Feeling safe & being safe
Some notes on anxiety and politics
I beg your indulgence for not writing for a full month. April was absurdly busy. My defense includes three weeks of school vacation for the kids followed by Passover, which is a famously productive time for Jewish women what with all the tin foil.
But in the meantime, a mass protest movement has popped up on American campuses—kicking off at my alma mater, Columbia—and devoured a great deal of media attention that might be more productively directed elsewhere. I don’t have anything to say about this movement that is original or surprising: I stand in solidarity with the students and affirm their right to protest an American-backed humanitarian catastrophe; I abhor the police brutality that has become the standard response to these protests; and I simultaneously denounce the very real antisemitism that has sometimes accompanied them, which I regard both as a moral failing and strategic error that undermines any possibility of creating the sort of big-tent coalition that is required to shift American foreign policy. All that said, my thoughts about the senseless slaughter and starvation of Gazans, need for permanent ceasefire and hostage release, and long-term political solution have not shifted because of the words or actions of American college students. At present, I’m only interested in the latter insofar as they help achieve the former — and here is where things get dicey.
Dr. Small Talk likes texts more than rank punditry, so I want to use the current moment to focus on the experience of risk and fear — in short, how our feelings about safety and potential danger steer our political choices. Insofar as we are believers in democracy, we should desire everyone to be safe — including those who might express views we find to be abhorrent. But does this mean everyone is also entitled to feel safe? Where are the boundaries between genuine danger, fear, and paranoia?
Let’s take the following tweet (kindly shared by a friend who knows I’m writing a book about risk) as a jumping off point:
One of the unpleasant paradoxes of contemporary life is that we have more ways than ever to monitor, quantify, and manage risk, but the proliferation of such tools has not made us feel any more secure. The more typical experience is a sense of being under siege from an ever-expanding list of possible threats — from climate change to health scares and political violence. Anxiety becomes particularly dangerous when the fear of hypothetical violence justifies the use of actual violence — as in the recent police crackdowns on student protestors and the armed attack on the UCLA encampment. The Global War on Terror has exhibited the same logic on a much larger and more gruesome scale.
It is one of the chief arguments of my new book that we must take fear seriously as a political phenomenon. This entails both investigating how a sense of perpetual insecurity is generated, and offering something besides securitization in response before human existence devolves into a hellish series of zero-sum games.
In this sense, I found myself disagreeing with a recent episode of Citations Needed in which hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson disparaged the need to take the feelings of American Jewish students seriously. In Johnson’s words, “I do feel like a lot of people genuinely do feel unsafe. But guess what? That’s not sufficient… Whether or not people feel safe is irrelevant.” He continued by offering other examples wherein we would not feel compelled to validate people’s sense of insecurity: pro-life protestors who feel unsafe around feminists, for instance, or white racists who feel unsafe around Black people.
Johnson’s statement was striking on account of being wholly at odds with the sort of DEI frameworks that prevail in higher education, where we have spent the last decade talking about trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, and the need to validate student experiences. You typically only get to disparage the insecurities of people if they are a dominant group, as the reference to white racists suggests. This begs the question: Are Jewish students who feel unsafe the equivalent to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white Missouri couple who pointed firearms at Black Lives Matter protestors walking by their mansion? Or is this comparison grotesque, because unlike the McCloskeys, Jews have actually been harassed by protestors—“Go back to Poland,” et al.—and moreover represent a minority group that has only recently gained full inclusion in American society? I don’t think this is an easy question to answer, as it raises thorny issues of historic oppression and contemporary privilege. But the idea that Jewish fear is not worth taking seriously is, in my mind, a grave mistake.
Let’s put some numbers on these fears. A recently published study by the University of Chicago offers concrete data about American college students in the aftermath of October 7. As the authors write:
I’ve written in the past about what I call the culture of constant vigilance, and more recently about the pitfalls of living in a world in which everyone is their own personal risk assessor, calling particular attention to the (usually racist) acts of aggression that are performed in the name of self-defense. What I want to focus on today is how risk perceptions are inherently subjective, highly mediated, subject to manipulation, and varied over time. Things like media portrayals and political commentary matter a great deal in shaping our ideas about danger and security — and in particular, in identifying who or what represents a risk.
Over the last several decades, scholars have identified the irrationalities and biases that cloud our risk perception. Armed with data, they have called attention to the overblown fears of dying in a terrorist attack, for instance, when the numbers suggest your bathtub is more dangerous. In some of this work (particularly by behavioral economists), the gap between “objective” and perceived risk stems from some biological or neuropsychological flaw that prevents humans from being perfectly rational. I think this misses the mark for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that risk is a materially embedded social phenomenon. There is nothing objective or static about who or what is viewed as threatening, as the authors of the bathtub study rightly note: “The constant unnuanced stoking of fear by politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and the media, however well received by the public, is on balance costly, enervating, and unjustified by the facts.” In short, risk determinations are contested and operate within systems of power. They are not just about following the numbers.
How does this all translate into political choices? To posit a very broad claim, I think that the growing sense of insecurity that many express about their personal safety—Steven Pinker be damned—offers very fertile territory for fascist politics to take root. In laymen’s terms, when whole groups of people have become classified as “risks” to “our” safety, we are teetering dangerously close to an existential zero sum game. This is no way to achieve genuine security.
I’ve been busy reading Franz Neumann’s 1954 essay, “Anxiety and Politics,” as I prepare a lecture I’m giving Monday in Norway, which speaks to our current moment in fascinating ways. Neumann was a German-Jewish political theorist who was part of the Frankfurt School gang (aka the inspiration for Brooklyn Institute for Social Research). He found refuge during WWII in the US, and, along with Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer, authored an intelligence report on Nazi German for the OSS. He died in an automobiled accident in Switzerland shortly after he delivered “Anxiety and Politics” as a lecture at the Free University in Berlin.
Franz Neumann
Neumann distinguished between what he calls “true anxiety” (realangst) and “neurotic anxiety,” and his characterization more or less corresponds to what we would call “fear” and “anxiety” or even “paranoia.” Realangst, he says, “appears as a reaction to concrete danger situations,” whereas the latter form of anxiety “is produced by the ego, in order to avoid in advance even the remotest threat of danger.” In layman’s terms, it’s perfectly understandable to experience fear if someone is shooting at you. But if you do not live in a war zone, yet go through life constantly looking out for a shooter, you might have tipped into neurotic territory.
Neumann argues that neurotic anxiety is particularly dangerous as a political emotion because it can easily become the grounds for persecution. The sense of perpetual threat compels identification with a strong leader who promises to overcome what psychically burdens the masses through targeting the culprit. One can see how neurotic anxiety bleeds into conspiracy theories and the attribution of all woes to a particular enemy: “If it were not for group X, we could be safe” — logic that can easily lead to, “eliminating group X is a prerequisite for our safety.”
Neumann continues to argue that persecutory anxiety (of which antisemitism is but one historic example) is not a product of one’s class position, but rather correlates with fears about the loss of social status:
It is my contention that persecutory anxiety…is produced when a group is threatened in its prestige, income, or even its existence; i.e., when it declines and does not understand the historical process or is prevented from understanding it. The examples are too numerous to be possibly mentioned here. German National Socialism and Italian Fascism are classical examples.
Neumann was speaking of class-based conflicts in this instance, but he noted that his observations could be applied to racial or ethnic ones as well:
The conflict between Negroes and whites in the southern states of the United States, the contemporary struggle of the South African government against the natives, take place in accord with the following scheme: the anxiety of a dominant white minority that it will be degraded through the economic and political rise of Negroes is used in propagandist fashion for the creation of affective mass movements, which frequently take on a fascist character.”
Depicting the case for Palestinian freedom as a zero sum game that necessarily comes at the expense of Jews sounds an awful lot like the neurotic anxiety Neumann warned us of. Many Israeli Jews have bought into this narrative hook, line, and sinker. Those of us who are committed to building truly multi-racial democracies badly need alternative narratives that diffuse, rather than ignite, neurotic anxieties — which yes, means trying to figure out how to make people feel safe. Here the successes of the American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid movements are instructive: they combatted neurotic anxiety by offering whites in both countries a glimpse of a more secure future built on the foundation of equality.
I know many supporters of Palestinian liberation think they are sending a similar message, and that it would come across loud and clear were it not for sensationalist reporting by the media. But that’s not the whole story. Few on the left will acknowledge that the protests have been alienating not just to many Jews or conservatives but the liberals who need to be moved—Hezbollah flags and calls to globalize the intifada don’t go down well with the 80% of Americans who support Israel over Hamas—and I don’t think there are enough people in the Frantz Fanon reading group to make victory inevitable.
The reality is that we need an anti-war movement that speaks to people outside the bubble in language that is compelling (Murtaza Hussain has an interesting recent post on how this might be done), and it’s absurd to expect college students to carry that burden alone. It has to be done by all of us committed to achieving actual safety, which can never be had when everyone around you looks like a risk.
In related news, I’ll be teaching a new online course, “Risk Society: Crisis, Power, and Neoliberalism,” with Brooklyn Institute this July. It will consider what it means to look at the world through the lens of risk, and ask what if anything differentiates the risks humanity faces today from those that prevailed in past eras. Exact time and dates TBD very soon, but will likely be on Sunday afternoons EST.