Lecture on Phobia in America

As children we fear things that as adults we might find silly
such as monsters or things under the bed. As we grow older
we develop phobias, which are irrational fears of a certian
object or idea such as an enclosed space or heights or even
light. phobias cause a person to feel alone and isolated in their
mind. He then described how fear could be mental, emotional,
and physical and how humans and animals both suffer from
fear.

The study of phobias and fears in centuries old. Expression
of Emotion: Man and Animals written by Charles Darwin says
that the emotion of fear is innate and is not something that is
taught to us. That fear however and be enhanced or guided by
outside influences such as the media as Barry Glassner explains
in his book The Culture of Fear. He blames the media for
creating some diffrent kinds of fear in people by sterotyping or
emphazising different people or groups in a negative way.
Sean Quimby, the lecturer, thought that there were two trends
in American life. The first is a dogged fantasy of invasion and
the second is the gradual emergence of therapeutic culture.

Quimby suggests that America has an obsession with being
invaded. The first example that he gives is Madison Grant’s The
Passing of the Great Race. In this book Henry Osbourne
explains that the greatest threat to America is that the Aryan
race might be dying out becasue of the inter-marriage
between Aryans and non-Aryans. As his second example
Quimby used the 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds and the
panic that followed from people actually believing that an alien
invasion was taking place. Princeton Professor, Hadley Cantrill
commented on this naiveté of the American public by saying
that it was due to Americans’ inability to distinguish reality
from fiction.

The second trend that Quimby talks about is the
therapeutic culture of fear. He spends much less time talking
about this aspect than the first and his only example was God.
He says that God is now being absorbed into this path of fear
in a way that people’s belief in a higher being helps alleviate
the uncertainty and horror of phobias.

While i enjoyed the lecture and the question and answer
session afterwards the speech tended to jump around alot and
did not present a clear thesis. Quimby gave quite a few
examples of fear in America but it did not seem to have any
real unifying themes and it did not seem to have any order in
the order the examples were presented. The lecutre also
was a bit short. It was schedculed to be an hour, but in reality
it only lasted around half an hour. It would have been a much
better presentaiton if Quimby had gone more indepth on some
topics and lengthened the presentation more.