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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
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Be Very Afraid - The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (Paperback)
Loot Price: R957
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Be Very Afraid - The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (Paperback)
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Robert Wuthnow has been praised as one of "the country's best
social scientists" by columnist David Brooks, who hails his writing
as "tremendously valuable." The New York Times calls him
"temperate, balanced, compassionate," adding, "one can't but admire
Mr. Wuthnow's views." A leading authority on religion, he now
addresses one of the most profound subjects: the end of the world.
In Be Very Afraid, Wuthnow examines the human response to
existential threats-once a matter for theology, but now looming
before us in multiple forms. Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global
warming: each threatens to destroy the planet, or at least to
annihilate our species. Freud, he notes, famously taught that the
standard psychological response to an overwhelming danger is
denial. In fact, Wuthnow writes, the opposite is true: we seek ways
of positively meeting the threat, of doing something-anything-even
if it's wasteful and time-consuming. The atomic era that began with
the bombing of Hiroshima sparked a flurry of activity, ranging from
duck-and-cover drills, basement bomb shelters, and marches for a
nuclear freeze. All were arguably ineffectual, yet each sprang from
an innate desire to take action. It would be one thing if our
responses were merely pointless, Wuthnow observes, but they can
actually be harmful. Both the public and policymakers tend to model
reactions to grave threats on how we met previous ones. The
response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, echoed the
Cold War-citizens went out to buy duct tape, mimicking 1950s-era
civil defense measures, and the administration launched two costly
conflicts overseas. Offering insight into our responses to
everything from An Inconvenient Truth to the bird and swine flu
epidemics, Robert Wuthnow provides a profound new understanding of
the human reaction to existential vulnerability.
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