Expert advice is the new terror – has scaremongering gone too far?

Scientific ‘truths’ change daily, and when the worst danger of all is said to be over-population, we begin to wonder, ‘Do they want us to live or die?’

Terror is a luxury of an advanced civilisation. I do not mean the kind of terror wrought by bearded extremists who blend chapati flour with industrial fertiliser in the upstairs rooms of social housing, but rather the variety practised as an adjunct to their trade by experts in other fields.

Those whom we are used to describing as primitive peoples get by without experts and suffer less terror as a result. True, their lives are not without fear. Crocodiles, snakes and other nasty creatures are an ever-present menace, and no one can tell what thunderbolts Nature might have up her sleeve.

But all of these threats are apt to be capricious and explicable only as acts of whatever providential force the local inhabitantssubscribe to. Life is made tolerable by a resigned fatalism.

In our advanced societies, things are different. Religious belief has been relegated to a kind of unreasoned superstition and superseded by objective scientific knowledge capable of revealing truths that are demonstrable, provable, and terrifying. The more we know, or think we know, the more frightened we become.

Scientists are the high priests of our age. They have access to the truth and that gives them power. That the truths which they pronounce may change and vary, just as the weather, does not detract from their truthfulness. Truth is in the eye of the scientist.

But let us not be too hard on these experts. They are human and among the many pleasures to be derived from existence is the joy of scaring others witless. That is what it means to have power. A life spent feeding noxious substances to laboratory rats would be quite without pleasure were it not for the prospect that, at the end of the long and winding project, whenthe last rodent has sighed, rolled on to its back and yielded with a final twitch to the onset of rigor mortis, there is a paper to be published that will strike fear into the souls of all who see it, or read about it in the pages of the popular press.

Such scaremongering is immune to the law of diminishing returns. Just as it was once hoped by enlightened liberals that the impact of the sexual revolution of the Sixties would be blunted by familiarity, only for it to bediscovered that the appetite fed upon itself, so any expectation that the power of science to frighten us would lessen with usageproved groundless.

And so, when we nervously open thepages of our morning paper at a breakfast table that once, in lost, carefree days, bore the weight of bacon, eggs, sausage, and fried bread, but now supports a bleak bowl of muesli dampened with skimmed milk, we learn what new thing is bad for us. Or rather what old thing that we had previously thought harmless is now revealed as lethal.

In recent weeks we have learnt that: eating one sausage or three rashers of bacona day can increase the risk of bowel cancer by a fifth – the warning involved only about 50g of processed meat daily; eating an egg a day increases the risk of death for middle-aged men, and eating any eggs at all is linked with an earlier risk of men dying from diabetes; popular vitamin supplements taken by millions of people in the hope of improving their health may do no good and could increase the risk of a premature death; of all the problem drinkers in the UK, the worst by far are the middle classes who sit at home and swallow a glass or two of wine.

These are all quite jolly scares in their way, but somehow unsatisfying. Heaven be praised, then, for the ultimate scare against which all others are measured and judged. Global warming or, to give it its other name, climate change, is to professional scaremongers what the Nicene creed is to Christendom. It is a statement of faith and a yardstick of correct belief.

So, when a scaremonger wishes to place his newest scare at the very pinnacle of terror, he compares it to global warming. In fact, he goes one better and says it is worse than global warming – worse, that is, than the slow asphyxiation of the planet. Obesity has been described in this way, and only the other day a learned judge described the breakdown in family life in the UK as worse than global warming.

Best of all, last week we heard that the prospect of more and more Britons living to the age of 95 was worse than you know what. Quick, let them eat eggs, let them eat sausage, let them swallow vitamins, let them drink Chardonnay. For God’s sake would someone scare them to death.