In Wasted: Modernity and Its Outcasts Zygmunt Bauman draws on Mikhail
Bakhtin’s comments on cosmic fear in order to explore the War on Terror and the
politics of (in)security. Cosmic fear is the ‘human, all-too-human emotion, aroused by
the unearthly, inhuman magnificence of the universe; the kind of fear that precedes
man-made power and serves it as foundation, prototype and inspiration.’
fear is the sense of trepidation felt by the ‘mortal being’ in relation to the enormity of
the universe, the sense of existing in a universe that, without a sense of order-by-
design, creates a feeling of fear and powerless-ness: ‘the sheer weakness, incapacity
to resist, vulnerability of the frail and soft human body that the sight of the ‘starry
heavens’ or the ‘material mass of the mountains’ reveals; but also the realization that
it is not in human power to grasp, comprehend, mentally assimilate that awesome
might which manifests itself in the sheer grandiosity of the universe.’
Cosmic fear results from the terror of uncertainty, the terror of not knowing if
there is a design for life, a logic to the existential condition we find ourselves in. We
feel vulnerable and fragile facing the terror of uncertainty and so look for ways of
overcoming this feeling of uncertainty and fear. For Bakhtin, the sense of cosmic fear
is drawn on in the unfolding of religious systems. Religion, on this view, derives its
power from the promise of security, acting as a mediator on behalf of the fragile and
vulnerable to the insecure universe; at the same time, religion provides us with
answers on the design/logic of the universe we find ourselves in. Cosmic fear emerges
from a universe that ‘does not speak’ but frightens; religion turns a frightening
universe into a frightening God – but a God that constitutes a form of organized
responsibility, a universal authority that can deliver us from insecurity. This drive to
believe transformed human beings into ‘slaves of divine commands.’ But it is also an
act of empowerment: humans could take actions to do ‘something to make sure that
the awesome catastrophes they feared would pass them by.’
become docile in light of godly power but we also have a system that tells us how to
act and why to act in the condition of insecurity: the terror of uncertainty is
ameliorated by the promise of a design, a sense of order to the universe, and an escape
from fragile bodies and insecure earthly environments. Humans found a medicine
against the terror of uncertainty in religion and, providing they observed the Law,
humans would no longer face cosmic fear. Yet as Bauman observes, ‘without
1
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives, p.46
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid p.47
2
Convention