{"id":3752,"date":"2023-08-25T14:17:36","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T14:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3752"},"modified":"2023-08-28T14:21:57","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T14:21:57","slug":"radiant-with-triumphant-calamity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3752","title":{"rendered":"Radiant with triumphant calamity"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Fear by Robert Peckham for the Telegraph, 25 August 2023\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember the UK intelligence claim that Saddam Hussein could strike the UK with a ballistic missile within 45 minutes? The story goes that this was spun out of a two-year-old conversation with a taxi driver on the Iraq-Jordan border. One thing\u2019s for sure: fear breeds rumour breeds more fear.<\/p>\n

Robert Peckham lives in fear, and claims we\u2019re all of us entering \u201can era of insidious, mediatised fear\u201d. This may be a case of misery seeking company. And you can see why: in 1988 this British historian of science (author of several well-received books about epidemics) narrowly missed getting blown up in a terrorist attack on the funeral of Abdul Ghaffar Khan in Jalalabad. More recently, in the summer of 2021, he quit his job at the University of Hong Kong where, he writes, \u201dfear was palpable… friends were being hounded by the authorities, news agencies shut down and opposition leaders jailed.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the spread of Covid-19, Peckham\u2019s political and medical interests dovetailed in Hong Kong in grim fashion. \u201cA pandemic turned out to be the ultimate anti-protest weapon,\u201d he writes, \u201cone that the city\u2019s chief executive, Carrie Lam, deployed ruthlessly to stifle opposition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fear is the story of how, over the last 700 years or so, power has managed and manipulated its subjects through dread: of natural disasters, pandemics, revolutions, technologies, financial crashes, wars and of course, through fear of the government itself.<\/p>\n

We see how the Catholic Church tried and failed to canalise the horrors of the Black Death into sacral terror and obedience; how instead that fear powered the Reformation. There\u2019s a revealing section about Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet, a play both steeped in fear and about it: and how fear is shown sometimes engendering, sometimes acting as a moral brake on violence. Through the bloody medium of the French revolution, we enter the modern era painfully aware that reason has proved more than capable of buttressing terror, and that the post-Enlightenment period is \u201cradiant with triumphant calamity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Peckham\u2019s history is as encyclopaedic as it is mirthless. After a striking and distressing chapter about the slave trade (every book should have one), Peckham even wonders whether \u201cperhaps slavery has been so thoroughly embedded in free market capitalism that it can\u2019t be dislodged, at least not without the collapse of the entire system\u201d.<\/p>\n

At this point, the reader is entitled tug on the reins and double check some figures on the United Nations website. And sure enough: in the 21st century alone global life expectancy has risen seven years, literacy has risen by nine per cent (to 91 per cent) and extreme poverty is about a third what it was at the beginning of this century.<\/p>\n

Allow Peckham\u2019s argument that the Machiavellian weaponisation of fear had a hand in all this: dare one suggest this was a price worth paying?<\/p>\n

Of course this is far from the whole of Peckham\u2019s argument. He says at the outset he wants to explore the role fear plays in promoting reform, as well as its use in repressing dissent. \u201cWhat,\u201d he asks, \u201cwould happen to all the public-spirited interventions that rely on the strategic use of fear to influence our behaviour? Don\u2019t we need fear to take our problems seriously?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting project. Too often, though, the focus on fear acts to dampen our responses, rather than enrich them. For instance, Peckham depicts Versailles as \u201ca policed society\u201d where \u201cprescriptions on how to eat, talk, walk and dance kept courtiers in line, with the ever-present threat that they might be stripped of their privileges if rules of comportment were infringed\u201d. This is at once self-evident and woefully incomplete, excluding as it does any talk of political aspiration, personal vanity, love of play, the temptations of gossip and the lure of luxe. This isn\u2019t an insight into Versailles; it\u2019s a gloomy version of Versailles.<\/p>\n

There is a difference, it is true, between the trenches of Verdun, and the fear felt in those trenches, just as there is a difference between the NKVD knocking on your door, and your fear of the knock. But — and here\u2019s the nub of the matter — is it a useful difference? Or is it merely a restatement of the obvious?<\/p>\n

In the end, having failed to glean the riches he had hoped for, Peckham is left floundering: \u201cFear is always intersectional,\u201d he writes, \u201can unnerving confluence of past, present and future, a convergence of the here and there.\u201d<\/p>\n

To which this reader replied, with some exasperation, \u201cOh, pull the other one!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Fear by Robert Peckham for the Telegraph, 25 August 2023\u00a0 Remember the UK intelligence claim that Saddam Hussein could strike the UK with a ballistic missile within 45 minutes? The story goes that this was spun out of a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[787,785,243,641,287],"class_list":["post-3752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-enlightenment","tag-europe","tag-politics","tag-risk","tag-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3754,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions\/3754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}