4 Bizarre Fears Humans Left Behind – Watts Up With That?

By Ross Pomeroy

Human beings are a panicky species – quick to fear and slow to understand. Over much of our evolutionary history, this ingrained alarm served us well, keeping us alive in a wild world brimming with dangers. But as humans came to dominate the globe and render the Earth more and more harmless (at least to us, mostly), we started to fret about increasingly innocuous things.

In his 2024 book, Fear/Less: Why Your Lifelong Fears Are Probably Groundless, Professor Wojciech Janicki, who’s based at the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Poland, recounted some of the things humans once feared that probably seem silly to us today. His ultimate point? “Even though humans have solved problem after problem, averting the obliteration of the species, it is still widely believed that catastrophe is almost inevitable.” It’s time to consciously allay our fears and deal with threats as challenges rather than reasons for dejection and doomism.

Here are four formerly widespread fears, many of which were dispelled through innovation:

1. Train Travel. As railway travel proliferated in the 19th century, worries spread in media, scientific literature, and popular culture that this futuristic form of transportation could wreak havoc on passengers’ physical and mental health. It was claimed that jarring movements and loud noises at unnaturally-fast speeds of sixty miles per hour resulted in chronic inflammation, impaired vision, and a nauseating host of other physical ailments. Worse, some people could suffer from “railway neurosis”, driving them temporarily or permanently insane. Habituation to train travel, along with improvements to tracks and locomotives, gradually assuaged travelers’ concerns.

2. Electric Wires. Today, electric wires fade into the background of modern life in much of the world, but in the late 1800s, residents of New York City looked up at them with trepidation. Though fewer than 10 percent of households were connected to the grid at the time, the metropolis was one of the first to see rising adoption. In 1889, when Western Union lineman John Feek was electrocuted on the job, the public’s unease turned into mass panic.

In an article recounting the saga in IEEE Xplore, J.P. Sullivan explained Americans’ thinking more than a century ago. “They believed that new technology would improve society, but at the same time worried that they had no control over the pace and direction of this change… The tension between technological enthusiasm and pessimism created a profound anxiety about electricity and the new urban world it was creating.”

We know what happened. Electrical safety improved, and the benefits of electricity grew too large to relinquish.

3. ‘Drowning’ in Horse Manure. In the 1890s, residents, officials, and planners living in London and New York worried that their streets would eventually become impassible and their cities unlivable from a build-up of horse manure. The hundreds of thousands of horses traversing city blocks to move freight and passengers left behind millions of pounds of fresh feces and urine each day. City cleaners would pile and move the gathered loads to designated locations, but sludgy excrement still caked the streets. As the cities’ populations rose, so, too would the mountains of dung!

Worries quickly evaporated when motorcars and electric streetcars arrived on the scene. “A kind of paradox, don’t you think? A car with a combustion engine was a solution, not a problem!” Janicki commented.

4. Global Population Crash. From Paul Ehrlich in the 1968, to Thomas Malthus 170 years prior, to Confucius in the 6th Century BC, esteemed thinkers have fretted over human population growth. Many portended imminent and catastrophic crashes, often through widespread famine. Thus far, on a global scale, they’ve always been wrong. There are roughly 8.1 billion humans living on Earth today, and global poverty continues to fall, albeit not as fast as it could. Eating too many calories is a more common problem than eating too few. Human population growth will likely halt later this century, but not because of mass death – rather, due to higher living standards and voluntary contraception.

This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.

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