ESSAY

What Are You

So Afraid Of?
Akiko Busch

About the Author

Akiko Busch (b. 1953) has published numerous books
and articles about design, culture, and the natural
world. She writes a regular blog and has appeared on
radio shows, given lectures, and directed workshops.
Busch lives in the Hudson Valley in New York and
teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

BACKGROUND
About one-half of American adults fear snakes. That’s more than those
who fear public speaking, or any other category of phobia. Some
scientists believe that ophidiophobia—the fear of snakes—is a legacy
from the distant past, when our survival depended on avoiding them.
Some believe that certain primate characteristics, such as sharp eyesight,
are the result of being on the lookout for snakes.
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Oct. 25, 2014

NOTES

1 A time of year when we celebrate and indulge in what frightens

us may be a good moment to consider how fear begins. It could
be anything: a sound, a dog’s bark or bite, some infant terror of
being left alone, darkness, a taste, some memory, the unknown,
the unseen, the known, the seen. Almost always, its origins are
unclear.
2 My own fear of snakes might have started when I was 3, in
a garden in Bangkok, in the klong, a rainwater ditch where I
was playing. A highly venomous, six-foot banded krait glided
alongside me. My mother, watching from a balcony above, was
unable to reach me, but she called for my older brother, who

UNIT 5 Independent Learning • What Are You So Afraid Of?  IL18

 picked me up and lifted me out of the trench. I remember nothing
NOTES of this. But my mother told me the story.
3 I wonder if my enduring panic half a century later at the rustle
of even the smallest garter snake in the grass is based on some
suppressed memory of the event, or on the story of the event. Or
is it possibly some genetic inheritance of the fear that centuries of
humans have had of the reptile world? Or is it some combination
of all of these?
4 Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with
personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop
in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we
sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own
absurd hierarchy,1 in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for
the wrong things. A childhood accident causes a friend of mine to
become white and shake at the sight of broken glass. But she is a
chain smoker as well, and has little worry about her pack-a-day
habit. And surely the recent alarm over the Ebola virus among
Americans who are not fully attentive to the need for flu shots
suggests a reluctance to recognize genuine threats to public health.
5 We have clear directives about what is really worth our fear.
Participants in the real parade of horrors include radical changes
in the carbon cycle, the rate of species extinction, extreme weather,
genetically modified food, institutional financial misconduct
that puts our security at risk. The archive2 of very real menaces
threatening us now is so full, it would seem we hardly know how
to choose what to be scared of.
6 Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the
ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles.
They are all things that have about as much chance of harming us
as the characters behind some of this season’s top trending scary
costumes: zombies, werewolves, and cast members from “Duck
Dynasty.”

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7 The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear
snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do
not fear the more likely instruments of danger—knives, guns, cars,
electrical sockets—because, he says, “our species has not been
exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time
to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic
avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that
changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are
likely to follow sensible instruction.
8 At this time of year, when I venture into the basement of our
old farmhouse, I find that it is, as always, a horror chamber of the
first order: damp, dark, and musty, with dirt floors, vast cities of

1. hierarchy  (HY uh rahr kee) n. arrangement of items by order of importance.

2. archive  (AHR kyv) n. collection of records or documents.

IL19  UNIT 5 Independent Learning • What Are You So Afraid Of?

 cobwebs and black alcoves. Yet it’s not the decrepit furnace with
its ravenous craving for fuel that causes me the moment of panic, NOTES

nor the behemoth3 oil tank, nor even the insanity of the soaring
cost to fill it. Though I am loath to admit it, the lethal agents that
set my heart racing are, instead, the sudden rustle and the glint
of pearly snakeskin that flashes in the ancient stone foundation
wall behind the boiler. The more dire menaces at that particular
moment seem to be: black rat snake, milk snake, grass snake,
garter snake. None of which are poisonous. Still, the question
looms: How can I get out of here as fast as possible?
9 The paths that human fear can take, and its often ridiculous and
pointless detours, are surely worth considering now. At a moment
of such social, political and environmental urgency, I would like
to think it is possible to tap into human fear to change behavior
in some fundamental and strategic way. Yet what seems more
likely to me is the possibility that fear is simply an unpredictable
rogue impulse that all too often remains indifferent to the genuine
threats around us. And that may be the scariest thing of all.  ❧

3. behemoth  (bih HEE muhth) adj. of enormous, monstrous size and power.
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UNIT 5 Independent Learning • What Are You So Afraid Of?  IL20