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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 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,099
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Be Very Afraid - The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (Hardcover)
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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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