselves when we study other animals, particularly mammals and our close relatives the great apes. Looking at the nervous systems of other animals we have learned fear is a product of our brain. Affective neuroscientists, that is scientists who study the interplay between emotions and the brain, have located the part of brain responsible for the production of fear within the midbrain. The midbrain is something that we share with all other vertebrates. This suggests that fear--or something akin to it--is experienced by fish, reptiles, birds and other mammals. The midbrain is not responsible for creating the so called social, or higher, emotions like love and empathy. This indicates that fear probably evolved in animals earlier than love and empathy. Affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp defines fear as:

"an aversive state of the nervous system, characterized by apprehensive worry, general nervousness, and tension, which tells creatures that their safety is threatened."

Fear is useful for self-preservation. Our brains are wired to experience fear when we are in danger. Fear induces a flight or freeze response depending on the proximity of the danger. If the danger is so close that it cannot be out run there is an instinct to hide. If it is far enough away the instinct is to flee. Fear can also teach us to avoid, or exercise caution around, certain things.

Animals are both capable of learning to fear things and are, often, hardwired to fear certain things. Young rats, for instance, will exhibit fear when exposed to the smell of cats even if they have never seen a cat before in their lives. The fear of cats is something that they have evolved to have. Presumably all of the rats who did not fear cats were weeded out of the gene pool when they became supper. Those rats who instinctively feared cats passed on their genes to the next generation.

We humans are probably born with the fear of isolation and abandonment embedded in our brains. We are the most social animals in existence. It is very difficult for us to survive as individuals. In fact, for much of our early lives we are dependent on our parents for our survival. Watching my son Asa, who is a little more than ten months old, I have learned just how basic the fear of abandonment must be. If he wakes up alone in a room he will cry and wail until someone comes to offer him comfort. I believe that he has had this response to isolation as long as he has been alive.

As we mature we learn to fear certain things and people through our experiences, our peers and, I would argue, the power structure and political system of which we are a part. I want to separate those fears that we learn because they are necessary for our survival, fears that are based upon the environment we live in, from those fears we are taught by our peers and our political system.

We learn what to fear. As a parent this is something that I am beginning to fully understand now that Asa is crawling. If left unattended he will happily play with dangerous objects and place them in his mouth. He would chew on an electrical chord if he could. I experience fear for him but he does not yet know what is dangerous in the world and what is not. He is completely trusting of strangers and will smile at anyone. It is beautiful. But beautiful as it is he needs to learn, and to a degree be taught, to fear certain things for his own survival.

Pain is one of life's great teachers. There is the old adage about the cat on the hot stove. The cat might not know that the stove will burn the first time she encounters it but after she is burnt she will learn to avoid the stove in the future. Children, likewise, learn to avoid and fear certain things based upon the pain that they experience. Knowledge that a knife is sharp, that it is best not to crawl off the bed and fall onto the floor and that electricity is dangerous probably comes as much through painful experience as through parental admonishments.

When I say that fear has an experiential component I mean we have to learn to fear certain aspects of the world around us such as fire, electricity, fast moving automobiles and sharp objects. We do not know instinctually that these are dangerous things. But we must learn that they are if we are to survive. That said, our fears of such things are value neutral.

The fears we learn from our peers and through our political system are not value neutral. They often serve specific ends and benefit certain groups in society over others. These fears often ensure that the status quo remains the same. This third component of fear is political fear. Corey Robin has defined political fear in his book "Fear; The History of a Political Idea" as fear that "reinforces a society's distribution of power and resources, influences public debate, compels public policy." Robin divides political fear into two types. The first "governs relationships between the higher and lower orders of society, whose mutual fear of each other helps maintain..." social inequality. The second type of political fear "can arise from forces external or internal to a society, where an entire people are threatened by a foreign enemy or dangerous presence like crime, drugs or moral decay."

Political fear is usually created by elites, for the benefit of elites, and taught to the rest of us. There is a song written by Martha Holmes and sung by the great Nina Simone that I think illustrates this point. The song is called "Turning Point" and, frankly, it is one of the disturbing songs that I know. The song is about a little white girl who wants to invite her African American playmate from school to come home and play with her. The song is a story told from the little white girl's perspective and the last six lines are:

Mom can she come over
To play dolls with me
We could have such fun mum
Oh mum what'd you say

Why not oh why not
Oh I see

We never hear the mother speak but we can imagine what she might be saying. She is teaching her child to hate and to fear black people. The song was written in the mid-sixties, it appears on Nina's 1967 album "Silk & Soul," and with a little creativity one can imagine the back story. The white girl's family is probably middle or working class. After desegregation occurred they did not have enough money to send their children to private school and now the family's children are being educated in an interracial setting. This did not change the family's prejudices or sense of superiority over African Americans. It simply divided the white family from black families. Most likely the white family had more in common with the African American families in their school district than with the social elites in their community. The racism that they have, however, keeps them from recognizes African Americans as their neighbors and realizing that they may share a common good.

The family of the white girl in "Turning Point" is not unlike the families that Dick Feagler writes of as being "realistic." The families that are leaving Cleveland and the inner ring suburbs for the likes of Solon or communities even further out are, for the most part, middle class. In actuality they have more in common with the black families that they are fleeing than with our society's elites. Both communities want good jobs, strong schools, safe streets and leisure time to spend with their loved ones. It will be difficult for either community to achieve these things in any stable way as long people keep fleeing the city and the inner ring suburbs for communities further out. Until it is stopped urban decay spreads in concentric rings. First the middle class leaves the city for the inner ring suburbs. Then when those suburbs are no longer considered to be safe they are abandoned for other communities. As the middle class leaves they take their tax base with them. Without money local governments slip into a decline as it becomes more and more difficult for them to offer basic services. Those who have been left behind then struggle to move to where public services are better and the cycle repeats itself.

The fear that Feagler's column and Nina's song invokes generates this type of urban dynamic. It is not a rational fear. Under the cold light of reason it should melt away. Viewed from a rational perspective we are far better off in the city than we may be in the distant suburbs.

We live in the safest society in the history of humanity. Whether we live in Cleveland or in Solon we have a far greater chance of dying from heart disease than we do from violence. Our modern society has the longest life span in human history. Many of the things that threaten us today--obesity and global warming, to name two examples--are, in part, a result of people's decisions to flee to the suburbs. Living in a thriving city we would develop a cultural scene capable of attracting smart young people, a stronger economy, better health--we would walk more and weigh less--and a smaller carbon foot print. If we were to pause to be rational about fear we would realize this.

Creating fear and maintaining it is big business. More people moving to the suburbs means more need for housing there. This in turn means more opportunity for developers. It is far cheaper to build on virgin land at the edge of an urban area than it is to redevelop land in the heart of the city. There is no legacy of dangerous chemicals or industrial waste to worry about, the utility lines are new and it is easier to clear land than to tear down buildings. Put bluntly the profit margins are higher if you build in exurbia than if you do downtown.

The problem is that the kind of political fear that drives the exodus from the city to the exurbs rarely's sees reason's light. Like Feagler, many people react reflexively. There is good cause for this. As human beings we respond to our environment emotionally first and rationally second.

This was the great insight of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was one of the founders of the liberal theological tradition of which Unitarian Universalism is a part. Working in the late 18th and early 19th century, Schleiermacher lived in a Newtonian world where the most recent physics suggested that each and every action had an opposite reaction. It was difficult to imagine the universe as much more than a string of infinite actions and reactions.

Schleiermacher was a Kantian and he believed in Kant's categorical imperative which states "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This is essentially the golden rule, treat others as would be treated. Kant, and Schleiermacher, believed that this moral law was hardwired into human psyche. If, then, as Schleiermacher believed the universe was a string of infinite actions and reactions and we are supposed to instinctively know the categorical imperative how is it possible to hold people accountable for their actions? How can we choose to follow the moral law within us?

Schleiermacher found the answer to his question in our emotional response to the world around us. We respond to the world reflexively and emotional first and rationally only second. We can only be held accountable for our actions if we can break the instinct to respond to our environment emotionally and access our reason and the categorical imperative embedded in our minds. Schleiermacher believed that this was possible and that the potential for the human to pause between action and reaction was the source of human freedom.

To a large degree Schleiermacher's insight into the human psyche has been shown to be true by contemporary neuroscientists. The findings of these same neuroscientists suggest how we can access our reason in the face of fear. The first component of fear is physiological and we have the great power to change our physiological state. In fact, it is quite easy to do. All you have to do is change your breathing pattern. By changing your breathing pattern you can increase or decrease the amount of oxygen flowing to your brain and the speed of your heart. The shift in the amount of oxygen in your blood and your heart rate alters the way your brain functions which in turn changes your emotional state.

Next time you are afraid remember to breath. Take a deep breath. Then take another. If you can take ten. This will change your physiological state and make room for reason. If we are not in a fight or flight situation this then gives us the opportunity to pause for reflection and examine our fear from a rational perspective. We can ask such questions as what am I afraid of? Why am I afraid of it? Depending on the situation we might even be able to ask the important question: who benefits from my fear.

Exploring these questions together is one of the tasks of our liberal religious community. Reminding each other to breath in the face of fear is another. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said the "only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Let us remember this. Let us also remember that when we breath we can overcome our fears and seek to respond proactively, rather than reflexively, to the problems that scare us in the first place.

Amen and Blessed Be.