Stupidity of the 'Jaws Effect'

People who say fear of lethal sharks is caused by a Hollywood movie never explain why they themselves are afraid of harmless insects.

From The Australian, 10 January 2018

To read this newspaper, you need one of two things: a computer with access to the internet, or to live near a newsagent to which you can stroll in relative safety.

In either case, it can be assumed that your environment has been mostly cleared of spiders, snakes, dingoes, crocodiles, paralysis ticks and other lethal vermin, not to mention irritating mice, rats, white ants, fleas and cockroaches. It will have also been laid with a network of stormwater drains so you can fire up the internet during a downpour without being electrocuted.

This is why it is so perplexing to read in newspapers arguments such as that posed by Charles Wooley here last week. His argument is that we should accept the dangers posed by nature — in this case, great white sharks — as a part of a life where safety can never be guaranteed.

Taking his argument to its logical conclusion would, in my opinion, make the production and distribution of newspapers, and most other benefits of modern life, almost impossible.

Wooley is a far more accomplished journalist than me, having interviewed international stars and reported from war zones for 60 Minutes. He is also clearly a knockabout bloke who doesn’t take himself or life too seriously.

But a jocular tone does not a coherent case make. His point that bees kill more people than sharks, snakes and crocs combined is a non sequitur. If a bee was buzzing around his house, especially near children, Wooley would swat it. The same would even apply, I assume, to mosquitos and cockroaches, which are mere irritants. The only reason he doesn’t do the same with sharks, it seems, is that he doesn’t go in the ocean very often.

The first time I wrote about this issue, 18 years ago, I theorised that most people dismissed the threat from great whites because they were not directly affected. Surfers, the most common victims of sharks attacks, had brought this indifference on themselves by spending decades nurturing an antisocial rebel-chic image. Now that surfing is mainstream, would it be too much to ask that people like Wooley cared?

We are not seeking to “punish” sharks, as Wooley says. We merely want the ocean, our chosen playground, to be as relatively safe as the places he enjoys, such as the highland lakes in his native state of Tasmania, where he likes to fish for trout.

Or, for a more pertinent analogy, we’d like the ocean to be as relatively safe as the streets of Weymouth, also in Tasmania, where a wombat that had been attacking people last month was, according to a report in The Australian, “killed over fears for public safety”.

Wooley also blames our fears of sharks not on their lethality but on the supposed hysteria generated in 1974 by Jaws, the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley adapted into a blockbuster film the following year by a young Steven Spielberg.

Wooley is no Robinson Crusoe there. Benchley was repeatedly blamed during the recent Senate inquiry into shark mitigation strategies for generating shark hysteria. One academic even coined the term “the Jaws effect”, which, like most other attempts by academics and shark huggers to influence the popular lexicon, such as calling a congregation of juvenile great whites a “nursery”, has failed to take hold among surfers, swimmers and divers.

Benchley famously later in life expressed deep regret for having written Jaws, which conservationists often repeat as if it proves that a fear of sharks is irrational. In fact, Benchley’s arguments are riddled with irrationality. In the preface to Shark Trouble (2002) he writes: “I’ve learned how to swim, snorkel and dive safely in the ocean, how to exist — coexist, really — with sharks.”

Two pages later he says we are “fair game to the predators” in the ocean. So are we fair game or coexisting? You can’t have your flake and eat it too, Peter.

Benchley’s many environmentalist fans conveniently overlook the fact that he was actually an abysmal writer with fashionable but superficial ideas. Shark Trouble, for example, also includes the blinding insight that sharks are “among nature’s most perfect creations, efficiently performing the functions nature programmed them to do: eat, swim and reproduce”. How this makes them more “perfect” than tadpoles, he doesn’t say.

A look at Benchley’s background explains his late change of heart towards sharks. He was an unemployed young writer with a young family when he pitched Jaws to a publisher in 1971. The book’s surprising popularity allowed him to pursue similar pulp fiction for another two decades, but without replicating the rewards.

He had nothing to lose and everything to gain when he converted to the new, pseudo-intellectual environmental cause in the early 2000s. To do so, he became a signed-up member of a self-loathing cult. “The animal truly most dangerous to man is man,” he wrote in Shark Trouble, a sentiment that is now commonplace.

He’s right, although not in ways he imagined. Humanity these days does seem preoccupied with destroying the benefits it has accrued through technology and progress, all in the name of environmentalism.