The Weekly Screed (#718)

The ministrations of fear
by David Benjamin

“So, first of all, 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, First Inaugural Address, 1933

MADISON, Wis. — We live in an era of fear, much of it — in FDR’s words — “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified.” We fear government health care. We’re afraid we might lose our government health care. We fear vaccines. And so, now, we fear measles and mumps all over again. We fear clean energy. We fear the filth in our skies and oceans. We fear deficits. We fear taxes. We fear spending and we fear austerity. We fear the police. We fear other colors of skin. We fear other sexes. We fear, well, others. We fear teachers. We’re terrified by politicians. We fear computers. We fear spying on ourselves but not on “them.” We fear guns but not as much as gun confiscation. We fear drugs. We fear placebos. We fear autism, asthma, abductions and obesity. We fear engineered veggies. We fear meat. We fear glutens, carbs, fructose and salt. We fear little lesbians on wedding cakes. We fear a wave of sneaky Islamism spreading Sharia across America before Bill O’Reilly notices. We fear a firestorm of Muslim terrorism that’s been promised us since 9/11. It’s coming soon. Honest!

We fear fear itself. But we’ve also come to love and cherish, nurture and exalt our fear. It’s not enough that you fear and I fear. Everyone must fear. Every day, in every way, in everything we see and do, we must express, magnify and broadcast our fear. No one must feel free to act out of hope or generosity, to think with optimism, to reach out with trust. All choices must spring from fervent anxiety. Fear must be the resurrection and the life. Terror must be our tabernacle.

The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston reminded me of the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, both of which brought strangely to my mind not fear nor anger, but ancient history, and the hoodlums once known — and feared — as sicarii.

In 1st-century Jerusalem, the sicarii were the princes of mass fear. Among dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects in those parlous times, the sicarii were perhaps the nuttiest and certainly the deadliest splinter. A sicarius — or dagger-man — would join a crowd and spot someone he suspected of favoring the hated Romans or collaborating with the corrupt Temple priests. He would plunge a knife into the stranger and then slip away. Several sicarii working one throng together could wreak carnage comparable to the Tsarnaev boys at the Boston Marathon.

The sicarii often operated on guesswork. A Roman sympathizer looked no different from anyone else. But somebody had to be stabbed — right now. This imperative made any random shlemiel in the crowd a suitable object lesson.

The sicarii were angry, alienated and ready to die. They claimed piety, but their grasp of theology was tenuous at best. There’s little evidence that they could read or write. Their personal obsession with death and annihilation drew them naturally to the catastrophic fringe of conservative Judaism.

Many religions have visions of the Apocalypse — few more traumatically expressed than in the Book of Revelations. Many devout 1st-century Jews saw the Roman conquest as prelude to Armageddon. John the Baptist, the most famous mentor to Jesus, spent his life dunking doomed sinners before it was too late.

In the 19th century, the scholars of German Protestantism undertook the daunting study of Jesus as an historical figure. They sought the mortal man beneath the Gospel. Among the last of these religious detectives was Albert Schweitzer, who synthesized the previous scholarship into an extraordinary book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer’s fearless research led to a heretical insight that others before him had reached before they flinched. He determined, from a close reading of Jesus’ teachings, that Jesus was an eschatological messiah. Schweitzer concluded — reluctantly — that Jesus expected to be crucified and then, as he breathed his last mortal breath, the World would End.

The implications of Schweitzer’s last chapter were devastating to the German clergy, as well as to the very foundations of Christianity. True to form, the bishops greeted Schweitzer’s earnest scholarship by stabbing him in the back. They forbade him from writing another word for the rest of his life, and exiled him to Africa, where he lived out his life as the 20th century’s most beloved missionary.

Backstabbers have always been with us. Sometimes, they’re bishops. Sometimes, peasants with daggers. Sometimes, they’re angry immigrant kids with a chip on their shoulder and a laptop full of propaganda. Often, they’re pulpit-pounding office-seekers who recognize fear — packaged for the mass market in 20-second soundbites — as their ticket to victory in the Iowa caucuses.

When FDR inveighed against fear incarnate, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He was fighting all those demagogues and tycoons who benefit, profit and triumph from the fear they instill in others. The goal of the ancient sicarii wasn’t the death of their victims, but fear of the survivors — the memory of that moment of helpless terror — and the power that lingers in such memories.

We live in an era of fear. But our fear of zealots with daggers and jihadists with bombs is misplaced. They’re small fry. Their influence comes only when their names are invoked and their crimes inflated by the professional fearmongers, who wear suits and hire bodyguards. Their ill-veiled threat always reads the same:

“All things fall apart. Horror overwhelms us. The end is nigh. The others made this happen. There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late. But trust us now. Step into line, pay the admission. (Yes, it’s steep. But what have you got to lose?) Wait quietly. We’ll make sure you have a seat on the last spaceship to Paradise.

“Honest.”