The Politics of Furedi

INTERVIEW The Politics of Furedi RANK FUREDI is Professor of Sociology at All the Intellectuals Gone?, made an impassioned Fthe University of Kent, in Canterbury, England. case against the dumbing down of our culture He was born in Hungary in 1948, but his family and argued for a revitalisation of what he calls the emigrated to Canada following the 1956 uprising. public sphere. And in his latest offering, Politics He moved to Britain in the 1970s where he founded of Fear, he bemoans the spread of fatalism about the Revolutionary Communist Party and wrote for the future (he is particularly scathing about Green the magazine Living Marxism. His early academic fear-mongering) and the loss of political faith in writings focussed on issues of race, imperialism and humanity’s ability to progress. To challenge this Third World development. fatalism, he recently set up a ‘Manifesto Club’ in His politics (and his sociology) are today England to encourage young intellectuals of varying much harder to pigeonhole. He describes himself political persuasions to come together and rebuild a as a humanist, and his writings emphasise the common commitment to Enlightenment values. importance of acknowledging human capability. In Frank Furedi spoke at the CIS Consilium in books like Therapy Culture and Paranoid Parenting August 2005, and his essay on anti-religious hysteria he shows how we are increasingly encouraged to appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of Policy. When think of ourselves as vulnerable and to rely on he re-visited Australia in April, CIS’s Social Policy ‘experts’ rather than having the confidence to Director, Peter Saunders took the opportunity to organise our own lives. His 2004 book, Where Have interview him. POLICY • Vol. 22 No. 3 • Spring 2006 43 PPolicySpring_06.inddolicySpring_06.indd 4343 222/09/20062/09/2006 33:50:04:50:04 PMPM FRANK FUREDI Peter Saunders: You have written a number of books collapses, a few hundred workers may be killed, but if which on the face of it appear very eclectic in their a nuclear power station melts down, a whole country themes—therapy culture, parenting, the decline of can disappear. Does this help explain the fear and risk the intellectuals, the culture of fear. What is your basic aversion in modern culture? agenda? What is it that underpins all this writing? FF: But this is the appearance, not the reality. Take Frank Furedi: Well it developed in a haphazard way. I Chernobyl because it’s a very good example. They use it wasn’t really sure what it was but I knew I was struggling all the time, that and BSE, as defi ning paradigms. I don’t with the same thing all the time. It’s to do with this know if you saw it, but a few months ago a study came idea I developed in the most recent book [Politics of out on Chernobyl that ran to several volumes. In The Fear], which is about personhood. How we view what a Guardian it got four lines. But the news was really, really person is—the human attributes and cultural attributes good. The news was that fewer people died in Chernobyl that we give to people. I think my concern with fear than in a train crash in England. It showed that contrary is really a concern with the way we tend to represent to all the fears about congenital deformities, that didn’t people as weak and vulnerable and lacking in agency, happen. Sperm counts that were supposed to disappear lacking in the capacity to control their destiny. Not only didn’t fall. All this pollution they were worried about that, but we also stigmatise many of those attributes didn’t occur. The news was absolutely good. Basically it which are important for a resilient, robust individual. was an industrial accident. And yet to this day we think of Chernobyl as the defi ning moment of that period. PS: In what ways do we stigmatise resilience? They [Giddens and Beck] argue we live in an age of ‘manufactured risk’. But when push comes to shove, FF: These days human aspiration to realise the ideal it’s still Hurricane Katrina, it’s still the Asian tsunami, of individual autonomy is dismissed as a grotesque it’s still these kinds of things that are really testing us. myth. The attempt to exercise self control or indeed Of course things are now more interdependent, but individual control over one’s life is caricatured as a that interdependence is as much a source of potential disease of perfectionism. Statements like ‘I can take solutions as it is of disruption. So although it appears to it’ or ‘I can do it’ are stigmatised as the products of be the case we’re far more vulnerable, that’s the dominant an outdated macho culture. In contrast we are always paradigm, but in reality we’re potentially much more encouraged to ‘acknowledge our weaknesses,’ we are resilient in dealing with these things. incited to worry about stress and emotional pain. We are even too weak to work hard. Terms like ‘long-hours PS: So if the objective risks are no greater than in the culture’ and ‘work-life balance’ are used to underline past, why is it we are so much more fearful of them? just how much we suffer from work. FF: I think the reason is that in previous times, there were one or two fears that defi ned humanity, so in We are always encouraged to the nineteenth century it was fear of death, or fear of 'acknowledge our weaknesses', we poverty, and in the twentieth century it was fear of are incited to worry about stress and unemployment in the thirties, or fear of nuclear war in emotional pain. the fi fties. These were fears that bound communities together, we feared them together, more or less. But I think what has happened now is that we no longer have a common narrative of fear that defi nes any particular Fear and loathing fear community because fears have become so promiscuous PS: The concern with risk aversion is a key focus in and so detached from any dominant concerns. So it your work. You explicitly criticise people like Beck could be the avian fl u or childhood obesity or illness, it and Giddens who have been central to the sociological could be 101 different things. Our fears are much more discussion of risk, but isn’t there some truth in their fragmented and atomised than was the case before. And basic hypothesis that if something does go wrong in the these are the kinds of fears we suffer from, rather than the modern world, the potential scale of the catastrophe is kind we do something about. This is why we’ve allowed so much greater, which is why they say we are right to a much more free-fl oating fear to dominate us. be more cautious? It’s the argument that, if a coal mine 44 Vol. 22 No. 3 • Spring 2006 • POLICY PPolicySpring_06.inddolicySpring_06.indd 4444 222/09/20062/09/2006 33:50:05:50:05 PMPM FRANK FUREDI PS: Why has fear become so promiscuous? Is it just for a very long time. It’s only now when everything global communications making us much more aware else has lost meaning that we’re confronted with a of all the threats happening in the world? problem. People have talked about loss of religion and its meaning systems for a very long time. It’s only now FF: It relates to what I talk about in my last book, it’s got this particularly poignant consequence to it. the redefi nition of personhood. As we become much more preoccupied with our vulnerability, as we lose Engaging the public sphere agency, and reduce the meaning of humanity, and PS: Sociology has always had the question of human lower our potential, so the way we imagine we can agency at its core, hasn’t it? Do you see your work as handle risks and problems also alters. Instead of tapping into this key theme of western sociology over emphasising our coping capacity, we emphasise our the last 150 years—the concern with individual agency disabilities in dealing with these things, and that’s and meaning in the modern world? the key thing. Because of that, fear then acquires an autonomy that’s quite detached from any objective FF: I think it does, but this is precisely at a time when element. If you look at the mission statement of any sociology has become estranged from the idea of police force you’ll fi nd them talking about the fear agency. My work is an attempt, I suppose, to explore of crime being as important as crime itself. If you how human agency can still mean something in read their documents they say they spend 50% of contemporary times, and particularly I’m concerned their time fi ghting fear of crime and the rest of the with its loss. Not only its loss, but the fact that people time fi ghting real crime (in other words, reassuring aren’t particularly worried that it’s no longer there as a people). It’s the same with terrorism where we make dimension in their lives. the point that fear of terrorism is a much greater problem than terrorism. Or with medicine, where PS: Your message is very optimistic in that you insist fear of cancer and fear of chronic diseases is now a we actually have a lot of capacity to deal with problems medical speciality that has to be dealt with separately that we think we are powerless in the face of.

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