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"Fear is the parent of cruelty," said James Anthony Froude, a 19th-century British historian. With politicians of all shades falling over themselves to deport, detain, expel and bar Syrian refugees from America, Froude is proven right.
There's nothing like an election campaign to engender fear in the strongest of hearts. There's a reason for that: most office-seekers panting for the attention of voters run on promises to go to war, to vaporize enemies foreign and domestic and to expose traitorous politicians on the other side.
The patron saint of the latter is the late Joe McCarthy, a one-time U.S. senator from Wisconsin in whose memory an era was named. The era and its bad behavior has come to life again, as if the Hon. Mr. Welch had not shut down McCarthy with these few terse words: "Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Civil fear of enemies under every bed did not die that day. That was 1954.
A decade or so earlier after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was pressed by his fearful security and military advisers to imprison Japanese-Americans, many of them long-time U.S. citizens and adult children of such citizens. One of them was the founding priest of the parish I later served for 22 years -- almost twice as long as he, though they loved him twice as much as they loved me. It would have been laughable had anyone ever confessed fear of such a dear man as Father Paul Hiyama.
America next had black people to fear because they sought equality and demanded respect for their dignity. Following them came women -- uppity women -- who wanted liberation from the burden of stereotypical roles in which they found themselves trapped. They even wanted reproductive rights.
Then came the Vietnamese whose desire to run their own show the military might of America for all its megatons of bombs could not beat down. Fear. It was all about fear. It was Lyndon John's fear that he would be called "soft on Communism" if he didn't keep on pulling the trigger.
In due course, out from its dank cave oozed the National Rifle Association with a campaign to arm us all to the teeth. The argument was that one never knew if the other guy had a gun, so you should have one, too. That did a lot for the gun manufacturers and their stockholders, but has left in its wake dead people in movie theaters, schools, churches, a Planned Parenthood clinic and now an ordinary public building in San Bernadino. The engine of it all is the F word: fear.
Today we are in the grip of a national spasm of fear -- fear of Islam, of Muslims of members of the LGBT community and generally of other people who are not like us, whom we would rather not see or with whom have much to do. Some of them are immigrants or would-be immigrants.
He whose name I will neither speak nor write wants to build a thousand-mile wall along the Mexican border, put the mark of Cain on every Muslim and otherwise drive the country into mass hysteria of the kind that Daniel Goldhagen* saw behind pogroms against European Jews from 1933 to 1945.
The white folk who showed up on this continent in the 17th and 18th centuries were also afraid. They feared the ones they mistakenly called "Indians," who just happened to have been long-time residents here. They were feared so much that they were eventually driven farther and farther west and left to rot in reservations. They buried their hearts at Wounded Knee.
The Native Americans that early immigrants encountered were a people who revered the land on which they lived, thought of nature's phenomena as deities and tried to move through their surroundings like a fish through water or a bird through the air, leaving no sign of their presence and no detritus behind. What was to fear about that?
Had it not been for the needless fear of Native Americans and the resultant cruelty heaped upon them, white European immigrants and their successors might have adopted the caring ecology of the ones they feared and demonized. And had that happened, perhaps the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have been avoided or at least mitigated. For one thing, we'd have a lot fewer casinos cluttering the landscape.
And let's be clear: The November 13 attacks in the City of Light were conducted to engender fear. It was not the invasion of a super power. It was a series of cowardly acts perpetrated by thugs driven by their own fear that the world had left them behind.
Most of the 298 people running for the Republican nomination for president are deliberately and cynically stoking fear that it could happen here. Maybe it could, but fear mongers are never good leaders, much less when they threaten reprisals against innocent refugees. And do they not know that such rhetoric has the effect of further alienating those who already feel alienated? Do they not get it?
Fear is our worst enemy. It comes to us from our animal ancestors on up the evolutionary path. Fear arises from deep down in our primal sub- or unconsciousness. Eventually our evolved brain processes the raw emotion into a narrative to explain the goose bumps, the increased heart rate, the perspiration and rapid breathing and, eventually anger and resentment.
The key is to manage the narrative so it does not turn into a vengeance tragedy of paranoid hatred that gives permission to strike out irrationally. The ancient Greeks turned such narratives into myths. We should give that a try.
*Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York, NY. Alfred P. Knopf. 1996
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