Videomitschnitte der Lunch Lecture Reihe "Fear"
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Introduction:
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less”, Marie Skłodowska Curie reportedly once said. Especially in these times, Europe seems to be more obsessed with fear than with understanding.
Fear belongs to a small set of basic, hardly controllable emotions, and is induced by real, perceived, or anticipated physical or emotional danger, especially a threat to body or life. More often, however, we fear situations that are far from life-or-death. Fear response (most notably fleeing, hiding, or freezing) has played an important part in evolution since appropriate behavioral responses to fear serve survival. There are rational and irrational fears, individual and collective fears. In post-WW II European societies, especially the societies of Western Europe, for example, fear predominantly became something very individual, and typically did not involve fear for one’s life or the lives of one’s family. But just in the course of the last two years fear seems to have been spreading fast in large parts of European societies – and not only there. Collective fears have become reality again.
What do different academic disciplines have to say on this issue? In 8 different Lunch Lectures, FRIAS Fellows from disciplines as diverse as economics, film studies, medieval studies, political theory, sociology, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy will reflect on the role of fear, its origins, consequences and meanings, in the present and in the past.
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"The economics of fear: applications from the literature on the economics of terror",4. Mai 2017 Prof. Dr. Günther Schulze (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Economics) Fear is not a concept typically used in economics. This talk seeks to conceptualize the term ‘Fear’ in the economic context. To this end, reactions of people to perceived terror threats are discussed: It is shown how individuals change their behaviour in the market place, in the political arena, notably in their voting behaviour, and in judging fellow citizens of a different group in response to perceived terror threats or actual terror attacks. |
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"Pleasure and Fear at the Movies", 18. Mai 2017 Prof. Dr. Barbara Mennel (University of Florida, Film Studies) According to the myth of the origin of cinema, when the Lumiѐre brothers showed their first film Arrival of a Train in Paris in 1896, audience members covered in fear of the oncoming train. How does film shock and thrill its audiences? How does it keep its spectators in suspense whether bad things will happen? Does the knowledge of cinema’s fictitious nature allow onlookers to find pleasure in fear? The talk takes the seeming paradox of pleasurable fear as its point of departure to discuss silent cinema’s aesthetics of shock and narrative cinema’s centrality of suspense. | |
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"Landscape of fear: A bridge across disciplines", 1. Juni 2017 Fear is a major driving force in evolution. Animals, however, rarely have perfect information on the occurrence of risks. But they need to maintain a certain level of fear to survive. The "Landscape of Fear" is a visual model. It tries to explain how fear could alter an animal’s use of an area as it tries to reduce its vulnerability. In this talk we introduce the ecological basics of the "Landscape of Fear" model, and attempt to extend it to the domain of politics. Much the same as animals, “political animals” employ fear as an adaptive contrivance. Nevertheless, their greater ability to gather information makes them more prone to fallacies, and, paradoxically, fallacies turn fear into a sinister rather than evolutionary force. | |
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"The final countdown: Mapping apocalyptic thought in the early Middle Ages", 22. Juni 2017 Prof. Dr. Immo Warntjes (Trinity College Dublin, History) Apocalyptic fear was, supposedly, an integral part of medieval society. Plagues, wars, celestial phenomena (solar eclipses, comets), or bad government were all considered portents of the coming of Judgment Day. But was this end of times fixed, could it be calculated? This talk focuses on a genre of texts that does just this, counting down to AD 800, believed to mark the end of the sixth millennium (and, incidentally, the year of Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor). As all of these texts can be geographically placed and dated precisely, this leads to the question of whether it is possible to map apocalyptic thought in the early Middle Ages. | |
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"Fear: The Hidden Driver of Modern Political Thinking", 6. Juli 2017 Prof. Dr. Martin Loughlin (London School of Economics, Law) The constitutional arrangements of modern governments derive less from the desire to realize the public good than from a fear of the human capacity for evil. This lecture examines the various ways in which political thinkers have managed to exploit this fear to establish a justification for their preferred constitutional form. This lecture will start with Thomas Hobbes’s brilliant device of exploiting our fears of what a lack of order foretells as a way of justifying the establishment of the office of the sovereign. It reveals how similar themes can be seen at work in the arguments of such scholars as Montesquieu, de Tocqueville and Arendt. It concludes with some reflections on how contemporary fears of terrorist threats are used to justify the extension of governments' emergency powers. | |
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"Governing fear: resilience as antidote to a catastrophic future", 20. Juli 2017 Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaufmann (University of Freiburg, Sociology) The driving force in the risk society, as Ulrich Beck has put it, is expressed by the statement “I’m afraid”. After 9/11 this diagnosis from 1986 is still gaining in persuasiveness. It is reflected in the tendency to address more and more areas of social life as security problems. On the surface, this is the effect of political mobilization through fear. Far more fundamental, however, seems to be a change in the epistemology and in the practices of institutionalised security management. These translate the fear of a potential catastrophe into policies under the guideline of resilience. |
