Don't hit the panic button

Risk by Dan Gardner and Panicology by Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams argue that far from being in ever-increasing danger, we have, in fact, never been safer, says Rafael Behr

• 
• • Rafael Behr
  • The Observer,
  • Sunday March 9, 2008
  • Article history

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, by Dan Gardner (Virgin £17.99, pp304)

Panicology, by Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams (Viking £18.99, pp304)

Humanity has never had it so good. Most people around the world are better off and will live longer than their ancestors. If we could hold on to that perspective, we would all be much more relaxed. But we aren't relaxed. We are anxious and stressed. We are scared that bad things will happen to us: nuclear war, cancer, child abduction. As for keeping things in perspective, Homo sapiens just isn't cut out for it,

as Dan Gardner explains in Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

If a history of man were written with proportionate space given to each stage of our development, Gardner tells us, we would be nomadic hunter-gatherers for 200 pages; there would then be one page of settled agrarian society. The modern world - everything that has happened in the last two centuries - would be a final paragraph.

But brain anatomy was fixed millennia ago. In other words, our poor troglodyte minds are simply not equipped to process the complexity of modern living, especially where risk is concerned.

We hear about a terrorist attack; we see the gruesome consequences on TV and before we can calculate the probability that we personally will be blown up, our brains have reacted as if we are being charged by a rhino: no time to think! Run!

Gardner elegantly summarises the results of

psychological research proving that people's visceral 'fight-or-flight' reactions always elbow their rational calculations out of the way.

Crucially, this happens even when the subjects are instructed to ignore their emotional responses. It happens to everyone, including psychology professors. So - clever clogs - if you think you don't believe everything you see on TV, it doesn't matter. Your Stone Age brain has processed the images and is using them to shape your opinions whether you like it or not.

Meanwhile, the sheer volume of stress-inducing messages is increasing exponentially, as media space expands on satellite channels and the internet.

Increased competition for our attention encourages scaremongering.

That, Gardner points out, isn't exclusively the fault of cynical or lazy journalism, although he unearths plenty of it.

Our brains are hard-wired to remember scary stories. We find narrative more compelling than data.

The gut-wrenching exception (a gory child murder) informs our risk perception more than the general rule (that our children are safer from violence than ever in human history).

Evolution has taught us to prioritise anecdotal evidence because, unlike statistics, our imaginations can process it into something resembling our personal experience. 'It could have been me' is a common response to news of a disaster, although usually the mathematical probability of it actually having been you is infinitesimal.

What scientists took decades to prove, marketing executives and politicians have known all along: fear sells. Gardner is forensic in his dissection of bogus claims in advertising and politics, just as he is lucid about the science explaining why they work. His chapters on the risk of being a victim of crime or terrorism provoke a peculiar mix of comfort and despair.

It is heartening that the danger is slight; it's unsettling how skewed our political system and consumer culture are towards convincing us of the opposite.

Gardner's book was written before Hillary Clinton ran her now infamous TV appeal to the voters of Texas, implying that their children would not be safe in their beds if Barack Obama were elected President. That is a shame. Recent political history offers no better lesson in getting viewers' dread hormones pumping to soften them up for a sales pitch.

The only antidote Gardner offers to that sort of thing is a redoubling of our mental efforts.

The primitive part of our brains might be open to seduction by alarmist politicians, but, given enough time, the rational part can step in and stop us going all the way. Think more, Gardner exhorts, think harder.

That is pretty much the same prescription on offer in Panicology. Its authors, Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams, also open with the premise that we seem unduly worried about everything when, in fact, we are mostly safe and well.

Their stated goal is to calm jangled nerves with statistically soothing reviews of recent voguish scares: bird flu, obesity, social decay, genetically modified food etc.

They are gloriously deft in their rebuttal of some of the more egregious cases of media-fuelled herd idiocy, such as mass rejection of the MMR vaccine because of one specious claim of links to autism.

Yet sometimes journalistic rigour and even-handedness with data create a picture that is far from reassuring.

Panic might not be the most effective response to climate change, for example, but, faced with a summary of the current scientific consensus, deep foreboding does not seem unreasonable.

In fact, the solace of unreason is notably absent from both Risk and Panicology. That is because the authors are rationalists. Rightly so. It would be hard to argue that policy-making on the environment or public health might benefit from an increase in blind superstition. But it does seem worth mentioning that one reason people used to be less afraid of life is that they had no illusion of control over it. You may have been far more likely to be murdered or struck by crippling disease in the 14th century than you are in the 21st, but if you were, you would probably have put it down to Providence.

When it came to calculating the likelihood of disaster, our ancestors had a choice between zealous optimism that everything would turn out for the best (God's design is perfect) and pious acceptance that everything was bound to be terrible (this life is just the entrance exam to the next one). But in liberal Western societies, individual choice, in everything from diet to political doctrine, is sacrosanct. We are empowered to lead the lives we want, on the condition that we take responsibility for the outcome. No wonder we are scared. If we make the wrong choices, if we eat the wrong food or take the wrong alleyway home, and something awful happens, we have only ourselves to blame.

It would be a terrible shame to start panicking now about our propensity to panic. In the overall scheme of things, mankind has only very recently cast off the mental shackles of submissive fatalism. We are bound to feel a bit wobbly on our feet. At least, as these books show, we have evolved the intellectual wherewithal to each be master of our destiny. Thank God. No, actually, thank Man.