Panic Nation. Stanley Feldman
air pollution, Aldrin™, aflatoxin, arsenic, arsine, asbestos, asphalt fumes, atrazine, AZT, baby food, barbecued meat, benzene, benzidine, benzopyrene, beryllium, beta-carotene, betel nuts, birth control pills, bottled water, bracken, bread, breasts, bus stations, calcium channel blockers, cadmium, captan, carbon black, carbon tetrachloride, careers for women, casual sex, car fumes, celery, charred foods, chewing gum, Chinese food, Chinese herbal supplements, chips, chloramphenicol, chlordane, chlorinated camphene, chlorinated water, chlorodiphenyl, chloroform, cholesterol, low cholesterol, chromium, coal tar, coffee, coke ovens, crackers, creosote, cyclamates, dairy products, deodorants, depleted uranium, depression, dichloroacetylene, DDT, dieldrin, diesel exhaust, diet soda, dimethyl sulphate, dinitrotoluene, dioxin, dioxane, epichlorohydrine, ethnic beliefs, ethylene acrylate, ethylene dibromide, ethylene dichloride, Ex-Lax™, fat, fluoridation, flying, formaldehyde, free radicals, fruit, gasoline, genes, gingerbread, global warming, gluteraldehyde, granite, grilled meat, Gulf war, hair dyes, hamburgers, Heliobacter pylori, hepatitis B virus, hexachlorobutadiene, hexachlorethane, high bone mass, HPMA, HRT, hydrazine, hydrogen peroxide, incense, infertility, jewellery, Kepone™, kissing, lack of exercise, laxatives, lead, left handedness, Lindane™, Listerine™, low fibre diet, magnetic fields, malonaldehyde, mammograms, manganese, marijuana, methyl bromide, methylene chloride, menopause, microwave ovens, milk hormones, mixed spices, mobile phones, MTBE, nickel, night lighting, night shifts, nitrates, not breast feeding, not having a twin, nuclear power plants, NutraSweet™, obesity, oestrogen, olestra, olive oil, orange juice, oxygenated gasoline, oyster sauce, ozone, ozone depletion, passive smoking, PCBs, peanuts, pesticides, pet birds, plastic IV bags, polio vaccine, potato crisps (chips), power lines, proteins, Prozac™, PVC, radio masts, radon, railway sleepers, red meat, Roundup™, saccharin, salt, selenium, semiconductor plants, shellfish, sick buildings, soy sauce, stress, strontium, styrene, sulphuric acid, sun beds, sunlight, sunscreen, talc, tetrachloroethylene, testosterone, tight bras, toast, toasters, tobacco, tooth fillings, toothpaste (with fluoride or bleach), train stations, trichloroethylene, under-arm shaving, unvented stoves, uranium, vegetables, vinyl bromide, vinyl chloride, vinyl fluoride, vinyl toys, vitamins, vitreous fibres, wallpaper, weedkiller (2-4 D), welding fumes, well water, weight gain, winter, wood dust, work, X-rays.
Or perhaps, to put it more succinctly, being alive can give you cancer.
Not so long ago, few would even have been aware of the existence of many of these issues, never mind worrying about them. Yet somehow our forebears seemed to survive perfectly well in blissful ignorance, their lifespan lengthening from generation to generation, despite often pursuing lifestyles and diets that would now be considered dangerously irresponsible.
So let us stand back from those headlines for a moment and ask ourselves, how could it be that many people now apparently feel threatened by so wide a range of new health risks? How could it be that so many different dangers suddenly appear to be menacing our society at the same time – and, moreover, at a time when as a society we are in such a state of rude public health?
It seems clear that this divergence between the facts of our longer, healthier lives and the perception of such varied and rising risks to our health cannot be explained by the specifics of any particular issue. It is not the details of our salt intake or of our cholesterol levels that make so many people open to these sorts of health concerns today. Rather, there must be some broader, overarching trends at work in our culture and society that can lend new weight to the fear of previously unimagined risks.
In order to grasp what is going on here, we must first come to terms with the broader spirit of the age.
For a start, we are faced today with a powerful cultural aversion to risk. Health risks that might have once have been brushed off as acceptable or negligible are now elevated into important issues of public concern. Thus ‘passive smoking’ – the inhalation of the smoke from other people’s tobacco – has recently become the subject of a major health crusade across the West, despite the questionable evidence of the real effect of environmental tobacco smoke on public health, and the fact that fewer people now die of smoking-related diseases than in the past. In a climate where there no longer seems to be such a thing as an acceptable level of risk, many other minor health risks can be used to spark major overnight controversies.
Where health risks are concerned, it seems the orthodoxy now is always to assume the worst-case scenario to be the most likely one, however far-fetched. Humanity has always faced risks, and there has always been a debate about how to manage them. Today, however, unlike in the past, risk is seen not as something we can handle or perhaps even turn into opportunity, but as something that we suffer from and must be guarded against.
The assumption that we cannot cope with risk and uncertainty reached a new level when the British Medical Journal came out with the argument that the word accident should henceforth be banned, since such incidents were really avoidable if we took the proper precautions. Not only, it seems, is there no longer any such thing as a manageable risk, but it is apparently no longer acceptable to suggest that accidents will happen.
Underpinning this heightened desperation to avoid or limit risk is another powerful theme of contemporary culture: the notion of human vulnerability. Once the widespread assumption might have been (based on some sound historical evidence) that humanity could survive more or less whatever was thrown at it, that the resilience that had taken us from the caves to something approaching civilisation was pretty well indomitable. Today, the opposite tends to be assumed.
The default setting for the human condition is now widely seen as being a state of vulnerability and victimhood. The autonomous individual who stands on his or her own two feet appears to be an endangered species. Instead the assumption is that we are pretty pathetic specimens who must need professional intervention and advice to protect us from the problems of everyday life. We are a society on the couch, under the supervision of the therapeutic state.
The overwhelming fear of risk and the sense of humans as near-powerless victims of life have not only stoked irrational health panics but have helped to create an unhealthy attitude to health and illness in our society.
First, it means that there is a tendency to medicalise many of our problems, to redefine personal issues and characteristics as medical afflictions requiring professional intervention. Thus, everything from childish mischief making to shyness can now be labelled as a syndrome or a disorder, and drugs or treatment prescribed. This process of medicalisation has the effect both of relieving people of responsibility for their lives (how can those suffering medical conditions be blamed for the symptoms?), and of making them even more obsessive about health issues.
Second, as Dr Michael Fitzpatrick – GP and author of The Tyranny of Health – has argued, these trends have created a climate in which it is now deemed perfectly normal for us to be ill rather than well, and where health has been turned from something we took for granted into the goal of life for which we must self-consciously strive:
In the recent past, health was regarded as the normal state of affairs and illness was considered an exceptional departure from normality, a transient state through which the patient passed… At the same time, illness has lost much of its stigma and even confers a series of socially approved identities – ‘person with HIV/AIDS’, ‘cancer survivor’, ‘sufferer from stress’, ‘victim of bullying’ – confirmed by patient organisations, celebrity sponsorship, soap opera story lines, autobiographical accounts and other forms of media coverage.3
Who is responsible for bringing about this unhealthy state of affairs? It is common to blame outbreaks of irrationality and health panics on stupid members of the public, now sometimes known as ‘the worried well’, who are whipped up into a moblike frenzy by ‘the meejah’. The media certainly play a key role in setting the public mood. But it is important not to underestimate the extent to which these problems emanate from the top of society downwards – starting with the government and the political class. They have done more than anybody to worry the well.
Since the panic about a SARS epidemic gripped the world in 2003, the New Labour government’s policy towards issues such as bioterrorism or SARS in the UK has been based on the principle of ‘organised paranoia’. That memorable but little-known phrase was coined at the time by Geoff Mulgan,