By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
I’ve been thinking about fear lately. Good, bad, justified or irrational, fear is the pile of old tires keeping many cultural fires burning long and hot.
Fear defines much of what we experience as daily life. Fear of rejection establishes everything from the height of your lift-kit to the irony of your tattoo. Fear of growing old drives some to stay on the job and hog the spotlight well past relevance. Fear of suffering causes us to seek bigger, better, faster and more of … everything. See Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” (Parental warning: super-not-for-kid language!)
But I suspect that the granddaddy of all fears, the fear driving the worst of what we are collectively experiencing these days (in the developed West, at least) is hiding in plain sight. It’s a fear that turns every unanswered question into a conspiracy. It turns every error into a scandal and every act of forgetfulness into an insult. It turns inconvenience into offense and delays into criminal incompetence.
It’s the fear of being wrong.
This fear sees Nazis in every squad room, commies in every classroom, every man is a rapist, and every woman is a tease. This fear hears only what it wants to hear, it consults only “trusted sources” and it produces its own propaganda.
When confronted with the possibility that we are wrong, we will bend, justify, inflate, conflate and fabricate to avoid it, because the cost of being wrong is just too high. We double down on our original position in the face of contradictory evidence because if we change our position we will be re-labeled. Politicians become “flip-floppers.” Doctors are “quacks.” Teachers, administrators, and managers are various kinds of “idiot.” Colleagues are “fools,” boomers “ignorant” and millennials “snowflakes.” If wrong and angry, we become “abusers.” (Of course, there is such a thing as actual abuse. I’m not speaking of that, and my fear of being seen as “wrong” about the issue accounts for 41 words within these parentheses in a pre-emptive effort to avoid a label.)
Allow me to suggest that the opposite of this fear is to be teachable: “Holding a perpetual awareness that there are things you don’t know and a willingness to discover them.” Explicit in the “not knowing” is the statistical certainty that some of what you currently hold true, is in fact not. This is not to say there is no truth or that we can never know truth. It is to say that we should be humbler; willing to be converted to truth wherever we find it.
The problem is, being humble in the face of fear is counter intuitive. When confronted by a tornado or a charging bull, boldness and action are instinctive. But when confronted by fear of consequences of one’s own errors, stillness and humility are needed.
What would political discourse look like if people engaged without fear of being shamed when mistaken? If city council meetings, school boards and church boards were populated with non-anxious, humble folks, what un-surmountable issues might simply evaporate?
I am endeavoring to be more teachable as I get older. I admit it: I’m wrong about some stuff. But I’m also committed to extending you some grace when it turns out you’re wrong. So don’t be afraid.
Dan Hazen is community pastor at Allen Creek Community Church in Marysville.
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