From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SCENE & HEARD
Don't Mock 'Monkey Man'
The West's mass hysterias are no less ridiculous.
Be very afraid. That's the word on the street in New Delhi, whose denizens have been terrorized by a "Monkey Man" with long, metal fingernails which he uses to scratch his victims and push his own "invisibility button."
Eyewitnesses have sworn up and down that the nasty creature looks like a bear, looks like a monkey, has red eyes, has yellow eyes, sprouts wings and can jump rooftops in a single bound.
Funny? Not to the folks in India's capital, who now prowl the streets toting pitchforks and clubs to whack the Monkey Man. Grown men have jumped off rooftops at what they thought was the sound of his approach. A pregnant woman fell to her death down a set of stairs after one purported sighting.
Mythical creatures crop up with some regularity in southern Asia. Malaysia was recently visited by "Oily Man," a slick character who would sneak into girls' bedrooms and put X marks on their foreheads. Headhunter rumors circulate regularly in Borneo. And on an earlier occasion, a group of mysterious old men supposedly kidnapped small Indian children to harvest their organs.
But of late, Western mass hysterias have taken on a political flavor. Whereas many panics in developing lands revolve around mythical figures or physical deformities (such as the "Nigerian Genitalia Vanishing Epidemic of 1990," so named by sociologist Robert Bartholomew), Western panics almost exclusively revolve around fear of science, technology and industrial chemicals. Yet many still qualify for the scientific definition of "mass hysteria"--in which people become physically ill as the result of an imaginary problem. In one case, written up in The New England Journal of Medicine, a whole class of schoolchildren fell sick from an icky odor issuing from an air vent after watching the Gulf War on television. But the most high-profile episode has been Europe's collective freak-out over genetically modified foods.
The GM to-do had little basis in reality. It began with the completely unrelated panic over mad cow disease, a naturally occurring phenomenon. Afterward, any charge of food adulteration was automatically credited, no matter how flaky. To this day the expert verdict on the Coca-Cola scare a couple years ago is that hundreds of French and Belgian kids were puking as a result of a condition that was all in their heads.
Mr. Bartholomew believes the public seizes on these episodes as convenient rationalizations for other fears, even at some violence to the facts. So, while Coke probably didn't poison any Belgian kids, many Belgian adults resent the success of American pop culture.
One of the amazing upshots of the biotech scare has been grown businessmen, who normally can't get far enough away from regulation, pleading with European regulators to establish a Continental equivalent of America's Food and Drug Administration. No sensible person believes that government bureaucrats are the reason why food is safe. But a society is a web of interactions that can't possibly be controlled or even seen, and we rely on them for our well-being.
In other words, fear of the monkey men in our midst may be an irrational manifestation of rational insecurity, and the answer is frequently to turn to government for an irrational security. If America's version of the genetically modified food panic has been limited to environmental ideologues and a few neurotics, it's because most Americans assume the FDA is on the job and therefore don't think twice about what might be in their Twinkie.
Ms. Levey is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal, temporarily stationed in Hong Kong. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.
