Nor is this fixation only a media trend, as film-makers, activists and, increasingly, politicians rush to adopt the language of catastrophe. The idea that the planet is on a downward spiral to ecological catastrophe and social meltdown is as attractive to Hollywood producers (The Day After Tomorrow) as it is to those encouraging direct action or fighting an election on green credentials (‘Ten years left to save the planet!’).

Apocalyptic conclusions

Perhaps there is some historic inevitability to this. An obsession with an approaching end, or at least a cataclysmic unravelling, arguably lies at the very roots of western ideas about history. Anticipating an apocalyptic conclusion to human history is partly inherited from Judaism and Christianity. But its influence extends far into secular ideas as well, and survives perhaps as the acceptance, fear and even desire that our days on this planet are numbered. Do we simply look to the sky, therefore, as much as our ancestors did, for signs of that eventuality?

The comparison is tempting but a little too simplistic. For one thing, our latest fears bear one disturbing difference. They appear to do little to bring about a sense of moral transformation or re- awakening. Commenting on a December 2007 MORI poll, the Observer noted that ‘although 70 per cent thought “the world will soon experience a major environmental crisis”, virtually nobody [interviewed] said they were prepared to do anything about it beyond trying to reuse plastic bags and recycle some rubbish’. In the US almost half the population is convinced that climate change is ‘very serious’, yet it remains several places lower than gay marriage on a list of national priorities. Some suggest that this sense of disconnection is due mostly to the magnitude of the problem. We seem to be incapable of connecting individual actions to problems that are planetary in scale.

These prophecies of doom are disseminated to us much in the manner of Guy Debord’s notion of the ‘society of the spectacle’. In other words, we consume the news of our approaching end as spectators. Watching and hearing repeated scenarios of disaster taps into our mesmerising love for
horror through what the Institute of Public Policy Research has dubbed ‘climate porn’. Indeed, there are important lessons to learn about the
‘mediatisation’ of disaster since the birth of the ‘war on terror’.

As Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, has argued, in both cases ‘the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society into a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory’. The looming of a ‘point of no return’ in global warming, little understood by the majority of people, can create fear as ambiguous and ubiquitous as ‘terror’. Without knowing what it is, its threat renders us powerless as individuals. Consequently we become ever more willing to defer power to those above us, through whatever form of political, technological or military control is on offer.

The language of catastrophe

But how, if we are to accept scientific consensus, can we avoid the language of catastrophe?

Some would argue that we have a duty not only to reveal the truth but to amplify its seriousness. We must let it speak above the daily clutter of trivia that passes for daily news. When the Network for Climate Action claims that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ unless people take radical direct action, the intention is not to frighten but to raise the stakes of the game. It is to make action perceived by many as ‘extreme’ not only normal but necessary.

Hulme’s response is that the reality of climate change is bad enough without sensational rhetoric clouding the issue. The problem is that public perception of climate change is a complex one, and it is far from clear which types of language are most heeded or understood. The very language of ‘tipping points’, for example, repeats references to a ‘two-degree warming threshold’ or so many ‘parts per million’ of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But beyond these abstract scientific concepts, more subjective factors need to be considered. What is a critical threshold and for whom? Is it only the loss of our own species that warrants radical change? And who decides when a tipping point is ‘policy relevant’?

Addressing these questions cannot be left to the physical sciences alone. ‘How do we understand the situation we are in?’ is fundamentally an ethical question, one about the foundations for action. It addresses not only the avoidance of catastrophe but the affirmation of the ‘good life’ under the shadow of catastrophe itself. And assessing exactly what that good life looks like is of course highly contested.

Is only a change in individual behaviour required, or do our commitments to social life also need to be challenged? Some clearly feel that recycling our rubbish and changing our light bulbs is sufficient. Others encourage mass direct action against the fossil fuel industry. In a climate predicted to displace millions from their homes and isolate entire regions and nations from natural resources, our received ethical notions of individual rights, nationhood and duties of ‘citizenship’ may well require radical re-evaluation if societies are to become truly sustainable.

Beyond climate despair

Once this ethical dimension is emphasised, reporting on ‘catastrophic’
climate scenarios ceases to be a compromise of the truth in the interests of protecting each other from climate despair. But it does mean moving beyond
the shallow moral formula of ‘X years to save the planet’. We must, to be sure, do all we can to alert ourselves to the seriousness of the present challenge. But we must also challenge our obsession with final, ‘once and for all’ points after which, if crossed, all will be lost.

As NASA scientist Gavin Schmitt has pointed out, neither a cavalier nor
a fatalist outlook is warranted from the evidence of tipping points. We are required to act, instead, in the knowledge of multiple tipping points of greater and lesser magnitude, from the level of the ‘smallest ecosystem’ (such as the extinction of certain species) to that of the entire planet (such as the irreversible melting of Arctic sea ice, triggering further negative effects). Threshold points demand our continual striving and vigilance. We must both mitigate the worst to come and adapt to those already upon us.

If the mediatised language of catastrophe is problematic it is because
it is ‘apocalyptic’ only in the Hollywood sense: it is devoid of ethical content. It says nothing of who we are and where we are going.

This is something of a paradox: ‘apocalypse’ is derived from the Greek word for revelation, or the unveiling of divine truth to mortal man. To many people apocalyptic literature (including biblical texts) represented the imaginative attempt to portray the corruption of the present in order to inspire radical social transformation. In contrast, populist catastrophism today represents a form of veiling, or clouding, of the ethical and political question of climate change.

Perhaps what is needed, therefore, is more, not less, of the imaginative apocalyptic. This would frame climate change as an unfolding story in which we continue to play a part. And it would mean affirming the permanent ethical task of responding to the most despairing of situations.

Stefan Skrimshire is postdoctoral research associate in religion and politics at the University of Manchester, and author of Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope (Continuum, 2008). He is currently organising a workshop series, \’Future Ethics: Climate Change, Political Action and the Future of the Human\’

The Spanish reaction to the Madrid attacks made a welcome contrast to the expressions of political disempowerment that have otherwise characterised the war on terror. And it has had a disarming effect on a war ‘coalition’ accustomed to the success of a politics of fear. At a time when exploitation of public fear and voter apathy is at an unprecedented high, this may be cause for hope. It should also, however, force us to consider carefully what forms of fear are being exploited on an everyday level, and how they might be resisted.

We are becoming familiar with government and media manipulation of public anxiety for political ends. Simultaneously talking up the inevitability of the next attack and condemning the ‘cowardice’ of backing out of war-on-terror campaigns leaves people without options. Ordinary people are caught in the crossfire of terror against terror, a battle that no one can win. As with Bali and Istanbul, since Madrid the war on terror’s apologists have rushed to assert their ultimate victory. ‘Security’ is to be guaranteed through a conflict that cannot be won, but which can be waged permanently so as to give the appearance that the powerful have the upper hand. The war on terror is rightly defined, even by US vice-president Dick Cheney, as a war with no end.

Unlike previous wars waged upon abstract nouns (those against drugs, crime and poverty, for example) the war on terror is unprecedented in its ability to guarantee the passivity of a frightened public, and so create a political vacuum where dissent might once have thrived. With echoes of the Cold War, the polarisation of political options – ‘support us or support terror’ – helps create social paralysis. Long-term analysis of underlying problems, such as questioning the global conditions that encourage terrorism, is drowned out in the cry for retribution and sidelined in the rush to show ‘resolve’ in the face of terrorists.

Awareness of this approach to creating ‘surface-level’ social hysteria was popularised by Michael Moore’s film on US gun culture Bowling for Columbine. A frightened population is an easier one to control, and its consent easier to manipulate. A wave of anti-terrorist legislation, leaked threats and unlawful detentions of terror suspects has followed what PR analysts have called the ‘hostility-intensification’ approach to fear psychology. In the US, George W Bush’s Patriot Act legislation has facilitated unprecedented suppression of political dissent with sweeping generalisations of what constitutes ‘domestic terrorism’, new provisions that target people simply for expressing unacceptable political views. In Britain anti-terrorist legislation rushed through after 11 September 2001 has already been used to obstruct peaceful demonstrations and detain suspects without trial, and it all but precludes any government intervention over the UK citizens detained in Camp X-Ray. The media, of course, are complicit in all this every time they whip up fear and suspicion of outsiders and dissenters. Even having been cleared as posing ‘no threat’ by home secretary David Blunkett, for example, the British detainees who have returned from Guantanamo Bay so far have been greeted by headlines such as The Sun’s ‘Enemy on our streets’.

This fear-propaganda has a precedent in the Committee on Public Information (CPI) established by US president Woodrow Wilson in 1917. The CPI adopted advertising techniques and research on human psychology to stir up anti-German hysteria in the US in order to justify America’s entry into WWI.

The mechanics of this approach were summed up succinctly by Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg trials, when he declared: ‘Nobody wants war& but it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship… That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.’ The use of Madrid’s tragedy to blame anti-war citizens and governments for encouraging the war on terror seems only to reaffirm the enduring popularity of these tactics.

So terrorising populations into submission is hardly a new thing. What is less appreciated, however, is the way in which fear transforms political participation itself – turning protest and dissent into, as Chomsky would say, a ‘crisis of democracy’ for the powerful. Superficially, it is true that fear of terror has not, as some predicted, signalled the death knell for urban living or stunted economic growth in potential target areas. And some commentators have linked the mass demonstrations in Madrid and the urban renewal of New York since 11 September to a refusal to ‘give up the city’. But does the refusal to stop living ‘normally’ or voicing protest really represent resolution in the face of terror, or is it a distraction from it? Perhaps the effects of fear run deeper than we imagine. What if living ‘normally’ incorporates a sense of permanent fearfulness? Emphasising the economic prosperity of terror-affected areas is an example of a trend that, ever since Bush, in a post-11 September speech announced that terrorists would not stop Americans from shopping, gauges public confidence by the health of the stock market rather than by popular political engagement.

An internalised sense of crisis, of imminent disaster, is thus allowed no expression but through the acts of consumption and spectating. When the consumption of images of terror absorbs our moral outrage and political response, we have gone beyond fear as producer of hysteria to fear as pacifier. The ambiguous and unspecified nature of ‘terrorism’, its ability to strike at any time and in any place, exploits this shift. It has allowed Bush and Blair to create what US writer Brian Massumi described in his book The Politics of Everyday Fear as ‘a permanent state of emergency against a multifarious threat as much in us as outside’. To say that a politics of fear is used to survey and control social space only scratches the surface. The popular appetite for political participation and dissent is being smothered by a sense that people are guilty if they don’t support the war on terror. The war is being used as a pretext for creating, in Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s words, a permanent ‘state of exception’ to democratic rights and civil liberties. People learn, in other words, to bless state repression (as Agamben puts it, ‘the indistinction between violence and the law’) as the only means for guaranteeing some semblance of order and peace. The real danger is that this kind of peace is really pacification and the silencing of dissent. The hysteria created by unseen terrorist threats obscures an almost subconscious acceptance of fear as a knowable and ‘safe’ guarantee of social normality.

Therefore, the war on terror, as a pacifier and not a peace-maker, needs to be resisted – not only for the protection of civil liberties and ethnic groups demonised as potential terror suspects, but also to defend political participation itself. This means more than denying terrorism the ability to disrupt everyday life. Indeed, it might frequently mean using acts of protest to disrupt everyday life wherever it becomes complacent about the culture of fear. It means seeking the causes of terrorism and questioning the very lifestyles and global disparities that motivate such violence in the first place. And we are already seeing examples of this every time people mobilise themselves in opposition to the military tactics of the war on terror and the polarisation of political options into ‘them’ against ‘us’, ‘good’ against ‘evil’ and ‘freedom’ versus ‘terror’.

Acts of resistance, such as the days of civil disobedience, the sabotage of military bases and the mass anti-war marches that shook cities in Britain and all over the world in reaction to the invasion of Iraq last year, have, therefore, an added importance in that they openly defy the politics of fear. We should feel encouraged by acts of protest all around the world in the face of governments’ increased warnings of terror attacks on cities, but these actions should not stand as isolated events. We should see them also as part of a growing transformation of ordinary people’s understanding of political participation in so-called liberal democracies. We should resist not just military invasions and state repression, but the normalisation of this permanent state of emergency, this culture of fatalist acceptance and fear of stepping out of line that we are experiencing with the tactics of the war on terror. Refusing a politics of fear is, after all, refusing to accept that politics is a spectator sport. It is to affirm dissent and protest as a condition, not a crisis, of democracy.Stefan Skrimshire is studying for a PhD on the politics of fear at Manchester University