A South African beach near to where I grew up has a warning system to alert bathers of visiting Great White sharks. A few years ago an English tourist ignored the white flag and siren, went for a swim, and was eaten by the shark about which he had been warned.
I offended a couple of English colleagues in my English workplace by expressing the opinion that, “Only an Englishman would have done that.”
I consider myself to have a licence to criticise the English because of my English ancestry; my father is English, and my South African mother is descended from English soldiers and settlers who were involved in the Boer War.
When I claimed that the English were uniquely insensitive to fear I considered this to be based on personal history and experience. My great-great aunt Caroline took a train from Newcastle to Southampton, then a boat to Cape Town, and another train to Kimberly, where she lived out a Boer War siege running a bakery dressed in her English finest while being shelled by Long Tom cannons. She kept a diary of the experience, and the only distress she records is at how dirty the captured Boer soldiers were.
My own father was not a man unduly influenced by fear. South Africa in the 70s and 80s was an environment which presented many opportunities for fear to temper behaviour, but one I remember in particular is my father taking me for a drive in a game reserve, and meeting an elephant coming down the road in the opposite direction. We were in my dad’s 1988 white Mk1 Ford Sierra 3.0LX, which was a great car, but at that time had two niggling mechanical faults, it didn’t go into reverse that easily, and it started only intermittently. So not the best car in which to drive up under an African elephant’s trunk and switch off the engine, which is what my father did. We have great photos of the experience because I was demonstrating my own Englishness by hanging out of the window taking close-ups of the charging elephant while my father tried to get the car started.
I went on to have a youthful career in fearlessness, the highlights of which, to spare my mother, and so as to not inspire my sons, I will not describe, but here are two more moderate examples.
In my early 20s I got into the habit of wreck-diving on SCUBA. Wreck-diving is a very technical activity, with schedules, spare air bottles, guidelines, torches and buddies, but I liked to do it solo, and without a torch. I would go into a wreck 30m under the sea, and bump my way around until I got to a place that was so dark it felt my eyeballs no longer existed. Then I would try to find my way out again. The wrecks weren’t that big, so it wasn’t a labyrinth, but it was disorientating and on one occasion I became completely lost. I remember floating in a big chamber and thinking to myself, “I don’t know how to get out of here.”
Fear would not have helped at this point. But feeling of calmness came over me. The slower I breathed, the more time I had to find my way out, which I eventually did, with even enough air to do a decompression stop 5m below the surface, and nobody had to know what had happened.
I had a different experience a year or two later. I was driving with a friend in another game reserve, and we came upon a white rhinoceros facing away from us, sleeping in a dust bowl. There was a small bush between us and the rhino, and I had the idea of getting out of the car and using the cover of the bush to creep up on the rhino to see how close I could get (I hadn’t really planned past this stage). At some point of my stalk I made a noise, and in an instant the rhino woke, rose to its feet, and turned to face me. I had known how big rhinos were, and I had an academic knowledge of how fast they can run, but what I viscerally realised in that moment was how big and fast and agile and pointy rhinos are.
I was so instantly and completely consumed by fear that I was given my own magical speed and agility and in my memory it seems as if I just teleported from the bush back into the car.
Some more mundane fear/danger experiences were being afraid of foxes as a young boy (there are no foxes in South Africa), being afraid of not very big waves while surfing in Durban, and not being afraid of driving too fast (in my father’s Sierra).
That’s a personal history of being unafraid when I should have been (elephant/car/before rhino woke up), unafraid when I shouldn’t have been (shipwreck), afraid when I should have been (after rhino woke up), and afraid when I shouldn’t have been (fox).
Is being unafraid a particularly English trait? My English grandfather Malcolm was a Manchester butcher who had to sell his shop before being allowed to enlist for the Second World War, where he bravely fought as an NCO in the Royal Marines on the front lines across Europe and into Germany. He said, “I wasn’t going to let anyone else fight for my wife and children.” In the same war, my Italian wife’s grandfather Libero was sent to jail for refusing to fight. I knew the jokes about Italian tanks having five reverse gears and one forward gear, and the stories about Italian soldiers sneaking into POW camps at night. It used to trouble me to listen to Libero laugh as he told stories about running away.
But my Italian family seems more comfortable talking about fear. My mother-in-law loved to tell a story about her mother, Amalia, who emigrated to South Africa with Libero after the war. One day Amelia was in the garden when she saw a chameleon for the first time. She ran back into the house crying, “Libero, Libero! Take me back to Italy! I have seen the devil”
In my English mind, you never ran away, not from German tanks, African elephants, dark shipwrecks, or chameleons (forget for now the foxes, rhinos, and Isandlwana). And historically, the English have not done a lot of running. It’s so long since anyone successfully invaded this country that we are as descended from the victors as the losers, and so can count that loss as a win. We have never lost! We won two world wars and one World Cup, ruled a subcontinent for 400 years with a combined bureaucracy and army of never more than 40000 people, and from a small island, built an empire upon which the sun never set. Surely bravery is a key national characteristic and key to the success of the country?
English narratives are good at explaining two relationships with fear – not being afraid when we shouldn’t be afraid (i.e. not being afraid of foxes, ghosts, spiders and native armies without modern weapons), and not being incapacitated by fear when there is reason to be afraid, but when fear would serve no purpose (i.e. being lost inside a shipwreck, or during the Blitz or Battle of Britain). Being unafraid where there is no danger is English common sense, and being unafraid where there is danger is the English stiff upper lip.
Disregard for fear is supported by two philosophical perspectives. The first is the idea that the mind is split into rational and irrational sides, and that the route to truth is through rational thought, rather than irrational emotion. The simplistic conclusion is that if emotions are irrational they must be wrong; therefore, it is wrong to feel afraid. (The rational/irrational dichotomy is incorrect because obviously we can have irrational thoughts, and rational emotions).
The second dismissive perspective of fear comes from the philosophy of positive thinking, which broadly considers that emotions can be divided into positive emotions and negative emotions, and makes the logical leap that positive emotions therefore are correct and negative emotions are wrong. (This is incorrect because obviously we can be wrongly happy, and correctly sad or afraid). But in addition, positive thinking is in thrall to what Rhonda Byrne, author of the 2006 book The Secret calls ‘the law of attraction’, which is the idea that thoughts can change the world directly. This quasi-religious idea has a long history with Protestant roots, it is also referenced in The Power of Positive Thinking, a 1952 book by Vincent Norman Peale (who was also family pastor to the Trump family when Donald J was growing up). So fear is not only wrong because it is ‘negative’, it is also dangerous, because feeling fear makes what is feared more likely to materialise.
From this perspective, confidence itself (the opposite of fear) makes something more likely to happen, whether it is a negotiation, an economic outcome, or a sporting event. At an intuitive level, this is an appealing argument, because it does seem that when we feel confident something will happen, that it does happen more often, and when we are afraid something will happen, that happens more often also.
But the explanation that confidence often correlates with positive outcomes and fear often correlates with negative outcomes because confidence causes positive outcomes and fear causes negative outcomes is ignoring at least two other reasons for the correlation. The one is that the probable outcome causes the prior emotion, rather than the other way round. For example, I feel afraid it is going to rain on my picnic because I see clouds and feel wind. The rain caused the fear, the fear didn’t cause the rain. Or I felt cautious about an upcoming negotiation because I assessed my position to be a weak one. The weak position caused the caution, the caution didn’t cause the weak position.
The other reason for the correlation could be that in some circumstances, fear can inhibit performance. So in this sense there is a causal relationship between fear and outcome (for example when the England football team lose penalty shootouts), but this isn’t a direct relationship. The fear doesn’t directly cause the failure, it is mediated through psychophysiological responses and the efficacy of mental and physical management techniques, which makes the relationship more complex than what the positive thinking philosophy suggests. The solution is more difficult than just removing or suppressing the fear.
The English narrative isn’t good at describing the full range of the fear-danger relationship. Monty Python parody this limitation in a skit from The Meaning of Life where Perkins’ stoicism about just having his leg bitten off by something that came through his mosquito net is revealed to be his assumption that, “So … it will just grow back then will it?” rather than a genuine understanding and acceptance of what has just happened.
The bravery story is a compelling one. Key naval and military battles were won by English bravery and discipline in the line of fire. Sailors and soldiers were trained to ignore fear and systematically reload and fire cannon and rifles so as to deliver the ‘volley’, which was the best method of delivering mass projectiles in the 2nd half of the 18th century. For a time, Englishmen were better at this than anyone else. (This same discipline and bravery was less effective when marching into machine gun fire in WWI). More recently, we prefer to believe our ancestors resisted German invasion in 1940 because of bravery, and we prefer to believe we built an Empire on bravery.
But this story can also be simplistic and self-serving. How much of the failure of Germany’s Operation Sealion was due to English obduracy, and how much of it was just because there is a large body of water between England and France? How many colonial battles were won from bravery, and how many were won through outgunning the opposition? As my father pointed out, if my grandfather Malcolm had been fighting for the Italians he would probably have had to run away also. And what took more courage and resolve from grandfather Libero - to blindly follow orders with an officer’s pistol in his back, or to accept the consequences of leaving a war that he didn’t believe in to personally find and protect his displaced family?
A simplified danger/fear story reduces our ability to respond to complex risk scenarios where each risk exists on a point between two extremes of the dimensions false to real, and insignificant to large, and each quadrant may contain circumstances in which either fearful or fearless responses are optimal. So there are disadvantages. But there are also reasons to persist with the bravery story, despite its limitations.
We like to believe we are brave.
Most of the time modern life is so safe there isn’t much to be afraid of.
Even when modern life does become dangerous, often we can get away with incorrect danger/fear responses because other people tidy up for us; a scenario this concussed, bloodied English football hooligan benefits from as he continues to goad the Russian hooligans who beat him up, while being rescued by French police.
Apart from simplistic ideals of bravery, there are other reasons for the failure of fear; failures of experience, and failures of instinct.
When one of my sons was little he was running through a forest, and looked backwards while still running at full speed. When he looked forwards again he ran into a stick that gouged his cheek but could have poked his eye. A couple of weeks later he did the same thing, and got another poke in the cheek. After that, it didn’t happen again. His lack of experience had been cured; running through a forest without looking where you are going is dangerous.
As human beings, we are instinctively afraid of some things, like heights, drowning, and snakes. But we didn’t evolve to be afraid of other things, like speed and long-term or uncertain consequences, which is why more young men die from car crashes and (eventually) smoking than from snake bites and falling off cliffs.
Taken in combination these three reasons, narratives, experience and instincts, can explain why, for example, people don’t fear lung cancer, diabetes, or heart disease even though they should. Each risk is hidden beneath a simplistic story (smoking is cool, sugar is sweet, exercise is hard), few people have experienced lung cancer/diabetes/heart disease when they establish smoking/poor diet/sedentary lifestyles, and we are not instinctively afraid of cigarettes, sugar and sofas.
They can also explain why we do generally fear sharks, elephants and rhinos. There are many cultural stories about dangerous animals, predators and monsters. We may not have experienced a shark/elephant/rhinoceros attack, but it isn’t uncommon to have been chased or physically threatened, and we are certainly instinctively primed to be afraid of large animals.
Misalignment of narratives, experience and instincts was what caused the tourist to not fear the shark, my father to not fear the elephant, and my lack of fear of the sleeping rhino; in each case simplistic narratives of English bravery and invulnerability, and inexperience of wild animals overrode natural instincts. In my case, as the rhino woke, I rapidly gained a new experience, and I was fortunate that my transition from unafraid to afraid was quick enough to save my life. The English tourist/swimmer was not so lucky, unless the shark ate him in a single gulp (they normally don’t) he would also have felt fear, but for him it would have been too late.
Deciding whether to be afraid, and what to be afraid of, has become a key part of the Brexit debate. The label ‘Project Fear’ is used to argue that anxiety about the economic risks of Brexit is unwarranted. On the other side of the political spectrum, there is a belief that anxiety about the future, or about cultural and economic effects of immigration is unwarranted.
Because of military and imperial success, the English may have evolved a narrative which is more dismissive of fear than other cultures which have been forced by history to be more pragmatic. I will not express an opinion on whether we are too afraid or not afraid enough of Brexit or immigrants. But I will suggest that there are times when fear is an accurate guide to behaviour, and there are times when it is not. But because fear can be either an impediment, or valuable, it is always useful for it to be accurate.
Labeling an entire political perspective as 'Project Fear', or the fear on the other side of the political spectrum as ignorance, is a simplification that the English may be vulnerable to accepting. To overcome this risk, here are three questions to help decide if our gut fear or confidence is well founded or whether the situation warrants deeper inspection:
Am I being over-influenced by a simple story?
Have I experienced this situation before?
Is this a situation where my instinctive fears are an accurate guide?
If we do realise that our, or others' fears are more complex and significant than we give them credit for, it may help us to listen to and understand these perspectives. Believing that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself invalidates an emotion which can be accurate, rational, and an effective guide to our and others' behaviour.