FEAR

"Do not be afraid, for I am with you" (Isaiah 41:10) is a sentiment repeated all through scripture, Abrahamic and otherwise. Religion generally counteracts fear--our instinctive physical reaction to impending danger, loss, or insult. Fear is a surge of adrenaline that causes sweating, dilation of the eyes, a fast heartbeat, a surge of blood to muscles, imprinted memories, and an impulse to freeze, flee, or fight. 

         For the millions of years our progenitors wandered in small bands exposed to carnivores, starvation, and strangers, terror helped them survive, but today, when wild beasts are rare, food warehoused, and most strangers harmless, fear can be useless and corrosive. Chronic anxiety afflicts us in social situations where we can't freeze, run, or fight--not productively anyway. Fear erupts as road rage, PTSD, agoraphobia, blanking on exams, and other dysfunctions, and chronic stress degrades sleep, health, and pleasure.
Fear is disproportionate to its causes. We can only be so frightened. Adrenal glands can pump only so much adrenaline and cortisol. Fear easily maxes out over the mundane. If we're terrified to lose a bid, what headroom's left for a nuclear holocaust? I recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, a sunny day after we saw arial photos of missile bases on television and knew that JFK had challenged the Soviet Union in a game of thermonuclear chicken.  Fear may have saved us--Nikita Khrushchev's sensible fear--but as I walked between classes in Auburn, looking at the clean, sunlit world, I knew that at any hour all of this could end (and we know now that an out-of-contact Soviet submarine almost launched a nuclear torpedo). For decades, before and after that frightening October, two nations stood one mistake away from annihilating each other in a nuclear tit-for-tat that would kill hundreds of millions, possibly billions. And we lived with it. Life normalized. Adrenaline and cortisol levels held at near-normal despite the fact that films like Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, and The Day After weren't fantasy, but merely fiction. This was the milieu of my early adulthood, a world where fallout shelters were practical.

In the context of the Cuban crisis. the collective hysteria in the United States after 9/11 seemed foolish. Let me be clear: I respect the enormity of almost three thousand lives snuffed out in a foreign attack. It was a massive tragedy and national insult. But there was a high probability (which turned out to be fact) that 9/11 was sucker punch that wouldn't be repeated, and, even if it threatened to be repeated a hundred times, the resulting deaths would have been fewer than one percent of the initial deaths in an American-Soviet nuclear war--not to speak of the millions more that might die from fallout and nuclear winter--perhaps the end of end civilization as we knew it. Still, I recall playing an open mic in Kentucky right after the collapse of the World Trade Center and feeling a collective panic, almost like hanging smoke, as if our little coffee shop off the square might be hit any second by a Piper Cub loaded with TNT. The communal adrenaline surge crested higher than any night when nuclear extinction loomed (maybe matched by Pearl Harbor, but that was before my time). No dark songs could be sung that night, and one woman wondered if there was any use in bringing children into such a world. I felt it too. Being a damned rationalist, I fought it, but I felt it. All of America was stressed out.

My point is that fear is irrational. It can't distinguish between three billion deaths and three thousand--even between those and a loss of one friend or of a reputation. There's always something to fear (something inevitable if we fear death) and so, if we open the door to fear, it moves in. Absent a nuclear holocaust, slighter threats (such as terrorism or divorce) will serve as well. But, absent the rare wild animals, muggers, fires, and natural disasters, panic is obsolete.

I say panic because milder forms of fear are useful. Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio explains in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1995) that emotion plays an essential part in "rational" decision making. Patients with neocortical damage in the prefrontal cortex are able to speak, observe, move, and draw logical conclusions, but they become social deviants dangerous to themselves and others because they lack emotion. Real-life Vulcans, they reason without fear, and this isn't good. A brain-damaged person missing the prefrontal centers of emotion, perfectly capable of calculating that one behavior will lead to success, another to failure, still can't decide which to do. A pang of emotion, a surge of adrenaline--in short, fear of failure--drags a normal person in the reasonable direction. 
     If I realize that I have forgotten about an important meeting, this comes as an almost electric shock, a fear response that may condition me not to forget again. I check my watch and may calculate that I still have time to get to the meeting. Or the meeting may have finished an hour ago, and all I can do is accept the fact and figure out whether I can make up for my absence. In any case, I should do whatever will be effective--hurry to the meeting, email my report with apologies, or accept that nothing can be done--and, having used but moderated my healthy fear response (not driving dangerously), let it go. Mundane twinges of fear collaborate with problem solving and become toxic only if they linger past their usefulness, or, even worse, if they hover over unlikely, imaginary futures.

So the challenge is to do what can be done, accept what can't be undone, and then let fear go--to acknowledge warning flares without letting them set the world on fire. This recalls my earlier examples of nuclear war and terrorism. Background states like these that we can't personally do anything about might as well be filed away and ignored. Like a missed meeting we can't make up, all we can do is dial down the toxic adrenaline and cortisol and carry on.

David Hume, no promoter of Christianity, acknowledges that "religious opinions" may be the basis of "joy and triumph" after times of fear, even though "when a man is in a cheerful disposition, he is fit for business, or company, or entertainment of any kind; then he naturally applies himself and thinks not of religion" (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part XII). Religion can be an antidote to fear. Many commands not to fear are scattered through the Bible. Isaiah's "Do not fear, for I am with you" (41:10) parallels John 6:20, where Jesus says, "It is I, be not afraid" (interesting because the Greek "it is I" can read as "I am," like Yahweh in Hebrew).

There is, however, another sense of fear prevalent in the Old Testament. Psalm 112 is one of many passages suggest that "fear" of God is a good thing: "Blessed are those who fear the Lord." This paradox suggests the loop in Christian theology that forgives sin on the condition of admitting sin--something like homeopathic medicine in which like is supposed to cure like. There's a process in both Testaments to (1) fear in the sense of feeling powerless before God (2) so that you surrender in trust to God and thus (3) no longer fear lesser powers that might otherwise overwhelm you. "The Lord is my light and my salvation--whom shall I fear? (Psalm 27:1) 

This sort of consolation, framed as submission to a king in the Abrahamic faiths, is similar to consolations in religions that don't personify the higher power, such as as Stoics who submit to Nature and Taoists to the Tao--to ultimately "good" overarching natural processes. "It is what it is," is a way of saying this.  Another: "Don't sweat the small stuff. It's all small stuff." It's not about not caring, but about not sweating. It's not about the absence of emotion, especially reasonable twinges of anxiety, but about avoiding terror. If we accept that our lives are ultimately out of our control, we're less likely to panic when we lose control. Don't scream and run in circles if you're in a burning building. Calmly look for an exit. Situational anxiety may be useful, but chronic stress and panic are bad. Don't live in fear. Chill. This may be easier said that done.

Eastern religions, of course, famously control fear with meditation, a process that has been scientifically shown to reduce stress and anxiety absent any form of theology. If you sit quietly in a meditation practice, including simply concentrating on your breath, this directly reduces stress and anxiety, lowering levels of adrenaline and cortisol with benefits ranging from lowering inflammation to controlling PTSD. Prayer in the Christian tradition blends into Hindu and Buddhist meditation--especially in rosary prayer, "centering" prayer, and hesychasm in the Eastern Orthodox Church. "Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) is a subset of a broader call of all religions: "Be still." The "opposite" of fear in this sense is not hope, but calm. Hope vs. fear projects an externalized contrast: facing an external threat, hope imagines a positive outcome, but calm as the opposite of fear does not depend on imagining such an outcome. Even facing the real prospect of something awful, it remains at peace. Calm does not need to lie to itself about material outcomes to mitigate toxic surges of hormones.

A concise memo to self:

If you can't do anything about it, don't be afraid. If you can, use appropriate adrenals to do what you can, then don't be afraid. Distinguish between these two. Still afraid? Breathe.