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Liquid fear.

Article Excerpt
Liquid Fear (Polity Press, 2006) by Zygmunt Bauman; Politics of Fear (Continuum, 2005) and Culture of Fear Revisited (Continuum, 2006) by Frank Furedi; and Fear and Politics (Scribe, 2006) by Carmen Lawrence

I don't think T. S. Eliot had the people of Mutijulu in mind when he wrote in The Wasteland:

Come in under the shadow of this red rock, And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

But he did know that fear could be found in the shadow of red rocks. It is accompanying the federal government's NT interventions all the way to Uluru. It extended to APEC and the Sydney 'security' lock down. It is evidenced in the many new statutes extending Commonwealth special powers of apprehension, interrogation, surveillance, censorship and incarceration. And, as SBS's Insight program on fear reminded us, it tends to breed political opportunists in these times of re-armament, terrorism and climate change.

Zygmunt Bauman thinks humans suffer from 'derivative fear' which, once interiorised, routinely causes people to, 'even in the absence of a genuine threat, resort to the responses proper to a point-blank meeting with danger'. Derivative fear, moreover, 'acquires a self-propelling capacity'. Carmen Lawrence, acknowledging that 'fear is arguably the most powerful of our emotions', also sees it as learned and, as Pavlov so tellingly demonstrated, can cause '"us to experience fear even in the absence of real threat, degrading the quality of our reasoning", interfering with our ability to learn new information and making us more likely to seek to avoid risks'.

For Lawrence, humans are unique and...

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