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We the Paranoid
By Eugene Robinson
12/05/07 "Washington
Post" -- - - 12/04/07 -- - We Americans
like to think of ourselves as strong, rugged and supremely
confident -- a nation of Marlboro Men and Marlboro Women, minus
the cigarettes and the lung cancer. So why do we increasingly
find ourselves hunkered behind walls, popping pills by the
handful to stave off diseases we might never contract and eyeing
the rest of the world with an us-or-them suspicion that borders
on the pathological?
Last week, I heard some of the nation's leading cultural
anthropologists try to explain these and other phenomena. I came
away convinced that we, as a nation, definitely should seek
professional help.
The American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting
here in Washington, and I was invited to an afternoon-long panel
discussion titled "The Insecure American." I decided to overlook
the fact that my hosts, Hugh Gusterson of George Mason
University and Catherine Besteman of Colby College, had recently
co-edited a book called "Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong."
"The Insecure American" turned out to be a revelation -- by
turns alarming, depressing and laugh-out-loud amusing -- as
scholar after scholar presented research showing just how
unnerved this society is.
Setha Low, who teaches at the City University of New York, has
spent years studying the advent and increase of gated
communities. People decide to sequester their families behind
walls because they are afraid of crime, they feel isolated from
their neighbors, and they're nostalgic for a kind of idealized
Norman Rockwell past, Low reported. Nothing terribly irrational
about that.
But after extensive interviews with residents of gated
communities in San Antonio and on Long Island, Low discovered
that there isn't really less crime behind the walls, people
don't really feel more secure, and there was no greater sense of
small-town closeness among neighbors. Despite the gates and
guard huts, people still felt they needed to set their alarm
systems.
Joseph Dumit of the University of California at Davis presented
his work arguing that health care has been redefined into a
statistical exercise in risk reduction. The average American
fills nearly 13 prescriptions a year, Dumit said, and many of
the drugs are not to make the patient well but to reduce the
statistical risk that the person will become ill. People who are
otherwise healthy are prescribed statins to lower their
cholesterol, for example, or beta blockers for high blood
pressure.
Dumit pointed out that this risk-driven approach assumes that
every one of us is "inherently ill." It also drives health-care
costs by pushing doctors and drug companies to spend whatever it
takes to incrementally reduce a patient's risk of getting sick
-- even though some of those patients never would have gotten
sick, anyway.
Susan F. Hirsch, a professor at George Mason University, gave a
riveting presentation on how terrorism feeds insecurity.
Hirsch's husband, Abdulrahman Abdullah, was killed in the 1998
al-Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
When some of the alleged perpetrators faced justice in a New
York courtroom in 2001, Hirsch began attending the trial as a
victim. She ended up studying it as an anthropologist,
concluding that the legal system, while imperfect, was the best
way to deal with terrorists.
Catherine Lutz of Brown University reported on her studies of
what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the
"military-industrial complex." She noted that the immense
resources this country devotes to war-making are based on
assumptions that anthropologists might not accept as given --
that war is embedded in human nature, for example, and therefore
can never be consigned to our barbarian past, as was done with
slavery.
Lee Baker of Duke University, Brett Williams of American
University and other presenters described their research on
economic insecurity, driven by forces such as globalization,
immigration and gentrification.
And Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of medical anthropology at
the University of California at Berkeley, had me wincing as she
talked about her investigations of what she called "vulture
capitalism" -- the global trade in body parts for transplant.
The fastest-growing segment of kidney transplant recipients,
Scheper-Hughes said, consists of patients over 70; when they
can't get a needed organ from the transplant registry, she said,
they often ask a healthy child or grandchild to donate.
To recap: We're afraid of one another, we're afraid of the rest
of the world, we're afraid of getting sick, we're afraid of
dying. Maybe if we study our insecurities and confront them,
we'll learn to keep them in check. Before we turn the whole
nation into one big, paranoid gated community, maybe we'll learn
that life isn't really any better behind the walls.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
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