Why Has Fear Changed In Society?

Roth wrote that fear has changed in modern times. He noted that premodern thinkers believed that fear should be cultivated to ensure moral behavior. However, modern thinkers discuss fear as an emotion or a reaction, not deliberate and certainly not cultivated by those who experience it. I believe this shift has impacted our class because we grew up in the shadow of the September 11th attacks and in periods of serious economic uncertainty. For us, fear is a childhood companion we have grown up familiar with, unlike hope. That is why I believe we struggled as a class with discussing hope. Hope is harder to talk about by its nature, as well. Edgoose notes that what makes us feel hopeful is often considered embarrassing and can be hard to precisely identify. These two factors made coming to …show more content…
Our natural reaction is to face them with the familiar fear and believe them unsolvable. Our experiences up unto this point would suggest this. Societally, I think that too much emphasis on fear without an emphasis on hope can be counterproductive and cause a society stay stagnant rather than making progress. Educationally, having experiences like this class which put fear and hope into political contexts helps consider and unpack the implications of the effects fear and hope have on our political system. However, this class is one of the very few experiences I had that gave us space to think through this dynamic and especially apply it to our own lives. This is concerning, since it is a small capstone class, which means most graduating seniors at the College have not been exposed to material like this. More exposure to formative experiences like this one could impact the way students consider their impact on