Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Fear Shaped History

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

What scares you? Some of humankind’s most common fears and phobias include fear of heights, flying, spiders, snakes, injections, germs, public speaking and….death.When you think about it…fear, and the panic it produces ,has long been driving forces — perhaps the driving force — of world history: fear of God, of famine, war, disease, poverty, and of other people. So how did it shape history? Fear not Betwixters - Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets by Robert Peckham to find out.You can find out more about Robert’s book here.This episode was produced by Charlotte Long and mixed by Tomos Delargy & Stuart Beckwith.If you're enjoying Betwixt please vote for us at the British Podcast Awards here. It would mean the world to us!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bit tricksters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here once again with your fair dues warning. In fact, my producers actually this week have given me a note that says that we don't really need a fair do's warning for this one because it's not particularly scary.

And we're not particularly straying into anything very controversial. But I said no, because I like doing the fair do it. Do's warning so much that I'm going to give them to you even if you don't need them. So here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way about a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Actually, I think this is quite a scary one because today we're talking about the history of fear. Fear itself and what could be scarier than that.

But now that you know and now that you've been warned, you can't get upset with us if you are frightened because fair do's you were warned. What scares you betwixters? Hmm? Some of humankind's most common fears and phobias include things like, fear of heights, that's one, for flying. It's probably more fear of falling out of the sky while flying, actually. Spiders, that's quite common.

Snakes as well, even Indiana Jones were scared of snakes. Injections, germs, public speaking, and of course, death. Who isn't scared of death? I'm not even sure that that is a phobia because I think that's quite rational. Everybody's scared of that, aren't they? But people's fears are weird. One study found that some people are actually more scared of giving a presentation at work than they are of dying.

Wow. Doesn't that just give you an insight into fear and society today? What do these fears say about us? Was there a medieval equivalent to freaking out before a PowerPoint presentation that you had to deliver to your manager? Were there medieval serfs freaking out in front of a tapestry that they had to present to their overlords? Did our ancestors understand fear in the same way that we do?

And in a world of 24-hour rolling news and constant social media updates, are we more fearful as a society today? When you think about it, fear and the panic it produces has long been a driving force, perhaps actually the driving force, behind world history. Fear of God, fear of famine, fear of war, disease, poverty, fear of other people. How did fear shape our history?

Well, fear not betwixt us because we are about to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society.

With me, Kate Lister. Today, we are talking about fear. Where did fear come from? How has fear evolved and how has it changed history? Also, is it always bad? Yeah, not to sound like a cheesy motivational speaker here, but isn't the reason society changes partly based on fear? Well, that's one way of looking at it, but I'm not sure that my fear of sock puppets has impacted on anything, but we move on. Today I'm joined by author Robert Peckham, who is also an expert in epidemics and panic, and he's going to tell us all about his research into fear. But before that, we have made the top 20 shortlist for the Listeners Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards. You lovely, lovely, lovely, gorgeous betwixtors, and that's thank you to you if you voted.

And if you haven't voted yet, this is your chance to bump us up. We might even win it. We're in the top 20, guys. We can do this. If you follow the link in the show notes, give us a click, give us a vote. We might even win it this time. Right on with the episode. Oh, and welcome to Betwixt this sheet.

It's only Robert Peckham. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you. I understand that you're recording this from the middle of a field somewhere. I am. It's a middle of a damp field in rural Wiltshire. See, I have so much respect for you for doing this, and I just feel like I want to set the scene for anyone listening to this, that you've properly committed to this using in the middle of a field Wi-Fi

to communicate this information. And I'm eternally grateful that you're doing so. Because you are here to talk to me about fear. That's right. It's such a fascinating subject to think, like, what is fear? What is the history of it? But I suppose my first question to you is, what brought you to this subject? What was it that made you think,

I want to research fear and the history of it. Well, fear is pretty pervasive in history, but it's been strangely little studied. And when it is, it's often seen as something of a distraction, an obstacle to progress, or some malevolent force that's exploited for evil ends by tyrants or dictators. And I actually became interested in fear

as I was researching the history of epidemics. And in 2015, I edited a collection of essays, Empires of Panic. And these moments of crisis I became interested in the way fear was often up for grounds, and the way fear became a crucial force for change. And I started to think about how power structures and the fears that support them get reconfigured.

And I call that in the book a process of recombinatory evolution. So that's kind of an academic route to fear. But I guess there's a personal dimension to this fear story, which I talk about a little bit in the book. In the late 1980s, I was a student traveling through Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was then occupied by Soviet troops. I got caught up in a terrorist attack. Holy shit, Robert. Wow.

Yes, and as I subsequently thought and reflected on this traumatic experience, I began to see how kind of my personal visceral response, you know, as part of a much bigger geopolitics, that this had a long history, and it would have a future that I couldn't then anticipate, which is the world of terror, which was to define the 1990s and 2000s, my guess is encapsulated by 9-11. So that's one personal context. And fast forward several decades to 2019.

And I was head of the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong as the pro-democracy protests erupted there. And that led to brutal government crackdown on protesters and ultimately to the passing of this very vaguely word in national security law, which made any criticism of the government of potential infraction. And that was a climate of censorship and general paranoia, where in which history became quite problematic and fear was never far from my mind.

And those are the sort of context that I began to think history and its relationship to the present. And then, of course, along came COVID-19. So many routes to this history of fear, both kind of academic and personal. Wow. Just listening to what you're saying there, I'm struck by that maybe there's different types of fear that you write about because the individual fear of I'm in a terrorist attack. Like that fires up everything in the brain and like that's a very immediate fear. But then you're also talking about, as I have described, like a long-term social fear where there isn't an immediate threat, but there's a fear of the threat. I guess that's what I'm actually interested in, the relationship between personal

fear and individual fear and a sort of collective fear. And that's sort of part of a kind of an intellectual history of fear. People have thought about and worried about this relationship between individual and collective fear. And there are lots of political histories of fear, but they tend not to focus on individual fear. And then there are a lot of sort of more psychological histories that focus on sort of individual fear. And I wanted to bring them together. So this book is, in one hand, an intellectual history of fear. In other words, it sort of traces how fear has been written about and thought about. But then there's an experiential dimension. And there's an experiential dimension to this thinking that I'm interested in. So there's a cultural and social narrative that

focuses on people and events, pandemics, revolution wars and the like. So just as sort of I was caught up incidentally in a terrorist attack and in a protest movement in Hong Kong, I'm kind of interested in this kind of entanglement of personal and kind of bigger geopolitical collective fears and movements. A real basic starter page one question I suppose should be what is fear from an evolutionary point of view, what function does it serve? There are many ways of which fear has been understood, and there's a good deal of controversy about it, even in a neurobiological context where scientists are debating,

you know, what neural circuits, reflex and cognitive processes are involved in what we call fear. And of course, we need to acknowledge that fear has different meanings in different cultures, which takes us immediately into the tricky realm of translation, how do we sort of translate between cultures and times fear? I think it's sort of true to say that fear generally been understood as an emotional response to perceive threat, may be real or imagined, and on a deeper level to uncertainty. And it's also been understood in relations as certain behaviours. Panic, particularly interests me among them. And while it's associated with neurophysiological processes, it's also been thought of as a cultural and social phenomenon. You know, to extent we learn how and what to fear.

It's an inculturation that happens. And that led the American psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, to say, fears are educated into us. It's because they're educated into us that we can, in effect, educate them out of us. So there's a sort of neuro-biological and a sort of cultural history to fear. Is there anything that is universally feared? Just what you're saying there about it's very subjective, it have to account for different cultures and different languages

and different, basically teaching people to be scared of things. Is there anything that is universally feared? Well, there's a sort of reflective response to danger that humans share with other animals. But there we quickly get into the debate about the cognitive element, the degree to which we can't extrapolate from an instinctive response to danger that we see in animals because the issue of consciousness comes into it.

I think it's a really tricky one. I've heard many people talk in different ways about this, the ways in which we can, for example, from archaeological evidence, sort of understand whether or not people experience fear in particular moments in distant history. In a way, what I'm more interested in it is in the uses that fear has been put to as a political tool. But I suppose one of the things that I'm trying to do

is to look at the ways in which it hasn't only operated, as it's often assumed for bad, but it's actually very key to some of the fundamentals within democratic institutions that we think many of us would cherish. So it's not something just exploited by tyrants and dictators. And I think that what interests me is how, as soon as we invest in a value, an ideal, and a future,

we live with a prospect that that may be undermining some way thwarted. So in this sense, we live with a fear that may be taken away from us. And so fear in that sense is the flip side of hope. And it's this kind of twinning of fear and hope that I'm kind of exploring in history, although I kind of gesture to a much longer prehistory of fear. You write about that very eloquently and about how fear isn't necessarily bad. I think we're all trained to fear fear, right? Like it's always a bad thing.

But then a person who wasn't afraid of anything would be a very strange individual. But you see it as a great motivator for social change as well, that it's not always a negative thing. Absolutely. So as we move into sort of more contemporary world, I think there are very good examples of fear as a motivational force, whether it's trying to galvanise social consciousness of climate around climate change and to affect political change in ways that, you know, beneficial justice and these things, fear is very, very, very important. One of the things that interests me that I sort of try and tease out is the way in which, often progressive fears are brought to bear on tyrannical fears. So fear is often immobilized to displace older fears.

And it's that reconfiguration of fear. The fears don't actually go away. They get rechoneled and redirected. Viewed in that way, you start to see sort of historical change, fear being very, very crucial to historical change. So what I tried to look at, for example, the French Revolution, is how tyrannical fear was displaced by revolutionaries and how that fear got dispersed into the late 18th, early 19th century

in very surprising ways. One of the things that you do write about is the bubonic plague. And I know you mentioned it there that it appeared in 19th century India. And I have no idea about that. That's fascinating. But what has your research shown you about fear and disease, in particular reference to the medieval bee? ebonic plague? Well, so yes, I begin the book, the plague in the mid-14th century.

Because that must have been scary, right? It must have been very scary. So the demographic impact has debated, but many historians think up to half of the European population died. And the psychological, social economic shocks that that produced were factors in undermining the church's authority in its capacity to manage fear. I'm kind of interested in what happened to that fear of death, disease and divine judgment, etc. And what I'm sort of explore is how over the next two centuries, centralising European states begin to claim this role for themselves, building the management of fear into the machinery of government. And it's at this moment that we see a new kind of vernacular literature, which is being promoted by the printing press, that reflects

on the nature of fear and power and the relationship between, you know, what we were talking about earlier, personal collective fear, so Thomas Moore, Shakespeare, Savantis, Montania. These are good examples of writers who reflect on what fear is, how it can be used, how it can be misused. And this is also the moment, of course, when European states begin to carve out global empires. One of my arguments is that they export a new politics of fear that's been honed in the political and religious struggles, you know, for the 16th century. And so it's that exportation of a particular kind of European fear and its machinery that I'm kind of interested in exploring.

So I guess what the plague teaches us is that fear can shatter communities, but it's also pretty fundamental to the creation of new communities. The fear, in other words, can tear us apart, but it also brings us together. So it's back to this idea that fear is part of a kind of recombinatory evolution, that it's actually fundamental as a fault. for political change that we see as we move from the medieval to the early modern world.

Listening to you talk, there's a certain sense of that fear becomes organized and regulated by the powers that be. Like that was almost like a conscious choice of like, right, we'll get round the table, lads. And if you thought of this thing called fear, I think it'd be really useful in boosting our numbers. But, I mean, I'm being facetious, but was it as conscious as that? or is this something that has evolved more organically for us? I think there was a new consciousness of fear, and this is when the vocabulary of fear begins to get more defined in relation to fear, panic, horror, etc.

Oh, tell me about the vocabulary of fear. Well, I mean, you know, I'm kind of interested in the history of panic and panic fear, and we start to get this period a far more concerted effort to sort of pin down the language of fear and to sort of define it. And it's obviously linked to a new idea of what kingship is that I think we'd associate with absolutism, a rationale for power. What is the place of fear in all of this? Or the fear of God should the ruler cultivate fear as a mechanism for ruling is love more important than fear.

So we start to get interesting debates about fear's role in justice. define rule and power, but also as part of a machinery of power. And so that's something that I sort of explore to an extent in the book, that shift that happens. Clearly, there's a very old literature on fear in relation to fear of God and a sort of theology of fear. And I do touch on that. But in the sense, I'm more interested in the later period of fear, when fear starts to gain visibility, is something that we, I think, in the 21st century, would recognise as fear and panic and the ways in which they're being used and exploited. I know that you've written about panic elsewhere, and I'm very interested in that,

is it a subtle distinction between fear and panic? Because I would have said that panic is a type of fear, but for you, it must have its own set of protocols and is operating slightly differently from fear overall. What is it about panic that interests you? It's interesting that panic has often been harnessed to fear. So, you know, there's a lot of literature that talks about panic, fear, fear, panic, that idea that they actually belong to each other.

I see panic more as a behaviour. Oh, okay. In that sense, it's very clearly related to fear, but it expresses itself in a certain sort of behaviour. There's one thing to talk about people panicking. So, for example, within the Breschenpa, colonial... authorities were often talking about sort of indigenous panics, as if panic was something that other people did. And of course, they were often panicking themselves, and their panics were, you know,

incredible consequences. So the framing of other people's behavior of panic is also kind of interesting. I'm interested in panic because I think the panic as a sort of collective behavior is central to a lot of the sort of political changes that happen in the 20th century, and it's linked to new technologies. So panics form around these new technologies, like the telegraph system, railways, etc. When lots of people are making use of these technologies, they can have countervailing effects

that undermine authority. And that's the sort of terrain of panic that I'm particularly interested in. When we talk about technology, something that I've written quite a lot about is the telegraph system in the 19th century and the idea of this incredible, rapid communication that it would be a means of sort of averting threats because, you know,

governments and agencies could be forewarned of threats long before they arrived. But then it soon became apparent that the telegraphic system could be sabotaged in various ways, subverted, and that in fact it could induce panic. So much information getting out there and people and responding to it. So what began as a force that could help governance ended up being one that had sort of these detrimental side effects that kind of destabilized. And I guess that is how I see panic operating within the sort of nexus of these technologies. I'll be back with Robert after this short break. Hey, I'm Don Wildman.

And on American History hit, my expert guests and I journey across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made the United States. From first flight to first ladies, from stitching the star-spangled banner to striking gold in California to shooting for the moon with Apollo. We've got you covered. Catch new episodes of American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit, every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. You would just say in there about how British colonialism used fear and behaviours around fear

to justify, I suppose, imperialism and colonialist rule. Have you done any research about the opposite of fear, which is bravery? Because I was just thinking there that the British character in the 19th century was very much rooted in this idea of bravery and stoicism, and these were held up as social ideals. And modelling behaviour by an aspiration is equally, well, maybe it's not equally as strong as being scared of something. But do you see the opposite of fear? Bravery is being something that's also modelled human behaviour and countries, I suppose. That's a really good point, but I don't see bravery as the opposite of fear.

your bravery exists in relation to fear. So you overcome your fear with bravery. So I definitely think it's part of a discourse on fear. And I think you're right that the espouse of courage and bravery as opposed to other kind of behaviours often linked to non-colonials. It was a feature of imperial rule. And not only of obviously to British colonial rule, to empire more generally. And I do look at sort of other empires, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

and the ways in which they are talking about Indigenous peoples behaving in certain ways as a means of foregrounding their own kind of behaviour, which is very different. Of course, in reality, we know the panic and fear we're very much part of colonial experience. Absolutely. One of the areas of history that I've researched quite a lot is the 19th century. I just seem to be gravitated towards them all the time. And one of the things that really interests me about a particular period is the Industrial Revolution and the scale of change.

and the scale of advancement and the reaction that that created, because on one hand, it's brilliant, all these new things coming out. On the other hand, it is a period marked by a lot of fear and panic. Do you see narratives around fear changing with industrial technology and the advancement of industry? Absolutely. I very much do. I think that all kinds of new fears grew around new industrial processes, you know, fear that the individual's autonomy was being undermined,

fear that technology could be misapplied, worries about industrial accidents. And I think what's important here is also how fears began to be marketed to sell products. And one rather later example is the German panic in the 20th century when anxieties about lurking microbes were leveraged to sell household products. And so in many ways we live in the aftermath of a lot of these fears that come to us out of the Industrial Revolution. I think many, we can relate to many of these fears. For example, fears about the dehumanizing aspects of AI, for example,

and fears about our reliance on technology that's increasingly in the hands of very few powerful individuals in the ways in which fearmongering underpins booming happiness industry, that we're sold happiness as an antidote to everlasting misery. And so, as in the Industrial Revolution, We see how fear and hopes are interconnected. I think while there were those, and there were in the 19th century, you celebrated technology.

They saw it in ways liberating us from jodgery, while others were claiming that it was heralding the end of human civilization. And you do see a sort of movement towards, like in the 19th century, it's brilliant, technology is racing ahead. But then what emerges out of that is a fascination with medievalism and with horror and Gothic and all of these things that are almost like, not the antithesis of industrial progress, but they're very much rooted in fairy stories and superstition almost.

No, exactly. I think that that in the sense is the contradiction, on the one hand, the espousal of technology and newness and visions of the future in opposition to feudalism. And we remember that feudalism is a term like the Black Death that's coined much later to reflect back on a period that seems to be remote, But at the same time, a kind of romantic and a nostalgia for a pre-industrial world. And so you get these sort of contradictory views.

And that's something that I want to explore in the book in relation to new technologies like electricity that gave rise to other technologies like cinema, etc. And these seem to open up a new world possibilities. But there were sort of disquiet about what that actually meant and they're kind of looking back to a world before them. So this looking back and forward and fear being very crucial in this sort of contradiction. One something that I definitely see, well, maybe it didn't emerge in the 19th century. I might be overreaching there. But a fear of the poor, though I know that there've always been people living in poverty, but particularly in the 19th century with the rapid urbanisation is people were living in slums on a scale that had never happened before.

And you get this fear about classes. Is that something that was characterised the 19th century? century or does that go back much earlier? Well, I think that it does characterize the 19th century, and it's part of the story of the Industrial Revolution, urbanisation, the creation of these cities and fundamental changes that were happening and how people lived and worked. And you get horror, in fact, of the masses and their potential for revolution, for spreading disease, for crime, etc. The revolution, that's probably born out of the French Revolution. Absolutely, the revolution and then the revolutions in the 19th century.

And one sees this kind of complex relationship between social reform and fear. That often social reform, the impetus for social reform, came not necessarily from a kind of liberal urge to help people, but also out of fear that, you know, if we didn't deal with these problems of slums, they would get to us. So I fear operated in many ways. I definitely think that there's a new sort of conscious. of the masses, of the working classes who are kind of underpinning this revolution and their

potential to undermine the whole system. It's fascinating just to think about how fear actually operates from an individual level of, I'm Scared of a Spider, for example, to more group fear and how that operates and that it's often about the concern about a potential threat rather than an immediate threat and that you see it being used like the witch trials for. for example, or persecuting various minority groups or, you know, tyrants use it as well, just to see how it has actually shaped our world. And of course, we've just lived through, and it's still happening, of course, but COVID-19, I mean, that must have been incredible for you as a historian of fear and about social attitudes to have lived through such a global event.

So much of that was stemmed in fear, wasn't it? Well, I mean, absolutely, to go back to your, you know, your observation about the relationship between sort of personal phobias and bigger sort of collective fears, I think that what's interesting is you get two strands of thinking in the 19th century. What is an interest in phobias? In other words, the idea that this new industrial urban environment was creating these new diseases and mental disorders and an interest in thinking about how they could be prevented and how they could be prevented and how they could. be treated. And then an interest in the psychology of the masses and the psychology of panic and how urban crowds can be controlled. And so you get sort of two different sort of optics, one focusing in on individual issues and the other focusing on bigger. And that's something that really interests me, how do these relate? And some of the thinkers about fear like Freud, etc., were so interesting in the way that they moved or sort of to move between these sort of levels.

the individual and the collective. But I absolutely, the COVID-19 has been an extraordinary example of the ways in which fear can be, in a sense, exploited. And, you know, I kind of live part of the pandemic in China in Hong Kong. And there, kind of the pandemic control policies were absolutely used to clamp down descent. And I think that what we've seen in China is the sort of, you know, the pandemic and there's zero COVID policy absolutely enhancing the surveillance state.

So our collective fears can be used in ways that are very troubling. And COVID sort of underscores a lot of the ways in which emergency measures that are brought in to deal with these crises can be problematic in the sense that they can extend the authority of the state with different agencies without the kind of proper scrutiny that would happen in a long crisis moment. So that there are these kinds of issues that I've been looking at in a historical context. And I think the other point is that epidemic crisis like COVID are moments when authority can be contested. They reveal the limits of power, the fragility of the social order. And so moving

from Hong Kong then to New York, where I currently live, has been really interesting to see the different ways, the similarities and the differences in which COVID-19 has unfolded and sort of provides an interesting comparative advantage onto some of the issues of fear and disease. It was the really interesting to see all the different dynamics in play. So you had the government and the authorities giving you instructions and laws and dictats, but then also that filtered down very quickly into just social groups and group dynamics amongst friends and amongst people that you didn't know and amongst just people out on the street. And very quickly, the judgments and dynamics changed. Like if you saw someone out with a mask, suddenly we will all be incredibly judgmental. But then also

we started policing ourselves. You know, you would be looking out your window at the height of lockdown and just go, well, that neighbour over the road, she's gone out for more than two walks today. And that becomes, like, why are we doing that? We're now surveilling ourselves as well. That kind of dynamic. Is that rooted in fear or is that something else? No, I think it is rooted in fear.

In fact, one of the things that I'm interested in going right back in history to the sort of 17th, 16th century, is the way in which one starts to get a sort of policing of things. the self. And I think sort of fear is part of that story. And so I touch a little bit on the writing of Montaigne, obviously he's writing the late end of the 16th century and the ways in which he sort of cultivates an approach to fear that sort of certain fears, in a way, if we take them on more, we can enhance our sense of living, that fear can give us a new sense of urgency to living, but also we need to contain fear from overtaking us, from completely inhibiting us from action. So I think there's sort of a long history of how fear is sort of internalised and the self-policing happens.

And so I definitely think that sort of interpolation happened with COVID. I also think going back to your point about group dynamics and kind of suspicion of other people that it's in these moments, particularly associated with epidemic episodes, that people become kind of fearful of others. Yes. Of different groups. And, you know, that can be highly problematic. So I think we saw, to degree, all of these played out during the COVID pandemic in ways that could be at times quite frightening. It was frightening.

It was a very frightening time. And I think that we're still going to be unpicking this one for a very long time to come. Yes. To stay in the modern day. Talk to me a little bit about eco panic because that's, well, obviously the environment is very important. We all want to do our bit. But eco panic is, well, it's something that you talk about very specifically. and it's a good thing because obviously we want to save the world,

but it is operating on those group dynamic and control mechanisms at the same time. Yes, I should say that my grandfather was an environmentalist and he, in the late 60s, founded an environmental think tank. So I definitely grew up in an environment of ecopathic. Yeah, in the book, I'm kind of interested in how fear in the face of climate change is experience through symptomatic fears. Okay. Because climate change is such a complex, non-visible process.

We see it through very specific concrete symptoms, like melting glasses, floods, famine, storms. So that's the sort of first issue, is that how do we galvanize people to act when climate change in some sense is a very abstract idea? But it has these incredible manifestations, and it's sort of that are very, very real and in our face. So, yeah, fear is an important motivator, spur to action, but then too much fear leads to apathy.

And so it's sort of an issue of kind of how we balance that. Yeah. You know, I begin from recognising that we're facing real challenges here. I think another fear linked to that is that the idea that environmental fears can become commercial opportunities to sell us environmentally friendly products with therapeutic methods to deal with our mental stress that comes from these fears. And that, I think, leads to a whole set of worries about greenwashing, what is true, what is not true, how being conned in some way. So climate change is a very real threat. But then I think what's interesting, too, is concerns that climate change fears may be used to exonerate politicians and institutions from their responsibilities.

For example, fires and floods that may be caused at least in part by, you know, I don't know, bad forestry management, overdevelopment or lack of investment in basic infrastructure. they can now be easily attributed to climate change. Oh, I see. As if human agency kind of isn't involved. So in that sense, climate change can become a convenient truth rather than an inconvenient truth. Yeah. And so I think that there are these sets of issues around in my chapter of EcoPaget that I kind of set out

to sort of explore and essentially in the end suggests that, you know, rather like the writer Rebecca Solmist is arguing, that, you know, that we need to be really concerned about what's happening, but on the same time, live in hope and the doomsday approach could in the end be counterproductive. That could be a very strong example of how you talk about fear being utilised for good, is we do want to save the world. That seems like a good thing to do it. And I can't think how you'd get people to do it unless you kind of scared them. I'm not, I'm not sure what are the room. Can you just talk to them really nicely? It's got, please stop doing the thing. It kind of, it needs the fear, doesn't it? It needs the fear. And, you know, it needs the fear.

And, you know, I talk about it too in the context of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s, you know, where public health messaging made use of fear and, you know, fear to change people's behaviours. But at the same time, you know, fear can easily tilt into prejudice stereotyping. It can lead to sort of responses that are actually detrimental to public health. So it goes back to this conundrum of how we induce fear to change behaviour, but not. not so much that people then say, well, hell, I can't do anything about this anyway. Seems like it's quite an unwieldy beast. It says it's an unwieldy beast, which makes it such a sort of complex issue.

And one that is very, very dangerous. Once you exploit fear to know how to challenge it and direct it, becomes a sort of real issue that often backfires in dangerous ways. And there's sort of plenty examples of dictatorial regimes right. Because then we get panicked. Exactly. There are lots of examples of dictatorial regimes. and history that have made use of fear in ways that have then boom around back and sort of in

the end destroyed those regimes. You've got to be careful. If there's anyone out there listening thinking, I'm going to utilise the application of fear in my day-to-day life, it's quite unwieldy. And humans are just kind of skittish monkeys, really, aren't we? Like, we're kind of operating on a very primal level to a lot of this stuff. And I guess that's what's the uncontrollable part about it. Well, yes, uncontrollable to an extent,

but I think that what I'm hoping in the book is that if we recognize that our fears are in part shaped and acquired and inherited, in the sense that sort of fears are inculturated into us, then we kind of, once we accept that, that history is very important as a way of gaining perspective and understanding how those fears have been shaped and for us to sort of rethink our assumptions

about what we actually fear. And so that's where I think that history becomes a really, really important sort of tool for modifying our fears in ways that could be beneficial. Robert, you haven't been fearful to talk to at all. You've been amazing. My final question to you on this fascinating subject is where are we up to today with fear? Because it's easy to look around at something like, I don't know, like AI technology. That seems to be something that people are a lot worried about and think that our own time is more fearful than any other time, that people are, that people are. People are really scared right now. Is there any truth in that, or have we always been frightened of something? Like you were saying earlier on, that fear just changes. So concerns around AI were just left over concerns from, I don't know, dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but it's the same thing.

Are we more scared now? I don't think we are more scared now. But what I do think is that we're confronted with a new series of fears, new kinds of fears. You know, aside from the intensifying environmental anxieties that we have, I think it's true to say that new technologies, digital networks, you political circumstances are creating a new set of fears. And one fear that's arising around, it's around the concentration of power and a handful of individuals and institutions

that affect it and control our interface with the world and the channels of communication. This is a coalescence of wealthy power that's been dubbed techno-fuelism. So I think this is one aspect that is new and it's one that is linked to concerns about misinformation, disinformation that are in turn fueling political polarizations, which are leading to worries about political economic stability and social disorder. So I think these are sets of fears that are new, that we can sort of see precursors of these fears in history, but the way they're being played out is new. Perhaps I could end just one of my favorites of metaphors for this complex relationship that I see between fear and freedom is comes in the writing of the Danish theologian and philosopher Sorin Kirkegaard. And he gives us a really poignant metaphor for this relationship. He asks us to imagine that a person staring down at the ground below from the top of a cliff. And as they look down from the dizzy height, they realize that they're free to hell themselves off the cliff edge.

In other words, the freedom that that person has is also the freedom to be able to. to throw themselves off the clip. So our freedom and all free will, in other words, presents us with this terrifying problem of choice, what Keir-Kagher calls the dizziness of freedom. And as I see it today, technology has opened many new avenues and prospects for us, but contemplating the dizzying possibilities that they present is pretty terrifying. And so the real danger, I think,

is that we relinquish our freedom for the comfort of some institutional, charismatic leader, making the choice for us. And then unwittingly, out of fear, we paved the way for tyranny. And that's kind of the conundrum that I'm partly interested in, how freedom leads to fear that then cancelled freedom. And so there's paradox of freedom. And many writers after the Second World War and the Holocaust, you know, reflected on how was it that democratic country

could have drifted in to a nightmare like Nazism and this idea that how did freedom lead to this kind of terror? So this idea that we're faced with all these choices and technology is only increasing these choices. And that is pretty terrifying. I think that's something that's always been there, but is the scale of this with this technological possibilities. And you were talking out of AI makes it a particular issue for us. Robert, you have just been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much.

And if people want to know more about you and all of your work, where can they find you? Or they can find me on Twitter at R.S. Peckham and are soon to be launched new website, wwwwRspeckham.com. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. You have just been glorious. Many thanks, Kate. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Robert for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever

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