Culture of Fear

Speaker: Professor Frank Furedi
15 June 2005

Fear has become an ever-expanding part of life in the West in the twenty-first century. We live in terror of disease, abuse, stranger danger, environmental devastation and terrorist onslaught. We are bombarded with reports of new concerns for our safety and that of our children, and urged to take greater precautions and seek more protection. But compared to the past, or to the developing world, people in contemporary Western societies have much less familiarity with pain, suffering, debilitating disease and death. We actually enjoy an unprecedented level of personal safety.

Professor Furedi argues that our obsession with theoretical risks is in danger of distracting society from dealing with the old-fashioned dangers that have always threatened our lives. We panic about GM food, about genetic research, about the health dangers of mobile phones. The facts often fail to support the scare stories about new or growing risks to our health and safety.

Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, and author of Therapy Culture, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear. Since 1995, his work has focused on the different manifestations of contemporary risk-consciousness. His latest book, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy, and argues that we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again.

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