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Robert Wuthnow, Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation and Other Threats , Oxford University Press, 2010, 294 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-973087-2

The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 suggested to many that the days of the human species might be numbered. The March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and the following nuclear crisis were a reminder not only to Japan but also to the rest of the world of the fragility of civilization. Within minutes, whole towns were obliterated. After a few days it appeared as if an entire region of Japan might become a Chernobyl-style time capsule, abandoned due to radiation contamination for generations to come. These events highlight the vulnerability of biological human life and complex social organization to dangers originating in nature, technology, or both. How does society respond to the looming threat of mass disaster? In Be Very Afraid, the noted sociologist Robert Wuthnow offers an answer. The book offers a tour through various catastrophic risks of global scale that have hovered over us for the past 60 years. Wuthnow moves from nuclear annihilation to the dangers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of terrorists and rogue states. He considers viral pandemics and the challenge of climate change. His treatment of each of these has something of the feel of narrative cultural history. Wuthnow reminds us of the chronology of key events. He traces the paths through which dangers came to be identified and taken seriously, quotes from sources of the time to capture some mood, and reminds us about key outcomes. Several key findings emerge from this sweeping investigation. Wuthnow shows convincingly that a discourse of impending disaster is a recurrent and surprisingly central feature of social life. We live in an era where there is an intense awareness that human life on earth or complex forms of social organization might suddenly come to an end. There is a continual discussion of apocalyptic scenarios in science fiction and an intense sensitivity to potential global dangers in our news pages. For example, a few deaths from avian influenza are sufficient to gain headlines half way around the world. Meanwhile governmental bureaucracies and think tanks have proliferated in order to manage each threat as it emerges. Wuthnow takes a broadly positive and optimistic view of this activity. In effect scaling up the symbolic interactionist reading of human action (e.g. as found in Herbert Blumer’s various theoretical tracts) he reads the response to lurking dangers as evidence of human cultural and organizational creativity: ‘Our ability to think, interpret, question, frame, ponder, reflect, and organize – to make and appreciate art and culture – is what makes us human. Other species