We live in troubled times, but can fear be a force for good?
On 22 January 1988, hordes of Pashtun mourners made the journey from Peshawar in Pakistan to Jalalabad in Afghanistan for the funeral of Bacha Khan, a political leader who campaigned against British colonial rule. Among them was Robert Peckham, a British student who was backpacking around the region. He hopped in a van with some friends, journalists and the editor of the Frontier Postand travelled along the winding Khyber Pass, a road punctuated by overtones of the SovietAfghan war: tanks, checkpoints and soldiers. A ceasefire had been negotiated and crowds flowed peacefully into Jalalabad to gather around Khan’s family home, where he wished to be buried.
It was then, with the ceremony under way, that the first bomb went off. Peckham felt its force jolt through the crowd, which, he recalls, sustained its form momentarily before a second explosion sent people scattering. Buses that had transported mourners to the city were destroyed, the parking lot a scene of chaos. Fifteen people were killed, it would later emerge, and dozens were wounded. As he recounts in his book, Fear:AnAlternativeHistory of theWorld, a crowd that had been “unified in grief” was suddenly fragmented as people kicked and elbowed in a desperate scrabble for safety. “People were dazed, wondering how they would get home,” writes Peckham. “Some were sobbing. Fights broke out and guns were pointed.” As he and his group raced back along the Khyber Pass for the safety of Peshawar, stranded mourners attempted to hitch a ride, but their driver, cursing, sped past without stopping. “Panic,” Peckham recounts, “which made us human, also made us cruel.”
It was a visceral experience, to be swept up in a stampeding crowd – to skirt death – and one that would shape Peckham’s subsequent career as an academic. He was struck by the way his personal experience of panic was entangled with loftier forces, from the Soviet incursion into British spheres of interest, to the shadow of colonialism. In that moment, seemingly abstract ideas were right there – quite literally exploding – in front of him. He wanted to understand how an emotion, such as fear, operated on both an individual and societal scale, and how – just like a panicking crowd – fear can evaporate our sense of self, simultaneously bringing us together and tearing us apart. To Peckham, fear seemed to be a central energising force driving history, one far more complex than most of us realise.
The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war have all pushed fear to the forefront of our minds, but evidence of human fears can be traced back thousands of years. The feeling has always been a facet of life, a primal neurological response designed to snap us into the moment, ready to fight or flee. People have found ways to express or contain these fears since we learned to make marks on rock. Cave art in Sulawesi, Indonesia, depicts monstrous half-human, half-animal creatures; at the site of a 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement in Turkey, the walls are daubed with images of headless people and vultures with human legs. As humans evolved to write, pray and reason, so did our capacity to be led by thoughts and feelings. Fear gained new complexity; it no longer served as an instinct to save us from a rampaging woolly mammoth or wildfire, but as a social tool.
During the middle ages, writes Peckham, “fear hovered in the corners of the everyday, like demons in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts”. In the words of Pope Innocent III: “Human life is constant fear”, and the Church was there to capitalise on it. Fear of the unknown, illustrated with images of monsters, demons and angels tumbling into fiery pits, was marshalled by the institution, which offered salvation and a promise that you wouldn’t languish in purgatory, for a price. Then, in the 14th century, these horrors became a reality; a famine followed by the Black Death conjured scenes akin to a hell on Earth. It left the population of Europe decimated and psychologically disturbed. With fear overflowing, the Catholic church struggled to retain its followers. It paved the way for the Reformation, a 16th-century revolution in the organisation of religion and state in Europe.
This, argues Peckham, was the first of many formative moments in history that were forged by fear and one that would shape the modern world. The Catholic Church’s “monopoly on fear” was broken. Now, Protestant kings were empowered to make use of the same powerful tool to control their subjects. No coincidence that around this period, Niccolo Machiavelli published his seminal work, The Prince, a manifesto for rulers that argued that lies and violence were justified to maintain power. A new “politics of fear” had emerged.
But fear is not just a tool for tyrants nor the harbinger of doom, argues Peckham, but can be a driver of change. “Some of the biggest transformations that have happened, from the Industrial Revolution, new democratic systems, global capitalism, have had some undercurrent of fear to them,” he says. Today, with the world facing myriad crises, from climate change to the renewed threat of nuclear war to AI, there may be lessons to learn from a glance back at how we have grappled with fears in the past. It may not be all bad news, Peckham is keen to reassure. If it is fear that you are feeling, then maybe that’s a good thing.
Peckham and I meton the anniversary of 9/11. Everyone remembers what they were doing on that day in 2001 – a testament to the way fear can etch itself into our collective memories – so we choose a spot in London’s East End, near to where Peckham was attending an art exhibition of his father’s paintings when news broke about the attack on the Twin Towers. During the years that followed, fear became a defining force in politics; the war on terror was pronounced, western forces invaded Iraq, Islamophobia flourished and there was a vast extension of state surveillance at the expense of individual privacy. The domestic terrorism that had marred America in the preceding years was swiftly overshadowed; Cold War anxieties were now a distant memory. It is a process we see repeated throughout history – fears of one thing being replaced by another. New fears rise up, old ones are quickly forgotten.
When Peckham finally started drafting his book, it was 2019 and he was head of history at the University of Hong Kong. For well over a decade, he had been writing on risk and panic in financial markets, epidemics in Asia, the colonial management of health (in which the management of fear was often more important than controlling the disease itself), and the interactions between a panicking government and its population. Now, Beijing was cracking down on pro-democracy protesters with force. As the protests escalated, a terrifying new foe, Covid-19, was used as cover to further suppress the movement. “It was an exemplary case of everything I’d been studying,” says Peckham. “Which is how authorities in moments of crisis move in and use the fears produced for their own ends.”
One year later, pro-Trump supporters staged an attack on the Capitol building in Washington. The following year, Russia invaded Ukraine. The world was entering an uncertain new era. Fear was rising to the fore. “As I was writing,” says Peckham, “it was happening.” He resigned from his position in Hong Kong in 2021 amid an atmosphere of increasing paranoia and selfcensorship. Hong Kong’s recent espionage law, he says, left himself and colleagues uncertain about what sort of statements were permissible and what would be deemed provocative. “It is a challenge for someone who writes about the histories of societies where saying certain things isn’t permissible,” he says. “But even speaking about it now I feel very guilty, because I have a lot of friends and colleagues in China and Hong Kong who are very nervous.”
It is one reason Peckham is sensitive about a discussion of fear becoming too introverted – and disconnected – from global realities. “We’re having a conversation on fear based in London, but there are many parts of the world where totalitarian regimes are recently exploiting fear really in a coercive way,” he says.
Even amid the battle for Hong Kong, Peckham found himself struck by the complexity of fear and how we conceptualise it. One piece of pro-democracy graffiti, scrawled near the university, particularly stuck: “Freedom from fear”. To Peckham it encapsulated the way in which we associate fear with tyranny, when in fact its presence also serves democracy, helping safeguard the values we wish to protect. Fear can function as a check on power – a government that fears consequences (or losing an election) is better than one that acts with impunity. And for the people, fFear can be a rallying call, a reminder of our agency and what we stand to lose through inaction.
It can be a difficult feeling to sit with, but is worth reflecting on in a country where freedom is often taken for granted. Writing in 1844, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard used the example of a person standing at the top of a cliff. It is not simply the fear of falling that terrifies us, but the compulsion to throw ourselves off it simply because we can. “The more free we are,” says Peckham, “the more choice we have, and the more anxious we become about choosing.” Rather than relinquish the choice, says Peckham, “which some people argue is what happened during the 20th century… with terrifying consequences,” we should realise that fear and freedom are inseparable. Following the 9/11 attacks, we sacrificed personal freedoms in the belief that it would ease fears of terrorism. The extent to which those fears had been exploited only became apparent a decade later, when National Security Agency files were leaked.
Technological advances – particularly relating to communication – often hasten the spread of fear, opening up new channels for it to travel through, and be managed. Without the invention of the printing press, the witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum could never have become a 15th- century bestseller, helping to fuel hysteria across Europe (it allegedly sold more copies than the Bible). In the 21st century, 24-hour rolling news gave an unbearable intimacy to the 9/11 attacks, amplifying the impact and consequences of the event. It is now normal to follow distant conflicts and disasters minute-by- minute with hashtags and livestreamed footage. Often the technology itself becomes the focus of our fears. In the 18th century, the popularisation of the novel provoked a moral panic much like violent video games have done recently. Today, many fears have coalesced around AI, which some tech leaders have warned poses a threat of human extinction.
Throughout history, technology has also alleviated fears, making the world safer, and new mediums we were once suspicious of have enabled fear to be marshalled for progressive causes.