Fear

Sean Quimby stood upright in a tailored black suit, walking firmly to the podium as he was introduced as a librarian scheduled to teach a new class next year on fear at Syracuse University. Though his stature and humor both exuded a marked feeling of confidence, his presentation, entitled “American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear,” lacked coherence, absent of the single most important aspect a lecture can have: a thesis. Quimby began the lecture referring to Edvard Munch’s famous piece, “The Scream” with a notable clarity and articulate tongue. The piece, noted for its ability to evoke fear in the viewer, allowed the audience to also experience fear on a very minute level, personalizing the lecture on a small scale. Quimby quickly digressed to the larger, overall concept of fear, simply stating “everyone knows it.” He attributed the almost debilitating emotion to both an emotional and physical origin. In terms of the physical aspect, he noted Charles Darwin as a key scholar who recognized that people along with animals have the innate emotion society deems fear. Quimby comments that “fear is deeply woven into the inner fabric of our landscapes,” which adequately supports Darwin’s theory that man naturally feels such emotion. Fear is in the genetic makeup of each person, something which man and animal alike cannot escape.
Quimby digressed once again to pose the question, “Why are Americans scared of the wrong thing?” He further questioned why Americans are scared of terrorist attacks, plane crashes and cancer, while dying in a car crash is more likely than any of the aforementioned fatalities. He attributed the 9-11 tragedies with solidifying this long term theme of fear in American life. According to Joanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History, fear is the most pervasive emotion in everyday life. Ultimately, she affirms, there is no “American” way of fear. Interrupting the flow of the lecture, Quimby paused for a moment to share the official Oxford Dictionary’s definition of fear as an emotion of pain or uneasiness causes by a sense of impending danger of by prospect of some evil. Somewhat out of place, Quimby undoubtedly should have provided the audience with this definition at the beginning of the lecture. The definition included no personal findings from the research and provided the audience with a very narrow explanation.
Quimby moved back into the rhythm of the speech, telling the audience that two trends persist in the presence of fear: the “dogged invasion fantasy” and the “gradual emergence of therapeutic culture.” This idea of invasion stems from the American fear of an internal threat, whether being immigrants, communists or terrorists. He relates this to Sacco and Venzetti, two dark skin Italians accused of being communists. This threat of communism snow balls into the Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy who furthered these invasion fantasies. Ultimately, people lack the fundamental ability to differentiate reality from fiction. In terms of the emergence of a reparative community, the goal is to eliminate fear from day to day life, or as Quimby says, “[Cripple] the effects of fear.” Concluding the lecture, Quimby notes that he is especially partial to John Vassos’ theory that fear is ultimately psychotic. A follower of Sigmund Freud, Vassos claims that the root of all fear is selfish, sexual desire, which inevitably leads to materialism.
While the lecture centered around fear as an emotion and ever-prevalent issue in society, Quimby’s speech failed to focus in on a particular aspect of fear that could be exploited and explored. Fear is too broad of a topic, to which he only devoted thirty-six minutes of time. Because his focus was much too general, it felt as an audience member that he just skimmed the surface of such a captivating topic. Looking back, Quimby might have intentionally done this to lure people to his class on this very topic that he will teach in Fall 2008.