State Of Fear

Page 48

"I'm sorry, Professor, but"
"However, I managed to hold on to this." He gave Evans the torn corner of a ticket. It was a genuine ticket.
"Where is the rest?"
"I told you, they took it."
A guard standing to one side beckoned to Evans. Evans went over to him. The guard turned his cupped hand, revealing the rest of the ticket in his palm. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, "but Mr. Drake gave specific orders this gentleman was not to be allowed in."
"But he has a ticket," Evans said.
"Perhaps you'd like to take it up with Mr. Drake."
By now, a television crew had wandered over, drawn by the commotion. Hoffman immediately played to the cameras, struggling anew.
"Don't bother with Drake!" Hoffman yelled to Evans. "Drake won't let truth into these proceedings!" He turned to the camera. "Nicholas Drake is an immoral fraud, and these proceedings are a travesty to the poor of the world. I bear witness to the dying children of Africa and Asia! Breathing their last because of conferences like this! Fearmongers! Immoral fearmongers!" He struggled maniacally. His eyes were wild. There was spittle on his lips. He certainly appeared crazy, and the cameras switched off; the crews turned away, seemingly embarrassed. At once, Hoffman stopped his struggle. "Never mind. I've said my piece. No one is interested, as usual." He turned to his guards. "You can let me go. I have had enough of this chicanery. I cannot bear to be here another minute. Let me go!"
Evans said, "Let him go."
The guards released Hoffman. He immediately dashed into the center of the room, where a crew was now interviewing Ted Bradley. Hoffman stepped in front of Bradley and said, "This man is a pimp! He is an eco-pimp for a corrupt establishment that makes its living by spreading false fears! Don't you understand? False fears are a plague, a modern plague!"
Then the guards were on Hoffman again, dragging him bodily out of the hall. He didn't struggle this time. He just went limp, his heels scraping on the ground as he was carried out. All he said was, "Be careful, I have a bad back. You hurt me and I'll sue you for assault."
They set him outside on the curb, dusted him off, released him.
"Have a good day, sir."
"I intend to. My days are numbered."
Evans hung back with Jennifer, watching Hoffman. "I won't say I told you," Jennifer said.
"Just who is he, anyway?"
"He's a professor emeritus at USC. He was one of the first people to study in a rigorous statistical fashion the media and its effect on society. He's quite interesting, but as you see he has developed, uh, strong opinions."
"You think Morton really invited him here?"
"Peter, I need your help," a voice said. Evans turned and saw Drake striding toward him.
"What is it?"
"That nut," Drake said, nodding to Hoffman, "is probably going to go straight to the police and claim he was assaulted. We don't need that this morning. Go talk to him. See if you can calm him down."
Cautiously, Evans said, "I don't know what I can do amp;"
"Get him to explain his nutty theories," Drake said. "That'll keep him busy for hours."
"But then I'll miss the conf"
"We don't need you here. We need you there. With the cuckoo."
There was a large crowd outside the conference center. The overflow was watching the proceedings on a big TV screen, with subtitles running underneath the speaker. Evans pushed through the gathering. "I know why you are following me," Hoffman said, when he saw Evans. "And it won't work."
"Professor"
"You're the bright young poseur Nick Drake sent to put me off my purpose."
"Not at all, sir."
"Yes, you are. Don't lie to me. I don't like to be lied to."
"All right," Evans said, "it's true. I was sent by Drake."
Hoffman stopped. He seemed startled by the honesty. "I knew it. And what did he tell you to do?"
"Stop you from going to the police."
"All right then, you've succeeded. Go and tell him, I am not going to the police."
"It looks like you are."
"Oh. It looks like I am. You're one of those people who care what it looks like."
"No, sir, but you"
"I don't care what it looks like. I care what is. Do you have any idea what is?"
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"What is your line of work?"
"I'm a lawyer."
"I should have known. Everybody is a lawyer these days. Extrapolating the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants. They will be born lawyers. What do you suppose it will be like to live in such a society?"
"Professor," Evans said, "you made some interesting comments in the hall"
"Interesting? I accused them of flagrant immorality, and you call that interesting?"
"I'm sorry," Evans said, trying to move the discussion toward Hoffman's views. "You didn't explain why you think"
"I do not think anything, young man. I know. That is the purpose of my researchto know things, not to surmise them. Not to theorize. Not to hypothesize. But to know from direct research in the field. It's a lost art in academia these days, young manyou are not that youngwhat is your name, anyway?"
"Peter Evans."
"And you work for Drake, Mr. Evans?"
"No, for George Morton."
"Well, why didn't you say so!" Hoffman said. "George Morton was a great, great man. Come along, Mr. Evans, and I will buy you some coffee and we can talk. Do you know what I do?"
"I'm afraid I don't, sir."
"I study the ecology of thought," Hoffman said. "And how it has led to a State of Fear."
Chapter 71
SANTA MONICA
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13
9:33 A.M.
They were sitting on a bench across the street from the conference hall, just beyond the milling crowds near the entrance. It was a busy scene, but Hoffman ignored everything around him. He spoke rapidly, with great animation, moving his hands so wildly that he often slapped Evans in the chest, but he never seemed to notice.
"Ten years ago, I began with fashion and slang," he said, "the latter being of course a kind of verbal fashion. I wanted to know the determinants of change in fashion and speech. What I quickly found is that there are no identifiable determinants. Fashions change for arbitrary reasons and although there are regularitiescycles, periodicities, and correlationsthese are merely descriptive, not explanatory. Are you following me?"
"I think so," Evans said.
"In any case, I realized that these periodicities and correlations could be regarded as systems in themselves. Or if you will, ecosystems. I tested that hypothesis and found it heuristically valuable. Just as there is an ecology of the natural world, in the forests and mountains and oceans, so too there is an ecology of the man-made world of mental abstractions, ideas, and thought. That is what I have studied."
"I see."
"Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see."
"I understand, Professor, but why"
"Why do ideas fall out of favor, you are wondering?" Hoffman said. He was talking to himself. "The answer is simplythey do. In fashion, as in natural ecology, there are disruptions. Sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. Accidental, haphazard, unexpected, abrupt change. That is what the world shows us on every side."
"Professor amp;"
"But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example. In the 1970s, it gains popularity from the work of Sperry at Caltech, who studies a specific group of brain-surgery patients. His findings have no broader meaning beyond these patients. Sperry denies any broader meaning. By 1980, it is clear that the left and right brain notion is just wrongthe two sides of the brain do not work separately in a healthy person. But in the popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades after scientists have set it aside."
"Yes, all very interesting"
"Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called the balance of nature.' If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice. "However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance, and that means"
"Professor," Evans said, "I'd like to ask you"
"That means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway."
"But George Morton amp;"
"Yes, yes, you wonder what I discussed with George Morton. I am coming to that. We are not off topic. Because of course, Morton wanted to know about environmental ideas. And particularly the idea of environmental crisis."
"What did you tell him?"
"If you study the media, as my graduate students and I do, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networksNBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking." He paused.
"What did you find?" Evans said, taking his cue.
"There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example, during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed."
"In what way?"
"These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic."
"Why should it have changed in 1989?"
"Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year."
Hoffman fell silent again, looking at Evans in a significant way. Very pleased with himself.
Evans said, "I'm sorry, Professor. I don't get it."
"Neither did we. At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn't. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West."
Another silence. Another pleased look.
"I'm sorry," Evans said finally. "I was thirteen years old then, and amp;" He shrugged. "I don't see where you are leading."
"I am leading to the notion of social control, Peter. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the roador the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear."
"Fear," Evans said.
"Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it."
Evans frowned. "You're saying that environmental crises took the place of the Cold War?"
"That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post9/11 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually."
He shifted on the concrete bench, turning away from the crowds.
"Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can't even seegerms, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusiona global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.