Putting Fear in Its Place

Where It Is

Fear has assumed an inordinate priority at this moment in history. Called now more often, in American discourse, by the name we give it at its worst extremity, terror shapes our world. We, who when we pledge our allegiance to our homeland, declare that ours is a nation “with liberty and justice for all,” defer to terror to define exactly what we mean by the words liberty, justice and all.

Which of our cherished liberties must we forgo in the hope that our Sovereign Ruler might thereby keep us safe from that which he taught us to dread? Surely, as one example, we must dispense with our right to be secure from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Without complaint we must submit willingly to being detained, fondled, stripped, probed and scanned before boarding a plane on the vague assertion that someone, somewhere intends us harm and that this procedure preserves us from it. Never mind that freedom from such a process was granted us by our Bill of Rights in reaction to the writs of assistance and thus is among the core motivations for the American Revolution. Never mind also that this particular liberty has since evolved into a fundamental expectation of ethical government far beyond its authors’ time or our own shores.

Shall we not also accept that justice can not be swift, certain, moral or impartial in times of peril? A speedy trial of a case on its merits is perhaps a quaint expectation when we are not sure if a a prisoner might be hiding a plan to do us all great harm. Our “precision guidance systems” may in fact miss their target and kill or injure innocent civilians. Lets be reasonable about this– they were accurate to within an engineering approximation and besides we had to target the “bad guys.” Torture is immoral in ordinary times but now? Impartial– those people would not even be prisoners of a liberty loving country like ours unless they did something wrong!

We can not be expected to temper our actions to grant liberty and justice to the prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Nor can we grant these to Iraqi or Lebanese civilians who are close to the the bad people that the good people are shooting at. We can only grant them to Americans. Well, not Americans who have friends or business associates who may perhaps support those who intend to do us all harm. Oh, and not the Mexicans. Just Americans, but all of them. Well, post Katrina, not the black folks. Well, not the poor….

Where It Belongs

Those who have made a special practice of cultivating enlightenment tell us that fear clouds perception, hinders judgment, and thus blocks enlightenment. Suzanne Segal dealt with this at some considerable length in her book Collision with the Infinite. One often sees this honest, substantial view of the presence of fear in her spiritual practice reduced to this aphoristic quote: “the presence of fear means only that fear is present, and nothing more.”

As a reification of her observations this phrase has little value. But perhaps there is a better reason one sees it sometimes used to stand in for her thought. These few of her words, in themselves, are a worthwhile guidepost for relocating fear to its proper place. The fact that we experience terror tells us nothing about the character of terrorists. Nor does it even tell us anything of substance about ourselves. It should no more shape our fundamental values than should a yawn or a blink.

It is, after all, only what it is. If clinging to it, or it to us, might it not help to voice what has been heard before?

I am not possessed of this fear
This fear does not possess me
I am not this fear
This fear is not me