Fear in West, 19th–20th Centuries: Living with the Enemy

Abstract

Referring to the famous work of Jean Delumeau La peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles. Une cité assiégée (Fear in Western Culture in the 14^th–18^th Centuries. A City under Siege) and assuming that man is always afraid of something and that in every historical era there is some dominant form of fear, in the article we ask what the West feared at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The Western culture of this period was scientistic in nature; therefore, it was assumed that the sources of fear in this era should be sought in science. The pessimistic demographic diagnosis of Thomas Robert Malthus of 1798 was indicated as the starting point for the growing anxiety, while the concepts strengthening this fear were theories of degeneration (Bénédict-Augustin Morel, Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau), of evolution (Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer) and of the eugenics (Francis Galton). Based on the analysis of these theories, it was concluded that science has become a source of fear primarily due to their failure to meet its own criteria of scientific knowledge, in particular due to the presence of certain convictions in its area specific to the religious mentality (such as the belief in the teleological nature of reality) which it naively recognized by scientists for already overcome.