Landscapes of Fear

16. Fears: Past and Present

16. Fears: Past and Present Many people even in the modern and affluent Westernworld are haunted byfear. Almostdaily we read aboutmuggingsand murders , and about elderly residents ofthe inner cities soafraid that they are virtually prisoners within their ownhomes. Whilewelleducated young people do not usually live in dread of physical violence, more nebulous threats plague their lives. They often appear to be anxious about the future, their own as well as that of humanity. They have the uncomfortablefeeling that "things are getting worse"; the future promises not onlyfurther deterioration of the inner cities but ecological crisis, racial tension, world famine, and nuclear disaster. Such contemporary fears encourage the strong human bent to postulate a better—or at least much safer—world either sometime in the past or at a distant sheltered place. In extreme reaction we might deliberately slight the real achievements of the modern age, such as sanitation, and find something admirable in the horrors of the past, such as the ubiquity of pain and the capacity tobear it. John Wain,in his recent biography ofSamuel Johnson, looked longingly to the comeliness of eighteenth-century landscapes, compared with which the modern English scene, ugly and begrimed, seems a desecration. However, Wain has to admit that there was an incongruous element in that vanished world of great beauty, namely, its large number of diseased and disfigured people and animals.1 Many humanists today bemoan the banishment of all evidences ofdeath from the modern town. Where are the picturesque graveyards that once lay amongthe houses ofthe living?Whereare those realistic and healthy reminders of mortality? But these humanists conveniently forget that the graveyard was at the center of the old Landscapes of Fear 210 European village because death occupied the center stage of life.2 We wish to know whether fear in the past differed in kind, intensity, and frequency from that of our time. The question bristles with difficulties. Fear is not only objective circumstance but also subjective response. Alandscape of gallows and gibbets is,objectively,a landscape offear. Certainly gibbets were put up for the purpose of inducing fear, and we dohear of people trying to avoid them when they traveled at night. On the other hand, in much of Europe, these ghastly instruments of execution had come to be accepted as a normal component of the urban and rural scene. They served as mere landmarks—like village ponds and windmills—in old road books. The historian Lynn White notes that in the fifteenth century, "Parisians liked to goon picnics to the Montfaucon gibbet outside the city where they could revel under the shredding remains ofthe dead."3 Weare shocked and uncomprehending. Yetinstances of such barbarity can easily be multiplied. If we are doubtfulthat any moral progress has occurred in the history of the West, we should ask: What practices that we accept as normal today would deeply offend the moral sensibility of our ancestors? Would it be the cramped and seedy rest homes for the aged, the long prison sentences, the slums, the violence on television? Surely not, except perhaps in their magnitude. Former fears may be closely bound up with values that we now consider good. This is a possible source of confusion when we try to compare fears of the past with those of the present. For instance, we sometimes lament the desacralization of nature. Woods, mountains, and streams were once the abodes of spirits and as such commanded respect and even fear. We have seen, for example, how the ancient Greek landscape was dotted with shrines to nature deities and to the spirits of dead heroes. Their departure from the landscape can seem to us a loss, a draining of power from the natural world so that its features are now merely pleasing rather than awesome. In fantasy, we long for the return of the guardian spirits of place, but could they reenter nature and our lives alone, unaccompanied bydemons and ghosts? Within the Christian tradition, a strong belief in angels has always been coupled with a strong belief in the dark forces of Satan. Those vivid landscapes of the past had bright patches of sunlight but also deep shadows. In comparing fears of earlier times with those of our day, a further possible source of confusion lies in our failure to recognize the profoundly ambivalent nature of the communal ideal. 211 Fears: Past and Present We often lament the looseness of human ties...