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Lapham's Quarterly: Fear

Name: Lapham's Quarterly: Fear
Rating: 4.11 (3 reviews)

Lewis H. Lapham (Editor)

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GenresHistoryEssaysNonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2017

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About the author

Lewis H. Lapham

181 books134 followers

Lewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.

Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

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Johnrh

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August 7, 2017

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" is the first thought that came to mind when seeing the topic. Lewis Lapham leads his Preamble introduction 'Petrified Forest' with the quote.

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." --Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It sounds like a WWII admonition but as Lapham notes "Speaking to citizens of what in 1933 was still a democratic republic, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the national resolve in the depth of the Great Depression..."

"...what in 1933 was still a democratic republic." That sets the pace.

We get through the Depression, win WWII, "...in the years since to bring forth the wealthiest society and the most heavily armed nation-state know to the history of mankind."

The result is... we live in fear.

Eloquently he says : "The force of mind rooted in the soil of adversity didn't take hold in the flower beds of prosperity."

"Fear itself is America's top-selling consumer product..."
"Diligently promoted by the news and fake news bringing minute-to-minute reports of America the Good and the Great threatened on all fronts by approaching apocalypse--rising seas and barbarian hordes, maniac loose in the White House, nuclear war on or just below the horizon."

"How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert?" "...a divided but democratically inclined body politic finds itself herded into the unifying lockdown imposed by the networked sum of its fears--sexual and racial, cultural, social, nuanced and naked, founded and unfounded." (all, p. 13-14)

Lapham refers to Sigmund Freud's piece later in the issue about real fear and neurotic fear: "...real fear invites action", "...expectant fear induces states of paralysis".

He asserts, I say, that "the newly enthroned masters of the universe in Washington" donned the mantle of American exceptionalism, 'the belief... that Americans are, by divine right, true, kind, and good." "...accepting America's victories in World War II as proof of its virtue."

Our ivory tower is soon disassembled by Soviet nuclear weaponry (the nuclear dominance honeymoon lasts from 1945 to 1949), the Cold War, and the standoff of Mutual Assured Destruction. Fear is never far away, despite having God on our side.

"Expectant anxiety maybe weakens the resolve of individual persons, but it strengthens the powers of church and state. Fear is the foundation of all government, the law, or the commandment that maintains peace on earth, the hold on property, goodwill toward men." (p. 15)

Without expounding on fear, even my revered Ayn Rand Lexicon tends to agree:

"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force." ---“The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 109.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR nearly ruins the military-industrial complex but Lapham notes we turn our resources to an equally un-winnable problem, the war on drugs. Vietnam is micro-briefly associated with expectant anxiety. Wasn't that war's pretext the domino effect, all of Asia falling to Chinese communism? (Some of my new oak furniture is made in Vietnam. Times have changed.)

The attack on the World Trade Center, 9/11/2001, gives a new rally cry, and it hasn't been the same since.

“We go forward," said President George W. Bush, displaying the innovative and entrepreneurial genius for self-deception, “to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."

"Undertaken to prove the theorem of its world—dominating omnipotence, the war in Iraq has shown the American Goliath humiliated in defeat. Like the war on drugs, the war on terror is unwinnable because waged against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. But while a work in progress, it is a war that returns a handsome profit to the manufacturers of cruise missiles and a reassuring increase of dictatorial power for a stupeﬁed plutocracy that associates the phrase national security not with the health and well-being of the American people but with the protection of their private wealth and privilege. Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the life and landscape of a free society, the government departments of public safety solve the technical problem by seeing to it that society becomes less free." (p. 19)

Obviously this preamble is a state of the world address as much as an issue introduction. It is Mr. Lapham's pulpit and though I don't agree with all his inclinations I've never found the contents of any issue to be similarly slanted. He has his points. There is much to fear in the world today. Do we live with it and get past it or are we consumed by it? I wonder, at almost any time in history has there been an undercurrent of disruption existing, subtle or pronounced, present or future pending, contributing to general unrest if not chaos?

The entire preamble is available free online. It is worth a careful read.

I'm sure there will be much to learn of many different fears in this issue.

From whom? Greeks and Romans such as Cicero, Epictetus, Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Suetonius. Darwin, H.P. Lovecraft, de Tocqueville, Joseph Heller, Dostoevsky, Orwell (George), Freud, Poe, Shakespeare, Vaclav Havel, Atiq Rahimi, Steve Biko, and James Baldwin.

81 extracts, 5 extended essays, 221 +2 pages, though the Art, Photography, and Illustrations list has been moved to the back, facing a page of generous donor names, the first time for both. I suspect L.Q. is not a profit-making enterprise. Pity. It should be homework somewhere in the education system.

Side quotes are generously scattered through each issue. In this issue I count 55 plus the IFC and IBC, not counting the 2 starting the Preamble. Here is a sampling:

"Fear first made gods in the world." --Statius, c. 90 (IFC) Who? A Roman poet extant c. 45 - c. 96 A.D. Quote also attributed to Petronius.

"We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears." --La Rochefoucauld, 1664 (IBC) A 17th-century French author of memoirs and maxims (aphorisms). Did Eric Hoffer and Elias Canetti know of him? An example from Wikipedia: II. Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers. Touche'.

"Worry over what has not occurred is a serious malady." --Solomon ibn Gairol, 1050 (p. 15) "...an 11th-century Andalusian poet and Jewish philosopher with a Neo-Platonic bent." --Wikipedia.

"Who lives in fear will never be a free man." --Horace, 19 B.C. (p. 18)

How vain and vile a passion is this fear?
What base, uncomely things it makes men do? --Ben Jonson, 1603 ( p. 27)

"The man in constant fear is every day condemned." --Publilius Syrus, c. 50 B.C. (p. 34) Who? A Syrian taken to Italy as a later but later freed and educated. Known for his sententiae (proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims). Hoffer and Canetti again?

"War is fear cloaked in courage." --William Westmoreland, 1966 (p. 37) Well said I say. U.S. Army General who commanded forces in Vietnam 1964-1968.

"Fear is the foundation of most governments." --John Adams, 1776 (p. 41)

"Neither a man nor a crown nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." --Bertrand Russell, 1943 (p. 86)

"Suffering has its limit, but fears are endless." --Pliny the Younger, 108 (p. 114)

"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear." --Albert Camus, c. 1940 (p. 132)

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows not fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more tbey are frightened. —George S. Patton, c. 1945 (p. 175)

"Fear the goat from the front, the horse from the rear, and man from all sides." --Russian proverb. (p. 184)

"Men are eager to tread underfoot what they have once too much feared." --Lucretius, c. 60 B.C. (p. 188)

"An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward." --Herman Melville, 1851. (p. 189)

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-- not absence of fear." --Mark Twain, 1894 (p. 206)

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror." --Oscar Wilde, 1891 (p. 209)

18 quotes from this issue are available free online. Seek and ye shall find.

I’ve finished reading FEAR and I think you few readers who do not subscribe to this superb publication are very, very lucky. A number of the best extracts presented are available free (FREE!) online at LaphamsQuarterly.org.

I had my doubts about the subject and contents of this issue but as usual with L.Q. I found it to be thought-provoking and insightful.

Sometimes fear is entertaining. There are ghost stories here. Don’t we like to be frightened when we know we are safe? Are we somehow adrenalin junkies when we seek thrills and fright, whether from a story, a movie, or a roller coaster ride? What planet do we live on where some have the luxury of fear while others in war- and strife-torn lands experience what many of us can’t begin to imagine. I know. Planet ‘Urrth.

Voices in Time, the main body of Lapham’s Quarterly, consists of:
Trigger Warnings – 30 extracts
Panic Attacks – 29
Terror Alerts – 22

31 of the 81 extracts are available online, as well as the 5 full, and very good, essays in Further Remarks at the end. You can also find Lewis Lapham’s Preamble, and quite a variety of other contributions. (Don’t miss ‘ “Fear Itself,” Itself ‘ online. The phrase ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ has quite a history.)

The very first extract is recent, as it often is. It’s neither eloquent nor entertaining, just chilling in its reality. It is excerpts of ICE reports on illegal alien arrests in the U.S. That’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I’m all for rule of law but the raids rival the Gestapo of Nazi Germany. The extract titled Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is available online.

They say history repeats itself, or “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana, Wikiquote. Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 piece on paranoid style of the Goldwater era seems an example.

“Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.”

“…there is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other work adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” (p. 27)

Sound familiar?

South African, Booker Prize and Nobel awardee, and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer’s 1949 story of a mugging is beautifully eloquent.

“…the gray, soft, muffled sky moved like the sea on a silent day.” (p. 34)

“There was a chest heaving through the tear in front of her; a face panting; beneath the red hairy swollen cap the yellowish-red eyes holding her in distrust. One foot, cracked from exposure until it looked like broken wood, moved, only to restore balance in the dizziness that following running…” (p. 35) Not online.

Ida B. Wells, c. 1900, informs us of lynch law and frontier/Southern ‘justice’. Chilling. I know there is a good Poe story in this issue. This isn’t it. Still we must not forget man’s inhumanity to man.

Charles Darwin reports extremely detailed human biological reactions to fear. It’s online as Body Language.

Ahh. A diversion from reality. The elements of horror literature in a superb extract from H.P. Lovecraft.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (p. 54)

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life that may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars…”

“With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear.” (p. 55)

Online as Weird Tales. Hurry.

Thud. Back to the horror of reality. Fear is horror is fear, isn’t it? L.Q. frequently includes extracts from WWII concentration camp survivors, gratefully lest we forget. Tadeusz Borowski inform us of Auschwitz.

“”Sir, what’s going to happen to us?” They repeat the question stubbornly, gazing into our tired eyes.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand Polish.”
It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. This is the only permissible form of charity.” (p. 60)

Borowski committed suicide in 1951.

Alexis de Tocqueville appears often in Lapham’s Quarterly. I’ve always thought his Democracy in America extolled virtues thereof, but L.Q. finds his sharp critiques.

“It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path that may lead to it.

A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” (p. 65)

Touche’. That early nineteenth-century admonition no longer applies, does it? Are we that shallow and obvious? Don’t answer that. This excellent one-pager is online as Home Insecurity.

Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, relates a story of paranoid fear. Paranoid style, now paranoid fear. He is excellent but immediately followed and upstaged by Dorothy Thompson’s tirade against the utter stupidity of a portion of humanity in believing the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast about an invasion from outer space, adapted from H.G. Wells 1898 novel War of the Worlds.

“The immediate moral is apparent if the whole incident is viewed in reason: no political body must ever, under any circumstances, obtain a monopoly of radio.

The second moral is that our popular and universal education is failing to train reason and logic, even in the educated.

The third is that the popularization of science has led to gullibility and new superstitions, rather than to skepticism and the really scientific attitude of mind.

The fourth is that the power of mass suggestion is the most potent force today and that the political demagogue is more powerful than all the economic forces.” (p. 71)

Sadly this piece is not online but if you google ‘Mr. Welles and Mass Delusion’ you might find it here: http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/rwocl... .

So many fine pieces in this issue, but thyme and I are marching on and I want to say a few words about the fine essays at the back. Who am I skipping over? Aristotle, Dostoevsky, Orwell, Freud, Poe, Machiavelli, James Baldwin. Former Intel CEO Andrew Grove’s piece from Only The Paranoid Survive (there’s that word again) is outstanding.

“Constructively debating tough issues and getting somewhere is only possible when people can speak their minds without fear of punishment.” (p. 125)

I can’t continue without mentioning the 1975 piece from Vaclav Havel, former president of the new Czech Republic:

“The basic question one must ask is this: Why do people do all the things that, taken together, form the impressive image of a totally united society giving total support to its government? For any unprejudiced observer, the answer is, I think, self-evident: they are driven to it by fear.”

“Fear of the consequences of refusal leads people to take part in elections, to vote for the proposed candidates, and to pretend that they regard such ceremonies as genuine elections…” (p. 132)

Compare that to this excerpt from a July 30, 2017 article in the Washington Post on the recent elections in Venezuela:

The nation’s 2.8 million state workers risked losing their jobs if they did not vote. Poor residents were warned that they could lose access to food baskets and government housing for failing to turn out for the election.

“To be honest, I’m voting because I’m afraid of losing my benefits,” said Betty, 60, who lives in public housing and was too scared to give her last name. “The government gave me my house, and I don’t want to lose it. I’m surviving because of government programs.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...

Three of the five full essays in Further Remarks, at the end of every issue, I thought outstanding. Film buffs will love the analysis by J. Hoberman of the movie The Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. I had not heard of Clouzot but I had heard of one of his other movies, Diabolique.

“The Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1953, is movie as doom show: the four principal characters have signed on to a suicide mission, driving two truckloads of nitroglycerin across three hundred miles of winding, mountainous, badly paved roads. After a lengthy setup, the movie itself becomes a fuse of indeterminate length. “You sit there waiting for the theater to explode,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther ended his review when The Wages of Fear opened in early 1955 at the posh Paris Theater in Manhattan.

An evocation of human existence under threat of instant annihilation, The Wages of Fear is no less a manifestation of nuclear anxiety than the Japanese monster movie Godzilla (1954) or even Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). In its way, The Wages of Fear—in production when the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak in the Marshall Islands—is cinema’s original articulation of that angst.” (p. 199)

The uncut version appears to be available on Amazon.com. Check it out.

Suki Kim’s Land of Darkness essay about North Korea gets my coveted triple-asterisk award. How timely is this, with Kim Jong Un taking ever larger steps in going ballistic toward the United States. Have you checked your geography maps lately? I’m surprised he hasn’t already accidentally dropped one on South Korea or Japan.

“I am the only writer ever, as far as we know, to have lived undercover in North Korea, embedded within the system to investigate the place. In 2011 I took my fifth trip into Pyongyang, where, under the guise of being a missionary and an ESL teacher, I lived for six months with 270 North Korean males in a military compound. For this act, I am often described as “fearless.” People call me brave. But even if it sounds illogical, I consider myself to be a very fearful person. Even more, I believe my fearfulness is the only way I can begin to explain my time undercover in the gulag nation.” (p. 205)

Despite recent fears, sorrows, and horrors of my own, this issue deepened my understanding of them without adding to them.