Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. It is certainly true that pure fear doesn’t feel good, but that is the whole point of the emotion. Fear tells us to get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge is a bad place. Fear evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger. So, yes, a feel-bad emotion, but also, and perhaps paradoxically, the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors—which inspire what we can call recreational fear.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From a very early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers in the form of peek-a-boo, and being hurtled into the air (and caught). They get older and take great pleasure in chase play and hide-and-seek. They are drawn to scary stories about monsters and witches and ghosts. They perform daredevil tricks on playgrounds and race their bikes toward what, from a parent’s perspective, is certain and violent death. A little older and they get together for horror movie nights, stand patiently in line for roller coasters, and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear—even if we eschew slasher flicks or dark crime shows brimming with murder, death, and gore.

So even though Dodge may be a bad place, we still keep visiting it, at least from the safe distance of play and make-believe. How come?

One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we play, we learn important things about the physical and social world, and about our own inner world. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we play with fear, challenge our limits, and learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.

To investigate whether that is indeed the case and why, my colleagues and I have established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark. We do lab studies, survey studies, and real-world empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.

The Recreational Fear Lab conducts investigations to understand the scientifically understudied phenomenon of fear—and why it might actually be good for us. Courtesy of author.

In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we set out to investigate the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house—Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors, and distributed a bunch of questionnaires. The surveillance footage allowed us to see how guests responded to frightening events, such as a chainsaw-wielding pig-man chasing them down a dark corridor. The heart rate monitors told us about their physiological responses to such events, and the questionnaires allowed us to understand how they felt about it all.

They told us they perceived their experiences as a kind of play, supporting our notion of recreational horror as a medium for playing with fear. But we also wanted to go deeper into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that relationship is linear—the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (which is boring), and they don’t want too much fear (which is unpleasant). What they want is to hit what we call the “sweet spot of fear.” That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions either. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal; when you pick a horror movie on Netflix, you try to go for the one that sits just at the right point on the scare-o-meter.

So, there is pleasure to be had from these vicarious visits to Dodge, but are there any other benefits? In several past and ongoing studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, we’ve seen it improve people’s ability to cope with stress and anxiety. For instance, one study—led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner—found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear from playing with it. We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.

You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing, or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us. My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia—emotional flatlining—momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.

With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll end up in Dodge sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.

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Because animals face predatory risks that can’t be fully eliminated, it’s essential that they learn to live with fear, and develop strategies to respond correctly. Overcompensate, you miss out on resources and may starve. Undercompensate, a predator abruptly ends your life. For instance, the animals I study—marmots—flee to the safety of their burrows when a coyote is around. But how long should they remain hidden away, unable to find food? Life is about managing tradeoffs. So when does, and how should, fear motivate change?

In humans, fear motivates change best when the threat is simple to understand, actions have a direct impact on the outcome, and the potential outcome is viscerally repulsive; disgust is a powerful motivator. Consider public health officials’ campaigns against methamphetamine abuse in the early 2000s. Because meth is so highly addictive, informational campaigns had limited success. Enter Tom Siebel, a software millionaire on a mission with a brilliant idea: Instead of peppering users with statistics, show them pictures of “meth-mouth,” the severe dental decay associated with meth abuse. Starting in 2005, Siebel paid for highway billboards in Montana that showed close-ups of a woman’s face with rotten teeth with text that read: “YOU’LL NEVER WORRY ABOUT LIPSTICK ON YOUR TEETH AGAIN.” He continued his fear- and disgust-driven campaign with a series of short television and internet commercials that showed unsuspecting users their horrible futures. The campaign worked. High school meth use went down 45 percent in two years, compared to an average of just 7.8 percent annually previously.

Fear most successfully leads to immediate responses. It doesn’t work as an agent of change over longer periods, because animals habituate—they stop responding to non-threatening stimuli over time. Indeed, designing habituation-proof stimuli to scare away “problem animals” and reduce human-wildlife conflict is a compelling challenge. The plastic owl above the outdoor urban park dining area works at deterring pigeon traffic for a just few days before the birds realize it’s harmless and start appreciating its utility as an object that helps protect them from the wind. People tend to tune out, too. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security began estimating terrorism threat levels and communicating them to the American public. The color-coded system reported elevated red or orange levels of risk over an extended period of months. An analysis I did showed that the unchanging high threat levels produced the opposite of the desired response—people stopped seeking out information on how to prepare for terrorist threats. Americans habituated to the government’s warnings. We’re experiencing habituation to warnings about coronavirus threats now.

There are other costs to maintaining a fearful state for too long. For snowshoe hares, the mere exposure to predators, or predatory cues, can increase production of stress hormones and shift individuals into “survival” mode, directing energy away from growth and reproduction and toward defense. Snowshoe hare populations increase and decrease over time, driven by the population of their main predator, the lynx. As lynx populations increase, hare populations decrease until there are not enough hares to feed the lynx, resulting in a dramatic crash of the lynx population and a rebound for the hares. Researchers have found that hares have higher stress hormone levels at the peak of the lynx population cycle. In another study, the mere proximity of a dog walking by an enclosure containing pregnant female hares resulted in higher stress hormone levels in the dams and their offspring. Importantly, stressed dams produced fewer offspring. In a follow-up study, researchers found that the effects of stress hormones on reproductive success persisted through generations: The offspring of stressed mothers themselves were relatively more stressed and had fewer babies.

Complex problems are, in part, so defined because causality isn’t obvious. Solving complex problems requires something more than the simple, direct, fear-based motivators we see in the animal world. This is certainly true of the pandemic. As we learn more about it, we may think we are better able to manage the risks we’re exposed to. To some extent we are. The risk of transmission and infection is reduced by wearing masks, physically distancing, and minimizing time spent in closed spaces with others. However, none of these actions totally eliminates the risk of getting infected—which makes giving up on any one of them very tempting.

When passive restraint systems like airbags in cars were first introduced, some people stopped putting on their seat belts because they assumed that they would be safe. In reality, it takes both tools together to increase your odds of surviving a bad accident by keeping you in the car, where you typically are safer. Studies of taxi drivers showed that they drove faster on wet surfaces when antilock brakes were first introduced because they could do so and still arrive reasonably safely, shaving precious driving minutes off each ride. However, driving faster on wet streets, even with anti-lock brake technology, is never a great idea: There was no net reduction in car accidents.

Marmots vary in how fast they can run away from threats. It turns out that marmots who are slower than average spend relatively less time looking around when they are foraging. By doing so they reduce the time they are away from the safety of their burrows, thus compensating for risk. But another way to view this variation is that animals who are better able to escape spend more time looking around while foraging and thus increase their exposure to risk. Perhaps marmots, like taxi drivers, accept a certain level of risk when the possibility of reward beckons.

At a very immediate level, our sadness at losing the chance to scare one another this Halloween could reflect our belief that we are in control of our risk of infection. And this has important insights for our response to a global pandemic. Responding to the pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. It will require constant vigilance and behavioral changes for more than the foreseeable future. As new drugs and vaccines are introduced, we should be extra vigilant of our perceived safety. Risks are cumulative, and the more you accept, the greater the likelihood that they will eventually catch up to you. Tragically, this was a message illustrated by the recent outbreak in the White House, and at a macro level, by the recent spikes we are seeing worldwide. Protective measures that increase our perceptions of safety (in the White House’s case, rapid testing and everywhere else, the success of social distancing in the summer months) encourage us to take more risks and are thus, counterintuitively, risky.

Some people view the warnings about coronavirus as the boy who cried wolf. After all, they themselves have not gotten sick, and most people who get COVID-19 don’t die. But this is the wrong way to interpret what we see around us. We all have different risks based on what we do, various pre-existing conditions, and our age. According to the CDC, if infected, I am at least four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than most of the undergraduates I teach. We know many people experience longer-lasting negative health effects from the virus. I also know that it’s not just my health at stake but also the health of others who may have even higher mortality risks. Taken together, this leads me to think that all of us—my students and myself included—are morally obligated to continue to take the coronavirus threat seriously.

Halloween illustrates the joy associated with celebrating our fears by allowing us to express one of our most primordial emotions. When we do so, we should embrace our fears and remember that we are descended from a long line of successful ancestors, dating back millions of years, who got their risk assessments right. They neither over-reacted, nor under-reacted to environmental threats; they figured out how to successfully live with them. I suggest that this Halloween we commit to making multimedia costumes that can scare, via Zoom, from afar. Meanwhile, let’s look forward to a time, hopefully not too far in the future, where we are surrounded, in person, with scary costumes, boos, and screams of both fear and joy.

The post Is It Possible to Be Just Terrified Enough This COVID Halloween? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

The garden has staged memorable spring performances before, though always to small audiences. We live four miles south of the State Capitol, well off the beaten path, on an eyebrow street just six houses long, connecting nothing to nowhere. Our hilly neighborhood of ranch houses was built without sidewalks in the early 1950s, when California planners were certain that walking was obsolete.

Weeks ago, back in normal times, only a few familiar souls would wander by. The dog walkers from the next block over. The slight blond teen walking bent, like a peasant woman carrying a bundle of firewood, under a backpack full of textbooks. The mother going to and from the nearby elementary school to retrieve her kids.

I haven’t seen the mother or the teenager since a substitute teacher at the elementary school died of COVID-19 and the schools shut down. But 13 days into the lockdown, as I sit in the garden to read on a sunny afternoon, what was once a trickle of walkers and bicyclists has broadened into a steady stream of people with nowhere else to go.

Many of the faces are new, and they arrive in family groups. The children are frisky and boisterous; the parents who trail them look like they’ve missed their naps. Some couples push baby strollers. Other couples push themselves, striding by fiercely to get the exercise they no longer get at the gym. In a role reversal, there are middle-aged children walking their elderly parents. The daughters tend to walk six feet to the side of the parent, letting them set the pace. The sons tend to lead, getting far out front, then pausing to let the parent shuffle within the prescribed distance before taking off again.

There are lone walkers, too, talking loudly to their white headphones. One woman gestures with her hands, as if to make the decisive point in what may be a conference call in motion. In a few instances the person ambling up the street is someone we haven’t seen since a school committee meeting or a dinner party sometime in Bill Clinton’s first term.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

Often people stop to admire the garden. We talk across the wide bed of Jupiter’s Beard, and I answer the horticultural questions if my wife is busy. The one with the tangerine flowers is mallow, I say, and behind it is the lupine, another native.

The irony here is that, for me, the social distancing that now fills our street is a social flowering. Coronavirus isn’t my first epidemic. In 1954, I was one of the 38,476 Americans paralyzed by polio. Sixty-six years later, in a wheelchair and no longer driving, I don’t get around much anymore. That’s especially true during flu season, when I try to stay away from the contagion. My “weak breathing muscles,” as my brother-in-law, the anesthesiologist, puts it, make me a good candidate to become a statistic again. Before the coronavirus arrived, I was fully trained for the loneliness Olympics, and in these recent early heats I haven’t yet had to break a sweat.

Until three months ago, I thought my 1954 epidemic experience had prepared me for the fear too.

Courtesy of Mark Paul.

I have only a few memories of those early days: Waking feverishly on the night the poliovirus took hold and then collapsing on the pink tile floor after my father carried me to the bathroom. Lying the next day on a hard table, under bright lights, in a mint-green operating room, to get the spinal tap that would confirm my illness. Being taken to an isolation room where everyone around me was shrouded in gowns and masks; even my parents were allowed no closer than the doorway. I don’t remember being scared. But I don’t doubt that it was fear that etched those memories into my consciousness.

The boy soon put the fear behind him. Today, the man he became isn’t as successful. The fear comes and goes in waves throughout the day. It follows me to bed in the evening, and it greets me in the morning when I open my eyes.

I am not alone in this.

“Did you sleep well?” I ask my wife.

“Yes,” she says, “but I had a dream about the grim reaper coming to the door to sell Girl Scout cookies.”

I do not fear for us. We have been physically distanced from the rest of the world for a month now. The virus is unlikely to breach our garden moat, not even in the guise of a Thin Mint, but I cannot hold out the images and news of the world around us.

I try to keep things in perspective.

You know from your reading, I tell myself soothingly, that folly and cupidity have marked every epidemic. Mom and dad went through the polio epidemics without losing their poise.

You’re right, I reply to myself. But would they have felt the same if people in their time were holding “polio parties”? And my parents probably took some comfort in having a president who was competent enough to organize and execute an invasion to destroy Nazi Germany.

Close the computer, I tell myself. Go to the garden. You’ll find calm and escape there.

So I pick up a book, roll through the front door and down the ramp. It’s warm and the air is thick with the mingled scents of the blossoms. I hear the footsteps of a jogger coming up the street. I look up and see her head emerge above the borage in the planter. She is wearing a mask. It’s the first I’ve seen.

I look over at the Greek poppies. I had it wrong. They aren’t fluttering, they’re trembling. And inside the incandescent red bowls blazing in the sun, there is a shadow.

The post A Letter From Sacramento, Where Fear Grows as Flowers Bloom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As of mid-March, “patient zero” for COVID-19 still had not been found, and who or what infected that person remains a mystery. There is even uncertainty about whether the viral jump from an unknown intermediate host to humans occurred in the location initially identified: an animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China. Despite these uncertainties and with no small assistance from scientists, the media has sensationalized the risks, settling on bats as the likely culprit and thus making them targets in a viral witch hunt.

Around the world, bats are feeling the effects of this misinformation. My Malaysian colleague Sheema Abdul Aziz has spent years documenting the key role of flying fox bats as essential pollinators of Southeast Asia’s multi-billion-dollar-a-year durian crop. Growers were planning to join her in a public education campaign explaining the value of bats, but now they fear a public backlash and are reluctant to support her efforts. A local resort has expressed fear of loss of sales due to a nearby flying fox colony. Fearing her research will trigger a new disease outbreak, private citizens have even asked the government to stop her from handling bats and to support eradication—a response already reported in neighboring Indonesia. My colleagues in China are also deeply concerned about the demonization of bats and calls for their eradication.

Even in my home city of Austin, Texas, where we have safely enjoyed sharing a downtown bridge with 1.5 million bats for decades, growing numbers of people are asking about disease risks. Despite warnings from poorly informed health officials that our bats were rabid and dangerous, they’ve yet to transmit a single case of disease. They simply attract millions of tourist dollars each summer and control tons of crop pests each night. Texas bats are worth more than a billion dollars annually. Now bat-lovers are experiencing a backlash against putting up bat houses because neighbors say they fear that attracting bats will bring disease.

But simply telling people that bats are valuable and shouldn’t be killed can’t counter panic. I have personally investigated instances where fearful humans burned, poisoned, or sealed caves, killing millions of bats at a time. Based on my experience, I have concluded that there is no greater threat than the intolerance and eradication that results from misguided fear.

Exaggerated warnings of bat disease risks aren’t just misguided. They threaten the health of entire ecosystems and economies. Researchers in Indonesia conservatively estimate that bats save cacao growers more than $700 million annually in avoided insect damage. In Mexico, tequila and mescal production worth billions annually relies on bats that pollinate agaves. From Southeast Asia to the Mediterranean, bats provide key pest control for rice growers. In South Africa, macadamia growers benefit from bat control of stink bugs.

Despite a long tradition of being misunderstood and feared, perhaps it’s because of their nocturnal habits and erratic flight that bats have an outstanding record of living safely with humans. Millions living in backyard bat houses, city parks, and bridges have proven to be safe neighbors. I have never been attacked and am still healthy after more than 60 years studying and handling hundreds of species worldwide, sometimes surrounded by millions in caves. Because, like veterinarians, I am occasionally bitten by unfamiliar animals I handle, I’m vaccinated against rabies.

For anyone who simply avoids handling bats, the odds of contracting any disease from one is incalculably small. All diseases attributed to bats are easily avoided, even when bats live in one’s yard.

However, these facts typically go unreported, while risks are often magnified. The March 11 issue of Scientific American provides an excellent example. Its COVID-19 article subhead reads, “Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there.” The use of “deadly” is unjustified speculation.

The article also claims that the Wuhan outbreak is the sixth outbreak caused by bats in the past 26 years. In fact, the first four listed (SARS, MERS, Hendra, Ebola) appear to have been transmitted to people by animals other than bats—yet bats still receive primary blame. The fifth, the Nipah virus, which likely is spread to people from flying fox bats, is easily prevented by simply covering collection containers or pasteurizing contaminated palm juice.

Two possible scenarios have been hypothesized for the COVID-19 outbreak. The first is that a new coronavirus entered an intermediate host animal, such as a pangolin, where it evolved over an undetermined period to gradually become a threat to people. Alternatively, the new coronavirus could have been harmless when it first entered humans, but over time evolved to become virulent. Such scenarios would be difficult to predict, and a publication currently under review even points to mice and domestic pigs as possible sources.

So why has the media almost universally blamed bats? In part, because scientists have disproportionately focused on sampling them.

Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates.

Easily blamed due to their lack of popularity, bats are also the easiest mammals to quickly sample in large numbers. This led to rapid publication of the results, and sensational speculations were deemed more acceptable when focused on already-feared animals.

Not surprisingly, more viruses have been found in bats than in less-surveyed species, so biased speculation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t yet know if bats have more viruses than other animals because we haven’t similarly sampled others. And even if bats do have more, the number of viruses isn’t necessarily indicative of transmission risk. Many viruses are innocuous or possibly even beneficial.

Some virologists have capitalized on the fear of pandemics to promote funding for viral surveys in nature as a possible means of preventing or mitigating these scary events. They convinced the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to budget $4.8 billion in 2019 for surveys searching for potentially high-risk viruses. Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, longtime surveying proponents now argue that the best way forward is to prevent future outbreaks by beginning with surveys to find and catalog wildlife viruses globally, focusing particularly on high-risk groups such as bats.

However, many leading experts strongly disagree. They argue that such surveys would be extremely costly and have little practical value. Viral-caused outbreaks are exceedingly rare, and their emergence is unpredictable. The evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes and associates note that even if all current viruses could be cataloged, new variants of RNA viruses are constantly evolving. They bluntly warn of arrogance and loss of credibility resulting from promises that viral surveys could prevent or even mitigate pandemics.

To understand why surveying will fail as a strategy, consider the examples of MERS, West Nile, and Zika viruses. MERS jumped to humans from a seemingly unlikely source—camels—in Saudi Arabia, previously believed to be an extremely improbable location for such an incident. Robert Tesh, an expert on emerging viruses, has pointed out that neither West Nile nor Zika viruses are new. They simply spilled over when transported to new areas in incidents that couldn’t have been predicted.

A growing number of leading epidemiologists agree that it isn’t possible to predict the animal origin of the next viral outbreak. Unfortunately, their warnings are seldom covered by public media. When they are, they tend to be de-emphasized.

Finding the true source and means of infection for patient zero in the current outbreak seems far more important than condemning bats or spending billions on searches for potential pathogens. Such public health funds would be much better directed toward improved early detection in humans.

But we humans must also address our own culpability. Caging and slaughtering a wide variety of animals in markets virtually guarantees the spread of viral infections. Blaming already unpopular bats only increases already severe threats to their survival, despite scientific certainty about the enormous benefits they provide to both the environment and societies. Care about bats or not, we should see COVID-19 as a grim reminder that human well-being requires responsible stewardship of nature—not just dominance.

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These difficult questions are at the heart of our fear of diseases. The story of leprosy—and about other, newer maladies—helps explain how fears spread and endure, especially within Judeo-Christian cultures.

The Book of Leviticus is a good starting point. Chapter 14 returns obsessively to the problem of distinguishing leprosy from less serious skin afflictions. How is the priest to know if a spot, blemish or sore is “clean” or “unclean”? If the bright spots are “darkish white,” Leviticus advises, it’s merely “a freckled spot” and the person is “clean.” But “if the rising of the sore be white reddish” the person is leprous or “unclean” and must be isolated (“without the camp shall his habitation be”).

Of course, the trouble with such diagnoses is that each identifying symptom prompts further uncertainty. How “darkish”? How “reddish”? How “white”?

Leprosy has always had an extraordinary signifying power, of being more than itself and becoming a magnet for wider political or cultural anxieties. Leviticus was composed during a long period of political upheaval between 538 and 332 B.C. Rumors of the poisoning of wells by lepers in 14th-century France grew into a wider fear of a conspiracy involving Jews and the Muslim king of Granada, a potent cluster of pariah groups with leprosy at its core.

In a Hollywood movie made during the Cold War, Big Jim McLain (1952), John Wayne plays an investigator for the Un-American Activities Committee sent to Hawai’i where a sinister communist bacteriologist is planning to infect the water supply. Approaching Honolulu, the film zooms in on the famous leper colony on Molokai, associating a disease thought to have been introduced by Chinese indentured laborers in the mid-19th century with the danger now posed by communism.

For much of the 19th century, leprosy was understood by advanced metropolitan medicine to be hereditary and constitutional rather than contagious. An Empire-wide survey of the disease undertaken by the British Royal College of Physicians in the 1860s concluded that leprosy was ‘essentially a constitutional disorder’, that it was overwhelmingly an affliction of the “dark populations” of the empire, transmitted indigenously and unlikely to jump barriers of geography and race, and that it was best tackled by improving the health and diet of native peoples.

But to many living in colonial settings, this seemed counter-intuitive. In India and the West Indies, especially, traditional practices of isolation—sending the leper “without the camp”—continued, and the more progressive approach, which challenged the stigma and opposed segregation, was widely ignored.

Medical opinion was correct in concluding that leprosy had low levels of communicability and was essentially a disease of poverty, though the prevailing theory of causation was wrong. But then came Hansen’s discovery of the leprosy bacillus, at a time when micro-biology was discovering the bacterial causation of other diseases (tuberculosis, for example), reinforcing traditional fears of leprosy and undermining the idea that Europeans were immune to it.

Why has leprosy inspired such fear? The leprous body—decomposing and putrefying while still living and able to reproduce—has often provoked horror. The Book of Numbers in the Bible defines leprosy as a condition in which the flesh is “half-consumed,” challenging the fundamental boundary between the living and death. The fear of losing this boundary is what has so often led to the construction of other kinds of borders to protect the living. Among such borders has been the lepers’ squint—that feature of medieval church architecture which allowed the leper to see into the church but not enter or partake of communion.

A more stringent kind of exclusion—one characteristic of the imperial world of the late 19th and 20th centuries—was the leper colony. These isolated settlements, frequently placed on uninhabited islands, were for those thought to have the disease.

Hawai’i was the locus classicus of the intensification of fear around leprosy at this time and became the earliest example of compulsory segregation in the modern imperial world. A rapid spread of the disease in the Hawai’ian islands group in the 1850s and 1860s resulted in a leper colony being established on an isolated peninsula on the island of Molokai. As an imperial debate over leprosy widened, Hawai’i became a laboratory for studying the disease.

Most of the cases involved Native Hawai’ians but a few Europeans also contracted the disease and were taken to the settlement. The unusual speed of this increase in the disease among a small population on a remote group of islands where it had not previously existed attracted international attention. It seemed to confirm that leprosy really was contagious, capricious, with no regard to racial boundaries.

Leprosy in Hawai’i was commonly blamed on Chinese indentured laborers and was known as mai pake, “the Chinese evil.” And here is where Charles McEwan Hyde, a Protestant missionary and schoolmaster in Honolulu, enters the story.

There had been several cases of leprosy in the college Hyde ran. One morning in 1884, putting on stockings just back from a Chinese laundry, Hyde noticed a rash and a discolored spot on his ankles. Then blotches began to spread over his body. He wrote to a friend:

I presume I have been poisoned, whether with syphilis or with leprosy remains to be seen … I saw only last week at Dr. Arning’s a leprous boy with matter exuding from his stockings which doubtless were sent to some Chinaman to wash.

The “Dr. Arning” of this note was a leprologist employed by the Hawai’ian government to investigate how the disease was communicated. He had conducted an experiment of implanting leprous tissue in a convicted murderer to see if it would take. It didn’t. But that finding didn’t stop fear from taking hold.

Moreover, many at the time thought of leprosy as the final stage of syphilis. So when Father Damien, the Catholic priest who lived and worked among the lepers of Molokai, died in 1889, Hyde—the missionary and schoolmaster—published an open letter suggesting the priest had died of syphilis from having sexual relations with female members of the colony. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited Molokai and met Damien, replied with a blistering response on behalf of the priest. In the meantime, Hyde’s worst fears had been allayed, his skin disorder proving to have been eczema.

Chinese indentured laborers were blamed for introducing leprosy throughout the Empire. In Australia, they were regarded as a threat to the racial integrity of the emerging nation—external contaminants dangerously prone to sexual relations with Aboriginal women. The consequences of this fear were severe. A group of Chinese lepers removed to an island in the Torres Strait starved to death. In 1903, a Chinese fruiterer in Wellington, Kim Lee, was diagnosed with leprosy and removed to a large rock off Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington harbor where he lived in a cave and had his food delivered by rope. He died the following year.

“I would rather a case of the plague here than see a hundred Chinese land,” declared Richard John Seddon, who served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1893 to 1906. “The chow element in New Zealand is like a cancer eating into the vitals of our being … insidiously encompassing the doom of its victim.’

When considering this history from today, comparisons with Covid-19 coronavirus—or Sars-CoV-2, as it has just been renamed—suggest themselves. The same uncertainties about cause, transmission, treatment, the pattern of spread and the issue of asymptomatic carriers that spread leprosy fears now raise the question of whether or not to quarantine. And that question, in turn, is creating world-wide anxiety and provoking responses that go beyond the purely medical and gather in their train other cultural fears and prejudices.

The most obvious connection between leprosy and coronavirus is the stigmatization of China. The West’s historic view of the Chinese as carriers of infection has been reactivated by Sars-CoV-2. Reports of the random abuse and occasional physical assault are spreading. I’ve come to see the face masks so commonly worn by Chinese people in European cities as not only a protection from the virus, but an attempt to reassure others: we might be Chinese but we’re ‘clean’; you have nothing to fear. Insofar as this inevitably becomes as much a warning as a reassurance, face masks are currently reminding me of the leper’s bell.

Matteo Salvini, the far-right leader of the Northern League and recent Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, has exploited the outbreak of coronavirus in his country to reinforce his virulent opposition to refugees entering Italy from North Africa, this despite the negligible number of cases so far reported from that continent.

Donald Trump has minimized the risk of the coronavirus, saying “one day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” But when he belatedly acknowledged its virulence he called it the “Chinese virus.” As the history of leprosy suggests, fear and panic—and the prejudices and stigma they provoke—can be as worrying as the disease itself.

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So I was relieved when I left the escalating tensions in Israel in August for the relative tranquility of Spain. And a week later, on the TV in my hotel room in Madrid, I saw a Jerusalem neighborhood I knew well turned into a chaotic mess by a suicide bomber.

I felt like I had dodged a bullet.

A month later, I was back in the United States, living in Los Angeles, a place that feels safe to me, when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Those attacks breached many Americans’ sense of national security in a way not known since Pearl Harbor. I had that same feeling I felt in Madrid a month earlier: A place I knew, New York, and buildings that I had been in, the Twin Towers, had been converted into a site of destruction and death.

Since 2001, I’ve felt this sense of dread and insecurity again and again. My work and research—understanding how religious communities are responding to the rapidly changing world—continue to take me across the globe, sometimes to violence-stricken locales.

I have traveled under armed guard with the Asia Foundation in Mindanao, Philippines, where a centuries-long conflict involving the Moro people in the Southern Philippines fighting against foreign governance later turned into a nearly 50-year-long separatist battle with different factions, bringing with it violence and terror attacks. On the first day of a trip to Nairobi in 2012, pregnant with my third child, I saw news of a shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In 2014, my flight from Amman, Jordan to Frankfurt, Germany was loaded with refugees who had fled ISIS’s grotesque violence in Iraq.

As often as I travel abroad, it seems as if there are more and more attacks closer to home. At a school in Connecticut, a nightclub in Orlando, a work party in San Bernardino, and this month a music festival in Las Vegas, individuals or small groups have murdered scores of innocent people. It seems as if this sort of exceptional violence is no longer exceptional, whether you’re overseas or in relative safety at home.

My travels have taught me another thing: not to retreat. Yes, after a trauma like the massacre in Las Vegas, it’s tempting to run away from other people and the places where they gather. But through experience, I’ve learned that living in fearful isolation is actually far scarier than moving through potentially hazardous places where I am challenged to confront the unfamiliar and my own assumptions about safety and security.

My family has constantly worried about my travels since I went to Jerusalem in 2001. But I’ve come to worry just as much about them. When I went to Uganda in 2015 with the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Generation Change program, it was a few weeks before the fifth anniversary of the Al-Shabaab attack on a soccer stadium in Kampala where hundreds were killed and maimed. Several of the young Ugandans we were training as peace-builders had survived that attack.

But after a long day of training in Uganda, news jarred me from back in the United States. A young white man had slaughtered nine souls in a black AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. And that church violence wasn’t new. Three of my colleagues at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California are ordained AME pastors, including Rev. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, who was once so reviled by white supremacists that that they plotted to blow up Los Angeles’ First AME Church, where he was senior pastor.

Thankfully, the FBI foiled their plan, and Rev. Murray remained undeterred in confronting the perpetual sources of violence that his community faces. But that connection, as I sat in my Uganda hotel room taking in tragic news, made the attack on the Charleston AME seem more worrisome than any potential violence I faced overseas.

Of course, my worries are part of the problem. The violence we experience through the media often feels immediate and visceral, making our own surroundings feel unsafe. Thanks to our access to news around the globe, we can empathize with the victims of the shooting in Las Vegas and the truck bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia. And that is a critically important thing for all of us to do. The focus on unimaginably terrible mass casualty news events also distorts our ability to assess our own risk. It makes every place feel unsafe at all times.

Violence is too much a part of human lives, particularly in places that lack economic and other resources, when people do not feel like they have access to power or where they are excluded and targeted because of their racial, ethnic, gender, political, or religious identities. It is this everyday violence that truly plagues us.

But it is obscured by exceptional violence—the type where individuals wreak carnage on a large group of bystanders—which truly is exceptional even if it feels as though it is ever-present.

It’s easy to forget the many hundreds of days before and after my visit to Uganda when there was no major terrorist attack in Uganda.

And even though it is exceptional, it is still far too frequent in the United States. There have been nine mass shootings in 2017 where a gunman indiscriminately killed four or more people in public.

Yet this exceptional violence can’t be allowed to control our actions. Threats and terror spread by white supremacists should not keep us from visiting black churches or standing with Muslim communities in the United States, just as fear of terrorist violence is no reason not to travel to Kampala, Jerusalem, Brussels, or Paris. And for people like me, whose work involves building peace and aiding people’s efforts to become architects of their own societies and to change the conditions that create violence, showing up is essential.

Human fears, of course, are no less real for being irrational. In my experience, I’ve found that preparing for the worst helps—getting trained for events, like how to respond to an active shooter, or learning vital skills like CPR or emergency first aid. I always know where my exits are. Preparedness goes hand in hand with the obligation to help, and a key way I navigate the world, not as an afterthought and not out of fear. I am more likely to use those skills to help someone having a heart attack or choking than to help a victim of exceptional violence.

When I returned home from my 2012 trip to Nairobi, during which a white supremacist killed six and wounded four others at a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, I met with the leaders of a Sikh congregation in Los Angeles. We ate in the langar hall, where Sikhs prepare free meals daily as a service to those in need, a beautiful part of the Sikh tradition. I kept an eye on the door just about every second, trying not to be disrespectful to my hosts, who were eager to talk about how Sikhs could contribute to L.A.’s disaster response because of their daily mass meal preparation tradition. My hosts were alert, too, not only because of the Oak Creek massacre but because Sikhs have been targeted in violent attacks in the United States for decades. They also are prepared because their faith obliges them to help.

For those who aren’t in immediate danger, the point is not to ignore your fear but to put it into context, develop a sense of agency over it, and use that agency to fight the sources and conditions which bring about violence. Above all, we cannot let fear stall our progress, collapse our communities, or keep us at home. This is not tough talk. It is a vital strategy for a safer, saner world.

The post Today’s Mass Killings Shouldn’t Distort Our Assessment of Everyday Risk appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.
—Traditional Nursery Rhyme, Yorkshire, UK

Ours was a safe neighborhood. Postwar cinderblock cottages stood unlocked in the shade of date palms that in summer cluttered our yards with vinegary, fermenting medjools and at trimming time offered their branches to boys for secret forts and clubhouses. Older children ran wild until evening dinner call, extending their explorations far afield to distant canals and vacant lots, disobeying their parents by ditching their toddler siblings who, somehow, always found their way home.

When the sun went down, the world changed: Elongated shadows trembled on concrete sidewalks, inchoate shapes lurked in dark alleys, eldritch rustlings shook the oleanders, bogeys and bugaboos squatted in the drear corners of fenced yards, and nameless terrors crouched like gargoyles in the tops of trees. Malevolent phantasms swooped low, and things went bump in the night.

Such horrors were irresistible to the imaginations of nine-year-old boys. After dinner we would sneak outside, daring to confront the night in rites of passage that put our bluster and moxie to the test. Our most dangerous adversary was the Booger Man who wandered abroad in search of wayward children who stayed out after dark. It was said that he wore a black trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat that hid a face no one had ever seen. Venturing into the neighborhood’s most isolated enclaves, we invoked him in games that ended with imagined sightings and full-scale retreats to the safety of brightly lit front porches.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim tells us that children find a symbolic resolution of their fears in traditional fairy tales, where the monstrous is clearly delineated and escape is assured in Happily-Ever-After endings. Certainly, we were no strangers to the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen, but our truest monsters in the Phoenix, Arizona of 1959 were those in our imaginations.

The Booger Man was one of these, but in time he proved too much an abstraction, lacking the intimate presence necessary to all ghouls who strive to terrorize the young. He was a faceless shadow lurking in the shrubbery and nurturing a dark agenda of “getting” whoever came within reach of his long, grasping hands. What he did when he got you was uncertain, for he was slow and easy to escape—no one, to our knowledge, had ever been gotten.

Literary great, and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe personified our propensity for courting the unthinkable. In the Imp of the Perverse, he made us consider a malevolent goblin who whispers in our ear tempting us to stand on the edge of a cliff and consider the consequences of jumping. We may never follow through, but the exhilaration of pushing the envelope of sane thinking can lead us into the sublime. A supreme heightening of the emotions can be achieved though the contemplation of the horrific, said the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

After a time, our encounters with the Booger Man no longer took us to this place, but we found a successor who himself had pushed the envelope, and paid a dire price for his hubris.

In the late 1950s, the Kiva Theater in Old Town Scottsdale supplemented its usual fare of European art films with Saturday afternoon children’s matinees. On one of these Saturdays, after crawling through the aisles in search of fallen change and throwing melted M&M’S on the heads of unsuspecting viewers in the front rows, we watched First Man into Space, a science fiction/horror flick cheesy in premise and execution but filled with possibility for young adventurers who played games with the night.

It told the tale of a test pilot who flew higher than any man had flown before. Losing control of his craft, he bailed out into a suspicious cloud of extraterrestrial particles. Encrusted in meteor fragments and hideous to behold, he survived his re-entry and roamed the countryside in search of human blood. First, he broke into blood banks but afterwards pursued the citizenry, killing several before being brought down by clever scientists.

That night, the Booger Man went on sabbatical and First Man into Space made his debut. As with the rituals that called forth his predecessor, we sought him out in the neighborhood’s darkest recesses, wary of the moment when one of us would be possessed by the tortured soul of the test pilot who had disobeyed his superiors and ventured into the unknown. In our imaginations, the boy who had chosen to host our newest tormentor morphed into a vile, misshapen thing that lurched and clawed and slavered like a rabid dog. Arms outstretched, he came for us, and with a collective shriek of “First Man into Space!” we scattered once again for the sanctuary of our well-lit homes.

First Man into Space, like the Booger Man, faded into memory as we approached adolescence. But for a while he gave shape to our fears where his faceless counterpart fell short. Being “gotten”—the horrific consequence of succumbing to the temptations of Poe’s imp—was palpable in the bloodlust of an irradiated zombie with a backstory and a physical presence in a possessed victim. He joined a distinguished cadre of childhood terrors, such as La Llorona, the ghoulish Weeping Woman who abducts and drowns children who get too close to water, or the Mogollon Monster, the devourer of Boy Scouts who wander too far from their campsites after dark. Like the venerable English bogey Raw Head and Bloody Bones, they all were hideous, immediate, and supremely threatening—in other words, perfect for the dark play of children.

The allure of shadowy places and the creatures that inhabit them doesn’t end with childhood. Today the Booger Man’s cyber-cousin Slender Man lurks in both his home on the internet and the waking world, challenging millennials to participate in the dialogue between belief and disbelief that characterizes the urban legend.

Legend tripping—the visiting of haunted houses, cemeteries, and other locales connected to extraordinary or supernatural happenings—has long been popular with teens and young adults. If those of us who have left our childhood behind approach such experiences with an uneasy, obligatory cynicism, we would do well to think back to the joy of the screaming retreat to the safety of the front porch, and, when contemplating the question of “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,” hedge our bets by invoking the last line of a traditional Scottish prayer: “Good Lord deliver us.”

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