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6 The Uses of Anxiety
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[ 6 ] The Uses of Anxiety ’Tis a quality of human nature, which is conspicuous on many occasions, and is common both to mind and body, that too sudden and violent a change is unpleasant to us, and however any objects may in themselves be indifferent, yet their alteration gives uneasiness. As ’tis the nature of doubt to cause a variation in the thought, and transport us suddenly from one idea to another, it must of consequence be the occasion of pain. This pain chiefly takes place, where interest, relation, or the greatness and novelty of any event interest us in it. —David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature s activists of all political persuasions quickly learn, the placid state of mind that philosophers and pundits often recommend to enable sound political judgment ill suits their requirements. Getting attention is not the only purpose of generating a sense of crisis; spectacle has long been a hallmark of politics (Duncan 1962; M. Edelman 1964, 1988; Marcus 1988a). Although spectacles can elicit a variety of emotional reactions, they tend to fall into one of two characteristic patterns. The first relies on the manufacture of enthusiasm for some purpose or cause, to strengthen allegiances, to bind a group more closely together—the processes that build and strengthen habits.1 The second intends to cause uncertainty or anxiety, for anxiety has interesting effects. Anxiety is often treated as a minor variant of the “negative” emotions. Because the negative emotions have been uniformly disparaged and people find them unpleasant (Rusting & Larsen 1995), it is hardly surprising that the special role of anxiety in enhancing reason has been largely missed. The surveillance system is a matching system. It compares information and does so at the earliest possible moment that the brain can begin analysis of the sensory data coming into the central regions of the brain, the limbic re99 1. Anger against some known target, foreign or domestic, is a variant of enthusiasm and the disposition system. I treat this variant of enthusiasm in detail in Chapter 7. A gion. The surveillance system can respond in less than one-tenth of a second , and it responds to sensory signals too slight and too transient to be represented in conscious awareness. Thus the surveillance system is very fast, much faster to respond than conscious awareness, and very sensitive, able to identify signals much weaker than conscious awareness regularly notices.2 The initial operation of the surveillance system is far simpler that that undertaken by the disposition system. Although the surveillance system is also a normative system, it compares only two of the three streams that the disposition system uses (Gray 1987b). The surveillance system accesses the current activities under the control of the disposition system. It has access to the current plan of action and what it can normally expect in the environment . The surveillance system also accesses the incoming sensory stream and thus knows what’s out there. By matching the anticipated conditions of the environment with the most recent reports, the surveillance system can tell whether or not the environment is cooperating. For example, if one has settled down to read a good book, alone in a room, the disposition system presumes no interruptions so that awareness can be narrowed, so that imagination can become lost in the world captured on the pages, perhaps John le Carré’s latest novel. But if the wind is up and a branch rattles ominously on a windowpane, one’s awareness shifts as the unexpected sound calls the surveillance system into action. A sudden movement, a strange noise, a noxious or unknown scent, all these and more may stimulate the surveillance system. As a normative system, the surveillance system seeks to identify all intrusions , not just known threats, for either can disrupt the otherwise secure realization of some course of action. At the initial stage, the input stage, the surveillance system is quite simple: it finds either a match (the environment is as expected) or a mismatch (something about the environment doesn’t fit the particular expectations of this course of action). What happens next, however, speaks directly to the archaic view that emotion and reason are antagonists , each seeking supremacy over the other. Variations in enthusiasm sufficient to generate sensations ranging from “feelings” of depression (actually the absence of enthusiasm) through modest to higher levels of enthusiasm are quite frequent in the course of normal activities; anxiety, as a sensation sufficient to enter awareness, is far more infrequent (Thayer...