GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannise in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.
Samuel Johnson in the Rambler (1761)
No-one’s disputing that very hot weather can be challenging, even dangerous, for some people. But I’ve been fascinated by the news coverage of the heatwave over the last week or so, largely because I’m currently touring in the American West, as I often am. Reading the British news one could be forgiven for thinking the country was on the brink of destruction.
However, it also links into an accumulating culture of fear which is having a paralysing effect on wider society. It’s been developing for years, driven not only by a news media craving stories, but also government seeking ever more control over our lives, and a vast industry capitalising on promoting fear to sell solutions, reassurance and ‘peace of mind’.
Out here the weather is seriously dangerous in ways most of we Brits have little or no idea. About two weeks ago I was driving across South Dakota into North Dakota through epic downpours that were like carwashes for the gods, and in 80mph winds. But the place carried on, as we did. I drive around 10,000 miles in the American West annually and I have developed a healthy regard for the weather, without letting us stop what we’re doing. We simply adapt.
You might remember that in 2023 there was a heat dome over Texas. Since we were due to fly into Dallas Fort Worth, we were a little worried, thanks in no small part to the tireless BBC that left us and everyone else with the impression that all Texas was about to be obliterated in a conflagration.
Naturally, when we rolled up, we found Texas was hot but in a 100% operational state. Everything was working as normal. We went about our road trip as planned. In southeastern Texas we visited a forest, lush with leaves and long green grass. We found a couple of nonagenarians, who in Britain would have been locked in a freezer to save their lives, out walking as they always did. We told them about the news in Britain. They laughed and carried on.
The interesting thing is not then the heat, or in my case the torrential downpour across the northern Great Plains on a remote and almost entirely empty road, but the fixation in the media and government to turn everything into something to be terrified of.
In recent years, Covid was utilised as the pretext for driving hundreds of millions of people to the brink of – or even actual – mental breakdown from fear. Now it seems the long-term impact on wider society is becoming clearer though Covid is only one facet of a mesmerising array of reasons to be petrified. However, we also have it within us to drive ourselves mad with fear.
In his Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Daniel Defoe included this observation of how fear of the contagion could lead to irrational behaviour, when describing what had happened in 1665:
It was in those shambles that two persons falling down dead, as they were buying meat, gave rise to a rumour that the meat was all infected; which, though it might affright the people, and spoiled the market for two or three days, yet it appeared plainly afterwards that there was nothing of truth in the suggestion. But nobody can account for the possession of fear when it takes hold of the mind.
The Telegraph has an article about how school trips are shortening because “Anxious parents are cutting children’s overnight school trips short”:
Steve Hallett, the Director of Operations at Rock UK, which offers residentials at centres across the UK, said a typical trip has fallen from four or five days to two or three.
He said it was partly because of costs but also described an increasing trend of parents collecting their children early or even staying at the site after they drop their children off.
Mr Hallett added that it had become more common for children on residentials to sit out certain activities, watching from the sidelines.
“The level of anxiety is really high. Children who have come through that Covid age, we’re seeing a level of concern even about going outside let alone being away from home,” he said.
A source at another residential company in southern England said a traditional trip was “always a week long” but had shortened since the pandemic.
They said: “Since the pandemic, many parents won’t even allow their children to go on your typical sleepover with friends because of the safeguarding concerns… to go from never being away from home to being away from home for a week is a big thing. Children find it overwhelming and exhausting.”
They gave examples of parents raising concerns about their children being abducted, the food their children are eating and calling the centre during a trip saying: “I’m worried that my child’s going to be cold in the accommodation.”
“There is this anxiety and it’s not helping with the children’s resilience. Parents are less likely – because of those growing fears from the pandemic – to want to allow those children to go off and take those types of risks that allow them to build that resilience,” they added.
One wonders what sort of adults these children will grow into. Last year, Joanna Gray wrote a piece called ‘Why Do Schools Now Resemble Prisons?’ for this site. It’s a dystopian tale of a world of security fences, lanyards and lockdown drills. I can second that. After I left full-time teaching in 2016, I delivered a Classics day to sixth formers at a West London comp. It was a terrifying place. Just being let in was like trying to enter a US high-security establishment. Inside it was a seething mass of teenagers contained in their ‘safe and secure’ environment like battery chickens.
We can only hope that when they grow up and escape into the adult world, they can leave the nonsense behind them. But I’m afraid it’s all too likely that growing up in a climate of fear is encouraging a significant minority to hide at home, unable to contemplate either going to school or facing adult life.
Before I was 10 years old back in the mid-1960s, my idea of fun on a Saturday was to meet a schoolfriend in London, spend five shillings each on a ‘blue rover’ ticket and then pass the day riding around on the tube with a nebulous aim to travel from the end of each line to the other.
I don’t think it ever occurred to my parents either to discourage or even stop me. In 1970 I was fortunate enough to go on a school classics cruise around the Mediterranean on a battered old ship called the SS Nevasa. Twenty-four boys in the charge of one teacher and not a risk assessment in sight! I remember vividly how the captain reminded us sternly that we were embarking on the high seas and not to go near the rails in rough weather.
Fear is a very useful phenomenon. A fear of crashing waves, based on knowledge of what water can do, might keep one away from the end of a jetty or off the deck of a cruise ship in a storm. A fear of traffic helps keep us away from roads. One might take reasonable precautions to avoid catching a serious infection. But there is a limit. To return to Defoe again, representing himself in the first person as the anonymous ‘Citizen’ recounting his experiences:
I had two important things before me: the one was the carrying on my business and shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked all my effects in the world; and the other was the preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well as other people’s, represented to be much greater than it could be.
In other words, as Samuel Johnson noted, fear can assist reason but fear for fear’s sake can overwhelm us. It not only makes things seem far worse than they are but also cripples our ability to cope.
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with many books to his credit. His most recent is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025). His next is Brief Lives of the Ancient World (Yale, September 2026).
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(UKR)
