Robert Wuthnow has been praised as one of the country’s best social scientists by columnist David Brooks, who hails his writing as tremendously valuable. The New York Times calls him temperate, balanced, compassionate, adding, one can’t but admire Mr. Wuthnow’s views. A leading authority on religion, he now addresses one of the most profound subjects: the end of the world.
In Be Very Afraid, Wuthnow examines the human response to existential threats once a matter for theology, but now looming before us in multiple forms. Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming: each threatens to destroy the planet, or at least to annihilate our species. Freud, he notes, famously taught that the standard psychological response to an overwhelming danger is denial.
In fact, Wuthnow writes, the opposite is true: we seek ways of positively meeting the threat, of doing something anything even if it’s wasteful and time consuming. The atomic era that began with the bombing of Hiroshima sparked a flurry of activity, ranging from duck and cover drills, basement bomb shelters, and marches for a nuclear freeze.
All were arguably ineffectual, yet each sprang from an innate desire to take action. It would be one thing if our responses were merely pointless, Wuthnow observes, but they can actually be harmful. Both the public and policymakers tend to model reactions to grave threats on how we met previous ones.
The response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, echoed the Cold War citizens went out to buy duct tape, mimicking 1950s era civil defense measures, and the administration launched two costly conflicts overseas.
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