Adrian Currie Filósofo da Ciência, University of Exeter
I
want to say three things. I want to start by saying a few things about fear generally, and then I want to talk about what is often called culture of fear, and I’m going to be moving into the discussion of existential risk in light of those things. So, when people think about fear, it is often thought of in a very negative way, fear is something that should be overcome. I think that’s a mistake. Say I walk close to a cliff edge, it seems that I justifiably may be afraid that I’m too close and that I might fall off. I identify a vulnerability I in fact have. And if that fear is a good fear it seems that it motivates me to mitigate that risk so I step away from the cliff edge. So we can see that fear is not just an irrational thing, it is something we can make judgments about. Good fear is fear, when I’ve in fact identified a way in which I’m vulnerable and the entire action motivates me to make myself less vulnerable. From this idea of good fear, we can think about what bad fear looks like. Negative fear is going to involve either being wrong about the ways in which one is vulnerable, or not motivating, or inhibiting a reaction or the right type of action. I might be so afraid that I don’t know what to do, or I might do the wrong actions in light of my fear. When people think about cultures of fear we often have rather extreme ideas in our minds, things like Stalin’s Gulags, but I think it’s worth thinking hard about the ways in which
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Conferência de Lisboa – 4 _ 2020 Lisbon Conference – 4
Philosopher of Science, University of Exeter
the current societies have elements of those sorts of cultures about them. The culture of something is a culture that promotes or lays the groundwork for the thing that we are talking about, so when people speak about rape culture, they don’t mean that everyone in that culture is a rapist, what they mean is that there are a series of institutions, social structures and behaviors that make that negative thing more likely, they provide excuses for and so on and so forth. So, when we talk about a culture of fear, what we mean is a section of institutions, social structures and behaviors that encourage us to feel afraid. Frank Furedi who is writing about the culture of fear says: - “fear is fast becoming a caricature of itself, it is no longer simply some emotion or response to the perception of a threat, but is becoming a cultural idiom through which we signal a sense of growing and ease a better place in the world”. Furedi talks about this, he is obviously giving a negative cast to it, but I think that we might in fact sometimes be right to feel vulnerable, to feel worried about our place in the world. What would make this culture negative would be to be wrong about the vulnerabilities, or not being able to act. What kinds of social structures lead to a negative culture of fear? 1. First, if one is going to act, if one is going to be motivated to act, one has to in fact have the capacity to make a difference, or at least believe that it does. The more
A ACELERAÇÃO DAS MUDANÇAS GLOBAIS THE ACCELERATION OF GLOBAL CHANGE
