A History of Terror
Introduction
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh –
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
(The Song of the Little
Hunter: Rudyard Kipling)
In February 1998 The Sunday Times ran a story about a
group of scientists who had discovered the seat of fear in the human brain,
“proving that one of the most potent human emotions has a chemical basis and
raising the prospect of a new generation of drugs that could make man
fearless.” The article was dramatically illustrated by a photograph of
soldiers, kneeling on a battlefield during the Second World War and praying for
courage to face the ordeal.
Apparently the sensation of fear is manufactured in tiny pathways
between nerve cells in a small, almond-shaped clump of tissue called the
amygdala. Professor Joseph LeDoux – an authority on the emotional brain –
commented: “We have shown that the amygdala is like the hub in the centre of a
wheel of fear. If we understand the pathways of fear, it will ultimately lead to
better control.”
Such information urges a reappraisal of our view of fear. At one time
it was seen as something that spread over the body, making the knees shake, the
stomach contract, but modern techniques of mind-mapping enable a precise
location to be fixed. The recent maps of the brain are not particularly
accurate but rather like those 16th century maps of the world where,
give or take a continent or two, things are approximately in the right place.
But they will no doubt get better and better until perhaps the tiniest of our
impulses will be pin-pointed.
The scientist’s view is that basically the brain is an elaborate piece
of circuitry served by neurotransmitters and odd behaviour is usually traceable
to a malfunction within this assemblage. For instance, a preposterously brave
or ‘fearless’ man could well be suffering from lack of responsiveness in the
amygdala. The personality itself – the arena of presence - seems to be stationed in the frontal lobes. Those who
lack a sense of personal definition - of agency – may be under-active in that
sector. If your frontal lobes are not responding, you may have a deficient
sense of being a discrete, fully-fledged citizen of the world.
Chemically speaking, fear
is close to curiosity – hence many so-called terrors have an eerie attraction.
That is why fear can be marketed as entertainment. We start out by being afraid
of things – spiders, ghosts, thunderstorms and volcanoes – and end up being
immensely well-informed about them. The natural sciences developed out of the
study of creatures and objects that once inspired superstition and loathing. In
a sense, the Renaissance is the most important watershed in human history,
marking the period when curiosity swamped fear. People began to wash the clay
of supersitiion from their eyes and explore the world. Dead bodies were cut
open and their organs mapped; stars were observed as they moved in the courses;
chemicals were mixed in retorts. The power structure based on hell and
damnation, which had been exploited by the Catholic Church, dissolved and with
it much theological lore that had passed for knowledge. Hence today we find
primitive fears are stock sources of amusement: films and entertainments are
devised that mock everything from God and Satan to werewolves and serial
killers. Roughly speaking, moving through historic time, fear expresses itself
in four stages, all of which overlap and sometimes run parallel:
1)Primal Response
2) Superstition
3) Frisson
4) Satire or Comedy
If we take leprosy, for
instance, that disease loomed as an awful possibility throughout the early
medieval period. It was a primal response,
an authentic fear; and then, as conditions improved, the threat lessened; but
there was a powerful lingering superstition
concerning the curative power of leper’s blood and the flesh of the leper. When
leprosy became a rare, almost exotic condition in Western Europe, it started to
be employed as a literary device, to add a frisson
or pleasurable shiver to a story, such as in the tale The Silver Man by Kipling. The final stage is when the dreadful
affliction becomes so distanced, so remote, that it is recycled as pure farce
in buffoonesqe comedies set in a Middle Ages of roistering belchers, clanking
knights and wimpled floozies.
Though it may
seem tangible at times, fear is a protean, shifting sensation, endlessly
altering its location and alliance. Down the centuries people feared the wrath
of God until scientists assured them it is unlikely that the universe is
presided over by a punitive deity. The information did not release them. Many
felt oppressed at the idea of being abandoned in a ‘godless’ universe.
Similarly, when the terror of being assaulted at night was allayed by
streetlighting, people began to fear other things, such as the safety of their
property. Insurance policies offered a temporary solution, but as people
prospered, more and more personal artefacts needed to be insured - was there
enough money to cover these payments? Fear and worry melt constantly and
reappear in altered guises. They are part of the intimate life of the
individual. In extreme forms, they lead to social paralysis, arrant prejudice
and rigidity of outlook.
Fear
has been divided into four components: the subjective experience of nervousness
or apprehension; physiological changes; outward effects, like trembling or
tension; and the tendency to back away from or avoid certain situations. There
are morbid anxieties such as the thought of teeth crumbling in the mouth or
one’s eyes being pecked out by a gull. Other anxieties are not relatable to
tangible stimulation but belong to the realm of fantasy: the sky is going to
fall or an entity from a UFO descend and kidnap one. Then there are
inexplicable onslaughts of ‘panic’ which descend on men and women and have been
linked with the ‘numinous’ or the threatening silence of God. And there are
minor but specific phobias like a dread of spiders, chicken, rats or snakes.
The latter can be treated by methods of aversion therapy in which people like,
say, arachnophobics, are taught to handle tarantulas and informed on their
habits and ways, quelling fear by knowledge and first hand experience.
Freud
held that many fears arose from conditioning and negative stimuli, like a
father regularly beating a child because he upsets a drink. When he grows up,
the child continues to feel the same shrinking terror each time he spills a
drop of beer, even though his father is long dead and he a married man. Then
there are fears learned by experience, like a dread of heights, fires, plants and
insects that sting. Such fears are educative and necessary for survival. Fear
of pain will make people proceed with caution. Fear of being discovered will
make a burglar tread less noisily. Fear of fire will make people acquire
flameproof furnishings. Fearlessness can be foolishness as well as courage.
Being
more contained than horror or revulsion, fear impinges directly on the ‘human
situation’, implicit in which is an almost a permanent sense of unease. As one
matures it may take on a specific character: old age, the onset of disease, a
sense of encroaching isolation or impending catastrophe. Like a stick of rock,
one is stamped through with mortality, but life demands a focussing, a goal, a
plan, and the obsessive pattern-making that defines civilisation can be seen a
massive distraction from the primal silence that preceded creation. On the
slender foundations of fears witheld and secreted, we build cities, ruins and
dreams.
Poets and literary critics often evoked fear
in the highly specialised sense of an intense frisson or feeling of awe before
the sublimity and wonder of creation. Graham Greene’s story The Ministry of Fear derives from
Wordsworth who expressed gratitude for the sanctimonious “ministry of fear”. He
is aware that he is a guest in an infinite universe whose deeper meaning
appears hidden. It is a feeling of reverence tempered by a shiver of unease.
A reflexive manifestation of fear can be found in
acts of violence against individuals and races. No one knows what the first
uttered word was - but it may have been generated by fear. Consider how many
pleasures involve silent communion like digging a garden, smelling wild garlic
in a wood, or listening to music, and then think how sound becomes of urgent
import when danger threatens: the shout to warn a child playing in the road of
an impending vehicle, the scream uttered by a drowning woman, the yelp of a frightened animal. The first word might
well have been a negative. A cave-man finds himself encircled by enemies who
intend to crush him with heavy stone implements; he shrivels and squirms. In
utter loss and abandonment, his gut struggles into his mouth which yanks open
and utters “No!” – a pure fusion of sound and terror. In a sense, fear had
given birth to a cry, and from that point it can be articulated as part of the
shared experience of mankind.
Comparitively little attention has been given in this present work to the reigns of terror imposed by Stalin and Hitler, and this is because, psychologically speaking, tyrannies that rule by instant death penalties are similar. In the 1820s, the Zulu chieftain Chaka killed around a million during his wars of conquest. He built an empire on fear. Once he massacred a whole tribe of 40,000, including women and children, although some of the more nubile girls were retained for his men’s pleasure. After each battle, Chaka ordered his chiefs to “bring forth the cowards” who were impaled on the spot. If a tribesman coughed, sneezed or irritated him in a minor way, he was liable to be taken away and beaten to death with sticks. When Chaka’s mother died, his men executed around 7,000 out of “sympathy” for their leader’s grief. Chaka’s system was arbitrary, erratic, moody. No one knew what would happen – who would die – next. Men were conditioned to a state of unerring cruelty. Instead of autonomous beings, they were extensions of their leader’s nervous system. To please him, they would volunteer to kill themselves and their own children. The system worked until Chaka was assassinated by his half-brothers in 1828. An attempt was made by his successor to introduce a liberal regime, but the result was a series of tribal rebellions and, to restore stability, a more moderate ‘reign of terror’ was installed.
The
essence of Chaka’s reign was control by breeding a terrifying, absolute
uncertainty. The ways in which tyrants establish such networks differ, but the
generated ‘fear’ is similar. Hence, to avoid a diet of horror and repetition,
large sections of this present work analyse the shapes of fear as they have come
down to us through the ages: the Devil, hell, ghosts, vampires, werewolves,
ghouls and little grey men from outer space. We differ in what we appear to be
frightened of, but the same primitive dread lurks behind manifold apparitions.
It is the translation in the mind of the perceiver that differs rather than the
experience itself.
Anyone
glancing through the ensuing chapters may be affronted by disproportions and
credulities that beg the question. How can one mention Hiroshima and Nazi death
camps alongside frivolities like Fatima, the Angel of Mons and the shenanigans
of UFO abductees? Well, beyond the hard facts of history, there are times when
waves of hysteria sweep over groups and nations. Whether the upshot of
groundless anxiety or delusive vision, there are marked changes of attitude.
During the Middle Ages, for instance, the prophecies of Revelation triggered dramatic sieges and persecutions - but today,
aside from cultic exceptions like Waco, such texts are ignored. Yet men and
women are still beset by inner demons, bedevilled by outrageous passions,
irrational horrors, and this book, written at the very start of the third
millennium, can be sampled as both warning and entertainment.
A History of Terror
Paul Newman
Introduced by Colin Wilson
Sutton Publishing
ISBN: 0 7509 2008 4
01453 – 731114
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