Salutary Fear? Hans Morgenthau and the Politics of Existential Crisis
Alison McQueen
Stanford University
[email protected]
Revised Version
February 1, 2016
Abstract: What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like
nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar
thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and
began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms.
I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may well have seemed like
an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties
that attend prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the
forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim
was ultimately to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political
order that he thought would provide the most effective bulwark against nuclear
catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons to be learned from this engagement with
Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate
change debate.
1
Writing at the end of the Cold War, the political theorist Judith Shklar argued: “What liberalism
requires is the possibility of making the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its political practices
and prescriptions” (Shklar 1989, 30). Shklar’s proposal seemed to speak to a world emerging from a
century in which horror had been heaped upon horror and fear had so often been the currency of
politics. However, the appeal of the proposal obscured more difficult questions about the politically
productive role of fear. One of the justifications for the resort to a “politics of fear” in the Cold War—
a politics of the doomsday clock, of duck and cover drills, and, most disturbingly, of McCarthyism—
was that it was precisely the kind of politics that was needed to rouse a complacent citizenry that had
but dimly grasped the looming possibility of mass annihilation. With a threat of existential proportions
bearing down on us, surely fear is an appropriate, salutary, and eminently civic response. Or, so the
argument went. The question of what role, if any, fear appeals1 should play in the politics of existential
crisis emerged anew in the context of the War of Terror and has more recently come to occupy a
central place in the climate change debate. Proponents claim that the polity (and indeed humanity)
faces real threats that its members have yet to fully perceive and squarely acknowledge. In these
circumstances, existential fear appeals, which in this context commonly rely on apocalyptic images of
catastrophic devastation, are necessary to rouse the complacent.2 Opponents of fear appeals argue
that they are both ineffective and objectionable on normative grounds. They claim that fear appeals
stifle dissent and deliberation, emotionally manipulate audiences, and ultimately engender a sense of
Following Walton (2001), I take a fear appeal to be a type of argument that “tries to get a target audience to adopt a course
of action by portraying the only alternative as some horrible disaster (usually death or severe injury) that is very fearful to
the audience” (xiii). What I call an existential fear appeal is a fear appeal that portrays a fearful outcome is an existential threat,
or a threat that would “cause extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or to reduce its quality of life (compared to
what would otherwise have been possible) permanently and drastically” (Bostrom and Cirkovic 2008, 4).
2 This view seems to underpin some of the more public interventions in the climate change debate (e.g. Davis
Guggenheim’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and Showtime’s 2014 series Years of Living Dangerously). There is empirical
evidence that fear appeals do elicit a sense of vulnerability among those previously unwilling to acknowledge a threat
(Moser 2007; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009). For a defense of the civic role of fear appeals, see Pfau 2007.
1
2
paralyzing fatalism (Robin 2004; Furedi 2005; Feinberg and Willer 2011; Gourevitch 2010; Nordhaus
and Shellenberger 2014; Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007; O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009).
The central contention of this paper is that we can find lessons for this contemporary debate
in the nuclear writings of Hans Morgenthau, a German-Jewish émigré scholar of International
Relations who spent most of his productive postwar career in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Chicago. Morgenthau is predominantly remembered today as a proponent of political
realism3—a legacy that, while not strictly inaccurate, hardly does justice to the range and complexity
of his work. This range and complexity is perhaps on fullest display in Morgenthau’s nuclear writings.
Like many of his contemporaries, he was slow to acknowledge the radical novelty of the nuclear era.
The tone of Morgenthau’s writings from the late 1940s and 1950s is unapologetically strategic and
often premised on the assumption that nuclear weapons were merely the latest stage in the
mechanization of warfare—a development similar in kind, though far greater in magnitude to the
invention of the machine gun (Morgenthau 1948a; Morgenthau 1950; see also Craig 2003 and
Scheuerman 2009). However, by the early 1960s, he had acknowledged the radical novelty of the
nuclear age and adopted a new and troubling rhetorical strategy for confronting it. Morgenthau’s new
writings offered a terrifying apocalyptic account of nuclear destruction that seemed calculated to elicit
an existential fear. His 1961 essay “Death in a Nuclear Age” calls forth an image of mass annihilation
in which individual deaths will be deprived of meaning as millions are “simultaneously reduced…to
radioactive ashes, indistinguishable from the ashes of their houses, books, and animals” (Morgenthau
The realist tradition, as defined by Morgenthau and others, is a distinctive family of approaches to the study, practice,
and normative evaluation of politics that tend to (a) affirm the autonomy (or, more minimally the distinctiveness) and
contextual specificity of politics; (b) hold an agonistic account of politics; (c) reject as “utopian” or “moralist” those
approaches, practices, and evaluations which seem to deny these facts; and (d) prioritize the requirements of political order
and stability over the demands of justice (or, more minimally, reject any kind of absolute priority of justice over other
political values). Contemporary International Relations realists would likely not affirm, at least in their scholarly work, the
normative dimensions of some of these claims. For an analysis of these commitments in the case of Morgenthau, see
McQueen (forthcoming). Some have suggested that Morgenthau’s realist commitments (particularly (a) and (b) above)
bear the mark of the formative influence of Carl Schmitt. For detailed evaluations of the extent of these influences, see:
Evrigenis 2008, 175-94; Frei 2001, 118-9, 123-32; Guilhot 2010; Scheuerman 2007; Scheuerman forthcoming.
3
3
1961a, 233). The essay confronts us with a bleak apocalyptic vision, asking us to imagine the terrifying
prospect of nuclear annihilation in order to prevent it.
In contrast to other more familiar cultivators of nuclear fear, Morgenthau presents us with an
interesting case because he is deeply wary of political uses of fear. While he did not offer a sustained
critique of fear appeals, a number of scattered remarks give voice to a standard set of liberal democratic
worries. These worries are clearest in Morgenthau’s analysis of McCarthyism. Here, the political use
of fear created a climate of perpetual anxiety in which survival became “an end in itself” to which all
other political questions, projects, and values had to be subordinated (1960, 153, 148). The everyday
conflict and uneasy conciliations of politics were put aside for calmer times that never seem to come,
while debates about ideals like equality and freedom were cast as dangerously indulgent in the face of
an overwhelming threat to collective survival. In place of the consensus and consent of liberal
democracy, McCarthyism substituted an “acquiescence induced by fear” (1960, 152). Americans were
faced with a coercive dichotomous choice between destruction at the hands of a foreign threat or
survival and conformity to the demands of a security state. Importantly, these worries are not specific
to the phenomenon of McCarthyism. For Morgenthau, political fear posed a perpetual threat to liberal
democratic regimes.4 In addition, then, to our general question about the role of fear in the politics
of existential crisis, we are faced with a more specific question about Morgenthau. What might have
4
For Morgenthau, two of the markers tyrannical and totalitarian regimes are that they rule by fear or terror, rather than
consent; and that they manipulate the emotions of citizens rather than attempting to rationally persuade them. These
themes preoccupy Morgenthau not only in his analyses of fascism (e.g. Morgenthau 1946, 227) but also in his diagnoses
of the pressures on American democracy, where he links the erosion of public trust in government to a temptation on the
part of leaders and public institutions toward political uses of fear (e.g. Morgenthau 1955, 402-4; Morgenthau 1964a, 209;
Morgenthau 1967, 35). It is also important to note that Morgenthau thought that fear appeals could have normatively
troubling effects, even when the relevant threat was an entirely rational one. Thus, Morgenthau notes that even in the face
of the threats of fascism and the attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s fearful focus on its own survival served to crowd out
virtually all other political questions (1960, 125). These are some of the underlying worries that explain why, as Michael
Williams notes, Morgenthau, like other progressive classical realists, “sought to counter and restrain the role of fear and
enmity in political life rather than embracing it” (Williams 2011, 458). Many of Morgenthau’s worries are echoed by
contemporary critics of a “politics of fear” (Furedi 2005; Gourevitch 2010; Robin 2004).
4
made a rhetorical strategy designed to elicit an apocalyptic fear of nuclear annihilation seem like an
appropriate one, in spite of his principled worries about political uses of fear? I think there is both
analytical and normative value in considering both questions together.
In what follows, I make three claims. In the first section of the paper, I argue that there are
particular features of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation that would have made the use
of fear appeals especially tempting. I propose that there are connected representational and
motivational challenges that are both particularly pronounced in cases of prospective catastrophes and
that enable various forms of denial and lead to political inertia. In the remainder of the section, I offer
an historical account of how these challenges manifested in the nuclear case. Together, this
conceptualization and historical account go some way to explaining why Morgenthau might have
turned to existential fear appeals and why he might plausibly have thought that such a turn was
warranted and appropriate. In the second section of the paper, I argue that Morgenthau’s later nuclear
writings are consistent with an attempt to cultivate the kind of salutary fear required to meet the
challenges of prospective catastrophe and to construct the new forms of political order that would
provide the most effective bulwark against nuclear annihilation. I suggest, however, that he was
insufficiently attentive to a paradox that can attend the use of existential fear appeals in cases of
prospective catastrophe. That is, the very means that are required to overcome the motivational and
representational challenges of a prospective catastrophe can also engender a sense of fatalism and
paralysis that leaves people less able to confront these challenges. In the third section of the paper, I
propose that fear appeals similar to Morgenthau’s are at work in the climate change debate. Global
climate change, I will argue, is a prospective catastrophe that suffers from motivational and
representational challenges that are even more pronounced than those of nuclear annihilation,
rendering existential fear appeals even more tempting for contemporary activists, intellectuals, and
policy entrepreneurs. However, I ultimately suggest that there remain strong normative and practical
5
reasons to be wary of such fear appeals. The underlying hope of the paper is that a consideration of
Morgenthau’s approach to nuclear catastrophe may be useful beyond the sphere of intellectual history
for those attempting to come to grips with the existential, motivational, and representational
challenges of prospective catastrophes today.
1. Prospective Catastrophe
Nuclear annihilation is a prospective catastrophe. It is the kind of catastrophe that, given
existing patterns of human activity, we have reason to think could or will arise in the future and that
poses an existential threat. That is, a prospective catastrophe has the potential to bring about human
extinction or, at the very least, to radically alter the character of human existence in profoundly
undesirable ways. The scale of prospective catastrophes poses motivational challenges because of a
potentially unbridgeable gap between the existential scope of their outcomes and the effective capacity
of preventive and adaptive human agency. The prospective nature of these catastrophes poses
additional motivational challenges because, in contrast to a contemporary or ongoing catastrophe,
“the act of thinking about it is always voluntary, and the choice of not thinking about it is always
available” (Schell 1982, 8). These motivational difficulties are connected to representational challenges.
In addition to the scope-agency gap, there is an imaginative gap that leaves us “incapable of mentally
realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced” (Anders 1962, 496). Prospective catastrophes
are difficult to visualize because they lack ready imaginative analogs. While some of their likely effects
(e.g. widespread radiation sickness) have been experienced before, both the exponential increase in
the scale of these effects and the ways in which they will be compounded by numerous other outcomes
mean that imagining prospective catastrophes requires “thinking about the unthinkable” (Kahn 1962).
That such thinking proves difficult is hardly surprising when one considers the enormity of
the imaginative and psychological task. Merely contemplating the prospect of nuclear destruction
6
brings to mind overwhelming and terrible images of human devastation and suffering, along with an
excruciating sense of helplessness. As Jonathan Schell suggests, nuclear annihilation “appears to
confront us with an action that we can perform but cannot quite conceive. Following upon these first
responses, there may come a recoil, and a decision, whether conscious or unconscious, not to think
any longer about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.” There is, to be sure, something worthy of
respect in this denial insofar as it emerges from a “love of life” and a commitment to the world.
Nevertheless, “a society that systematically shuts its eyes to an urgent peril to its physical survival and
fails to take any steps to save itself cannot be called psychologically well” (Schell 1982, 8). Nor can
such a society be called morally well. To the extent that we cannot properly conceive of the devastation
wrought by nuclear war or the part we might play in bringing it about, avoiding honest confrontations
with questions of moral responsibility and guilt becomes far easier. The motivational and
representational difficulties of prospective catastrophes, then, enable dangerous—even if
understandable—forms of individual and collective denial. The remaining portion of this section
traces three strategies of nuclear denial: the conventionalization of nuclear weapons, optimism about
the capacity of societies to survive and even thrive after a nuclear attack, and narratives of nuclear
redemption. Together, I suggest, these strategies of denial, themselves enabled by the representational
and motivational challenges posed by prospective nuclear catastrophe, begin to make sense of why
Morgenthau might have thought it appropriate to turn to a politics of fear.
The first strategy of nuclear denial is the attempt to “conventionalize” nuclear weapons. This
strategy involves treating nuclear weapons as quantitative “improvements” on the destructive
capacities of conventional weapons, rather than as part of a qualitative transformation of the nature
of war and the prospects for human survival. While he would later reveal such a strategy to be an
appealing but dangerous delusion, Morgenthau himself initially deployed it in his writings from the
late 1940s through the 1950s. However, he ultimately came to reject it on principled grounds. As
7
Robert Jervis would later note, the psychological appeal of the conventionalization strategy to political
actors is that it denies what is most disturbing about the nuclear revolution—“the fact that your fate
rests in your adversary’s hands, the split between what you threaten and what you would want to do,
and the immorality of planning to kill millions of civilians.” The intellectual appeal of the strategy is
that it “allows the analyst to use familiar concepts and apply ideas and arguments which have proven
their utility over centuries of experience” (Jervis 1984, 57).
For the later Morgenthau and other critics of American nuclear policy, this strategy of denial
manifested itself in various attempts to imagine the use of nuclear weapons without the prospect of
totalizing violence. These attempts included the quest for a “clean H-bomb” with minimal fallout; the
idea of graduated deterrence, in which a nuclear war would escalate in “the detached and rational
manner in which chess players make their choices”; the counter-force strategy, in which only military
objectives would be targets for nuclear attack; and the prospect of a tactical nuclear war, in which
nuclear weapons would be used on the battlefield but would not lead to mutual destruction
(Morgenthau 1964b; Morgenthau 1976). All of these proposals, which began circulating during the
Eisenhower administration and were defended by political and military officials and policy experts
throughout the Cold War, failed, on Morgenthau’s view, to acknowledge the novelty of nuclear
weapons and grossly overestimated the degree to which they could be subject to any kind of rational
control.5 The strategy of conventionalization reflected an “absurd attempt, not to adapt our modes
of thought and action to the new objective conditions of the nuclear age but to transform those
objective conditions in light of the pre-nuclear modes of thought and action.” Proponents of
conventionalization mistakenly saw nuclear weapons as a rational means to achieve national ends,
rather than as instruments of “suicide and genocide” (Morgenthau 1976, 256).6
Morgenthau expressed similar worries about strategies of deterrence (1956, 1957).
It is worth noting that conventionalization was not just a strategy embraced by American policy-makers and prominent
think-tanks, but also a crucial rhetorical and policy tactic in a government campaign aimed at shifting public opinion about
5
6
8
The second strategy of nuclear denial is a complacent optimism about the human capacity to
live with the outcomes of an all-out nuclear war. Its most eloquent defender was the RAND strategist
Herman Kahn, who took his own task to be a battle against a kind of nuclear denial. We must be
willing to “think about the unthinkable” (Kahn 1962). This entails evaluating the risks of nuclear war
in order to avoid it. And, because sober preparation may not be enough, it also demands that we think
about how we would fight and survive an all-out nuclear war. While we cannot wish these possibilities
away, we must also not “overestimate or assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism,
inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventive war or
undue accommodation” (Kahn 1960, 19). Those who were preoccupied with catastrophic scenarios
of nuclear annihilation were blinded by emotion and thus could not confront the problems of war and
peace on a “factual basis.” “It is not,” Kahn explains, “that the problems are not inherently emotional.
They are. It is perfectly proper for people to feel strongly about them. But while emotion is a good
spur to action, it is only rarely a good guide to appropriate action.” We will only increase the
probability of nuclear catastrophe “if we refuse to make and discuss objectively whatever quantitative
estimates can be made” (Kahn 1960, 47, n. 1). An objective and quantitative assessment, he thought,
suggests that humans can survive an all-out nuclear war.
Kahn enumerates the likely effects of nuclear war and offers “factual” arguments about the
human capacity to protect against, manage, or live with them. Some of these arguments rest on the
familiar conventionalization claim that nuclear war amounts to a quantitative extension of, rather than
a qualitative rupture from, conventional war. For instance, Kahn suggests that the physical and genetic
effects of nuclear fallout would not differ in kind from the “natural radiation” to which man has been
subject for millions of years. They would just be “more intense” (Kahn 1960, 53). Nonetheless, the
the use of nuclear weapons by attempting to normalize them. The most well-known example of such a campaign is Project
Plowshare, which was tasked with identifying nonmilitary applications of nuclear technology (O’Neill 1994; Tannenwald
2007).
9
prospect of radiation sickness may cause survivors to lose morale. Kahn recommends equipping them
with radiation meters to confirm exposure levels. One could then readily assess whether a sick survivor
has cause to be depressed: “You look at his meter and say, ‘You have received only ten roentgens,
why are you vomiting? Pull yourself together and get to work’” (Kahn 1960, 86). Several of Kahn’s
other arguments rest on a distinctly economistic assessment of survival prospects. No doubt, he
acknowledges, the standard of living would decline in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack.
“We must remember, however, that our standard today is far higher than preservation of life requires.”
Gesturing vaguely toward studies of postwar recuperative capacity, Kahn reasons: “assuming there is
a successful reorganization, the standard of living (including life expectancy and probability of normal
birth) would be higher than the standards prevalent in the U.S. between 1900 and 1930.” Survivors
could even expect to lead “relatively normal and happy lives” (Kahn 1962, 87).
For Kahn’s most vociferous critics, these arguments were not only dangerously escapist, but
also amounted to a moral defense of mass murder: “how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away
with it, how to justify it” (Newman 1961, 197). Morgenthau was somewhat more measured. He
recognized the way in which Kahn’s arguments rested on a conventionalization strategy that “chooses
to treat thermonuclear power as just another form of violence, different in quantity but not in quality
from the conventional forms” (Morgenthau 1961b, 18). Yet, for Morgenthau, the problem with
Kahn’s arguments ran deeper. Even if Kahn’s quantitative estimates were something more than
optimistic guesses clothed in social scientific garb, they failed to account for the psychological effects
of an all-out nuclear war. On Morgenthau’s reading, Kahn “raises the question of happiness and
answers it in terms of the standard of living. He assumes casualties in the tens of millions and the
massive destruction of the economic plant and then figures out how many men would be needed to
rebuild that plant.” As a result, he dangerously overestimates the recuperative capacities of human
societies by treating them like termite colonies “that will mechanically build up what has been
10
destroyed” (Morgenthau 1972, 128).7 Kahn failed to recognize that human societies “have a breaking
point” that can only be identified with certainty after the worst has happened. We cannot afford to be
sanguine about the ability of societies to rebuild their productive, political, and familial institutions “in
the company of tens of millions of rotting corpses” (Morgenthau 1972, 127).
The nuclear optimism of Kahn and others formed the basis of the final strategy of nuclear
denial—narratives of redemption. Kahn was hardly the only person willing to contemplate the world
that might come into being after thermonuclear war. From the 1950s onward, numerous articles,
books, and films considered the possibilities of a post-nuclear war survival. These works offered a full
range of possibilities—from the dire to the unapologetically optimistic (Rose 2001). The dire scenarios
were those that most troubled the Eisenhower administration. Political and military officials worried
that a public captivated by apocalyptic images of nuclear annihilation would be less willing to “support
national policies which might involve the risk of nuclear warfare” (Val Peterson, as quoted in
Vandercook 1986, 184). As part of its nuclear public relations campaign, the National Security Council
ordered a classified study of the effects of the threat of nuclear annihilation on American attitudes and
behavior.
A panel of social scientists completed a report entitled “The Human Effects of Nuclear
Weapons Development” (HENWD). The report recommended a widespread program of “town hall
meetings,” aimed at balancing public awareness of the effects of nuclear weapons with an “increased
knowledge and understanding of both the broad aspects of national security…and the specific
countermeasures that can reduce the effects of nuclear attack” (HENWD, as quoted in Vandercook,
193). The report concluded by noting that nuclear war might actually provide survivors with an
opportunity for heroism and renewal:
This portion of Morgenthau’s Science: Servant or Master? is drawn from lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in
1962.
7
11
The extremity of human disaster might become the opportunity for resolute survivors.
It is a brave thing, admittedly, to brace ourselves against the threat of annihilation. It
is another, and better, thing to nerve ourselves to make the very best of the very worst.
At this historic crossroads we would begin with knowledge and we would end with
wisdom. Thus to take counsel with one another, to the very town meeting grass roots,
would be to draw inspiration from our forefathers and to point our children to the
sources which make all American generations one and which raise hope for a new
dynamics for the human race. It is a vision, indeed, but where visions flourish nations
endure (HENWD, as quoted in Vandercook, 193).
While “The Human Effects” report was eventually shelved, it suggests a strong concern with
tempering fears of nuclear annihilation with secular apocalyptic mysticism and patriotic narratives of
renewal.
Even without the implementation of the report’s “town hall” public relations program, some
continued to indulge in hopeful scenarios of nuclear redemption. Kahn entertained the possibility not
only that humans could survive a nuclear attack but also that the experience could prove economically
invigorating. It was not unreasonable to “imagine a renewed vigor among the population with a
zealous, almost religious, dedication to reconstruction, exemplified by a 50- to 60-hour work week”
(Kahn 1960, 646). These kinds of optimistic expectations, combined with President Kennedy’s 1961
civil defense and fallout shelter initiative, helped fuel radical hopes. In an October 1961 editorial, Life
magazine argued that a shelter-building campaign “will give all Americans the hope that they, like their
forebears, can some day abandon the stockades to cross whatever new mountains of adversity or trial
may lie ahead” (1961, 4). Later that month, an article in Time magazine struck a similar note: “Only
12
two days after the thermonuclear attack, many adults might start emerging from the protection of
their shelters for brief periods…[W]ith trousers tucked into sock tops and sleeves tied around wrists,
with hats, mufflers, gloves and boots, the shelter dweller could venture forth to start ensuring his
today and building for his tomorrow” (1961, np). These images of emergence suggest a rebirth and an
opportunity for a uniquely American exercise of courage—a kind of post-apocalyptic pioneer spirit.
What the “Human Effects” Report and these more popular images attempt to elicit is not just the
hope that Americans could survive a nuclear attack. Rather, they go beyond nuclear optimism and
present an enticing image of a clean slate and an opportunity to create the world anew and engender
“a new dynamics of the human race.” This is the vision of creative renewal through destruction for
which the public memories of nuclear fear may fail to account. Together with the conventionalization
and optimistic strategies of nuclear denial, such redemptive narratives begin to account for why
Morgenthau and others might have found an existential fear appeal to be warranted and entirely
appropriate, in spite of his principled worries about such a strategy. When there is a genuine and
serious threat that must be collectively apprehended in order to be collectively avoided, existential fear
appeals may serve a salutary and civic purpose (Pfau 2007).
2. Salutary Fear and Nuclear Annihilation
As I suggested at the outset, Morgenthau himself initially struggled to find a way to overcome
the motivational and representational challenges of prospective nuclear catastrophe without
succumbing to these dangerous forms of denial. Morgenthau’s difficulty in finding the language and
imagery appropriate to “thinking about the unthinkable” is understandable. While he agreed with
Kahn that we must confront the unthinkable in order to prevent it, he could accept neither the RAND
strategist’s economistic optimism nor the redemptive hopes to which it had helped to give birth.
Perversely, the optimistic and redemptive confrontations with the unthinkable seemed to make
13
nuclear annihilation more likely by suggesting that we could survive and even prosper after a nuclear
war and by providing moral cover for those preparing to wage it. Morgenthau needed a means to
confront nuclear annihilation in a way that might render the unthinkable less probable.8
By the early 1960s, he had found his own way to confront these possibilities. Both the
expressive style of these later writings and their existential preoccupations mark a definitive break
from his earlier Cold War work.9 This break is clearest in his remarkable essay, “Death in a Nuclear
Age.”
10
The essay attempts to overcome the motivational and representational challenges of
prospective catastrophe by wrenching readers out of their dangerous denial and complacency.
Morgenthau closes the essay with an unambiguous declaration of nuclear novelty that takes square
aim at conventionalization strategies of denial. Implicating both himself and his readers, he warns: “In
spite of what some of us know in our reason, we continue to think and act as though the possibility
of nuclear death portended only a quantitative extension of the mass destruction of the past and not
a qualitative transformation of the meaning of our existence” (Morgenthau 1961a, 234). More
fundamentally, however, offers a bleak account of a nuclear apocalypse that seems aimed at depriving
the audience of the usual mechanisms for coping with death and collective annihilation. It elicits an
existential fear and then denies our usual strategies for managing and lessening that fear.
In this respect, Morgenthau’s growing concerns align him with “nuclear realism,” a position that incorporates a realist
assessment of the nuclear threat with radical proposals for international political transformation (van Munster and Sylvest
2014; van Munster and Sylvest forthcoming).
9 Scheuerman (2009: 146-52) makes a persuasive case that Morgenthau’s reading of Karl Jaspers’ Future of Mankind in an
Atomic Age—a book that his colleague and friend Hannah Arendt had asked him to review in 1958—helped him to glimpse
the fundamental transformation that thermonuclear revolution had wrought. Morgenthau, like Jaspers, eventually came to
argue that a collective awareness of the threat of nuclear annihilation could provide a basis for the moral and political
transformation of man (see Jaspers 1958, 4 and passim).
10 This change in Morgenthau’s thought exemplified in this essay has also been identified and discussed by Craig (2003)
and Scheuerman (2009). While the two treatments differ on the question of how to characterize Morgenthau’s nuclear
writings from the late 1950s (Craig takes Morgenthau to be defending the status quo and affirming “a militaristic cold war
line,” while Scheuerman sees a deep ambivalence), they share a common concern with identifying and explaining a shift
in Morgenthau’s nuclear writings (Craig 2003, 96-7; Scheuerman, 137-42). The treatment I offer here, in contrast, is more
focused on the rhetorical purpose Morgenthau sought to achieve in these later writings (and the “Death” essay in
particular) and how to square this rhetorical purpose (and the means used to achieve it) with his other principled
commitments.
8
14
Death, Morgenthau explains, “is the great scandal in the experience of man.” It negates
everything that “man experiences as specifically human in his existence: the consciousness of himself
and of his world, the remembrance of things past and the anticipation of things to come, a creativeness
in thought and action which aspires to, and approximates, the eternal” (1961a, 231). Man preserves
his humanity by transcending death. Historically, he has done this in three ways: he has denied the
reality of death through a faith in human immortality, he has sought mastery over death through
suicide or heroic sacrifice, and he has conquered death by achieving worldly immortality through his
deeds and works. The secular modern age has deprived us of the first strategy, while the looming
possibility of nuclear death has made the other two absurd.
Many religious believers transcend death through a belief in the immortality of the person.
They may assume “that the finiteness of man’s biological existence is but apparent and that his body
will live on in another world” (Morgenthau 1961a, 231). Alternatively, they may insist that our
specifically human attributes will survive the worldly destruction of our bodies and be preserved in
another realm whose shape we can but dimly grasp. Morgenthau argues that religious immortality is
no longer available to us in a secular age. And perhaps this is not something that we should lament. If
we still had the comfort of religious belief, we could await nuclear death with calm acceptance. Perhaps
we could even muster some enthusiasm as we “look forward to the day of the great slaughter as a day
on which the preparatory and vain life on this earth would come to an end for most of us and the
true, eternal life in another world begin” (1961a, 234). Morgenthau’s insistence that this strategy is no
longer available to modern man seems to ignore the persistence of religious belief in the secular age.
One can only guess at the reasons for his insistence. Perhaps it is a rather blunt rhetorical move aimed
at quickly dispensing with the possibility of confronting nuclear death with a sense of hopeful
anticipation. Or, perhaps he is making a more nuanced point about the effects of secularization. Of
course there remain substantial portions of humanity that do have recourse to beliefs about the
15
immortality of the body or soul. They can still look forward to nuclear destruction as the cataclysmic
prerequisite for an eternal life in a new world. However, the doubt and skepticism of modernity mean
that this strategy is, at best, one that can be privately contemplated by the individual believer. It cannot
form the basis of a collective and public attempt to grapple with the meaning of death in a nuclear
era.
Without a faith in immortality, modern secular man is left with two alternatives, both of which
are rendered absurd in the face of nuclear annihilation. First, he can attempt to master death by
choosing to end his life through suicide or sacrifice. The latter choice gives him the best chance of
being remembered for posterity. The hero who freely sacrifices himself for a cause gives his death
and, retrospectively, his life a larger meaning. However, this meaning depends on the existence of a
culture or civilization that will live on to interpret and remember this courageous sacrifice.
Morgenthau’s colleague and friend Hannah Arendt had made a similar point some years earlier,
suggesting that “man can be courageous only as long as he knows he is survived by those who are like
him, that he fulfills a role in something more permanent than himself” ([1954] 1994, 421). Drawing
on examples from Greek mythology, Morgenthau reasons: “Patroclus dies to be avenged by Achilles.
Hector dies to be mourned by Priam. Yet if Patroclus, Hector, and all those who could remember
them were killed simultaneously, what would become of the meaning of Patroclus’ and Hector’s
deaths?” (Morgenthau 1961a, 233). For the heroic individual, the value and meaning of his death may
well depend on the assumption that human beings and certain shared understandings will persist when
he is gone. Without this expectation, his sacrifice would not be valuable or intelligible to him.11
The mass death that would result from the deployment of a thermonuclear weapon would
deprive the individual hero of both the opportunity for a freely willed sacrifice and a surviving culture
For a philosophical argument for the connection between leading a “value-laden life” and the assumption that one will
be survived by a human future, see Scheffler (2013). For a philosophical argument for the connection between leading a
meaningful and intelligible life, on the one hand, and cultural persistence, on the other, see: Lear (2006).
11
16
that could understand and honor this sacrifice. Even if some manage to survive a nuclear war,
individual deaths would lose any heroic significance:
There is meaning in Leonidas falling at Thermopylae, in Socrates drinking the cup of
hemlock, in Jesus nailed to the cross. There can be no meaning in the slaughter of the
innocent, the murder of six million Jews, the prospective nuclear destruction of, say
fifty million Americans and an equal number of Russians. There is, then, a radical
difference in meaning between a man risking death by an act of will and fifty million
people simultaneously reduced—by somebody switching a key thousands of miles
away—to radioactive ashes, indistinguishable from the ashes of their houses, books,
and animals (Morgenthau 1961a, 233).
When death tolls are measured in the millions, lives and deaths have no meaning. The specifically
human qualities of the dead will be effaced as the remnants of persons with minds, experiences,
memories, and attachments are irretrievably co-mingled with the ashes of physical objects and other
animals. Human remains will be unsalvageable and therefore unavailable for the individuation of the
dead required by almost all practices of mourning and commemoration. Here, Morgenthau calls to
mind not only the staggering death tolls but also the mass graves of the Nazi genocide.12 Their sheer
number, he suggests, rob the dead of the possibility of worldly immortality through heroic sacrifice.
What is remembered, if there is anyone left to remember, is “the quantity of the killed—six million,
twenty million, fifty million—not the quality of one man’s death as over and against another’s”
(Morgenthau 1961a, 233). Thus, the heroic individual is both physically obliterated by being reduced
to radioactive ashes and historically annihilated by being denied the hope of posterity.
Here again, Morgenthau’s strategy aligns him with the “nuclear realists” (and especially Günter Anders, Lewis Mumford,
and John Herz) who similarly used the Holocaust as “a reference point, fable and symbol of a thoroughly disenchanted
and technologized world” (van Munster and Sylvest 2014, 534).
12
17
So much for heroism. The second way in which modern secular man transcends death is by
leaving behind the works of his will and his hands as evidence of his existence. He lives on through
his children. He creates monuments, leaving behind “an inheritance of visible things not to be
consumed but to be preserved as tangible mementos of past generations…’Roma eterna,’ ‘the Reich of
a thousand years’ are but the most ambitious attempts to perpetuate man and his deeds. The tree he
has planted, the house that he has built, have been given a life likely to last longer than his own”
(Morgenthau 1961a, 232). Perhaps most importantly, man produces works of the imagination—
books, poetry, art—which are lasting testaments to a distinctly human capacity for creativity. When
he creates, man participates in “an unbroken chain emerging from the past and reaching into the
future, which is made of the same stuff his mind is made of and, hence, is capable of participating in,
and perpetuating, his mind’s creation” (Morgenthau 1961a, 233). These acts of creation are where, as
Arendt had suggested, both “the task and potential greatness of mortals lie.” Through the production
of “works and deeds and words…mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is
immortal except themselves” (Arendt [1958] 1998, 19). Even if it did not bring about human
extinction, a nuclear catastrophe would destroy the “common world” which these works, deeds, and
words help to build—the artifacts, institutions, and communities that bind us “not only with those
who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us”
(Arendt [1958] 1998, 55). Without such a common world, the biological immortality of the human
species would persist as long as individual members survived. What a nuclear catastrophe would
destroy, however, is our knowledge of this immortality. Generations would live and die in ignorance
of one another. Even if we were to accept the optimistic assessments of the early 1960s that a
thermonuclear attack would not lead to extinction and would “only” kill 50 to 100 million Americans,
it would nevertheless make it impossible for any individual to envisage a human future that would
18
survive him (Schell 1982).13 To the extent that the assumption of such a future is necessary for leading
a “value-laden” life, individual survivors would lead lives of depressed motivation and insidious
indifference (Scheffler 2013, 72). For Morgenthau, this is the terrifying loss wrought by nuclear
catastrophe and the reason that all humans share to fear it.
Morgenthau’s essay then takes its most decisive turn, as it rhetorically performs the nuclear
catastrophe whose enormity his contemporaries have systematically failed to grasp:
Nuclear destruction is mass destruction, both of persons and of things. It signifies the
simultaneous destruction of tens of millions of people, of whole families, generations,
and societies, of all things that they have inherited and created. It signifies total
destruction of whole societies by killing their members, destroying their visible
achievements, and therefore reducing the survivors to barbarism. Thus nuclear
destruction destroys the meaning of death by depriving it of its individuality. It
destroys the meaning of immortality by making both society and history impossible.
It destroys the meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself (1961a, 233).
Morgenthau calls forth all of the markers of the common world only then to rhetorically
annihilate them. In so doing, he offers the reader an apocalyptic vision of nuclear catastrophe in which
the suffering and death of millions are deprived of collective meaning. The essay at once appeals to
an existential fear and denies its readers the possibility of managing this fear through the hope of
transcendence.14
I take this to be what is at stake in Morgenthau’s insistence that even if there were survivors of a nuclear attack,
“civilization” would not be able to withstand the shock. The point is also made in Morgenthau (1961c).
14 In this way, Morgenthau’s strategy anticipates terror management theory, which posits that cultural worldviews that
encompass notions of literal or symbolic immortality “manage existential terror by providing a meaningful, orderly, and
comforting conception of the world that helps us to come to grips with the problem of death” (Pysczynski 2003, 830). It
is precisely this coping mechanism that Morgenthau wants to thwart.
13
19
Why might Morgenthau have thought such a strategy warranted and appropriate, especially
given his principled worries about the political uses of fear? Recall that he worried, along broadly
liberal democratic lines, that fear appeals displace democratic contestation by making survival the
overwhelming aim of political life and imperil democratic deliberation by securing citizen acquiescence
through emotional manipulation rather than persuasion. We already have a partial answer to the
question of why Morgenthau might nonetheless have found such a strategy warranted and appropriate
in the nuclear case. There are particular features of the problem of potential nuclear catastrophe that
might plausibly give some warrant for a politics of fear.15 These include the existential scope of an allout nuclear war, its prospective nature, its linked motivational and representational challenges, and the
tendencies of denial that these challenges enable. We can complete the answer by attending to
Morgenthau’s account of the solution to nuclear catastrophe. Since the late 1940’s, Morgenthau had
recognized that the only completely reliable safeguard against total catastrophe was a world state with
a monopoly on nuclear violence: “It is only when nations have surrendered the means of destruction
which modern technology has put in their hands to a higher authority—when they have given up their
sovereignty—that international peace can be made as secure as domestic peace” (1948b, 445).16 Yet
such a state was not possible in the absence of a world society and such a society would not be possible
without some underlying human unity (Craig 2003).17 The unity of mankind would have to precede
At roughly the same time as Morgenthau’s had turned to existential fear appeals, another German-Jewish émigré scholar,
Günther Anders was making a case for existential fear appeals. For Anders, the magnitude of the nuclear threat vastly
overpowered our capacity to fear. He called upon his readers to increase their “capacity to fear” and to “have the courage
to be frightened, and to frighten others, too.” He envisioned the possibility of a fearless, stirring, and loving fear that
expands the scope of our moral concern and invites, rather than forecloses, collective deliberation. To my knowledge,
Morgenthau does not cite Anders in any of his published work. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think that
Morgenthau would have been familiar with Anders’ ideas. Like Morgenthau, Anders had been a German-Jewish émigré
intellectual in postwar America and he was the ex-husband of Morgenthau’s friend and University of Chicago colleague
Hannah Arendt. I am grateful to Kyle Haines and Jean-Pierre Dupuy for directing to me to Anders’ nuclear writings and
to Casper Sylvest for conversations about potential connections between Morgenthau and Anders.
16 The fact that Morgenthau could not see far beyond a world state as a solution to the dilemmas of the nuclear age reflects,
I suspect, a product of an uncritically Hobbesian (or Schmittian) view of sovereignty as necessarily unified and indivisible.
17 Campbell Craig summarizes this rather unusual line of argument: “for a world state to emerge, a world society would
have to form, with enough power and influence to: a) persuade majorities of the world’s national populations to transfer
15
20
the creation of a world state. In a world marked by crusading Cold War ideologies, this kind of unity
seemed like a dim and futile hope.
By the 1960s, however, Morgenthau had begun to recognize in the prospect of nuclear
catastrophe not just a novel threat, but also a novel possibility. It presents us with nothing less than
an opportunity to effect a fundamental transformation of humanity. An inchoate “awareness of the
unity of mankind,” long submerged by crusading ideologies, has been sharpened by the common fear
of nuclear death ([1961] 1962, 174-5). Our longing to give some political and institutional form to this
unity has been greatly strengthened in the nuclear age “by the desire, innate in all men, for selfpreservation.” This desire could now be harnessed, in a way that had previously been impossible, to
abolish “international relations itself through the merger of all national sovereignties into one world
state which would have a monopoly of the most destructive instruments of violence” ([1961] 1962,
175).
However, Morgenthau’s essay on nuclear death betrays some doubt about whether we can rely
on this innate desire to emerge on its own as a political force. Clinging to the hope of secular
immortality, we fail to grasp the enormity of the nuclear threat. Our fear of mortal death cannot always
be relied upon as a natural force. It must sometimes be actively cultivated. One way to read
Morgenthau’s account of nuclear death is as an attempt to cultivate this kind of salutary fear. He strips
his readers of the comforts of secular immortality and leaves them with a terrifying account of nuclear
catastrophe that facilitates the cultivation of a salutary fear. He envisions a radical transformation of
human nature. No longer would humans be driven by our pursuit of power or our will to dominate.
In the shadow of nuclear catastrophe, self-preservation would become our guiding motivation and the
basis for a project of permanent peace. Thus prepared, perhaps his audience will be more willing to
their loyalties from their own state to a world entity; b) ensure somehow that the citizens of the world state can expect
justice from it; and c) then compel all of the world’s states to turn over their arms to a new world entity” (2003, 66).
21
accept our common humanity and to contemplate the possibility of a world state. In the shadow of
annihilation, Morgenthau seeks to strip rob his readers of the comforts of nuclear denial and to replace
it with an existential fear. On this interpretation, both the gravity of the nuclear threat and the
preconditions for its institutional remedies mean that existential fear appeals are warranted and
appropriate.
I have argued that particular features of the problem of nuclear catastrophe as well as
Morgenthau’s assessment of the solution to this problem explain why he might have envisioned that
fear might serve a salutary and civic purpose. On the most charitable construal of this strategy,
Morgenthau’s existential fear appeal seeks to make palpable a threat whose seriousness had been
obscured by the particular motivational and representational challenges that attend prospective
catastrophes. By prompting us to acknowledge our common humanity, this existential fear appeal
encourages collective foresight and asks us to envision the possibility of radically new forms of political
order.18
Yet, even on this charitable construal, Morgenthau’s existential fear appeal encounters
normative difficulties. If my reconstruction of his aim and means is accurate, he is confronting his
reader with a choice between nuclear annihilation and the world state. The normative problem here is
that the very means that may be necessary to overcome the motivational and representational
challenges of prospective catastrophe—the portrayal of the nuclear threat as an apocalyptic menace
that threatens humanity—also engender a sense of debilitating fatalism that potentially undermines
the force of the fear appeal. How is the ordinary reader, who is hardly in a position to bring about a
world state even by the most indirect means, supposed to confront the nuclear threat as anything
18
For an Aristotelian account of how fear appeals can encourage collective foresight, see Pfau 2007.
22
other than a terrifying inevitability?19 Aristotle’s conception of the rhetorical function of fear can help
to pin down this concern more precisely. For fear to serve a salutary and civic purpose, it must be
capable of prompting collective judgment, deliberation, and action. If fear is to serve this purpose,
“there must be some hope of being saved from the cause of the agony…no one deliberates about
hopeless things” (Aristotle 1991, 141; see also Pfau 2007). A salutary and civic fear appeal must present
us with an outcome that is not necessary but contingent—an outcome that it is within our power to
affect. By closing off any options between nuclear catastrophe and the world state and by denying
readers the comforts of heroism and immortality, Morgenthau’s strategy of salutary fear risks eliciting
a paralyzing hopelessness. This, I suggest, is a paradox that prospective catastrophes all too easily
engender—the kind of fear appeal necessary to overcome their motivational and representational
challenges is liable to elicit the sort of debilitating fatalism that undermines collective action.
3. Salutary Fear and Climate Change
In this final section of the paper, I want to suggest that Morgenthau’s principled attempt to
come to grips with nuclear annihilation can give us analytic and normative purchase on questions
surrounding the role of fear appeals in the contemporary climate change debate. This may seem like a
rather forced connection. There are certainly important differences between the problems of nuclear
and climate catastrophe. 20 My claim is not that the two problems are the same across all dimensions.
That Morgenthau was aiming at a general audience (as opposed to an audience of high-level public decision-makers) is
suggested by the publication venues for his early 1960s nuclear writings: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Christianity and Crisis,
Commentary, New York Times, Saturday Review, and Washington Post. For a fuller account, see: Scheuerman (2009, 142-52).
20 One seemingly obvious disanalogy centers on the question of agency. During the Cold War at least, the agents capable
of bringing about nuclear catastrophe were a small number of political elites exercising active agency. In the context of
climate change, by contrast, causal agency is less active and more diffuse. There are at least two possible lines of response.
First, it is not clear how much the disanalogy matters for the analysis offered here. If anything, the less active and more
diffuse agency involved in the climate change case make the representational and motivational challenges, as well as the
temptations toward denial, even more pronounced. This, if anything, might provide an even stronger warrant for a politics
of fear. Second, the disanalogy may be less pronounced than it initially seems. Given the structure of the nuclear situation
(i.e. the strong temptations to pursue a first strike in times of crisis the imperative of ensuring a deterrent automatic second
strike capability), it is not clear how much active agency political elites saw themselves as capable of exercising in the
nuclear case. Thanks to Mark Budolfson, Bert Kerstetter, Melissa Lane, and Robert Socolow for pressing on this point.
19
23
Rather, is that they are sufficiently similar across those dimensions that are relevant for our evaluation
of the appropriateness of existential fear appeals. First, as prospective catastrophes, both nuclear
annihilation and climate change pose existential threat.21 Second, both nuclear catastrophe and global
climate change have been subject to organized forms of political denial. Several of the most powerful
strategies of nuclear denial are rehearsed in the first section of the paper. While nuclear denial focuses
on countering claims to radical novelty and offering compelling survival scenarios, global climate
change denial is centered on challenging scientific and expert claims about the existence, causes, and
likely effects of the phenomenon. The most powerful instances of global climate change denial have
been carried out by organized and well-funded movements whose goal is to generate epistemological
and scientific doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010; Jacques et al 2008). A different but ultimately
complementary strategy has been to accept the scientific findings on climate change but to challenge
the seriousness of the problem or the priority of its mitigation relative to other policy goals (e.g.
Lomberg 2001). These challenges and questions have been amplified by a media environment where
the norm of balanced reporting has given members of the denial movement an amount of time and
airspace that is vastly disproportionate to the balance of evidence on the issue (Boykoff and Boykoff
2004).22
Third, both forms of prospective catastrophe suffer from connected motivational and
representational difficulties. Both sets of challenges are more pronounced in the climate change case.
At the motivational level, because the effects of climate change are “temporally and spatially remote
from the individual,” it can be difficult to recognize the phenomenon as a moral problem in which
one’s actions are implicated (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009, 360). Unlike those forms of
See footnote 1 for a definition of “existential threat.”
While it is clear that these denial strategies have helped structure the public debate and actively supported political inertia
on climate change, their causal effect on patterns of public opinion remains contested. For a quick summary of the evidence
on this question, see Nisbet (2011).
21
22
24
interaction most easily identified as moral wrongs, “climate change is not a matter of a clearly
identifiable individual acting intentionally so as to inflict harm on another identifiable individual,
closely related in time and space” (Jamieson 2011, 44).23 Even if one is prompted to admit that one
has moral obligations to change one’s individual practices and priorities and to advocate domestic and
intergovernmental action to deal with climate change, one may nonetheless still find these
commitments under threat. The fact that climate change mitigation will require changes in both
collective and individual practices and priorities makes this prospective catastrophe especially
vulnerable to moral rationalizations, or attempts to weaken the demandingness of our moral
obligations in order to reconcile them with our needs and inclinations (Gardiner 2011, 301-38).
These motivational difficulties are connected to representational challenges. Both nuclear and
climate change catastrophes are difficult to visualize. Here again, the prospective catastrophe of
climate change may prove comparatively more challenging. Rob Nixon suggests that climate change
is a form of “slow violence…that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction
that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence
at all.” While its longer-term effects may persist and unfold in a similarly slow and attritional manner,
the immediate outcomes of nuclear catastrophe are more easily incorporated into our customary
understandings of violence “as immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting
into instant sensational visibility.” Global climate change may have its own sensational moments, but
the causes of these cataclysms are complex and contested and their resultant casualties often
postponed. Gradual environmental catastrophes therefore “present formidable representational
obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert suggests another reason why climate change may not be easily recognized as a moral
problem—it does not activate the moral emotions. We don’t find it “indecent, impious or repulsive…Yes, global warming
is bad but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we
do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by
gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets” (Gilbert 2006, np).
23
25
and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from…climate change—
are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.” How, Nixon asks, “can we
turn to long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and
warrant political intervention…?” (2011, 2-3).
Morgenthau had dealt with this problem in the nuclear case by deploying apocalyptic imagery
and an existentially terrifying meditation on nuclear death in order to cultivate the kind of salutary fear
needed to create new forms of global political order. A similar strategy appears to be at work in certain
prominent corners of the climate change debate. The April 3, 2006 of cover of Time Magazine provides
a now iconic example. It featured a lone polar bear on a shrinking ice floe with the caption: “Global
Warming: Be worried. Be VERY worried.” Many of these fear appeals draw overtly on an apocalyptic
imaginary. Consider James Lovelock’s vision of a future of climate catastrophe: “the evidence coming
in from the watchers around the world brings news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one
that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now
alive will survive” (2007, 147).
However, perhaps the most prominent examples of overt deployments of catastrophic and
apocalyptic images for the purpose of cultivating fear come from Al Gore’s contributions to the
climate change debate. In Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which was marketed
as “the most terrifying film you will ever see,” the viewer is shown a particularly devastating set of
images of communities, neighborhoods, and landscapes annihilated by “natural” disasters. These
images visually perform the task of Morgenthau’s annihilatory rhetoric. They are at once metonyms
of our common worldly life and of its annihilation. Pausing briefly to allow the viewer to take in the
force of these images, Gore then notes that they are “like a nature hike through the book of
Revelations [sic].” Unlike the biblical apocalypse, however, this will be an end wrought by human
agency and deprived of any ultimate redemption or transcendent meaning.
26
There is little doubt that, for Gore, the fear elicited by apocalyptic imagery is a civic and
salutary one. With distinct echoes of the arguments of Morgenthau on nuclear fear, Gore suggests:
Today, there are dire warnings that the worst catastrophe in the history of human
civilization is bearing down on us, gathering strength as it comes…[T]he tragedy of
Hurricane Katrina…as horrible as it was, may have been the first sip of a bitter cup
which will proffered to us over and over again until we act on the truth we have wished
would go away…This crisis is bringing us an opportunity to experience what few
generations in history ever have the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the
exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of
being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle
the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise (2006, np).
We can discern several familiar moves here. First, Gore collapses the cataclysmic time horizon and
casts the prospective catastrophe of climate change as both an imminent and contemporary problem.
It is “bearing down on us, gathering strength as it comes.” This catastrophe, he notes earlier, “could
be set in motion in the lifetime of children already living—unless we act boldly and quickly…We are
in grave danger of crossing a point of no return within the next 10 years!” (Gore 2005, np). Second,
Gore attempts to bridge the imaginative gap of the prospective catastrophe by invoking a terrifying
contemporary analog—the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, “the first sip of a bitter cup which will
be proffered to us over and over again” (Gore 2006, np).24 Gore also gestures to the totalizing
imaginative analog of the Holocaust when he compares the political inertia on climate change to
Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and the gathering storm of ecological devastation to the “evil
threat posed by the Nazis.” Third, like Morgenthau, Gore discerns in this prospective catastrophe a
Beyond echoing Churchill’s condemnation of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in a 1938 speech to the House of
Commons, the language of “proffered cups” calls to mind the cups of God’s wrath in Revelation.
24
27
transcendent and unifying purpose. It is an opportunity that must compel us to “put aside…the
pettiness and conflict” of everyday politics and “to rise.” Gore asks us to bask in the “thrill of being
forced by circumstances” to confront a radically novel and “unprecedented danger” (Gore 2006, np).25
For Morgenthau, the prospective catastrophe of nuclear annihilation was capable of making
individuals conscious of their shared humanity, allowing them to overcome the conflicts, differences,
and particularities that normally define the political condition. Gore’s apocalyptic framing of climate
change seems to rest on a similar set of connections. Rightly imagined, this prospective catastrophe
will be an opportunity to put aside the “petty” conflicts of everyday politics and to acknowledge a
“compelling moral purpose.” As we have seen, a familiar criticism of fear appeals is that they elicit a
terrifying existential anxiety that robs everyday politics of its vigor and struggle. In the place of debate,
disagreement, and courageous dissent, we are promised security and predictability (Morgenthau 1960;
Gourevitch 2010, 421-4). In Gore’s hands, the exchange is largely reversed. In place of the trivial and
staid politics of the everyday, we are offered a thrilling and heroic politics of catastrophe.
As powerful, deliberate, and affecting as this attempt to grapple with prospective catastrophe
is and as rational as it is to fear the threat posed by global climate change, I think we have normative
reasons to be wary of such a fear appeal. To be sure, Gore’s approach, like that of many other
prominent environmental activists, is less bleak than Morgenthau’s. It explicitly invites political
courage and enthusiasm. Yet it nonetheless suffers from the paradox engendered by prospective
catastrophes. Gore’s fear appeal attempts to overcome the motivational and representational
challenges of global climate change by relying on apocalyptic imagery that can easily engender a
paralyzing sense of fatalism that undercuts the moral and civic aim of the fear appeal. The very means
it uses to make the threat of climate change salient potentially erodes the audience’s sense of efficacy
in confronting the threat. Scholars studying climate change communication have provided empirical
25
Many made similar arguments about the “thrill” induced by 9/11 (Robin 2006).
28
evidence that this worry is not misplaced. Many attempts to cultivate existential fears about climate
change through the use of catastrophic and apocalyptic narratives and imagery tend to prompt feelings
of powerlessness, fatalism, and disengagement. Faced with a prospective catastrophe of unimaginable
magnitude, many are inclined to conclude—not entirely without good reason—that any individual
actions they take will be futile (McComas and Shanahan 1999; Moser and Dilling 2004; O’Neill and
Nicholson Cole 2009; and more generally Ruiter et al. 2014). When existential fear appeals prompt
audiences to see the threat of global climate change as necessary rather than contingent, they
undermine any salutary value that such appeals might otherwise have had. To put it another way, the
means used to make the threat salient to audiences are parasitic on their sense of efficacy. Rather than
prompting collective judgment, deliberation, and action, such appeals elicit collective paralysis.
Conclusion: From Fear to Hope
I have argued that there are features of prospective catastrophes that pose particular kinds of
motivational and representational challenges that in turn make individual and collective denial easier.
These features and challenges, along with Hans Morgenthau’s assessment of the solution to nuclear
catastrophe, provide a plausible account of why he would have embraced the use of existential fear
appeals, despite his principled worries about such strategies. I have also suggested that a similar logic
is at work in contemporary responses to the threat of global climate change—a prospective
catastrophe for which the relevant motivational and representational challenges are arguably even
more pronounced. In both cases, I have argued that existential fear appeals have the potential to
produce a paradoxical effect. The very rhetorical strategies necessary to overcome the motivational
and representational challenges of making the threat of prospective catastrophe salient can leave
audiences with a sense of debilitating fatalism. This fatalism thwarts the salutary and civic function of
existential fear appeals by eroding the hope and efficacy required for collective judgment, deliberation,
29
and action. For fear to incline us toward civic action, we must see it as within our own power to avert
the relevant threat.
I have suggested that this paradoxical effect is particularly pronounced in cases of prospective
catastrophes. However, this may not be a necessary effect of existential fear appeals in such cases. There
are at least some empirically-supported reasons for modest hope in this regard. Scholars of climate
change communication posit that when existential fear appeals are paired with proposed actions that
both plausibly respond to the threat and can be feasibly carried out by audiences and citizens, this
paradoxical effect might be averted (Maibach et al. 2008, 494-5; Moser and Dilling 2011, 164-5; O’Neill
and Nicholson Cole 2009, 375-7). For this reason, a genuinely salutary fear is perhaps more likely in
response to the threat of climate change than nuclear annihilation. In the former case, where individual
and local action can more plausibly play a role in mitigation of and adaptation to the threat, it seems
well within our reach to pair apocalyptic visions of climate catastrophe with images and arguments
that allow people to see the threat as a contingent one. This possibility cuts against the suggestion that
we should, as some environmentalists have argued (e.g. Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2014; Nordhaus
and Shellenberger 2007), give up entirely on existential fear appeals. To be sure the hope about
effective fear appeals in this case is, at best, a modest and challenging one. What does seem clear is
that liberal and other critics of a politics of fear have not yet grappled squarely with the profound
motivational and representational difficulties of prospective catastrophes. Whether these difficulties
amount to a temptation toward the politics of fear that must be resisted or a challenge that might be
successfully navigated is a debate that urgently remains to be had.
30
Bibliography
Anders, Günther Anders. 1962. “Theses for the Atomic Age.” The Massachusetts Review 3 (3): 493-505.
Arendt, Hannah. [1954] 1994. “European and the Atom Bomb.” Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954:
Formation, Exile, and Totalitarnianism, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 418-422.
Arendt, Hannah. [1958] 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bostrom, Nick and Milan M. Cirkovic. 2008. “Introduction.” In Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick
Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-30.
Boykoff, Maxwell T. and Jules M. Boykoff. 2004. “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige
press.” Global Environmental Change 14: 125-136.
Craig, Campbell. 2003. Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and
Waltz. New York: Columbia University Press.
Evrigenis, Ioannis D. 2008. Fear of Enemies and the Logic of Collective Action. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Feinberg, Matthew and Robb Willer. 2011. “Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in
Global Warming by Contradicting Just-World Beliefs.” Psychological Science 22, no. 1: 34-8.
Frei, Christoph. 2001. Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University.
Furedi, Frank. 2005. Politics of Fear. London: Continuum.
Gardiner, Stephen M. 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gilbert, Daniel. 2006. “If only gay sex caused global warming.” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006,
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/02/opinion/op-gilbert2 (accessed April 16, 2014).
Gore, Al. 2006. “The Moment of Truth.”
Vanity Fair, May 2006,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/05/gore200605 (accessed April 17,
2014).
Gourevitch, Alex. 2010. “Environmentalism—Long Live the Politics of Fear.” Public Culture 22 (3):
411-24.
Guilhot, Nicolas. 2010. “American Katechon: When Political Theology Became International
Relations Theory.” Constellations 17 (2): 224-53.
Jacques, Peter J., Riley E. Dunlap, and Mark Freeman. 2008. “The organization of denial: Conservative
think tanks and environmental scepticism.” Environmental Politics 17 (3): 349-85.
Jamieson, Dale. 2011. “The Nature of the Problem.” In The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and
Society, eds. John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 38-54.
Jervis, Robert. 1984. The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kahn, Herman. 1960. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kahn, Herman. 1962. Thinking About the Unthinkable. New York: Horizon Press.
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Life. 1961. “Let’s Prepare Shelters.” Life, October 13, 1961, 4.
Lomberg, Bjørn. 2001. The skeptical environmentalist: Measuing the real state of the world. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Lovelock, James. 2007. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York:
Basic Books.
Maibach, Edward W., Connie Roser-Renouf, and Anthony Leiserowitz. 2008. “Communication and
Marketing as Climate Change—Intervention Assets: A Public Health Perspective.” American
Journal of Preventative Medicine 35 (5): 488-500.
31
McComas, Katherine and James Shanahan. 1999. “Telling Stories About Global Climate Change:
Measuring the Impact of Narratives on Issue Cycles.” Communication Research 26 (1): 30-57.
McQueen, Alison. Forthcoming. “The Case for Kinship: Classical Realism and Political Realism.” In
Politics Recovered: The Return of Realist Political Thought, ed. Matt Sleat. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Morgenthau, Hans. J. 1946. “Naziism.” Reprinted in The Decline of Democratic Politics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962, 227-40.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1948a. “The Twilight of International Morality.” Ethics 58 (2): 79-99.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1948b. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1950. “Power Politics.” In The Atomic Era: Can it Bring Peace and Abundance?, ed.
Freda Kirchway. New York: Medill McBride, 36-50.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1955. “The Corruption of Patriotism.” Reprinted in The Decline of Democratic
Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 390-408.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1956. “Has Atomic War Really Become Impossible?” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 12 (1): 7-9.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1957. “Atomic Force and Foreign Policy: Can the ‘New Pacifism’ Insure Peace?”
Commentary 23: 501-5.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1960. The Purpose of American Politics. New York: Vintage.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1961a. “Death in a Nuclear Age.” Commentary 32: 231-234.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1961b. “An Atomic Philosophy.” Saturday Review, February 18, 1961, 18-19.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1961c. “Western Values and Total War” (with Sidney Hook, H. Stuart Hughes,
and C.P. Snow), Commentary 32: 277-302.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1961d. “Threat to—and Hope For—the U.N.,” New York Times Magazine,
October 29, 1961, SM 21.
Morgenthau, Hans J. [1961] 1962. “International Relations.” In The Restoration of American Politics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 167-75.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1964a. “The Coming Test of American Democracy.” Reprinted in Truth and
Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960-70. New York: Praeger, 1970, 209-14.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1964b. “The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy.” American Political Science Review
58 (1): 23-35.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1967. “What Ails America?” Reprinted in Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade,
1960-70. New York: Praeger, 1970, 29-39.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1972. Science: Servant or Master? New York: New American University.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1976. “The Fallacy of Thinking Conventionally about Nuclear Weapons.” In
Arms Control and Technological Innovation, eds. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 255-64.
Moser, Susanne C. 2007. “More bad news: the risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate
change information.” In Creating a Climate of Change: Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change,
eds. Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64-80.
Moser, Susanne C. and Lisa Dilling. 2004. “Making Climate Hot: Communicating the Urgency and
Challenge of Global Climate Change.” Environment 46 (10): 32-46.
Moser, Susanne C. and Lisa Dilling, 2011. “Communicating Climate Change: Closing the ScienceAction Gap.” In Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, eds. John Dryzek, Richard B.
Norgaard, and David Schlosberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 161-74.
Newman, James R. 1961. “Two discussions of thermonuclear war.” Scientific American 204 (3): 197204.
32
Nisbet, Matthew C. 2011. “Public Opinion and Participation.” In Oxford Handbook of Climate Change
and Society, eds. John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Schlosberg. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 355-68.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Nordhaus, Ted and Michael Shellenberger. 2014. “Global Warming Scare Tactics.” New York Times,
April 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/opinion/global-warming-scaretactics.html?_r=0 (accessed April 15, 2014).
Nordhaus, Ted and Michael Shellenberger. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to
the Politics of Possibility. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
O’Neill, Dan. 1994. The Firecracker Boys. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
O’Neill, Saffron and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. 2009. “‘Fear Won’t Do it’: Promoting Positive
Engagement with Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations.” Science
Communication 30 (3): 355-79.
Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the
Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury.
Pfau, Michael William. 2007. “Who’s Afraid of Fear Appeals? Contingency, Courage, and
Deliberation in Rhetorical Theory and Practice.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40 (2): 216-237.
Pyszczynski, Tom. 2004. “What Are We So Afraid Of? A Terror Management Theory Perspective
on the Politics of Fear.” Social Research 71 (4): 827-48.
Robin, Corey. 2004. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rose, Kenneth D. 2001. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New
York University Press.
Ruiter, Robert A.C., Loes T.E. Kessels, Gjalt-Jorn Y. Peters, and Gerjo Kok. 2014. “Sixty years of
fear appeal research: Current state of the evidence.” International Journal of Psychology 29 (2): 6370.
Scheffler, Samuel. 2013. Death and the Afterlife. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schell, Jonathan. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Albert A. Knopf.
Scheuerman, William E. 2007. “Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and beyond.” In Realism
Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, ed. Michael C. Williams.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62-92.
Scheuerman, William E. 2009. Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity.
Scheuerman, William E. Forthcoming. “Realism and the Autonomy of Politics.” In Politics Recovered:
The Return of Realist Political Thought, ed. Matt Sleat. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shklar, Judith. 1989. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 21-38.
Tannenwald, Nina. 2007. The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since
1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Time. 1961. “Civil Defense: The Sheltered Life.”
Time, October 20, 1961,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872787-9,00.html (accessed April 16,
2014).
Vandercook, Wm. F. 1986. “Making the Very Best of the Very Worst: The ‘Human Effects of Nuclear
Weapons’ Report of 1956.” International Security 11 (1): 184-95.
Van Munster, Rens and Casper Sylvest. 2014. “Reclaiming nuclear politics? Nuclear realism, the Hbomb and globality,” Security Dialogue 45 (6): 530-547.
Van Munster, Rens and Casper Sylvest. Forthcoming. Nuclear Realism: Global political thought during the
thermonuclear revolution. New York: Routledge.
33
Walton, Douglas. 2000. Scare Tactics: Arguments that Appeal to Fear and Threats. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic.
Williams, Michael C. 2011. “Securitization and the liberalism of fear.” Security Dialogue 42 (4-5): 45363.